Mary K. Holland

Succeeding Postmodernism (eBook, PDF)

Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. April 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781441159342
• Artikelnr.: 48422868

Autorenporträt

Mary Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Writing Postmodern Humanism / 1. "Dead Souls Babbling":
Language, Loss, and Community in Don DeLillo's The Names and White Noise
2. "The Art's Heart's Purpose": Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David
Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest / 3. A Lamb in Wolf's Clothing: Postmodern
Realism in A. M. Homes's Music for Torching and This Book Will Save Your
Life / 4. Recuperating the Postmodern Family: Mediating Loss in Mark
Danielewski's House of Leaves / 5. Joining Gravity: Making Language Matter
in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close, and Steve Tomasula's The Book of Portraiture / 6. "Set
[...] down softly beside you": Poststructural Realism in David Foster
Wallace's "Octet" and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated /
Conclusion: Metamodernism / Bibliography / Index