8,066 research outputs found
Lateness and lessness
No full textThe work of Don DeLillo and Philip Roth has been characterized as a turn to writing novels about lateness in a style that for both authors tends toward “less and less.” Their work manifests a relationship between lateness and style that departs both from canonical accounts of late style and from Theodor W. Adorno’s and Edward Said’s theories of late style as ironic anachronism. By conveying in prose style the relative decline and the contingent reduction that for Roth and DeLillo define lateness as a temporality, their novels find in lessness a motivated style for lateness. Furthermore, by reproducing in style the features of a particular historical temporality, their work suggests a method for reading the historicity of temporality through literary style.</p
Sequence, series and character in Children of Violence
No full textExplorations of selfhood have been central to Lessing’s work. Perhaps less recognized, however, is that this has been accompanied by an ongoing and highly self-conscious exploration of the function of literary character as a formal device. This chapter addresses this question by focusing on Lessing’s most sustained treatment of character: Martha Quest in the five novel Children of Violence (1952-69) series. Previous criticism has often read Martha autobiographically, but this chapter begins by analysing how Lessing situates her novel-series in relationship to the history of the form, from Balzac to Proust to Louis Aragon, and how her initial conception of character bears close comparison with Georg Lukács’s discussions of critical realism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization. Such questions are written into Children of Violence, in Martha’s own scenes of reading and inability to find a fictional representation of her life. The chapter closes by considering how Lessing manipulates the aesthetic requirements and tensions of the novel sequence to foreground the representational limitations imposed not just by realist theories of character, but by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the bourgeois family. These, in the end, provide the horizon beyond which Martha cannot pass – but which Lessing’s writing can.</p
Beckett, painting, and the question of 'the human'
No full textThis article contextualizes Samuel Beckett's art criticism within post-war French critical debate about what constitutes “the human.” Beckett announces the question as central to the period. The post-war debate traversed the spheres of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, and Beckett's criticism is here brought into contact with that of his contemporaries: Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Ponge, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. Consequently, a more historicized reading of Beckett's art criticism and of the political stakes of his work comes into focus, especially in regard to“The End,” Eleutheria, and Molloy. This article proposes that Beckett's art criticism as well as his fiction be understood as part of the history of critical theory
W. G. Sebald's revisions of Roland Barthes
No full textW. G. Sebald’s work has frequently been compared to that of Roland Barthes; James Wood is typical in speculating that Austerlitz is ‘in deep dialogue’ with Camera Lucida. Evidence from Sebald’s archive both supports and complicates such claims. Sebald first read Barthes in the early 1990s, engaging with him in his art criticism, yet Sebald’s compositional practice in The Emigrants, which involved erasing an image’s indexical relationship to its referent, shows a rejection of the central ontological claim of Camera Lucida. Sebald returned to Barthes in the late 1990s while composing Austerlitz and revised the draft manuscript so that the published version directly references Sebald’s reading of Camera Lucida. Through an extended engagement with Barthes, Sebald contested the indexical nature of photography in order to reflect upon the desires that led to the figuration of trauma and history as an indexical trace at the end of the twentieth century
Histories of the future: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the reconstruction of modernism in postwar Britain
No full textReview: Peter Ffield and David Addyman (eds), Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, New Critical Essays. Pp. viii + 244. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013. £65.00 (ISBN 978 1 408 18361 8)
No full textArt, history, and postwar fiction
No full textArt, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context
Kevin Brockmeier, Fiction Reading
No full textOctober 25, 2013, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State UniversityAward winning author Kevin Brockmeier, reads from his work.University Libraries, Department of English, Department of Women's Studies, Watermark Books & Cafe, Ulrich Museum of Ar
Dr. Kevin Pelletier – Faculty Author Interview
No full textDr. Kevin Pelletier, Associate Professor of English, discusses his new book, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in US Antebellum Literature, published recently by the University of Georgia Press. The book provides powerful insights into the relationship between nineteenth-century sentimentality, religious discourse, and antislavery reform
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