Chronic City

Author	: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher	: Faber & Faber
Release Date	: 2010-03-04
ISBN 10	: 9780571258529
Pages	: 560 pages
Rating	: 4.5/5 (712 users)

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Download or read book Chronic City written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chase Insteadman is a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, living off his earnings as a child star. Chase owes his current social status to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiance, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, and trapped in a vague routine punctuated only by Upper Eastside dinner parties and engagements. Into Chase's life enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop-critic, whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus' countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Together Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the Truth - that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought. Beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, Lethem's new novel is as always, utterly unique.

The City Since 9 11

Author	: Keith Wilhite
Publisher	: Rowman & Littlefield
Release Date	: 2016-03-04
ISBN 10	: 9781611477191
Pages	: 302 pages
Rating	: 4.6/5 (114 users)

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Download or read book The City Since 9 11 written by Keith Wilhite and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes post-9/11 literature, film, and television through an interdisciplinary lens, taking into account contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. Featuring an international group of scholars, the volume theorizes how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins.

Fictions of the War on Terror

Author	: D. O'Gorman
Publisher	: Springer
Release Date	: 2015-06-29
ISBN 10	: 9781137506184
Pages	: 217 pages
Rating	: 4.1/5 (375 users)

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Download or read book Fictions of the War on Terror written by D. O'Gorman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that there are a number of contemporary novels that challenge the reductive 'us and them' binaries that have been prevalent not only in politics and the global media since 9/11, but also in many works within the emerging genre of '9/11 fiction' itself.

Chronic City

Author	: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher	: Tropen
Release Date	: 2011-06-10
ISBN 10	: 9783608101751
Pages	: 473 pages
Rating	: 4.6/5 (81 users)

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Download or read book Chronic City written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Tropen. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chase Insteadman, ein ehemaliger Kinderstar, ist fester Bestandteil der New Yorker High Society. Sein soziales Ansehen verdankt er einem Unglück, das in der Klatschpresse für Furore sorgt: Seine Verlobte Janice Trumbull schwebt manövrierunfähig im Weltraum, von wo sie ihm herzzerreißende Liebesbriefe schreibt. Auch Chase treibt haltlos durch seinen Alltag, bis er den schielenden Kulturkritiker Perkus Tooth kennenlernt. Zwischen Migräneanfällen und durchkifften Nächtenscheint er als Einziger durch die glitzernde Oberfläche auf die Realitätzu blicken. Gemeinsam versuchen sie das Rätsel um einen Tiger, die Nebelschwaden über der Wall Street und den Schokoladengeruch in Manhattan zu lösen. Dabei entdecken sie auf der Insel, auf der alles käuflich ist, etwas äußerst Seltenes: die Wahrheit.

Reality Simulation in Science Fiction Literature Film and Television

Author	: Heather Duerre Humann
Publisher	: McFarland
Release Date	: 2019-08-13
ISBN 10	: 9781476677538
Pages	: 204 pages
Rating	: 4.4/5 (766 users)

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Download or read book Reality Simulation in Science Fiction Literature Film and Television written by Heather Duerre Humann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, science fiction in both print and visual media has produced an outpouring of story lines that feature forms of simulated reality. These depictions appear with such frequency that fictional portrayals of simulated worlds have become a popular sci-fi trope--one that prompts timeless questions about the nature of reality while also tapping into contemporary debates about emerging technologies. In combination with tech-driven tensions, this study shows that our collective sense of living in politically uncertain times also propels the popularity of these story lines. Because of the kinds of questions they raise and the cultural anxieties they provoke, these fictional representations provide a window into contemporary culture and demonstrate how we are reassessing our own reality.

Narrating Nonhuman Spaces

Author	: Marco Caracciolo
Publisher	: Routledge
Release Date	: 2021-08-19
ISBN 10	: 9781000441550
Pages	: 250 pages
Rating	: 4.0/5 (4 users)

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Download or read book Narrating Nonhuman Spaces written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.

Gangs in America s Communities

Author	: James C. Howell
Publisher	: SAGE Publications
Release Date	: 2015-02-18
ISBN 10	: 9781483379746
Pages	: 607 pages
Rating	: 4.4/5 (833 users)

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Download or read book Gangs in America s Communities written by James C. Howell and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2015-02-18 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangs in America's Communities offers a comprehensive, up-to-date, and theoretically grounded approach to gangs and associated youth violence. Authors Dr. James C. Howell and Dr. Elizabeth Griffiths introduce readers to the foundations of gang studies through the origins of gangs, definitions and categories of youth/street gangs, transnational as well as prison gangs (and the distinctions between these arguably different types), national trends in gang presence and gang-related violence across American cities, distinguishing attributes of serious street gangs, and myths and realities. Students and instructors will benefit from the Second Edition’s comprehensive treatment of the state of the literature on individual-level causes and consequences of gang membership. Going beyond the traditional topics covered in most texts in the market, this book uniquely describes specific gang patterns, trends, and cultures within a group-based structure while illuminating the most promising avenues for reducing the presence and seriousness of gangs in American communities.

Seen and Not Seen

Author	: Jasun Horsley
Publisher	: John Hunt Publishing
Release Date	: 2015-01-30
ISBN 10	: 9781782796749
Pages	: 316 pages
Rating	: 4.7/5 (827 users)

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Download or read book Seen and Not Seen written by Jasun Horsley and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular culture mirrors the human soul and it can't lie about the state it is in—which is what makes it an essential guide on the quest for self-knowledge. Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist is a series of autobiographical explorations which slowly uncover the author's secret life to himself. Revisiting his former writings on film and deconstructing old texts, he engages in a literary dialogue with his past as he struggles to bust open his fantasy life and reach the truth behind it. Moving into and through the cultural, social and political dimensions of movies, the book maps previously undiscovered psychological and spiritual realms of the movie-going experience to create an engaging, thought-provoking, utterly original narrative about the essential acts of movie-watching, writing, and self-examination.

Understanding Jonathan Lethem

Author	: Matthew Luter
Publisher	: Univ of South Carolina Press
Release Date	: 2015-07-15
ISBN 10	: 9781611175134
Pages	: 144 pages
Rating	: 4.6/5 (111 users)

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Download or read book Understanding Jonathan Lethem written by Matthew Luter and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Jonathan Lethem is a study of the novels, short fiction, and nonfiction on a wide range of subjects in the arts by American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Motherless Brooklyn, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Gun, with Occasional Music. Matthew Luter explores the key contemporaries of and influences on Lethem, who is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Luter begins this volume by explaining how Lethem’s innovative and provocative essay on creative appropriation “The Ecstasy of Influence” differs from other writing about influence, suggesting an artistic mode that celebrates thoughtful borrowing. Readings of Lethem’s three major novels follow: taken together, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City present a novelist coming to terms with the joys and downsides of artistic influence. Motherless Brooklyn pays tribute to and subverts traditional hardboiled detective novels as Lethem plays with the conventions of a favorite (and influential) genre. Fortress dwells obsessively on appreciation and criticism of influential art, as Lethem’s main character spends a lifetime contemplating the complexities of the art he loves, interrogating his own reactions to it, and thinking through the political implications of the ways he has been influenced by that which he consumes. Chronic City depicts the cost of fandom and the dangers of giving over too much of oneself to the art that one loves, dramatized via a character brought nearly to ruin not by the demands of artistic creation, but by obsessive cultural consumption. Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low (experimental fiction, comic books, art film, detective novels), Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary originality might mean in a postmodern age. Some suggest that such borrowings indicate a literary well that has run dry, making writers such as Lethem mere patchwork artists. Luter argues instead that Lethem’s propensity for wearing his influences and obsessions on his sleeve encourages new thought about originality itself. Out with “it’s all been done” and in with “look at all that’s been done, and all that we can still do with it!”

David Foster Wallace s Balancing Books

Author	: Jeffrey Severs
Publisher	: Columbia University Press
Release Date	: 2017-01-03
ISBN 10	: 9780231543118
Pages	: 304 pages
Rating	: 4.2/5 (315 users)

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Download or read book David Foster Wallace s Balancing Books written by Jeffrey Severs and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality. Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors—including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith—interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.

Representing 9 11

Author	: Paul Petrovic
Publisher	: Rowman & Littlefield
Release Date	: 2015-06-17
ISBN 10	: 9781442252684
Pages	: 251 pages
Rating	: 4.4/5 (422 users)

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Download or read book Representing 9 11 written by Paul Petrovic and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the horrific events of September 11, 2001, slip deeper into the past, the significance of 9/11 remains a global cultural touchstone. Initially, filmmakers, writers, and other artists wrangled with its meaning, often relying on fantastical, ethnic, or exceptionalist themes to address the psychic dread of the terrorist attacks. Over time, however, more nuanced and socio-historical perspectives about 9/11 and its impact on America and the world have emerged. In Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television, prominent authors from a variety of disciplines demonstrate how emergent American and international texts expand upon and complicate the initial post-9/11 canon. Editor Paul Petrovic has assembled a collection of essays that broadens our understanding of how popular culture has addressed 9/11, particularly as it has evolved over time. Contributors bring fresh readings to popular novels, such as Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom; films like Zero Dark Thirty and This Is the End; and television shows such as 24 and Homeland. Showcasing a diverse range of viewpoints, essays in this collection assess, among other topics, how African American identity is challenged by post-9/11 allegories; how superhero films foretell the inevitability of city-wide destruction by terrorists; and how shows like Breaking Bad problematize ideas of liberalism and masculinity. Though primarily aimed at scholars, Representing 9/11 seeks to engage readers interested in how various forms of media have interpreted the events and aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001.

The Digital Banal

Author	: Zara Dinnen
Publisher	: Columbia University Press
Release Date	: 2018-01-02
ISBN 10	: 9780231545402
Pages	: 218 pages
Rating	: 4.2/5 (315 users)

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Download or read book The Digital Banal written by Zara Dinnen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity, digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work, and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and followers? Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the “digital banal,” not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media. Authors like Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark Amerika, Ellen Ullman, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; and the continuation of the “Californian ideology,” which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture

Author	: Mitchum Huehls
Publisher	: JHU Press
Release Date	: 2017-09-19
ISBN 10	: 9781421423104
Pages	: 342 pages
Rating	: 4.4/5 (214 users)

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Download or read book Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture written by Mitchum Huehls and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.

Conversations with Jonathan Lethem

Author	: Jaime Clarke
Publisher	: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Release Date	: 2011-06-01
ISBN 10	: 1604739649
Pages	: 224 pages
Rating	: 4.7/5 (396 users)

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Download or read book Conversations with Jonathan Lethem written by Jaime Clarke and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversations with Jonathan Lethem collects fourteen interviews, conducted over a decade and a half, with the Brooklyn-born author of such novels as Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and many others. Winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, Lethem (b. 1964) covers a wide range of subjects, from what it means to incorporate genre into literature, to the impact of the death of his mother on his life and work, to his being a permanent “sophomore on leave” from Bennington College, as well as his flight from Brooklyn to California and its lasting effect on his fiction. Lethem also reveals the many literary and pop culture influences that have informed his writing life. Readers will find Lethem as charming and generous and intelligent as his work. His examination of what it means to live a creative life will reverberate and enlighten scholars and fans alike. His thoughts on science fiction, intellectual property, literary realism, genre, movies, and rock ’n’ roll are articulated with elán throughout the collection, as are his comments on his own development as a craftsman.

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

Author	: Ralph Clare
Publisher	: Cambridge University Press
Release Date	: 2018-08-31
ISBN 10	: 9781108602570
Pages	: pages
Rating	: 4.1/5 (86 users)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace written by Ralph Clare and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time.

Natura Urbana

Author	: Matthew Gandy
Publisher	: MIT Press
Release Date	: 2022-03-08
ISBN 10	: 9780262367462
Pages	: 432 pages
Rating	: 4.2/5 (623 users)

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Download or read book Natura Urbana written by Matthew Gandy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy’s fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences,and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.

Are We Postmodern Yet

Author	: Reinhold Kramer
Publisher	: Springer Nature
Release Date	: 2019-11-08
ISBN 10	: 9783030305697
Pages	: 328 pages
Rating	: 4.0/5 (33 users)

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Download or read book Are We Postmodern Yet written by Reinhold Kramer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of “How-I-Feel” ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths. He argues that the displacement, since the 1990s, of grand narratives by ego-based narratives and small narratives has proven inadequate, and that selective adherence, pluralist adaptation, and humanism are more worthy replacements. Relying on evolutionary psychology as much as on Charles Taylor, Kramer argues that no single answer is possible to the book title’s question, but that the term “postmodernity” – referring to the era, not to postmodernism – still usefully describes major currents within the contemporary world.