Bright Light Big City Losing And Getting Lost In Postmodern New York

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: The success of his debut novel "Bright Lights, Big City" brought Jay McInerney an astonishing amount of media coverage and an equivalent in book sales, but not much approval, let alone deeper analysis of his work, from critics and scholars. In fact, the hype that surrounded him and his fellow “brat-pack” writers is likely to have prevented any serious scholarly interest in this kind of new urban literature back in the day. “Bright Lights, Big City” was dismissed as a “yuppie bildungsroman- full of tortured self- searching and struggling- writer romance” (Young/Caveney 1992: 47) at first, without any considerable novelty or value. However, the enthusiasm of the large, young readership showed that there was something to McInerney’s novel that other novels did not offer- a setting and a language that were familiar and uncomplicated for them, but, at the same time, an account of relevant, postmodern issues that very well did concern the Bright Young Things of the 80s, but were usually seized in more elitist literature, and thus, eluded an audience that was ready for them to be taken up. This thesis attempts to perform a detailed analysis, starting with a brief description of the historical and cultural features of the setting and then proceeding to the interpretation of all important themes, motifs and symbols of the book in the context of postmodernism but also in general terms. Each chapter investigates the influence of a certain aspect of the protagonist’s life on his crisis, especially in how far one or the other led him to a life on the edge and to the loss of the self. In order to understand why, in the end, the protagonist has to “learn everything all over again” (BLBC 174) to get back on the right track, it is essential to point out the roles that Amanda- his opportunist model wife- his job in the fact checking department and the death of his mother played over time, and how drugs and Ray-Ban sunglasses seem to provide temporary solutions for the most acute of his troubles.

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

It is party time in eighties Manhattan. Smart, sassy and cynical, Alison lives for the moment. Her life is a carnival of gossip and midnight sessions of Truth or Dare, and her cocaine-bashing friends and flirting flatmates all crave satiation. Young and beautiful, hip and indulgent, sex-crazed and alcohol-fuelled, Alison can neither pay her fees for drama school nor track down her indifferent father. She juggles rent money with abortion fees, lingering lovers with current conquests and is the despair of her gynaecologist. She's fallen deeply in lust with Dean, although that nasty present Skip Pendleton left her with hasn't yet cleared up. Story of her life right? But in a world of no consequences, Alison is heading for a meltdown.

A fully revised, updated and expanded edition of the bestselling guide Psychogeography. In recent years this term has been used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from ley lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of psychogeography in the Paris of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political application in the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists. Psychogeography continues to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions, from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flâneur and the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Patrick Keiller. From the urban wanderer to the armchair traveller, psychogeography provides us with new ways of experiencing our environment, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. Merlin Coverley conducts the reader through this process, providing an explanation of the terms involved and an analysis of the key figures and their works. Praise for Psychogeography 'This little book does exactly what an introduction should; it examines, explains, and whets the appetite...It has an extensive bibliography and an index of websites, research into which has been clearly and cogently utilised. It is a short, but valuable, book' - Telegraph 'It would be a fitting tribute to Coverley's unfussy and informative book if it encouraged people in other cities to try psychogeography' - Scotland On Sunday 'An excellent overview of a tradition that can be tricky to pin down and a great portal for loads of further reading' - Hugh Marwood

Each of the eight chapters takes a period of up to forty years and examines the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, fashion, the mass media and individual practitioners.-Back Cover.

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.