[PDF] Jonathan Franzen At The End Of Postmodernism eBook

Author : Stephen J. Burn
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 21,57 MB
Release : 2011-10-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1441191240

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Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Author : J. Green
Publisher : Springer
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 12,43 MB
Release : 2005-05-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1403980403

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Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade, including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in culture.

Author : Jonathan Franzen
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 48,59 MB
Release : 2012-04-24
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0374708762

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Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus proclaimed it "a masterpiece of American fiction" and lauded its illumination, "through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, [of] the world we thought we knew." In Farther Away, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. Whether recounting his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus, examining his mixed feelings about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace, or offering a moving and witty take on the ways that technology has changed how people express their love, these pieces deliver on Franzen's implicit promise to conceal nothing. On a trip to China to see first-hand the environmental devastation there, he doesn't omit mention of his excitement and awe at the pace of China's economic development; the trip becomes a journey out of his own prejudice and moral condemnation. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day. Farther Away is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

Author : Jes�s Blanco Hidalga
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 30,60 MB
Release : 2017-01-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501319833

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Working within theoretical and critical contexts, Hidalga applies a model of the conversion/redemption narrative to the novels of Jonathan Franzen.

Author : Matt Graham
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 32,10 MB
Release : 2024-07-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 104009113X

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Postmodernism’s ‘end’ is a complex and contentious topic. Yet, one overarching consensus emerges: the postmodern has been surpassed. This book poses a thought experiment challenging this position – what if postmodernism persists within the twenty-first century? Rather than designate a new epoch or coherent movement, this book interrogates the fragmented, contradictory, and counterintuitive endurance of postmodern aesthetics within post-Cold War America. An alternative use of postmodern aesthetics becomes possible when they are decoupled from their twentieth-century historical location. Collectively, these repetitions posit a postmodern continuum, contrasting the widely called-for succession of postmodernism via this decoupling. When postmodern aesthetics are no longer unconsciously repeated within their cultural moment, this emergent shift within a period ‘after’ postmodernism presents an alternative historical positioning and use. After their cultural vanguard, postmodern aesthetics become a confrontation of the chaotic realism of an inescapable post-Cold War capitalism, tapping into this cultural zeitgeist through literature.

Author : Clare Hayes-Brady
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 18,78 MB
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501335847

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"A critical overview of the writing of David Foster Wallace, taking his persistent interests in philosophy, language and plurality as points of departure"--

Author : Cody Marrs
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 22,60 MB
Release : 2019-01-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1421427133

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What is our definition of "modernismif we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial,genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.

Author : Reinhold Kramer
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 12,70 MB
Release : 2019-11-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3030305694

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In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of “How-I-Feel” ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths. He argues that the displacement, since the 1990s, of grand narratives by ego-based narratives and small narratives has proven inadequate, and that selective adherence, pluralist adaptation, and humanism are more worthy replacements. Relying on evolutionary psychology as much as on Charles Taylor, Kramer argues that no single answer is possible to the book title’s question, but that the term “postmodernity” – referring to the era, not to postmodernism – still usefully describes major currents within the contemporary world.

Author : Casey Michael Henry
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 19,43 MB
Release : 2019-02-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350064971

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How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age? Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis's J R and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho through to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Through these histories, the book charts the ways in which print-based postmodern writing at first resisted new mass media forms and ultimately came to respond to them.

Author : Sebastian Huber
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 41,88 MB
Release : 2017-11-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501338080

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What does falling in love have in common with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or the fall of the Twin Towers? In the light of postmodernism's programmatic critique of a humanist notion of the subject and an emphatic understanding of events, Subject of the Event shows that selected American novels after 2000 offer an alternative to the ?death of the subject.? As the first book to comprehensively engage with Alain Badiou's writings outside of a philosophical context, Subject of the Event analyzes five critically acclaimed novels of the new millennium-Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Jess Walter's The Zero (2006), Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Paul Beatty's Slumberland (2008) and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2006)-and argues that they create different 'subjects of the event' that are empowered with ?reagency.? The ?subject of the event? and its empowerment, what this book calls ?reagency,? implies that subjects only evolve out of their confrontation with the revolutionary impetus that events propel. Unlike a humanist capability of having agency, reagency is defined as a repetitive subjective praxis that is contingent upon events, which is given a concrete literary form in the novels under investigation. Sebastian Huber explores how the American penchant for events (?new beginnings,? ?clean slates,? ?apocalypse?) is being critically dealt with in the novels at hand, while still offering an emphatic idea of singular disruptions that open up ways for subjects to affirm and become empowered by the new propositions of these happenings.