Ethics Of Literary Forms In Contemporary American Literature

This work links ethics and the formal arrangement of literary texts. It shows that specific formal techniques and devices and the overall form of literary texts always have an ethical dimension and beg certain ethical questions. Covering the three main genres of narrative, drama and poetry, the discussion addresses aspects of syntax, line breaks, mise-en-scene and narrative situation as well as the table of contents, list of characters and chapter structure in six texts by contemporary American authors (Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham).

Why is it that we tend to think about our lives as stories? Why do we strive to create coherent narratives that reflect a particular perspective? What happens when we discover multiple, perhaps conflicting perspectives in our narratives? Following groundbreaking work in the study of narrative identity in the last 20 years, the scholars of this volume have expanded and merged their theories of narrative identity with new perspectives in fields such as narratology, literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, gender studies and history. Their contributions focus on the significance of perspective in the formation of narrative identities, probing the stratagems and narrative means of individuals in testing out personae for themselves.

Paul Auster is one of the most acclaimed figures in American literature. Known primarily as a novelist, Auster's films and various collaborations are now gaining more recognition. Evija Trofimova offers a radically different approach to the author's wider body of work, unpacking the fascinating web of relationships between his texts and presenting Auster's canon as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools. Exploring Auster's literal and figurative use of these tools – the typewriter, the cigarette, the doppelgänger figure, the city – Evija Trofimova discovers Auster's “writing machine”, a device that works both as a means to write and as a construct that manifests the emblematic writer-figure. This is a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways such machines invest them with meaning. Embarking on a scholarly quest that takes her from between the lines of Auster's work to between the streets of his beloved New York and finally to the man himself, Paul Auster's Writing Machine becomes not just a critical investigation but a critical collaboration, raising important questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, and about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their critics.

This volume presents a multidisciplinary approach to narrative engagement within the paradigms of cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, and social-psychology. In their basic form, storyworld possible selves, or SPSs, are blends resulting from the conceptual integration of an intra- and an extra-diegetic perspectivizer. In written narratives, SPS blends function as hybrid referents for a variety of inclusive and ambiguous linguistic expressions, which are here explored from the standpoint of interactional cognitive linguistics, as instances of SPS objectification and subjectification. The model also draws on character construction and on the social-psychology notions of self-schemas and possible selves. This allows an exploration of emotional responses to narratives not just in terms of empathy or sympathy towards fictional entities, but also in terms of narrative ethics and of culturally determined and simultaneously idiosyncratic feelings of personal relevance and self-transformation.

In this book, the authors provide a much-needed general theory of interdisciplinarity and relate it to health/wellbeing research and professional practice. In so doing they make it possible for practitioners of the different disciplines to communicate without contradiction or compromise, resolving the tensions that beset much interdisciplinary work. Such a general theory is only possible if we assume that there is more to being (ontology) than empirical being (what we can measure directly). Therefore, the unique approach to interdisciplinarity applied in this book starts from ontology, namely that there is a multimechanismicity (a multiplicity of mechanisms) in open systems, and then moves to epistemology. By contrast, the mainstream approach, which fails to acknowledge ontology, is “unserious” and tends to result in a methodological hierarchy, unconducive of interdisciplinarity, in which empiricist science is overtly or tacitly assumed to be the superior version of science. This book is primarily aimed at those people interested in improving health and wellbeing – such as researchers, policy-makers, educators, and general practitioners. However, it will also be useful to academics engaged in the broader academic debate on interdisciplinary metatheory.

When Brazil was honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2013, the Brazilian author Luiz Ruffato opened the event with a provocative speech, claiming that literature, through its pervasive depiction and discussion of ‘otherness,’ has the potential to provoke ethical transformation. This book uses Ruffato’s speech as a starting point for the discussion of contemporary Brazilian literature that stands in contrast to the repetition of social and cultural clichés. By illuminating the relevance of humanities and literature as a catalyst for rethinking Brazil, the book offers a resistance to the official discourses that have worked for so long to conceal social tensions, injustices, and secular inequities in Brazilian society. In doing so, it situates Brazilian literature away from the exotic and peripheral spectrum, and closer to a universal and more relevant ethical discussion for readers from all parts of the world. The volume brings together fresh contributions on both canonical contemporary authors such as Graciliano Ramos, Rubem Fonseca, and Dalton Trevisan, and traditionally silenced writing subjects such as Afro-Brazilian female authors. Essays deal with specific contemporary literary and social issues while engaging with historically constitutive phenomena in Brazil, including authoritarianism, violence, and the systematic violation of human rights. The exploration of diverse literary genres -- from novels to graphic novels, from poetry to crônicas -- and engagement with postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, Brazilian studies, South American literature, and world literature carves new space for the emergence of an original Brazilian thought.

An Ethics of Reading considers how writers of contemporary American fiction represent collective identities by producing literature that bears witness to cultural traumas. With chapters focused on important American novelists including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Junot DÃ-az, the book works to situate novels that explore ethnic identity in conversation with one another. From those intertextual conversations, it draws conclusions about how fiction functions as testimony and the ways that readers might work to ethically respond to the testimonial features of the prose. The bookâ (TM)s investigations of distinct cultural traumas are broad, ranging from analyses of African American novels that treat slavery to Native American novels that portray land and child theft to Dominican and Haitian American accounts of US-backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora. Ultimately, the central claim of the book â " that some works of contemporary American fiction function both didactically and aesthetically as cultural markers around which ethnic identities might be negotiated by writers and readers â " becomes a kind of call to action for literary studies in the early 21st century, encouraging an ideological and pragmatic shift in how contemporary literature is read, analysed and discussed. By suggesting specific strategies for considering ethnicity in a radically diasporic American context, the book calls for critical engagement that is also concerned with the ethics of interpretive praxis, which, it suggests, might be a mechanism for building coalitions for social justice within, around, and through literature.