Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture

Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture
Author: J. Karnicky
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2007-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230603599

This book argues for the ethical relevancy of contemporary fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through reading novels by such writers as David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Irvine Welsh, this book looks at how these works seek to transform the ways that readers live in the world.

Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture

Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture
Author: J. Karnicky
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2009-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781403977601

This book argues for the ethical relevancy of contemporary fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through reading novels by such writers as David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Irvine Welsh, this book looks at how these works seek to transform the ways that readers live in the world.

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

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.

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
Author: John J. Su
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2005-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139448536

Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Author: Rudolf Freiburg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9783030834234

The Ethics of Survival provides us with a kaleidoscope of intellectually inquisitive, intriguing and invariably topical perspectives on human suffering, trauma and testimony in close dialogue with the increasingly urgent challenges of both individual and collective care and responsibility. The fourteen original essays expertly assembled here by Freiburg and Bayer reinvigorate and indeed rewrite the global ethics agenda for scholarly debate and critical analysis across the disciplines of literature, philosophy and cultural history, problematizing contemporary quandaries against the background of the Holocaust's enduringly horrific legacy. The volume launches a thought-provoking intervention into extremely sensitive and controversial terrain where humanity must confront its own fallibility, destructiveness and pain beyond humanism's much-vaunted catalogue of traditional ideals. -Prof. Berthold Schoene, Faculty Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Arts and Humanities, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK 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 Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), "But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man": Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson), and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry). Gerd Bayer is Professor of English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has published on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaust literature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK).

Ethics in Culture

Ethics in Culture
Author: Astrid Erll
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2008-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110206552

Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics. This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.

Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature

Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature
Author: Nick Levey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317205030

This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.

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

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.

The Cruft of Fiction

The Cruft of Fiction
Author: David Letzler
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2017-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496201663

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elements that he labels “cruft” after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention. While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.

Untheories of Fiction

Untheories of Fiction
Author: Mark Axelrod-Sokolov
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2021-01-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3030593460

This book takes a closer look at the diversity of fiction writing from Diderot to Markson and by so doing call into question the notion of a singular “theory of fiction,” especially in relation to the novel. Unlike Forster’s approach to “Aspects of the Novel,” which implied there is only one kind of novel to which there may be an aspect, this book deconstructs how one approach to studying something as protean as the novel cannot be accomplished. To that end, the text uses Diderot’s This Is Not A Story (1772) and David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel (2016) as a frame and imbedded within are essays on De Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (1829), Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs Of Braz Cubas (1881), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945).