Uncertainty And Undecidability In Twentieth Century Literature And Literary Theory

Download or read book Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory written by Mette Leonard Høeg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing ‘theory of uncertainty’ to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific ‘sustained’ and ‘productive’ kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.

Download or read book Literary Theories of Uncertainty written by Mette Leonard Hoeg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first study to examine the concept of uncertainty of meaning as it relates to modern and contemporary literature and literary theory, Literary Theories of Uncertainty demonstrates how this notion functions as a literary feature, narrative device and theoretical concept in 20th and 21st-century texts. Calling upon theories of interpretation and challenging the distinction between literature and theory, this exploration is broken down into three sections: Poststructuralist legacies of uncertainty; life-writing and uncertainty; and contemporary literary uncertainties. The volume takes into account related terms such as undecidability, indeterminacy, ambiguity, unreadability, and obscurity, and the topics examined include: undecidability and the motif of suspension in deconstruction; Derrida and Bataille; poetry as a mode of critical discourse and point of convergence between logico-mathematical ideas of undecidability and literary forms of uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to speech and the impact of Robert Antelme on Mascolo and Blanchot; Proust and temporal uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to death, trauma and autobiography; moral uncertainty in the Scandinavian welfare state and Nordic Noir; the aesthetically disruptive and anti-authorian effect of uncertainty in in the works of German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar; uncertainty in the form of 'the double' and in relation to meta-fiction; and many more. Literary Theories of Uncertainty collates original and diverse discussions by some of the most prominent, inquiring minds in literary, cultural and critical theory today to map out the contours of the field of 'theory of uncertainty'.

Download or read book Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-century Literature and Literary Theory written by Mette Leonard Høeg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth- century literature and literary theory.

Download or read book Exile as a Continuum in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction written by Ludmilla Voitkovska and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-29 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Conrad is famous for being an unusual, strange, and even eccentric English writer. However, despite his difference, English criticism has primarily interpreted his fiction from the perspective of the English culture. In turn, Polish criticism has portrayed Conrad as a Pole who happened to write in English. Considering Conrad’s transcultural background, neither exclusively English nor an exclusively Polish writer, this volume investigates the essential features of his expatriate writing as a form distinctly different from any writing done within a single culture. Conrad's unique contribution to English literature and sensibility stems from his ability to incorporate the complexity of the exilic condition without discussing it explicitly. Furthermore, this book establishes Conrad's expatriation archetypes and examines them as they manifest themselves not only in a realistic, but, more importantly, in a symbolic mode. Those archetypal features demonstrate themselves through Conrad’s thematic choices, narrative structure, and critical discourse that reflect his complex relationship with both the parent and the adopted reader. While the existence of these patterns in Conrad's fiction are not entirely obvious, this book aims to illuminate Conrad’s contributions to the current critical debate concerning the place of the author in his/her own narrative.

Download or read book Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender written by Tania Chakravertty and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender presents fresh insight into the gender issues and sexual ambiguities that have always been present in Hemingway’s work, utilising a variety of historical, socio-cultural and biographical contexts. Offering a close analysis of the gender issues and sexual ambiguities present in Hemingway’s work, this book provides insight into the position of white middle-class women in America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, illuminating Hemingway’s androgynous impulses and the attitudinal changes that occurred during Ernest Hemingway’s lifetime. Women and gender were Hemingway’s steady concern; his fictional females are drawn with the same kind of complexity and individuality like his fictional males, manifesting endurance, stoic courage and grace under pressure. This volume highlights Hemingway’s textual world’s resistance of patriarchal phallocratism and his abolition of the binaries of masculinity/femininity, passivity/activity and the like, dismantling binary oppositions involving gender and sexuality. Exploring the metamorphosis of American social and cultural history, this volume unravels the stereotypical myths associated with womanhood and the complexity of women in Ernest Hemingway’s novels. Tania Chakravertty is the Dean of Students’ Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. Chakravertty has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University on “Gender Representations in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway”. Chakravertty visited the US to participate in the academic group project “Strengthening and Widening the Scope of American Studies: The U.S. Experience” in 2010 as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her monographs have appeared in national and international journals.

Download or read book Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture written by John Carlos Rowe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture addresses the interesting revival of Henry James’s works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James’s fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels into films, challenging us to understand James’s popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James’s literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. “Part I: His Times” considers James’s reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesser known short stories. “Part II: Our Times” focuses on how James’s considerations of changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced Hollywood representations of emancipated women in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. Recent fiction by authors including James Baldwin and Leslie Marmon Silko also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James’s works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture.

Download or read book Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels written by Lynne W. Hinojosa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels: Hope and the Burdens of History argues historical novels can help readers receive the burdens of history—meaning both the burdens of the past, present, and future and the burden of living in time—and develop a more robust conception of and concrete practice of hope. Since the 1960s, historical novels have been a dominant literary genre, but they have been influenced primarily not by Christian but by postmodern and marxist thinkers and writers. This book provides a theological and literary analysis of all three types of historical novels—postmodern, marxist, and Christian—and outlines what each school of thought can learn from each other regarding historical understanding and hope. Using Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope and Frank Kermode’s literary criticism as a theoretical basis, the book offers readings of novels by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Ursula LeGuin, among others, and ends with an extended analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series.