Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature
Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature

Author: Matthias Eck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-04

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1000054535

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Masculinities in Austrian Contemporary Literature: Strategic Evasion shows the important contribution that literature can make to the understanding of masculinities, by offering insights into the mental structures of hegemonic masculinity. It argues that while there is evidence of frustrating hegemonic masculinities, contemporary Austrian literature offers few positive images of alternative masculinity. The texts simultaneously criticize and present fantasies of hegemonic masculinity and as such provide a space for ambiguity and evasion. While providing readers with an in-depth study of the works of the authors Daniel Kehlmann, Doron Rabinovici and Arno Geiger, Matthias Eck elaborates the concept of strategic evasion. In order to bridge the gap between the ideal of masculinity and reality the male characters adopt two strategies of evasion: evasion to hide a softer and gentler side, and evasion into a world of fantasy where they pretend to live up to the ideal of hegemonic masculinity.

New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature
New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature

Author: Frauke Matthes

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-05-13

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 3031103181

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The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.

The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century
The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century

Author: Katharina Donn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-23

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1000074269

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How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

Transcending the Postmodern
Transcending the Postmodern

Author: Susana Onega

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-04

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1000060144

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Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

All Along Bob Dylan
All Along Bob Dylan

Author: Tymon Adamczewski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-09

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1000195872

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All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World offers an important contribution to thinking about the artist and his work. Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, the volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic artist. The chapters, organized around three broad thematic sections (Geographies, Receptions and Perspectives), address the notions of audience, performance and identity, allowing to map out the structure of feeling and authenticity, both, in the case of the artist and his audience. Taking its cue from the collapse of the so-called high-/ low culture split following from the Nobel Prize, the book explores the argument that Dylan (and all popular music) can be interpreted as literature and offers discussions in the context of literary traditions, or visual culture and music. This contributes to a nuanced and complex portrayal of the seminal cultural phenomenon called Bob Dylan.

The Fact of the Cage
The Fact of the Cage

Author: Karl A. Plank

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000338967

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David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace’s masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace’s theology of a "boneless Christ," The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank’s work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.

The London Object
The London Object

Author: Grant Hamilton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-26

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1000390551

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Étienne Balibar writes that today we are at the end of capitalism. This is not because capitalism has run its course or has met an irresistible force, but because there can be no purer form of capitalism than the one we have today. Taking seriously the idea that this strain of capitalism has not only seized the urban environment but is the urban environment, works by Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Penelope Lively, Peter Ackroyd, and J.G. Ballard are read as representative of a loosely allied group of London writers who have anticipated, critiqued, and offered up various avenues of resistance to the deleterious effects of this most vigorous strain of capitalism. Writing on the city by charting a politics of reconnection to the real that necessarily unsettles the epistemological and ontological ground upon which both modernity and capitalism sit, this stable of writers makes clear the ways in which the sheer materiality of the urban environment profoundly influences the being and thinking of individuals. In so doing, these writers produce works which when read together give the coordinates of an altermodernity that might just allow capitalism to reach its final conclusion.

Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma
Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma

Author: Beatriz Pérez Zapata

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-13

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1000407152

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This monograph analyses Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time as trauma fictions that reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political facets of trauma. Starting with Smith’s humorous critique of psychoanalysis and her definition of original trauma, this volume explores Smith’s challenge of Western theories of trauma and coping, and how her narratives expose the insidiousness of (post)colonial suffering and unbelonging. This book then explores transgenerational trauma, the tensions between remembering and forgetting, multidirectional memory, and the possibilities of the ambiguities and contradictions of the postcolonial and diasporic characters Smith depicts. This analysis discloses Smith’s effort to ethically redefine trauma theory from a postcolonial and decolonial standpoint, reiterates the need to acknowledge and work through colonial histories and postcolonial forms of oppression, and critically reflects on our roles as witnesses of suffering in global times.

A Man's World?
A Man's World?

Author: Kathleen Starck

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781443859820

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Political institutions and practices such as the state, parliament, citizenship and nationality, the vote, the military, and the making and implementation of laws have traditionally been treated as if they were un-gendered and guided exclusively by objective reasoning and rationality. Rationality and reason, though, have been habitually ascribed to masculinity, a fact which has often been ignored in favour of the apparent gender-inclusiveness of the realm of politics. In contrast to this view, this book explores the interdependence of the construction of masculinities, on the one hand, and the emerging, maintenance, and modification of concepts such as the state, citizenship, nationality and nationalism, democracy and militarism on the other. Illustrating the great amount of research activity in the field of political masculinities, the book offers many perspectives in its attempt to shed light on different modes of representing and constructing political masculinities across time and space. Findings from the fields of political science, history, media studies, literature, and film studies, as well as cultural studies, encourage an interdisciplinary debate of political masculinities in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

Author: Josep M. Armengol

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-26

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 3030715965

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This book focuses on representations of aging masculinities in contemporary U.S. fiction, including shifting perceptions of physical and sexual prowess, depression, and loss, but also greater wisdom and confidence, legacy, as well as new affective patterns. The collection also incorporates factors such as race, sexuality and religion. The volume includes studies, amongst others, on Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Edmund White. Ultimately, this study proves that men’s aging experiences as described in contemporary U.S. literature and culture are as complex and varied as those of their female counterparts.