Does It Really Mean That? Interpreting the Literary Ambiguous

Does It Really Mean That? Interpreting the Literary Ambiguous

Author: Janka Kaščáková

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-01-18

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1443827495

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However disconnected the essays in the volume might appear to be at first glance, the unifying factor is the very notion of ambiguity—which is one of the essential features of the postmodern age: how it can be defined as opposed to what it means or is, where it can be found, to what purposes it can be put, including questions of whether it is a positive or negative factor. But this, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Writers have always depended on equivocation, multiplicity of meaning, uncertainty of meaning—deliberate mystification one might say. Language itself is the base of ambiguity not only in literature but in everyday public discourse. Thus the papers in the volume should appeal not only to scholars working in the fields of modern or postmodern literature, but those who see the importance of ambiguity in the earlier texts, and perhaps their influences in later writing. Finally the essays included here not only provide specific analyses and proposed solutions for specific works or authors they also open the reader to other appearances of ambiguity, often not simply in literature or critical theory, but in the kinds of social issues the literary works deals with.


Widening Horizons

Widening Horizons

Author: Mohit Kumar Ray

Publisher: Sarup & Sons

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9788176255981

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Mohit K. Ray, b.1940, former Professor of English, Burdwan University; contributed articles.


Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature

Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature

Author: Patricia Garcia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317581326

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Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.


The Way of Kings

The Way of Kings

Author: Brandon Sanderson

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 0765376679

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A new epic fantasy series from the New York Times bestselling author chosen to complete Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time® Series


The Postmodern Sacred

The Postmodern Sacred

Author: Emily McAvan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2012-10-09

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0786492821

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From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. Topics include how media technologies like CGI have blurred the lines between real and unreal, the polytheisms of Buffy and Xena, the New Age Gnosticism of The DaVinci Code, the Islamic "Other" and science fiction's response to 9/11, and the Christian Right and popular culture. Today's pervasive, saturated media culture, this work shows, has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary, so that popular culture is not only powerfully shaped by the discourses of religion, but also shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world.


Representations of the Post/human

Representations of the Post/human

Author: Elaine L. Graham

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780813530598

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This work draws together a wide range of literature on contemporary technologies and their ethical implications. It focuses on advances in medical, reproductive, genetic and information technologies.


Visions of the Human in Science Fiction and Cyberpunk

Visions of the Human in Science Fiction and Cyberpunk

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-09-25

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1904710166

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This collection of papers joins a growing body of work addressing what are arguably some of the most important questions faced in the 21st century; what does it mean to be human and what do we understand by humanity?