Narratives of Nothing in 20th-century Literature PDF Download

Author: Meghan Vicks
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781501307249
Category : Narration
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Meghan Vicks
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501331965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero ? the number that is also not a number ? allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative ? that is, how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, and how we exist in language.

Author: Sofya Khagi
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644697785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.

Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Author: Dominik Gerhard
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640117999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg, course: 20th Century American Short Stories, 4 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In his stylistic masterpiece, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Ernest Hemingway confronts his readers with the omnipresent fear of nothingness. The main characters of the story show different ways of dealing with that problem, but only the older waiter is able to present a satisfying solution. By establishing a haven for all desperate people who need a dignified place to dispel their fear, the old waiter has found his meaning in life and therefore, his way to combat his fear of nothingness. According to him, life does not need to be senseless and end in despair, as long as one keeps composure and protects one’s own dignity and the dignity of others.

Author: Yuri Leving
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441142630
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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A unique anthology devoted to a single story–“Signs and Symbols” by Vladimir Nabokov–which exposes the way we read and interpret short stories.

Author: Elke D'hoker
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional ‘canon’ of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the ‘case’ of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.

Author: New Yorker Magazine
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0375751505
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Mavis Gallant, Julian Barnes, Michael Chabon, Jamaica Kincaid, John O'Hara, Muriel Spark, Ann Beattie, and William Maxwell are among the contributors to Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker--assembled by Roger Angell, senior editor at The New Yorker. This is the first fiction anthology in more than three decades from the magazine that has defined the American short story for almost a century. As noteworthy for its range as for its excellence, Nothing But You features a stunning array of present and past masters writing about love in all its varieties, from the classic love story to dislocated narratives of weird modern romance. Taken separately, these stories suggest the infinite variety of the human heart. Taken together, they are a literary milestone, a comprehensive review of the way we live and love now.

Author: John Cheever
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743985
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1093

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheever’s crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." —The Guardian

Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698160576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1122

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Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.