Oscillation in Literary Modernism

Oscillation in Literary Modernism PDF Author: John Francis Harty
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631593936
Category : Oscillations
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
While the two modernist novels considered in this book, Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, were initially understood within the categories of stoic and tragic despair, more recent criticism has focused upon their carnivalesque dimension. The identification of these hermeneutic polarities presented the author with the challenging problem which underlies the present analysis, namely the question concerning the structural relationship between the contesting thematics. Drawing upon the paradigm of oscillation as established within the natural sciences, and adding a figurative dimension to the concept, the author has adapted this model as a key to unravelling the narrative buoyancy and structural coherence which sustain these novels of Modernism. The book elucidates how the carnivalesque challenge to despair contributes towards innovative narrative configurations, galvanizing the thematic antipodes into vertiginous microcosms of defiant selfhood.

Oscillation in Literary Modernism

Oscillation in Literary Modernism PDF Author: John Francis Harty
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631593936
Category : Oscillations
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
While the two modernist novels considered in this book, Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, were initially understood within the categories of stoic and tragic despair, more recent criticism has focused upon their carnivalesque dimension. The identification of these hermeneutic polarities presented the author with the challenging problem which underlies the present analysis, namely the question concerning the structural relationship between the contesting thematics. Drawing upon the paradigm of oscillation as established within the natural sciences, and adding a figurative dimension to the concept, the author has adapted this model as a key to unravelling the narrative buoyancy and structural coherence which sustain these novels of Modernism. The book elucidates how the carnivalesque challenge to despair contributes towards innovative narrative configurations, galvanizing the thematic antipodes into vertiginous microcosms of defiant selfhood.

Oscillations of Literary Theory

Oscillations of Literary Theory PDF Author: A. C. Facundo
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846309X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Revises key psychoanalytic concepts that influence interpretive practices in the humanities and formulates a new approach to reading fiction. Oscillations of Literary Theory offers a new psychoanalytic approach to reading literature queerly, one that implicates queer theory without depending on explicit representations of sex or queer identities. By focusing on desire and identifications, A. C. Facundo argues that readers can enjoy the text through a variety of rhythms between two (eroticized) positions: the paranoid imperative and queer reparative. Facundo examines the metaphor of rupture as central to the logic of critique, particularly the project to undo conventional formations of identity and power. To show how readers can rebuild their relational worlds after the rupture, Facundo looks to the themes of the desire for omniscience, the queer pleasure of the text, loss and letting go, and the vanishing points that structure thinking. Analyses of Nabokov’s Lolita, Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Findley’s The Wars, and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go are included, which model this new approach to reading. “Armed with a full repertoire of psychoanalytic resources, Facundo navigates the paranoid?reparative debate in literary studies with greater finesse than any critic I’ve read. Reframing current critical impasses, Oscillations of Literary Theory makes substantial contributions to narrative theory and aesthetics by illuminating their crucial connections with sexuality and pleasure. Facundo offers us here nothing less than a new method of reading queerly.” — Tim Dean, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “This book seeks to understand hermeneutic imperatives and flights from these in terms of paranoid and reparative drives (as distinct from affect). It is a bold and ambitious project, but Facundo brings to it an exceptional array of skills. I am impressed by the author’s close, subtle, and very canny readings of both theoretical and literary texts and by her demonstration of the complexity, variety, and centrality of ideas and operations of paranoia and the reparative in writings from Freud to the present. Oscillations revitalizes psychoanalytic criticism in its distinctly queer relation to psychoanalysis, a relation that yields surprising and refreshing insights.” — Stephen M. Barber, coeditor of Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory

Franz Kafka in Context

Franz Kafka in Context PDF Author: Carolin Duttlinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107085497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.

Terrorism and Modern Literature

Terrorism and Modern Literature PDF Author: Alex Houen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191541982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Is terrorism's violence essentially symbolic? Does it impact on culture primarily through the media? What kinds of performative effect do the various discourses surrounding terrorism have? Such questions have not only become increasingly important in terrorism studies, they have also been concerns for many literary writers. This book is the first extensive study of modern literature's engagement with terrorism. Ranging from the 1880s to the 1980s, the terrorism examined is as diverse as the literary writings on it: chapters include discussions of Joseph Conrad's novels on Anarchism and Russian Nihilism; Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde responses to Syndicalism and the militant Suffragettes; Ezra Pound's poetic entanglement with Segregationist violence; Walter Abish's fictions about West German urban guerrillas; and Seamus Heaney's and Ciaran Carson's poems on the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. In each instance, Alex Houen explores how the literary writer figures clashes or collusions between terrorist violence and discursive performativity. What is revealed is that writing on terrorism has frequently involved refiguring the force of literature itself. In terrorism studies the cultural impact of terrorism has often been accounted for with rigid, structural theories of its discursive roots. But what about the performative effects of violence on discourse? Addressing the issue of this mutual contagion, Terrorism and Modern Literature shows that the mediation and effects of terrorism have been historically variable. Referring to a variety of sources in addition to the literature—newspaper and journal articles, legislation, letters, manifestos—the book shows how terrorism and the literature on it have been embroiled in wider cultural fields. The result is not just a timely intervention in debates about terrorism's performativity. Drawing on literary/critical theory and philosophy, it is also a major contribution to debates about the historical and political dimensions of modernist and postmodernist literary practices.

On the Margins of Modernism

On the Margins of Modernism PDF Author: Chana Kronfeld
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520914139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other"—yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers. Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.

James Joyce and Modern Literature

James Joyce and Modern Literature PDF Author: W. J. McCormack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317287290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This collection, first published in 1982, brings together thirteen writers from a wide variety of critical traditions to take a fresh look at Joyce and his crucial position not only in English literature but in modern literature as a whole. Comparative views of his work include reflections on his relations to Shakespeare, Blake, MacDiarmid, and the Anglo-Irish revival. Essays, story and poems all combine to celebrate the major constituents of Joyce’s work – his imagination and comedy, his exuberant use of language, his relation to the history of his country and his age, and his passionate commitment to ‘a more veritably human tradition’. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

Modernist Literature

Modernist Literature PDF Author: Mary Ann Gillies
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748631615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This engaging textbook provides a critical assessment of British modernist literature produced between 1900 and 1945.Each chapter focuses on a single decade, a distinct genre and a specific theme: the 1900s - the short story - gender and sexuality; the 1910s - poetry - war, technology and propaganda; the 1920s - the novel - new modes of literary expression; the 1930s - the documentary - political engagement. A final chapter covers the 1940s and beyond looking at new literary and artistic movements and 'other' modernisms. Covering canonical texts and lesser-known works, Modernist Literature introduces students to current debates in Modernism and a range of literature in its historical and aesthetic contexts.Features:*Examines four distinct genres - the short story, poetry, novel and documentary - decade-by-decade.*Combines close readings with cultural and political analyses of British modernism.*Includes a Chronology and Further Readings with each chapter.

Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism

Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism PDF Author: Paul Poplawski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313016577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Modernism is still widely acknowledged as perhaps the most important and influential artistic and cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. Written by expert scholars from around the world and covering hundreds of different topics in a clear, incisive, and critical manner, this reference maps the complex field of modernism in a fresh and original way. The principal focus of the book is on English-language literary modernism and the period 1890-1939, yet many entries extend beyond those parameters to include important precursors and successors of the movement. The book also covers the crucial European and interdisciplinary dimensions of modernism and provides complementary comparative perspectives from countries and regions not usually included in traditional accounts of the subject. Entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

The Modes of Modern Writing

The Modes of Modern Writing PDF Author: David Lodge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147424422X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.

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.