Author: Pavlina Radia
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781443897969
Size: 50.57 MB
Format: PDF
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256
View: 6949
"While modernity aspired to "fix" radical alienation through aesthetics by assigning an ethical value to narratives, contemporary literature and the arts are no longer immune to the impact of commodity culture amplified by globalization. In the world of commodity, corporate logic, and cyborgs, the very notion of identity is frequently turned into a spectacle. Yet, it is also simultaneously mobilized by the search for what Jean Baudrillard describes as the "ecstatic" form that materializes aesthetics. Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature investigates not only how these transformations affect gender, racial, and class relations, as well as how they impact the representation of historical events. Pop culture media and discourses of multiculturalism, both important venues of and vehicles for globalization, have had an extensive effect on contemporary writers like Don DeLillo, Marge Piercy, and Jane Smiley, as have the discourses of terrorism and assimilation on the works of Diana Abu-Jaber, Chang-Rae Lee, Shalom Auslander, and Alissa Torres. As the works of these authors show, the tendency to unify the world as a global village has been frequently complicit in perpetuating oppressive, neo-colonial ideologies. As these writers reveal, literature no longer provides a solid cure for the somnambulist culture of instant gratification.On the global stage, the body becomes the ultimate commodity: the fetish of ecstatic consumption, as it is persistently mobilized by the search for ecstatic avatar (anti)forms. Whether these forms provide an escape into a utopian space or further enhance the dystopian ecstasy is a crucial query framing this book. As it shows, the works of DeLillo, Smiley, Piercy, Abu-Jaber, Lee, Auslander, and Torres provide important and challenging commentaries on the ecstatic gaze of global dystopia, particularly its appetite for alterity and the tragic, often disguised as interchangeable metaphors of Otherness, fear, anxiety, terror, pain, and pleasure, titillation, exoticism, and ecstasy. Consequently, the book sheds light on the ways in which the culture of spectacle is ever-evolving, manipulating and affecting the global dependence on the ecstasy of consumption and its many different forms."
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Author: Treasa De Loughry
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030393259
Size: 47.10 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
View: 4648
This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to the interrelations between postcolonial, world, and global literatures, this book argues that postcolonial literary studies cannot account for global crises that exceed the national and anti-colonial. Advocating an interdisciplinary framework informed by a synthesis of materialist literary theory with world-systems theory, combining Fredric Jameson and Georg Lukács with Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, this book examines how global literatures metabolise not only socioeconomic conditions, but also transformations in the world-ecology, and emergent developmental and epochal crises of capitalism.
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Author: Diletta De Cristofaro
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350085790
Size: 26.20 MB
Format: PDF, Docs
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
View: 6291
Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed? The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with 'the end' by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature's most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity's apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.
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Author: Juris Dilevko
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1598849093
Size: 22.57 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 526
View: 1507
This much-needed guide to translated literature offers readers the opportunity to hear from, learn about, and perhaps better understand our shrinking world from the perspective of insiders from many cultures and traditions. • Over 1,000 annotated contemporary world fiction titles, featuring author's name; title; translator; publisher and place of publication; genre/literary style/story type; an annotation; related works by the author; subject keywords; and original language • 9 introductory overviews about classic world fiction titles • Extensive bibliographical essays about fiction traditions in other countries • 5 indexes: annotated authors, annotated titles, translators, nations, and subjects/keywords
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Author: Arthur W. Biddle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Size: 27.17 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 845
View: 6482
This exciting anthology of fiction, poetry, and drama provides students with a window into the cultures and literatures of the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. The selections for the six parts of the book were assembled by a team of six regional experts under the general editorship of Arthur W. Biddle. The regional editors have also provided introductions, headnotes, and footnotes, apparatus that is designed to give students the information they need without overwhelming them.
