Ethics of Literary Forms in Contemporary American Literature

Ethics of Literary Forms in Contemporary American Literature
Author: Rüdiger Heinze
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783825885366
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This work links ethics and the formal arrangement of literary texts. It shows that specific formal techniques and devices and the overall form of literary texts always have an ethical dimension and beg certain ethical questions. Covering the three main genres of narrative, drama and poetry, the discussion addresses aspects of syntax, line breaks, mise-en-scene and narrative situation as well as the table of contents, list of characters and chapter structure in six texts by contemporary American authors (Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham).

Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil

Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil
Author: Vinicius Mariano De Carvalho
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1315386364
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When Brazil was honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013, the Brazilian author Luiz Ruffato opened the event with a provocative speech claiming that literature, through its pervasive depiction and discussion of ‘otherness,’ has the potential to provoke ethical transformation. This book uses Ruffato’s speech as a starting point for the discussion of contemporary Brazilian literature that stands in contrast to the repetition of social and cultural clichés. By illuminating the relevance of humanities and literature as a catalyst for rethinking Brazil, the book offers a resistance to the official discourses that have worked for so long to conceal social tensions, injustices, and secular inequities in Brazilian society. In doing so, it situates Brazilian literature away from the exotic and peripheral spectrum, and closer to a universal and more relevant ethical discussion for readers from all parts of the world. The volume brings together fresh contributions on both canonical contemporary authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Rubem Fonseca, and Dalton Trevisan, and traditionally silenced writing subjects such as Afro-Brazilian female authors. These essays deal with specific contemporary literary and social issues while engaging with historically constitutive phenomena in Brazil, including authoritarianism, violence, and the systematic violation of human rights. The exploration of diverse literary genres -- from novels to graphic novels, from poetry to crônicas -- and engagement with postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, Brazilian studies, South American literature, and world literature carves new space for the emergence of original Brazilian thought.

An Ethics of Reading

An Ethics of Reading
Author: Sandra Cox
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-01-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144388751X
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An Ethics of Reading considers how writers of contemporary American fiction represent collective identities by producing literature that bears witness to cultural traumas. With chapters focused on important American novelists including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz, the book works to situate novels that explore ethnic identity in conversation with one another. From those intertextual conversations, it draws conclusions about how fiction functions as testimony and the ways that readers might work to ethically respond to the testimonial features of the prose. The book’s investigations of distinct cultural traumas are broad, ranging from analyses of African American novels that treat slavery to Native American novels that portray land and child theft to Dominican and Haitian American accounts of US-backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora. Ultimately, the central claim of the book – that some works of contemporary American fiction function both didactically and aesthetically as cultural markers around which ethnic identities might be negotiated by writers and readers – becomes a kind of call to action for literary studies in the early 21st century, encouraging an ideological and pragmatic shift in how contemporary literature is read, analysed and discussed. By suggesting specific strategies for considering ethnicity in a radically diasporic American context, the book calls for critical engagement that is also concerned with the ethics of interpretive praxis, which, it suggests, might be a mechanism for building coalitions for social justice within, around, and through literature.

Rethinking Narrative Identity

Rethinking Narrative Identity
Author: Claudia Holler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2013
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027226571
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Why is it that we tend to think about our lives as stories? Why do we strive to create coherent narratives that reflect a particular perspective? What happens when we discover multiple, perhaps conflicting perspectives in our narratives? Following groundbreaking work in the study of narrative identity in the last 20 years, the scholars of this volume have expanded and merged their theories of narrative identity with new perspectives in fields such as narratology, literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, gender studies and history. Their contributions focus on the significance of perspective in the formation of narrative identities, probing the stratagems and narrative means of individuals in testing out personae for themselves.

Paul Auster's Writing Machine

Paul Auster's Writing Machine
Author: Evija Trofimova
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2014-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623560810
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Paul Auster is one of the most acclaimed figures in American literature. Known primarily as a novelist, Auster's films and various collaborations are now gaining more recognition. Evija Trofimova offers a radically different approach to the author's wider body of work, unpacking the fascinating web of relationships between his texts and presenting Auster's canon as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools. Exploring Auster's literal and figurative use of these tools – the typewriter, the cigarette, the doppelgänger figure, the city – Evija Trofimova discovers Auster's “writing machine”, a device that works both as a means to write and as a construct that manifests the emblematic writer-figure. This is a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways such machines invest them with meaning. Embarking on a scholarly quest that takes her from between the lines of Auster's work to between the streets of his beloved New York and finally to the man himself, Paul Auster's Writing Machine becomes not just a critical investigation but a critical collaboration, raising important questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, and about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their critics.

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Author: Rudolf Freiburg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030834220
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The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

Storyworld Possible Selves

Storyworld Possible Selves
Author: María-Ángeles Martínez
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-03-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110568667
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This volume presents a multidisciplinary approach to narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social-psychology. In their basic form, storyworld possible selves, or SPSs, are blends resulting from the conceptual integration of an intra- and an extra-diegetic perspectivizer. In written narratives, SPS blends function as hybrid referents for a variety of inclusive and ambiguous linguistic expressions, which are here explored from the standpoint of interactional cognitive linguistics, as instances of SPS objectification and subjectification. The model also draws on character construction and on the social-psychology notions of self-schemas and possible selves. This allows an exploration of emotional responses to narratives not just in terms of empathy or sympathy towards fictional entities, but also in terms of narrative ethics and of culturally determined and simultaneously idiosyncratic feelings of personal relevance and self-transformation.

Poetry for historians

Poetry for historians
Author: Carolyn Steedman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526125242
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This is a book about the conflict between history and poetry – and historians and poets – in Atlantic World society from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day. Blending historiography and theory, it proceeds by asking: what is the point of poetry as far as historians are concerned? The focus is on W. H. Auden’s Cold War-era history poems, but the book also looks at other poets from the seventeenth century onwards, providing original accounts of their poetic and historical educations. An important resource for those teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in historiography and history and theory, Poetry for historians will also be of relevance to courses on literature in society and the history of education. General readers will relate it to Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1987) and Dust (2001), on account of its biographical and autobiographical insights into the way history operates in modern society.

The Novel and the New Ethics

The Novel and the New Ethics
Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503614077
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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.