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Author: Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.
Author: Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book
Book Description
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.
Author: Katarzyna Nowak
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631556276
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The book analyzes traveling post-colonial subjects in recent prose by women writers of South Asian origin, tracing the links between the tropes of femininity, silence, loss, and migration. Traveling is understood as an act of generating meaning out of movement, displacement and migration, while the position of traveling subjects is seen as that of a paradoxical liminality, yet carrying the insurgent potential of finding new modes of agency. The argument evolves from crossing boundaries of one's own body towards radical transgression of borders of identity. Before the traveler is able to transgress the limitations exhorted by forces beyond a single person's grasp, she has to establish the boundaries of her own identity - only in order to shed its steadiness and discover liberating instability.
Author: Stephen M. Levin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135915970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel examines the aesthetics of adventure travel since World War II by exploring the many referents travelers evoke as they imagine their escapes: the lingering memory of the war, the disintegration of empire, and the rapid growth of capitalism and commercial culture.
Author: Françoise Besson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527513009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Travel writing presents stories of human journeys and can guide us towards a better perception of our connections with the nonhuman world. This book is a collection of essays by writers and scholars from China, England, France, India, Tunisia and the United States of America. It discusses sustainable travels and travel writing, and explores the sense of connection with nature. From travels around one’s home to mountain hikes and bicycle rides, it also reminds us that planes can be used in a responsible way. It discusses conscious travelling and shows the important role texts play in educating us on this issue. This multidimensional book encompasses several literary genres: essays, autobiographies, mountain reports, novels, poetry, journals, graphic novels and scientific reports. It is aimed at all those who have some interest in travel, ecology, and the philosophy of place.
Author: Shreevatsa Nevatia
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9386815885
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Diagnosed as bipolar at twenty-three, a young journalist struggles for a decade, fighting a cycle of depression and euphoria. In this unique journey, we visit former loves and eccentric fellow sufferers, mental health institutions and Benares. We relive his moments with Diana Eck and Deepika Padukone-and his reckonings with past wounds. Part confession, part joyride and wholly enjoyable, this riveting debut announces a formidable new talent. Nevatia is a master storyteller, empathetic, intelligent and witty. Here is the story of owning your narrative, no matter how difficult and complicated it is. Here is How to Travel Light.
Author: J.F. Bernard
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474417345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
A new edition of the bestselling textbook for Scottish teacher training courses.
Author: Corinne Fowler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135019339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Despite the recent increase in scholarly activity regarding travel writing and the accompanying proliferation of publications relating to the form, its ethical dimensions have yet to be theorized with sufficient rigour. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, literary studies and modern languages, the contributors in this volume apply themselves to a number of key theoretical questions pertaining to travel writing and ethics, ranging from travel-as-commoditization to encounters with minority languages under threat. Taken collectively, the essays assess key critical legacies from parallel disciplines to the debate so far, such as anthropological theory and postcolonial criticism. Also considered, and of equal significance, are the ethical implications of the form’s parallel genres of writing, such as ethnography and journalism. As some of the contributors argue, innovations in these genres have important implications for the act of theorizing travel writing itself and the mode and spirit in which it continues to be conducted. In the light of such innovations, how might ethical theory maintain its critical edge?
Author: Teresa Scott Soufas
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826207142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
"Employing a broad historical perspective that forces the reevaluation of historical and literary commonplaces, Soufas artfully illuminates the complex responses of Spanish Golden Age authors to major shifts in European intellectual outlook during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century."--Publishers website.
Author: Nitzan Lebovic
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041856
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The atmosphere of militarism and conservative state politics left little room for democratic opposition or dissent. Lebovic and others depict the failure to respond not only as a result of institutional pressure but as the effect of a long-lasting "left-wing melancholy." In order to understand its grip on Israeli society, Lebovic turns to the novels and short stories of Israel Zarchi. For him, Zarchi aptly describes the gap between the utopian hope present in Zionism since its early days and the melancholic reality of the present. Through personal engagement with Zarchi, Lebovic develops a philosophy of melancholy and shows how it pervades Israeli society.
Author: Jonathan Boulter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441152164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape (Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of the archive as such.
