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Author: C. Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-04-30
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 0674729099
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiterature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
Author: C. Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-04-30
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 0674419685
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiterature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature’s capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature’s ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson’s groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader’s shifting responses to structures of conflicting information. A number of these novels employ a structure of mutual exclusion, which presents opposed explanations for the same events. Some use a structure of multiplicity, which presents different perspectives regarding events or characters. The structure of repetition in other texts destabilizes the continuity of events and frustrates our ability to follow the story. To explain how these structures produce uncertainty, Serpell borrows from cognitive psychology the concept of affordance, which describes an object’s or environment’s potential uses. Moving through these narrative structures affords various ongoing modes of uncertainty, which in turn afford ethical experiences both positive and negative. At the crossroads of recent critical turns to literary form, reading practices, and ethics, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers a new phenomenology of how we read uncertainty now.
Author: Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Undelivered Lectures
Published: 2020-09-29
Total Pages: 140
ISBN-13: 9781945492433
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSpeculative essays that probe the mythology of the face by the author of The Old Drift
Author: Inger H. Dalsgaard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-06-20
Total Pages: 694
ISBN-13: 1108752705
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas Pynchon in Context guides students, scholars and other readers through the global scope and prolific imagination of Pynchon's challenging, canonical work, providing the most up-to-date and authoritative scholarly analyses of his writing. This book is divided into three parts. The first, 'Times and Places', sets out the history and geographical contexts both for the setting of Pynchon's novels and his own life. The second, 'Culture, Politics and Society', examines twenty important and recurring themes which most clearly define Pynchon's writing - ranging from ideas in philosophy and the sciences to humor and pop culture. The final part, 'Approaches and Readings', outlines and assesses ways to read and understand Pynchon. Consisting of Forty-four essays written by some of the world's leading scholars, this volume outlines the most important contexts for understanding Pynchon's writing and helps readers interpret and reference his literary work.
Author: Ernest N. Emenyonu
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 1847012280
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInvestigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.
Author: Brown Bob Brown
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2019-10-14
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 1474455077
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritical facsimile edition making crucial modernist texts available for the first time since 1931 Restores a rare but highly influential modernist anthology to print in a new critical facsimile editionProvides extensive scholarly commentary, analyses, and newly discovered biographical information, setting the anthology in its broader cultural contextOffers the first collection of avant-garde writing designed to be read on a 'reading machine' invented by the American expatriate poet Bob BrownIncludes both Craig Saper's new Introduction and a separate chapter on the Contributors and their readies. Saper is the leading scholar of Bob Brown's work as well as an important scholar of experimental writing, media, publishing, and artThis new edition of Bob Brown's groundbreaking collection of modernist writing experiments has been out of print since 1931, when Brown's Roving Eye Press originally published it. Only a few copies exist in archives today. The contributors include major modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti, Eugne Jolas and Ezra Pound, key social realists like Kay Boyle and James T. Farrell and daring queer novelists and artists including Charles Henri Ford and Sidney Hunt. Providing extensive scholarly commentary, analyses and newly discovered biographical information, this book sets the anthology in its broader cultural context. This is an essential resource for those interested in print and book history, the politics and culture of the expatriate avant-garde and the reading machine's impact on reading, writing and literacy.
Author: Julie Beth Napolin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2020-06-02
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0823288188
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?” For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.
Author: Theodore Martin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-05-30
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 0231543891
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat does it mean to call something “contemporary”? More than simply denoting what’s new, it speaks to how we come to know the present we’re living in and how we develop a shared story about it. The story of trying to understand the present is an integral, yet often unnoticed, part of the literature and film of our moment. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin argues that the contemporary is not just a historical period but also a conceptual problem, and he claims that contemporary genre fiction offers a much-needed resource for resolving that problem. Contemporary Drift combines a theoretical focus on the challenge of conceptualizing the present with a historical account of contemporary literature and film. Emphasizing both the difficulty and the necessity of historicizing the contemporary, the book explores how recent works of fiction depict life in an age of global capitalism, postindustrialism, and climate change. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction, and the postapocalyptic novel, Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers. Martin argues that genre provides these artists with a formal strategy for understanding both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Genre writing, with its mix of old and new, brings to light the complicated process by which we make sense of our present and determine what belongs to our time.
Author: Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2014-10-28
Total Pages: 626
ISBN-13: 1620407809
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 2014, UNESCO's World Book Capital is Port Harcourt, Nigeria-the first city in Africa to receive the designation by public bid. This makes it a special year for the Port Harcourt Book Festival, which will be in its seventh year, and bigger than ever. They are joining forces with the internationally renowned Hay Festival, which will bring to Port Harcourt its 39 Project-a competition to identify the thirty-nine most promising young talents under the age of forty in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. It follows the success of Bogotá 39 in 2007 and Beirut 39 in 2010. Both recognized a number of authors who now have international profiles: in Bogotá, Adriana Lisboa, Alejandro Zambra, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Daniel Alarcón, and Junot Díaz; in Beirut, Randa Jarrar, Joumana Haddad, Abdellah Taia, Samar Yazbek, and Faiza Guene. In Nigeria this year, the esteemed judges include leading-edge publisher Margaret Busby; novelist and playwright Elechi Amadi,writer and scholar Osonye Tess Onwueme, and Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina. For the second time, Bloomsbury is honored to be a part of the festivities, publishing worldwide Africa39-a collection of brand new work from these talented thirty-nine. With an introduction by Wole Soyinka, Africa39 is a must-read for anyone curious about Africa today and Africa tomorrow, as envisioned through the eyes of its brightest literary stars.
Author: Johannes Voelz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 1108418767
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Poetics of Insecurity explores how American literary writers forged a cultural imaginary in which insecurity acts as an enlivening force.
