Site Reading Postwar Fiction Visual Art And Social Form
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| Author | : David John Alworth |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 2012 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 9781267437075 |
"The sociological imagination," wrote C. Wright Mills in 1959, "is becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature." This dissertation argues that site-specific literature constitutes both a product of and a challenge to that imagination. More specifically, it claims that postwar American writers—such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jack Kerouac, and Vladimir Nabokov—figure real, material sites as narrative settings in order to imagine the social as a domain that includes both human and nonhuman actors. Recent works by Bill Brown, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Harvey Molotch, and Lynn Meskell all invite us to consider the social agency of the nonhuman, suggesting that things, objects, technical devices, and built structures can, in Bennett's words, "act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, tendencies, or propensities of their own." In this dissertation, I track an important prehistory to such a suggestion, arguing that postwar American literature addresses the paradox of nonhuman agency by meticulously delineating the relays between humans and nonhumans at four sites: supermarkets, dumps, roads, and ruins. Moreover, while examining how these sites function as literary settings, I consider their respective roles in the history of visual art—analyzing the Brillo Boxes of Andy Warhol, the trash art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the crushed-car sculptures of John Chamberlain, and the bomb shelters of Richard Ross—ultimately to define site specificity as a widespread attempt to refigure the social.
| Author | : Kevin Brazil |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 208 |
| Release | : 2018 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 0198824459 |
Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which twenty-century novelists responded to visual art and how writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period.
| Author | : David J. Alworth |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 224 |
| Release | : 2018-11-20 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0691183341 |
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.
| Author | : Kevin Brazil |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 208 |
| Release | : 2018-10-18 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0192557823 |
Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.
| Author | : Sara Blair |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 298 |
| Release | : 2020-07-14 |
| Genre | : Art |
| ISBN | : 0691202877 |
New York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "other half," was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies. This book takes an unprecedented look at the practices of observation that emerged from this critical site of encounter, showing how they have informed literary and everyday narratives of America, its citizens, and its possible futures. Taking readers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Sara Blair traces the career of the Lower East Side as a place where image-makers, writers, and social reformers tested new techniques for apprehending America--and their subjects looked back, confronting the means used to represent them. This dynamic shaped the birth of American photojournalism, the writings of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan, and the forms of early cinema. During the 1930s, the emptying ghetto opened contested views of the modern city, animating the work of such writers and photographers as Henry Roth, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. After World War II, the Lower East Side became a key resource for imagining poetic revolution, as in the work of Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and exploring dystopian futures, from Cold War atomic strikes to the death of print culture and the threat of climate change. How the Other Half Looks reveals how the Lower East Side has inspired new ways of looking-and looking back-that have shaped literary and popular expression as well as American modernity.
| Author | : Fredric Jameson |
| Publisher | : Verso Books |
| Total Pages | : 213 |
| Release | : 2014-06-17 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1784780065 |
The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson-perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity-excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive 'modernity' as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well. In this major interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms-which can probably not be banished at this late date-helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.
| Author | : Ben Lerner |
| Publisher | : Mack |
| Total Pages | : 78 |
| Release | : 2018-06 |
| Genre | : Art and literature |
| ISBN | : 9781912339013 |
In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, 'The Polish rider', incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about "recuperating the lost paintings through prose," about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in 'The New Yorker', Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she'd helped inspire. 'The Polish Rider' is the result of this ongoing conversation across media and genres. In addition to the story, this volume includes an essay by Lerner that describes how Ostoya's actual body of work catalyzed the fiction, as well as the contingencies and uncanny correspondences that have shaped their exchange. Ostoya's compositions -- both those that prompted Lerner's writing and those that take it up -- are never merely illustrative. Instead, they keep literature from having the last word. In this unclassifiable volume, the boundaries between fact and fiction, original and reproduction, text and image, flicker as you read and look.
| Author | : Pierre Bayard |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 129 |
| Release | : 2010-08-10 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 1596917148 |
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.
| Author | : Truman Capote |
| Publisher | : Modern Library |
| Total Pages | : 417 |
| Release | : 2013-02-19 |
| Genre | : True Crime |
| ISBN | : 0812994388 |
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.
| Author | : Ali Smith |
| Publisher | : Anchor |
| Total Pages | : 235 |
| Release | : 2019-04-30 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : 1101870788 |
From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.
