"This is one of the most lively and lucid studies of contemporary fiction around. Whether or not you agree with his provocative definition of the postmodern, McHale's argument is always engaging, bold and forceful."--Linda Hutcheon
"Not only does the critical jargon not get in the way of his thesis, but McHale even uses examples you've heard of....A useful and comprehensive examination of the nature of The Beast."--City Limits
"McHale...has written a brilliant, forceful and lucid defence of his own view."--Journal of European Studie
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Customer Reviews:
Applied literary postmodernism.......2004-02-10
How refreshing!! Unlike so many literary theorists who rarely if ever cite a work of literature, McHale actually reads books and applies his theories to them. If you ask me, any literary postmodernist who doesn't talk about an author like Pynchon is missing the point. This is one of the best examples of applied postmodern theory I've ever read. And full of remarkable insights (like his discussion of modernism/mystery and postmodernism/sci fi). If you're interested in what postmodernism is in literature, this should be the first book you read (after one of the fun, easy guides like "Postmodernism for Beginners"). Highly recommended.
As Good as It Gets.......1999-07-30
No one has ever been able to place a great contemporary within a set framework, or at least not until they (the great contemporaries) finally fit the framework, in a way that suited the scheme of the critics of the time, or were well out of the way and hence harmless in the sense of further complicating the matter. Most of the literary criticism frameworks provided so far (20th century-wise) have been non-rigid and quite self-abating, but few are as analytical and as erudite as this. Read it; you may learn.
A Useful, Easily Understood Analysis of Postmod Literature.......1998-11-15
The one definable quality of postmodern literature is its resistance to definitions. Any survey of the criticism done in this field will turn up a huge number of "central characteristics," some of which seem contradictory, others of which are just plain impossible to wrap your mind around. McHale, like so many of his colleagues, does attempt a "paradigm" of postmodernism, but his at least has the advantage of being easy to grasp. Using the idea of the literary "dominant" as set forth by the narratologist/linguist Roman Jakobson, McHale argues that postmodernism in general "foregrounds" ontological issues (questions of being), as opposed to modernist writing, which foregrounds epistemological issues (questions of the nature and limits of knowledge). For example, a novel such as Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra is deeply postmodern to the extent that it disrupts time and space (factors that determine the nature of being) by gathering together various literary and historical figures in one place for "transtemporal feasts." A high-modernist book such as Joyce's Ulysses, on the other hand, concerns itself more with the nature of knowing: how people think, how information is created and transmitted, what discourses influence our thought and perceptions of the world, and so on. Obviously, this paradigm isn't perfect: seldom is fiction exclusively epistemological or ontological in emphasis, leaving the critic to make the highly subjective decision over which concern is foregrounded in any particular work. Nevertheless, McHale does a good job of accounting for "problem cases," explaining how texts can approach the condition of postmodernism but remain in a state of indecision (McHale classifies such texts as "limit-modernist" and offers a number of examples). Thus, even if it fails as a sure-fire way to distinguish postmodernist fish from modernist fowl, McHale's book offers a new way of looking at texts familiar to fans of both literary movements, which alone makes it a valuable addition to any library. Among the authors whose work is analyzed are Thomas Pynchon, Carlos Fuentes, Samuel Beckett, John Barth and Vladimir Nabokov, to name only a few.
Book Description
The first anthology to do full justice to the vast range of postwar American innovations in the art of fiction. Beginning in the 1950s with the generation of Pynchon, Burroughs, and Paley up to David Foster Wallace and Kathy Acker, Postmodern American Fiction is the first anthology to richly represent the diversity of experimental fiction in postwar America. A deep and wide collection of short fiction, novel excerpts, cartoons, hypertexts, creative nonfiction, and theoretical writings by sixty-eight writers, Postmodern American Fiction conveys the wit, inventiveness, and edgy skepticism of fiction that grows out of and refracts five decades of profound political, technological, and cultural change in America. The editors' lucid Introduction explores the modernist roots and cultural contexts of postwar America that gave rise to postmodern fiction and offers a window into the complicated, turbulent connections between postmodern fiction and literary theory. Section introductions and brief author headnotes frame the selections. A final section, "A Casebook of Postmodern Theory"--with writings by Cixous, Brub, Eco, hooks, and others--provides valuable contexts for reading the works. Each copy includes a user password to the hypertext fiction selections at Norton's Web site.
Customer Reviews:
What? No Hunter S thompson?.......2006-11-16
Just for that I'm giving it 4 stars. Had the anthology included at least one HST story or at least a blurb I would have given it 5 stars but so it goes.
On my first style and composition course I was assigned a paper on donald Barthelme's "the school". The name Donald Barthelme didn't tell me much back then (two years ago). I read "the school" and liked it, scratch liked... LOVED it. Few days pass and I'm at the University library and come across a spine design I like. I slide it out of the shelf and it's "Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology." I go through the index and Donald Bartheme's "see the moon?" is one of the first stories listed. Loved "see the moon?" I read the whole introduction, kept on reading and come across pieces by William S Burroughs, Mark Leyner, Jay Cantor, Kurt Vonnegut, Curtis White, Walter Abish and so on and so on. Love it so much I decide to take the book home.
One of my favorite stories on the anthology is David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon" and I was disappointed when, a few days later, I take home one of Foster's other books and it didn't even come close to holding a candle to "Lyndon."
The Norton Anthology basically turned me on to the POMO movement. I even read the more high brow, intelligentzia-oriented "A Casebook of Postmodern Theory" section and loved it. Laurie Anderson's another name that wouln't have touched a nerve were it not for this anthology. I am now infatuated with Laurie Anderson and anything related to Laurie Anderson. A wall in Haifa University's Hecht Art building has a plaque dedicated to Laurie Anderson. Damn right!
So it's missing Hunter S thompson but there's enough HST to go around elsewhere. Besides, Norton couldn't have intentionally left out Hunter S thompson, right?...RIGHT!!!?
Almost got it right..........2006-01-24
This is a decent collection of most of the major postmodern american writers and gives some sense of the scope and players (even if the selections are a little too short in many cases)...However, there are some major omissions, most notably there is no Jonathan Baumbach, who is widely considered one of the top experimental writers along with Coover and Barth and Barthelme, and, even with a section called "Fact and Fiction" Hunter S. Thompson is passed over in favor of far less "post modern" New Journalists such as Capote and Mailer. One can only hope that these glaring omissions are corrected in future editions...
good selection, but lacking a few.......2004-05-14
A great selection in a number of ways, but missing a few major writers. Probably the most significant is Richard Powers, whose Galatea 2.2 is a major work of postmodern fiction. Bruce Sterling as well...and Cryptonomicon is a much more significant postmodern novel than Snow Crash.
From my textbook to my favorite read........2003-10-23
This was one of my assigned texts for an English class I took. At the time I didn't even know what Postmodernism was, but this book changed all that and more. Now I love Postmodernism and have bought and read many of the books from which this collection has exerpts from. From Postmodern theory to classic postmodern stories, this book kept me interested through it all. I love this book and have reread it for fun many times.
A Text Book On Arts and Culture.......2000-02-16
This book with it's lucid chapter introductions offers an anthology which could be useful as a textbook for a class on arts and culture in America in the second half of the 20th Century.
Also, it is a good read, a nice collection of literature.
Average customer rating:
- One-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity
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Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas (Religion and Postmodernism Series)
Jill Robbins
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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ASIN: 0226721108 |
Book Description
"I don't know of any other book that deals with the hermeneutical problem of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in the way this one does. Full of cunning and unpredictable turns, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother addresses the question of the elder brother's fate by opposing two sets of readings, Christian and Jewish, ancient and modern, figural and midrashic. No one, after reading this book, will any longer connect Judaism and Christianity with a hyphen."—Gerald L. Burns, University of Notre Dame
"Through a creative reading of the prodigal son parable, Jill Robbins demonstrates the hermeneutical impasse of the Christian exegete who must and yet cannot incorporate the Old Testament. Having disclosed the aporia at the heart of Christian hermeneutics, she proposes an alternative approach to the Hebrew Bible and new interpretations of Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, and Levinas. Robbins brilliantly integrates the discourses of biblical texts, literary works, and critical analysis."—Mark C. Taylor, Williams College
Customer Reviews:
One-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity.......2007-06-20
Other than the endorsement by Mark C. Taylor, editor of a series on Religion and Postmodernism of which this was the first volume, I can see why this is a first review, some sixteen years after its publication. Reading this book from the perspective of an historian of ideas, and not that of a literary critic, I found it a very difficult read, yet well worth my persistence. As an historian of "ideas," I seek their presuppositions and implications, seeking for culture that which is somewhat akin to the unconscious for the human person, an "un-idea."
As a "roamin'catholic," I appreciate most deeply the author's deconstruction of the false dichotomy between old and new testaments, looking for the day when the Hebrew Bible might speak to us without being encapsulated within the categories of Hellenistic thought forms. The sibling rivalry between Judaism and Christianity continues to have catastrophic consequences for our so-called Western Civilization. What we need is a cathartic deconstruction of the presuppositions of this rivalry, enabling and empowering us to see the otherness of one another, alterity. For, one-anothered into existence from the vast genetic pool of our ancestors, we never cease one-anothering one another into the fullness of our humanity.
Book Description
What are the ethical responsibilities of the historian in an age of mass murder and hyperreality? Can one be postmodern and still write history? For whom should history be written?
Edith Wyschogrod animates such questions through the passionate figure of the "heterological historian." Realizing the philosophical impossibility of ever recovering "what really happened," this historian nevertheless acknowledges a moral imperative to speak for those who have been rendered voiceless, to give countenance to those who have become faceless, and hope to the desolate. Wyschogrod also weighs the impact of modern archival methods, such as photographs, film, and the Internet, which bring with them new constraints on the writing of history and which mandate a new vision of community. Drawing on the works of continental philosophers, historiographers, cognitive scientists, and filmmakers, Wyschogrod creates a powerful new framework for the understanding of history and the ethical duties of the historian.
Average customer rating:
- A worthwhile read for contemporary readers & writers
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Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism
Robert Rebein
Manufacturer: University Press of Kentucky
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Snow
ASIN: 0813121760 |
Book Description
Eschewing allegiance to particular literary movements, Robert Rebein offers a shrewd topographical map of contemporary American fiction.
Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientation in contemporary fiction, he discusses in detail the various names by which this fiction has been described, including literary postmodernism, minimalism, Hick Chic, Dirty Realism, ecofeminism, and more.
Rebein's clearly written, nuanced interpretations of works by Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, E. Annie Proulx, Chris Offut, and others, will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Customer Reviews:
A worthwhile read for contemporary readers & writers.......2001-11-15
An impressive analysis on contemporary fiction. The breadth of material reviewed is comprehensive and each chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Rebein's particular sub-theme (i.e., "hick chic" or "tribes" etc...). In truth, a lot of these kind of lit-crit analyses can end of being hollow: novels and writers become roadkill on the highway of some critical theory dogma. Rebein actually appears to have enjoyed the work, and the respect for the work or the writer is apparent. Genuine good humor is suffused throughout the book, which is always good to see in literary analysis. The strengths of this study are definitely his discussions on the West, "New" West, and the Western writers given that label: Cormac McCarthy, Erdrich, Kingsolver etc... His chapter on Cormac McCarthy and his literary cultural mileu is the clearest and sharpest discussion I've read about the work. It's hard to discuss realism and regionalism in general without mentioning the Southern writers and that long history and I found his anaylsis and arguments of Dorothy Allison and her ilk helpful as well. Less compelling for me were the discussions on "Tribe" and minority-American writers he discusses, but the fact that he includes them in his work is a statement in itself. One area I was not well-read in and enjoyed immensely was the "White Prison Novel," which despite the subject matter sounded like something that would be fun to read. In short, I would have to say that anyone interested in contemporary american fiction or anyone writing contemporary American fiction can learn a lot from this well-considered, comprehensive, and well-written study.
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Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium
Jeremy Green
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 140396632X
Release Date: 2005-04-28 |
Book Description
Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority, and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade--including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers-Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in the culture.
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Towards a New Material Aesthetics (Legenda) (Legenda) (Legenda)
Alastair Renfrew
Manufacturer: Legenda
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ASIN: 1900755947
Release Date: 2007-03-30 |
Books:
- Dora Bruder
- Empires at War [Three Volumes]: A Chronological Encyclopedia
- Employment, Labor Unions and Wages (Economists of the Twentieth Century)
- Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series)
- Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind
- Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna (National Geographic)
- Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
- Fight Back: Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style
- Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)
- Fundraising Mistakes That Bedevil All Boards (And Staff Too): A 1-hour Guide To Identifying And Overcoming Obstacles To Your Success
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the kitschmeister dishes.......2006-10-14
