Memory Imagination And Desire In Contemporary Anglo American Literature And Film

This volume offers a series of analyses on the renewed interest of western culture in themes and aesthetic proposals that either look back to the past or recreate future worlds. The turn of the century has witnessed artistic efforts to reconsider past literary and cinematographic forms and adapt them to the new social concerns of contemporary artists and readers/viewers. Similarly, science-fiction and utopian narratives have attempted to reshape the world as we know it and speculate about the mysteries the future might hold for us. This book includes contributions that focus on and problematise the dialogue between past, present and future in literary works and films produced within the English-speaking context in the last two decades of the 20th century. It is divided in five sections - maps of the postmodern, the postcolonial experience, stories revisited, popular narrative genres and views of the future - which attempt to include all the motifs associated with that dialogue, from the interaction of memory and history to the reformulation of old stories and forms, or the representation of dystopian and utopian futures.

This is a study of Jeanette Winterson's work, containing analyses of her nine novels and cross-references to her minor fictional and non-fictional works. It establishes the formal, thematic, and ideological characteristics of the novels, and situates the writer within the panorama of contemporary British fiction.

This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.

Both literary author and celebrity, Bret Easton Ellis represents a type of contemporary writer who draws from both high and the low culture, using popular culture references, styles and subject matters in a literary fiction that goes beyond mere entertainment. His fiction, arousing the interest of the academia, mass media and general public, has fuelled heated controversy over his work. This controversy has often prevented serious analysis of his fiction, and this book is the first monograph to fill in this gap by offering a comprehensive textual and contextual analysis of his most important works up to the latest novel Imperial Bedrooms. Offering a study of the reception of each novel, the influence of popular, mass and consumer culture in them, and the analysis of their literary style, it takes into account the controversies surrounding the novels and the changes produced in the shifty terrain of the literary marketplace. It offers anyone studying contemporary American fiction a thorough and unique analysis of Ellis's work and his own place in the literary and cultural panorama.

Scholarly approaches to the relationship between literature and film, ranging from the traditional focus upon fidelity to more recent issues of intertextuality, all contain a significant blind spot: a lack of theoretical and methodological attention to adaptation as an historical and transnational phenomenon. This book argues for a historically informed approach to American popular culture that reconfigures the classically defined adaptation phenomenon as a form of transnational reception. Focusing on several case studies- including the films Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Portrait of a Lady (1997), and the classics The Third Man (1949) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)-the author demonstrates the ways adapted literary works function as social and cultural events in history and how these become important sites of cultural negotiation and struggle.

On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English is an attempt to listen to the various voices that participate in the current dialogue on the relationship between fiction and ethics. The editors’ introduction investigates the current state of affairs on the return to ethics in critical and literary consideration, and it opens up the way for the variety of approaches that follows. Participants include internationally recognized scholars like Andrew Gibson, Patricia Waugh, or Native American fiction writer and poet Gordon Henry, winner of the American Book Award in 1995. All in all, contributors cover a significant geographical diversity, and their approaches also vary from general theory to particular examples, from traditional interpretations to post-deconstruction ethics. Authors analyze texts both mainstream and marginal, colonial and postcolonial; they examine the ethics of race, gender and sexuality; the ethics of self-positioning and orientation; the ethics of style; the ethics of reception; the ethics of mode and genre; the ethics of extreme situations of evil, disease and fascism. In its search for a better understanding of the global/nationalistic world of today, On the Turn therefore moves beyond the scope of literary criticism into issues of wider, more urgent relevance. What should I, ought I, may I, must I, do, if anything, on the basis of reading, when I have read a literary work? What does reading a literary work authorize, or even command, me to do? Writing an essay about the work would be one response. On the Turn is a wonderfully diverse, learned, challenging, provocative, even sometimes controversial, collection of essays on the ethical dimensions of literature. This book is testimony to the continued lively interest in the ethical turn in literary studies. The authors are, for the most part, concerned with ethical theory and with ethically charged situations in postmodern novels in English, as they shape readers’ values and judgments. Poetry and non-print media are, however, also discussed. J. Hillis Miller UCI Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of California at Irvine The Ethics of Fiction is an important and exciting volume that explores with energy and rigour the connections between ethics and literature. Relating literature to philosophy, neurobiology, politics, religion, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the twenty two contributors richly advance ‘the ethical turn’ recently embraced by many critics. Works by authors such as Ian McEwan, A.S.Byatt, Charles Palliser, Hanif Kureishi, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, George Orwell, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and Paul Auster are presented in a new light and complex topics such as territoriality, the nature of love, Islamophobia and the politics of representation are tackled with imagination and intellectual integrity. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the dialogue between ethics and literature. Avril Horner, Professor of English, Kingston University

Drawing on a variety of popular films, including Avatar, Enter the Void, Fight Club, The Matrix, Speed Racer, X-Men and War of the Worlds, Supercinema studies the ways in which digital special effects and editing techniques require a new theoretical framework in order to be properly understood. Here William Brown proposes that while analogue cinema often tried to hide the technological limitations of its creation through ingenious methods, digital cinema hides its technological omnipotence through the use of continued conventions more suited to analogue cinema, in a way that is analogous to that of Superman hiding his powers behind the persona of Clark Kent. Locating itself on the cusp of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive approaches to cinema, Supercinema also looks at the relationship between the spectator and film that utilizes digital technology to maximum, ‘supercinematic’ effect.

Theorizing Narrativity is a collective work by an international array of leading specialists in narrative theory. It provides new perspectives on the nature of narrative, genre theory, narrative semiotics and communication theory. Most contributions center on the specificity of literary fiction, but each chapter investigates a different dimension of narrativity with many issues dealt with in innovative ways (including oral storytelling, the law, video games, causality, intertextuality and the theory of reading). There are chapters by Gerald Prince on narrativehood and narrativity, Meir Sternberg on the narrativity of the law-code, Werner Wolf on chance and Peter Hühn on eventfulness in fiction, Jukka Tyrkkö on kaleidoscope narratives, Marie-Laure Ryan on transfictionality and computer games, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer as well as Monika Fludernik on the narrativity of drama, Beatriz Penas on (non)standard narrativities, David Rudrum on narrativity and performativity, Michael Toolan on textual guidance, John Pier on causality and retrospection, and José Ángel García Landa on retelling and represented narrations.