The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction
The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction

Author: T.V. Reed

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1350010820

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Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.

Succeeding Postmodernism
Succeeding Postmodernism

Author: Mary K. Holland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1441159347

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While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism
Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism

Author: Graham Matthews

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1441134395

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What is the significance of writing in the wake of postmodernism? The previous decade has seen a growing interest in criticism of postmodern ethics and aesthetics from theorists and writers. This book begins to answer what art form or critical methodology might take its place. Exploring the work of six contemporary novelists - Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Michel Houellebecq, Tama Janowitz and Chuck Palahniuk - Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism delivers a series of interventions into six key areas of contemporary debate: fear, nihilism, revolution, ethics, enjoyment and feminism. The book goes on to develop an innovative critical methodology which reinvigorates the ability of art and literature to engage in ideological critique. Rather than valorising separatism, plurality or indeterminacy, this approach delivers a critical framework which enacts a radical de-centering of the fundamental coordinates of contemporary society.

The Art of Protest
The Art of Protest

Author: T. V. Reed

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 1452958653

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A second edition of the classic introduction to arts in social movements, fully updated and now including Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and new digital and social media forms of cultural resistance The Art of Protest, first published in 2006, was hailed as an “essential” introduction to progressive social movements in the United States and praised for its “fluid writing style” and “well-informed and insightful” contribution (Choice Magazine). Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of T. V. Reed’s acclaimed work offers engaging accounts of ten key progressive movements in postwar America, from the African American struggle for civil rights beginning in the 1950s to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. Reed focuses on the artistic activities of these movements as a lively way to frame progressive social change and its cultural legacies: civil rights freedom songs, the street drama of the Black Panthers, revolutionary murals of the Chicano movement, poetry in women’s movements, the American Indian Movement’s use of film and video, anti-apartheid rock music, ACT UP’s visual art, digital arts in #Occupy, Black Lives Matter rap videos, and more. Through the kaleidoscopic lens of artistic expression, Reed reveals how activism profoundly shapes popular cultural forms. For students and scholars of social change and those seeking to counter reactionary efforts to turn back the clock on social equality and justice, the new edition of The Art of Protest will be both informative and inspiring.

From Kafka to Sebald
From Kafka to Sebald

Author: Sabine Wilke

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-06-21

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1441109366

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This volume is a response to a renewed interest in narrative form in contemporary literary studies, taking up the question of literary narratives and their encounters with modernism and postmodernism within the German-language milieu. Original essays written by scholars of German and Comparative Literature approach the issue of narrative form anew, analyzing the ways in which modernist and postmodernist German-language narratives frame and/or deconstruct historical narratives. Beginning with the German-language modernist author par excellence, Franz Kafka, the volume's essays explore the unique perspective on historical change offered by literature. The authors (Kafka, Kappacher, Goll, Bernhard, Menasse, and Wolf, among others) and works interpreted in the essays included here span the period from before World War I to the post-Holocaust, post-Wall present. Individual essays focus on modernism, postmodernism, narrative theory, and autobiography.

Introduction to New Realism
Introduction to New Realism

Author: Maurizio Ferraris

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1472590651

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Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new Enlightenment, has had an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience. Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism.

Digitized Lives
Digitized Lives

Author: T.V. Reed

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1136690034

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In a remarkably short period of time the Internet and associated digital communication technologies have deeply changed the way millions of people around the globe live their lives. But what is the nature of that impact? In chapters examining a broad range of issues—including sexuality, politics, education, race, gender relations, the environment, and social protest movements—Digitized Lives seeks answers to these central questions: What is truly new about so-called "new media," and what is just hype? How have our lives been made better or worse by digital communication technologies? In what ways can these devices and practices contribute to a richer cultural landscape and a more sustainable society? Cutting through the vast—and often contradictory—literature on these topics, Reed avoids both techno-hype and techno-pessimism, offering instead succinct, witty and insightful discussions of how digital communication is impacting our lives and reshaping the major social issues of our era. The book argues that making sense of digitized culture means looking past the glossy surface of techno gear to ask deeper questions about how we can utilize technology to create a more socially, politically, and economically just world. Companion website available at: culturalpolitics.net/digital_cultures

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism
The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

Author: Mary K. Holland

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-06-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 150136264X

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Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new “realisms” in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature “realistic”? And if it is, then what does “realism” mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

After Postmodernism
After Postmodernism

Author: Jose Lopez

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2005-03-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1847141064

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What comes after 'postmodernism'? A buzzword which began as an energising, radical critique became, by the 20th Century's end, a byword for fracture, eclecticism, political apathy and intellectual exhaustion. The last few years have seen a growing interest in critical realism as a possible, alternative way of moving forward. The virtues of critical realism lie in its successful provision of a philosophical grounding for the social sciences and humanities and of a methodology applicable to many different fields of analysis. After Postmodernism brings together some of the best-known names in the field to present the first truly interdisciplinary introduction to critical realism. The book presents the reader with a compendium of accessible essays illustrating the connection between meta-theory, theory and substantive research across Sociology, Philosophy, Literary Studies, Politics, Media Studies, Psychology and Science Studies. The flexibility of critical realism is illustrated in the range of topics discussed - ranging from quantum mechanics to cyberspace, to literary theory, nature, smoking, the future fo Marx, the unconscious and, of course, postmodernsim and the future of theory itself. Contributors: Allison Assiter, Ted Benton, Francis Barker, Roy Bhaskar, Jean Bricmont, Sue Clegg, Andrew Collier, Justin Cruickshank, Robert Fine, David Ford, Tim Forsyth, Rom Harre, Pam Higham, Philip Hodgkiss, Jose Lopez, Christopher Norris, Bertell Ollman, Jenneth Parker, Frank Pearce, Douglas V. Porpora, Garry Potter, John Scott, Philip Tew, Charles R Varela, Anthony Woodiwiss

From Puritanism to Postmodernism
From Puritanism to Postmodernism

Author: Richard Ruland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 1317234146

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Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.