Discrepant Solace

Discrepant Solace PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.

Discrepant Solace

Discrepant Solace PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.

Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry

Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry PDF Author: Antony Rowland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901557
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.

The Novel and the New Ethics

The Novel and the New Ethics PDF Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

Nature Prose

Nature Prose PDF Author: Dominic Head
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192698443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.

The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson

The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson PDF Author: Laura E. Tanner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Framing Marilynne Robinson's fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson's novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson's novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. Stiffly perched on the edge of un-cushioned furniture or propped awkwardly in the midst of someone else's conversation, Robinson's characters hover in the margins of a lived experience they are often forced to observe self-consciously and vigilantly. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson's narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson's novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson's fiction.

Handbook of Aging and the Family

Handbook of Aging and the Family PDF Author: Rosemary Blieszner
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
No other reference provides such a comprehensive and timely overview of theory and research on family relationships, the contexts of family life, and major turning points in late-life families. It includes many suggestions for theoretical and practical applications for future research on a score of important topics. This multidisciplinary survey is an invaluable library reference and teaching resource intended for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and practitioners — for gerontologists, family scholars, psychologists, sociologists, historians, social workers, health-care providers, and policy makers.

New Techniques of Persuasion

New Techniques of Persuasion PDF Author: Gerald R. Miller
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description


The Oxford Dictionary of Current English

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English PDF Author: R. E. Allen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192819192
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 932

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Book Description
Traces the history of the United States' symbol of freedom, the Statue of Liberty, from its conception and design, through the fund-raising and construction, to its dedication in 1886.

The Peerage of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland

The Peerage of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gentry
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description


International Journal of Ethics

International Journal of Ethics PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description