Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest

Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest
Author: Ilana Shiloh
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Paul Auster published his first prose work, the autobiographical The Invention of Solitude, in 1982; since then his fiction has gained ever growing popular and critical acclaim. This book is a stimulating pioneering study of eight works that make up the Auster canon: The Invention of Solitude, the three novellas that comprise The New York Trilogy, and the novels In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan. Focusing on the quest - which she sees as the master narrative of all of Auster's novels - Shiloh examines Auster's writing in a multi-layered context of literary and philosophical paradigms relevant to his practice, such as the American tradition of the «open road, » the generic conventions of detective fiction, postmodernist concepts of the subject, Sartre's and Camus's existentialist theories, and Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytic models, all of which offer enriching and insightful perspectives on Auster's poetics.

Paul Auster's Postmodernity

Paul Auster's Postmodernity
Author: Brendan Martin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2007-09-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135898111

This book focuses upon the literary and autobiographical writings of American novelist Paul Auster, investigating his literary postmodernity in relation to a full range of his writings. Martin addresses Auster’s evocation of a range of postmodern notions, such as the duplicitous art of self-invention, the role of chance and contingency, authorial authenticity and accountability, urban dislocation, and the predominance of duality.

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

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.

Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction

Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction
Author: Eberhard Alsen
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1996
Genre: American fiction
ISBN: 9789051839685

Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.

Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy" as Postmodern Detective Fiction

Paul Auster's
Author: Matthias Kugler
Publisher: diplom.de
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1999-10-28
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3832418520

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, published in one volume for the first time in England in 1988 and in the U.S. in 1990 has been widely categorised as detective fiction among literary scholars and critics. There is, however, a striking diversity and lack of consensus regarding the classification of the trilogy within the existing genre forms of the detective novel. Among others, Auster's stories are described as: metaanti-detective-fiction; mysteries about mysteries; a strangely humorous working of the detective novel; very soft-boiled; a metamystery; glassy little jigsaws; a mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman; a metaphysical detective story; a deconstruction of the detective novel; antidetective-fiction; a late example of the anti-detective genre; and being related to 'hard-boiled' novels by authors like Hammett and Chandler. Such a striking lack of agreement within the secondary literature has inspired me to write this paper. It does not, however, elaborate further an this diversity of viewpoints although they all seem to have a certain validity and underline the richness and diversity of Auster's detective trilogy; neither do I intend to coin a new term for Auster's detective fiction. I would rather place The New York Trilogy within a more general and open literary form, namely postmodern detective fiction. This classifies Paul Auster as an American writer who is part of the generation that immediately followed the 'classical literary movement' of American postmodernism' of the 60s and 70s. His writing demonstrates that he has been influenced by the revolutionary and innovative postmodern concepts, characterised by the notion of 'anything goes an a planet of multiplicity' as well as by French poststructuralism. He may, however, be distinguished from a 'traditional' postmodern writer through a certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and by showing a certain responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements. Many of the ideas of postmodernism were formulated in theoretical literary texts of the 60s and 70s and based an formal experiments include the attempt of subverting the ability of language to refer truthfully to the world, and a radical turning away from coherent narrative discourse and plot. These ideas seem to have been intemalized by the new generation of postmodern writers of the 80s to such [...]

Paul Auster

Paul Auster
Author: Mark Brown
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1847796532

Paul Auster provides the first extended analysis of Auster’s essays, poetry, fiction, films and collaborative projects. It explores his key themes of identity; language and writing; metropolitan living and community; and storytelling and illusion. By tracing how Auster's representations of New York and city life have matured from a position of urban nihilism to qualified optimism, the book shows how the variety of forms he works in influences the treatment of his central concerns. The chapters are organised around gradually extending spaces to reflect the way in which Auster’s work broadens its focus, beginning with the poet’s room and finishing with the global metropolis of New York: his home city and often his muse. The book uses Auster’s published and unpublished literary essays to explain the shifts from the dense and introspective poems of the 70s, through the metropolitan fictions of the 80s and early 90s, to the relatively optimistic and critically acclaimed films, and his return to fiction in recent years.

Postmodernism and After

Postmodernism and After
Author: Regina Rudaitytė
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443810320

The present collection of academic articles is an attempt to reflect on new openings and recent developments in literature, literary theory and culture which seem to point beyond postmodernism and register a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises and authorial practices. Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), the book is trying to diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism, which was predicted by David Lodge already two decades ago. It also attempts to trace the signs in contemporary literature indicating that postmodernism is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine, fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old” or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies. Herbert Grabes’ comprehensive and illuminating article “From the Postmodern to the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory” which opens and sets the tone for this collection of essays is a major assessment of new developments in literary culture, focusing on the evolution of the postmodern to the premodern mode; it also highlights the role and current popularity of cultural studies and cultural history – theoretical movements which have been prevailing for some time now after the end of deconstruction. The articles assembled in this collection are on diverse thematics and written from diverse theoretical perspectives; they differ in scope and methodology, and their focus ranges from the postmodern, intertextual aspect to the open questioning of it and to more recent developments in the literary culture. Focusing on literary icons like A.S. Byatt, John Banville, Margaret Atwood, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov (but also extending into a less-known regions – geographically as well), they invite reconsideration and reconceptualization of such key notions as “truth”, meaning production, textuality and literary interpretation. This book aims at opening fresh discussion, debate and reflection on the new age reaching beyond postmodernism, and the budding literary mode, whatever labels we might stick to it.

Paul Auster's Ghosts

Paul Auster's Ghosts
Author: María Laura Arce Álvarez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2018-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498561640

The following book explores the intertextual relationship between Paul Auster’s first and most remarkable work, The New York Trilogy (1987), and the works of certain American and European writers who shaped this novel and Auster’s future works. Auster’s The New York Trilogy is a novel formed by an intertextual dialogue which in some cases it is explicit, mentioning authors and books intentionally, and in others implicit, provoked by Auster’s admiration for authors such as Samuel Beckett or product of his role as a translator, as it occurs with Maurice Blanchot. These two different ways of intertextuality essentially show Auster’s influence of the American Renaissance, Samuel Beckett’s fiction and the work of the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. In these terms, this book proposes an exhaustive analysis of City of Glass and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Ghosts and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and The Locked Room and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe. The two last chapters also offer a thorough analysis of the whole trilogy in comparison to Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and finally introduces a study of the trilogy as a fictionalization of Maurice Blanchot’s literary theory.

Paul Auster and the Influence of Maurice Blanchot

Paul Auster and the Influence of Maurice Blanchot
Author: María Laura Arce
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2016-04-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476663610

Poet, writer and filmmaker Paul Auster is one of the great contributors to American postmodern literature. Influenced by authors like Poe and the hardboiled detective stories of the 1950s, Auster's novels represented a new genre of "anti-detective fiction," in which the case itself loses direction and is overshadowed by existential questions. Analyzing three of his novels--Ghosts (1986), The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994)--this critical study explores the intertextual relationship between Auster's work and the oeuvre of French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. The author explores Auster's work as a fictionalization of Blanchot's concept of inspiration and the construction of imaginary space.

Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits

Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits
Author: Adriano A. Tedde
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000566331

This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today. Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the ‘Other America’ – the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scène of Auster and Jarmusch’s work and Waits’s lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism. Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.