The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace
01 Oct 1996-Critique-studies in Contemporary Fiction (Taylor & Francis Group)-Vol. 38, Iss: 1, pp 12-37
TL;DR: The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace as discussed by the authors is a collection of works by Powers, Vollman, and Wallace, published in 1996.
Abstract: (1996). The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 12-37.
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25 Jun 2015TL;DR: The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism as mentioned in this paper surveys the full spectrum of postmodern culture across a range of fields, from architecture and visual art to fiction, poetry, and drama, and it deftly maps postmodernism's successive historical phases, from its emergence in the 1960s to its waning in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Abstract: The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism surveys the full spectrum of postmodern culture - high and low, avant-garde and popular, famous and obscure - across a range of fields, from architecture and visual art to fiction, poetry, and drama. It deftly maps postmodernism's successive historical phases, from its emergence in the 1960s to its waning in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Weaving together multiple strands of postmodernism - people and places from Andy Warhol, Jefferson Airplane and magical realism, to Jean-Francois Lyotard, Laurie Anderson and cyberpunk - this book creates a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon that continues to exert an influence over our present 'post-postmodern' situation. Comprehensive and accessible, this Introduction is indispensable for scholars, students, and general readers interested in late twentieth-century culture.
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TL;DR: In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin applied the symbolic hierarchical inversions of medieval carnival to literature and galvanized intellectual interest in carnival as an analytic, literary, and political model for transgression. For Bakhtin and those influenced by his theory, carnival provided an ideal setting for what he termed the “dialogic imagination,” because it involved a temporary suspension of official order that allowed for a creative and therapeutic admixture of the symbolic forms of cultural life. As Wilson Yates succinctly explains in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, this heterogeneous festivity also served as a “revolutionary vision and understanding of a new world freed from both bourgeois and totalitarian cultures” (22). In the postmodern era, carnival's liberatory vision has been used to counter hegemonic notions of stable identity, gender, language, and truth in the contemporary work of such authors as Ishmael Reed, Angela Carter, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon...
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30 Jun 2013
TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that despite the non-event of nuclear exchange during the Cold War, the nuclear referent continues to shape American literary expression, and that nuclear war is a trope that can be traced throughout twentieth century American literature.
Abstract: This dissertation looks at global nuclear war as a trope that can be traced throughout twentieth century American literature. I argue that despite the non-event of nuclear exchange during the Cold War, the nuclear referent continues to shape American literary expression. Since the early 1990s the nuclear referent has dispersed into a multiplicity of disaster scenarios, producing a “second nuclear age.” If the atomic bomb once introduced the hypothesis “of a total and remainderless destruction of the archive,” today literature’s staged anticipation of catastrophe has become inseparable from the realities of global risk. Consequently, to understand the relationship between the archive of twentieth and twenty-first century disaster literature and the world risk society, my dissertation revitalizes nuclear criticism by emphasizing the link between the development of nuclear weaponry and communication technologies.
I read a group of writers for whom nuclear war functions more as a structural principle than as a narrative event. William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923) is a significant precursor of a nuclear imagination distinct from a more general apocalyptic imagination. By imagining the destruction and reappearance of terrestrial life, Williams’s poem captures the recursive character of the nuclear imagination. I then address the relationship between the nuclear imagination, narrative, and the writing of history in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, and how his asymptotic engagement with nuclear war attempts to transform postmodernity’s sense of an ending. David Foster Wallace’s subsequent response in Infinite Jest (1996) to US metafiction’s apocalyptic atmosphere is transitional between the first and second nuclear ages, reconfiguring the archive from a target of destruction into a system capable of producing emergent disaster through accumulation. My dissertation thus draws together technologies of destruction and preservation, and shows them to be inseparable in twentieth and twenty-first century US literature.
20 citations
TL;DR: In the first critical article on David Foster Wallace's second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), Tom Le Clair calls the work an "allegory of aesthetic orphanhood".
Abstract: In the first critical article on David Foster Wallace's second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), Tom Le Clair calls the work an "allegory of aesthetic orphanhood."1 Wallace's novel is at once a dense compendium of American neuroses and addictions, an astute examination of the insatiable American proclivity to the pursuit of happiness "happification"2 in an age of infinite stimulative choice, and a latent aesthetic allegory. For Wallace, the typically American rush toward attaining (and sustaining) pleasure is a self-destructive habit of mind that has its root in the arts, particularly the literary arts of millennial America. The postmodern bequest of heavily ironic and self-conscious fiction has corrupted literature, according to Wallace, diminishing it from its previous status as a "living transaction between humans," leaving literary orphans in its wake.3 The consequence, for Wallace, is that current fiction regresses into a game that celebrates the author and privileges the artifact over the reader, ter-
18 citations
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TL;DR: This book discusses a Brain-Based Approach to Dreaming Early Dream Science, the Functions of REM Sleep and Dreaming, and the Interpretation of Dream Form.
Abstract: * Introduction: A Brain-Based Approach to Dreaming Early Dream Science * The Study of Dreaming in the Nineteenth Century * Psychoanalysis and Dreaming * Dream Investigation in the Early Twentieth Century Dreaming And Neurobiology * A Spark of Natures Fire: The Electrical Brain * The Regulation of Consciousness by the Brain Stem * The Discovery of REM Sleep and Dreaming A New Model Of The Dreaming Brain * A Window on the Brain: Neural Activity * A War of Nerves: The Reciprocal-Interaction Model of REM-Sleep Generation * The Brain as a Dream Machine: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of Dreaming Dream Form: The Journal Of The Engine Man * The Form of Dreams * The Form of Dream Sensation * The Form of Dream Movement * The Bizarreness of Dreams * The Interpretation of Dream Form The Future Of Dream Science * The Functions of REM Sleep and Dreaming
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