American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction
American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction

Author: Jaroslav Kušnír

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 3838255143

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Jaroslav Kušnír’s book American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction is a sequel to his previous study on American postmodern fiction entitled Poetika americkej postmodernej prózy: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme [Poetics of American Fiction: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme]. Prešov: Impreso, 2001. It explores various aspects of American postmodernist fiction as manifested in the works by Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme and other American postmodernist authors such as Robert Coover, E. L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster. Analyzing various short stories and novels, the author shows differences between modernist and postmodernist literature in the works of Donald Barthelme; the way postmodern parodies of popular literary genres give a critique of some aspects of American cultural identity and experience (the American Dream, individualism, consumerism); and he also shows different ways postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster create metafictional effect as one of the most significant aspects of postmodern literature.

Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature and Arts
Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature and Arts

Author: Jaroslav Kušnír

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 3838255135

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This book includes contributions by African, East and West European, Asian and North American scholars which deal with and compare ideological and non-ideological approaches to the analysis of literary, artistic as well as popular works (popular music) mostly by American authors. Most of the essays deal with a way various aspects of American identity are depicted, represented, treated, ideologized and aestheticized in different literary genres, forms of art and media. The contributions offer multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative perspectives and represent a diversity of scholarly voices ranging from the general discussion on the relationship between ideology and art (Anton Pokrivčák), ideology and multiculturalism (Cristina Garrigós). They also give the analysis of poetry (Pokrivčák, Obododima Oha), postmodern fiction (Pi-Hua Ni, Cristina Garrigós), drama (Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Csaba Csapó) as well as the comparative analysis of the depiction of the identity of North American Indians in such different media as literature and film (Michal Peprník). In addition to this, the book includes the analysis of Black rap music (Wojciech Kallas).

Popular Culture Values and the Arts
Popular Culture Values and the Arts

Author: Ray B. Browne

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0786453451

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In countries around the world, the rise of class divisions and unbridled capitalism are changing the conventional definitions of art and esthetics. Historically, the philanthropy of the elite has played a leading role in supporting, funding, and distributing artistic works. While such measures may be pure in intent, many worry that private funding may be gentrifying the arts and creating a situation in which art will only be valued for its prestige or, worse, its price tag. This collection of essays examines the current movement to democratize the arts and make the world of artistic endeavor open and accessible to all. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

BRANDING & ADVERTISING AND COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES
BRANDING & ADVERTISING AND COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

Author: BARBARA LÄMMLEIN

Publisher: Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 6061610599

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From billboards, print advertisement and the Internet through to TV spots, advertising uses various channels to convince the potential customer to buy a certain product or brand. Companies use advertising that is an omnipresent form of modern popular culture, as a communication tool to promote their brands and products to a mass audience in order to generate sales. Therefore, the message within the advertisement has to be as persuasive as possible to ensure that among other things pleasurable emotions and ideas are awakened in the consumer that are supposed to be linked to the product and brand to fulfill its mission – increase sales volume. Within this thesis interdisciplinary approaches for deciphering messages of selected car advertising were used. Multiple methods and paradigms such as cultural studies, media communication, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, were applied in order to analyze TV spots and print advertisements from a variety of angles. The results reveal that archetypes, symbols, and mythical narratives are a permanent feature of contemporary car advertising.

Paul Auster and the Influence of Maurice Blanchot
Paul Auster and the Influence of Maurice Blanchot

Author: María Laura Arce

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1476624909

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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.

Escaping from the Prison-House of Language and Digging for Meanings in Texts among Texts: Metafiction and Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s Novels Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin
Escaping from the Prison-House of Language and Digging for Meanings in Texts among Texts: Metafiction and Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s Novels Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin

Author: Andrea Strolz

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 3838256433

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Margaret Atwood's novels are photographs of her characters' lives: while words only ever describe her protagonists’ blurred visions of their pasts, their 'true' stories are told in subtexts which run parallel or even contrary to the main story line and which depict the unseen, the buried, the 'untrue'. Replete with intertextual references, her fiction illuminates that and why "[w]hat isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light" (The Blind Assassin). She plays with our conventional modes of perception to make us aware of the way we frame reality in our minds. Andrea Strolz discusses in her book the interrelation between metafictional and intertextual features in two of Atwood's novels that share many similarities, even though written in different decades. She examines how Atwood weaves intertextual references into her fiction, how she facilitates a reader's recognition of the intertexts, and she shows that Atwood's narrator-protagonists also reflect on our age as one of intertextuality.

Paul Auster's Ghosts
Paul Auster's Ghosts

Author: María Laura Arce Álvarez

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-06-13

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1498561640

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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.