Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits

Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits
Author: Adriano A. Tedde
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000566331


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This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today. Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the ‘Other America’ – the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scène of Auster and Jarmusch’s work and Waits’s lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism. Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.

Routledge International Handbook of Failure

Routledge International Handbook of Failure
Author: Adriana Mica
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 668
Release: 2023-01-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000775682


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This Handbook examines the study of failure in social sciences, its manifestations in the contemporary world, and the modalities of dealing with it – both in theory and in practice. It draws together a comprehensive approach to failing, and invisible forms of cancelling out and denial of future perspectives. Underlining critical mechanisms for challenging and reimagining norms of success in contemporary society, it allows readers to understand how contemporary regimes of failure are being formed and institutionalized in relation to policy and economic models, such as neo-liberalism. While capturing the diversity of approaches in framing failure, it assesses the conflations and shifts which have occurred in the study of failure over time. Intended for scholars who research processes of inequality and invisibility, this Handbook aims to formulate a critical manifesto and activism agenda for contemporary society. Presenting an integrated view about failure, the Handbook will be an essential reading for students in sociology, social theory, anthropology, international relations and development research, organization theory, public policy, management studies, queer theory, disability studies, sports, and performance research.

The Mercurial Mark Twain(s)

The Mercurial Mark Twain(s)
Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000814203


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Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain’s reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.

Unhappy Beginnings

Unhappy Beginnings
Author: Isabel González-Díaz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000998207


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This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.

From Subjection to Survival

From Subjection to Survival
Author: Molly J. Freitas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2022-12-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000827658


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From Subjection to Survival is a work of feminist scholarship that works at the intersection of literature and art history, the written and the visual. By examining six important and diverse multiethnic American women writers of the twentieth century (Kate Chopin, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Wharton, Zitkala-Ša, Nella Larsen, and Helena María Viramontes), From Subjection to Survival establishes a genealogy of how women writers claim the power and possibility of visual art to make sense of their experiences. These writers write about women and feature female protagonists who engage with art as painters, writers, muses, or icons in the texts themselves. The texts are written visually to expose the fundamental substantiation of gender in art and the unavoidable aestheticization of women in daily life. As every text in this book makes clear, women can claim substantial power through art. Yet, aestheticization is not always positive. As a consequence of such negative possibilities, the artistic self-referentiality of all of the texts in From Subjection to Survival exposes a negotiated course between subjectivity and objectness which women experience when engaging with art. From Subjection to Survival studies this negotiated course to lay bare the difficult path of women’s artistic and aesthetic experience, but ultimately to claim the power and the possibility of the visual arts for women.

Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction

Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction
Author: David Smit
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000587894


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This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.

Asian American War Stories

Asian American War Stories
Author: Jeffrey Tyler Gibbons
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2022-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100077709X


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Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary writers like Chang-rae Lee, Ocean Vuong, Nora Okja Keller, Julie Otsuka, Lan Cao, and Lawson Inada, this book explores the ways that recent Asian American literature reflects the enduring consequences of America’s wars in Asia at the individual and collective levels. The book also considers the journeys that individuals take as they pursue healing of their traumatic wounds.

Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo

Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo
Author: Philipp Wolf
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000587797


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This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development of one of the most philosophical and prestigious novelists writing in English. Death, in its close relation to time, temporality and transience, has been an ongoing subject or motif in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre. His later work is shot through with the cultural and sociopsychological symptoms and responses death elicits. His "reflection on dying" revolves around defensive mechanisms and destruction fantasies, immortalism and cryonics, covert and overt surrogates, consumerism and media, and the mortification of the body. His characters give themselves to mourning and are afflicted with psychosis, depression and the looming of emptiness. Yet writing about death also means facing the ambiguity and failing representability of "death." The book considers DeLillo’s use of language in which temporality and something like "death" may become manifest. It deals with the transfiguration of time and death into art, with apocalypse as a central and recurring subject, and, as a kind of antithesis, epiphany. The study eventually proposes some reflections on the meaning of death in an age fully contingent on media and technology and dominated by financial capitalism and consumerism. Despite all the distractions, death remains a sinister presence, which has beset the minds not only of DeLillo’s protagonists.

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937
Author: Grant F. Scott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000588017


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This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.

Transgender Identities in the Press

Transgender Identities in the Press
Author: Angela Zottola
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 135009756X


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Winner of the PROSE Award (2022) for Language & Linguistics For many people, newspapers are a key source of information on many topics, including issues related to gender and sexuality. Applying a broad range of corpus linguistic methods, Transgender Identities in the Press critically explores the linguistic cues and patterns used by the print media in their representation of trans people. Through close analysis of a corpus of articles collected from English-language newspapers from the UK and Canada, Angela Zottola focuses on the semantic categories of representation associated with transgender identities. Exploring a set of key terms, this book examines the semantic prosody and the language choices that each term is invested with, using Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the way the press represents this topic influences readers and their understanding of the major debates. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, Transgender Identities in the Press casts light on the complex picture of press language during a period of social change and increasing awareness. Highlighting both efforts to represent this community in an inclusive and non-discriminatory way and areas where there is need for improvement, this book illustrates a variety of issues from a critical and social perspective.