Gale Researcher Guide for: Anticipating Postmodernism: Saul Bellow and Donald Barthelme is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
On the eve of his coming of age, a young Lord begins to see the truth of his parents' lives: his mother cannot buy her way into society no matter how hard he tries, and his father is being ruined by her continued attempts. The young Lord then travels to his home in Ireland, encountering adventure on the way, and discovers that the native residents are being exploited in his father's absence.
At her kitchen table, somewhere in the South, Powell's narrator embarks on a spirited and often hilarious imagining of certain historical figures and current national preoccupations. Ostensibly writing her grocery list, Mrs. Hollingsworth most happily loses her sense of herself.
DIVDIVFinalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossoms/divDIV/divDIV Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina, in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother (known to local blacks as “the Duchess”), who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate and literary as any English professor./divDIV When Taurus, a soft-spoken African American stranger, moves into the cabin recently vacated by the Manigaults’ longtime maid, a friendship forms. The lonely, excitable Simons and the quiet, thoughtful Taurus, who has appointed himself Simons’s guide in the ways of the grown-up world, bond over the course of a hot Southern summer./div But Taurus may be playing a larger role in the Manigaults’ life than he is willing to let on—a suspicion that is confirmed when Simons’s absent father suddenly returns to the family fold. An evocative, thoughtful novel about growing up, written in language that sparkles and soars, Padgett Powell’s Edisto is the first novel of one of the most important southern writers of the last quarter century. /div
Examining how teachers help students respond to short fiction, this book presents 25 essays that look closely at "teachable" short stories by a diverse group of classic and contemporary writers. The approaches shared by the contributors move from readers' first personal connections to a story, through a growing facility with the structure of stories and the perception of their varied cultural contexts, to a refined and discriminating sense of taste in short fiction. After a foreword ("What Is a Short Story and How Do We Teach It?"), essays in the book are: (1) "Shared Weight: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'" (Susanne Rubenstein); (2) "Being People Together: Toni Cade Bambara's 'Raymond's Run'" (Janet Ellen Kaufman); (3) "Destruct to Instruct: 'Teaching' Graham Greene's'The Destructors'" (Sara R. Joranko); (4) "Zora Neale Hurston's 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me': A Writing and Self-Discovery Process" (Judy L. Isaksen); (5) "Forcing Readers to Read Carefully: William Carlos Williams's 'The Use of Force'" (Charles E. May); (6) "'Nothing Much Happens in This Story': Teaching Sarah Orne Jewett's 'A White Heron'" (Janet Gebhart Auten); (7) "How Did I Break My Students of One of Their Biggest Bad Habits as Readers? It Was Easy: Using Alice Walker's 'How Did I Get Away...'" (Kelly Chandler); (8) "Reading between the Lines of Gina Berriault's 'The Stone Boy'" (Carole L. Hamilton); (9) "Led to Condemn: Discovering the Narrative Strategy of Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'" (James Tackach); (10) "One Great Way to Read Short Stories: Studying Character Deflection in Morley Callaghan's 'All the Years of Her Life'" (Grant Tracey); (11) "Stories about Stories: Teaching Narrative Using William Saroyan's 'My Grandmother Lucy Tells a Story without a Beginning, a Middle, or an End'" (Brenda Dyer); (12) "The Story Looks at Itself: Narration in Virginia Woolf's 'An Unwritten Novel'" (Tamara Grogan); (13) "Structuralism and Edith Wharton's 'Roman Fever'" (Linda L. Gill); (14) "Creating Independent Analyzers of the Short Story with Rawlings's 'A Mother in Mannville'" (Russell Shipp); (15) "Plato's 'Myth of the Cave' and the Pursuit of Knowledge" (Dennis Young); (16) "Through Cinderella: Four Tools and the Critique of High Culture" (Lawrence Pruyne); (17) "Getting behind Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (Dianne Fallon); (18) "Expanding the Margins in American Literature Using Armistead Maupin's 'More Tales of the City'" (Barbara Kaplan Bass); (19) "Shuffling the Race Cards: Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif'" (E. Shelley Reid); (20) "Readers, Cultures, and 'Revolutionary' Literature: Teaching Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Lesson'" (Jennifer Seibel Trainor); (21) "Learning to Listen to Stories: Sherman Alexie's 'Witnesses, Secret and Not'" (Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez); (22) "'Sometimes, Bad Is Bad': Teaching Theodore Dreiser's 'Typhoon' and the American Literary Canon" (Peter Kratzke); (23) "Teaching Flawed Fiction: 'The Most Dangerous Game'" (Tom Hansen); (24) "Reading Louise Erdrich's 'American Horse'" (Pat Onion); and (25) "Opening the Door to Understanding Joyce Carol Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" (Richard E. Mezo). An afterword "Writing by the Flash of the Firefly" and a bibliographic postscript are attached. (RS)
DIVHailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark/divDIV/divDIV On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a “woman named Drown.” He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they’re heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life’s laboratory is about to get quite contradictory./div Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.
The lights in the bus burned dim, orange-hued behind opaque bevelled glass; ranged below the luggage racks they lit up the advertisement panels with repeated circles of bilious light. A white face that never seemed to turn away was watching her in the glass. Imogen Langrishe, the youngest of four sisters, embarks on a reckless love affair with a charismatic and indigent German scholar. Her family's name has long been a byword for money, status and respectability in Celbridge, County Kildare, but the world is now changing.
