Transgression Stylistic Variation And Narrative Discourse In The Twentieth Century Novel

This book offers a valuable contribution to the practice of literary criticism and cultural studies by seeking to explore “transgression” as a literary theme. Based on the analyses of six representative twentieth century novels, it deals with the fictional representation of various transgressive acts, from murder and incest to forbidden love affairs and adultery. A detailed consideration of major reader-response theories establishes a useful context for the textual analyses, as the readers are encouraged to integrate knowledge about style, narrative structure, and formal interpretive strategies with knowledge about social norms and moral values embedded in each text. Focusing on the evolving relationship between text and reader, the book exposes the potential of narrative strategies revealed in the act of narrating a story in an unconventional manner. “Broken” narratives, “unreliable narrators”, and “self-referentiality” are only some of the features discussed in the book with the aim of stimulating the readers to reflect on the narrative complexity of the twentieth century novel and to question their reading expectations. Designed for use in small and large classes organized by Literature, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Departments in colleges and universities around the world, this systematic, in-depth novel study aims to increase the students’ capacity to interpret challenging narrative texts, appreciate the aesthetic value of world literature, and experience the pleasure of reading beyond the limits of their own field.

Julian Wolfreys introduces students to the central concept of transgression, showing how to interpret the concept from a number of theoretical standpoints. He demonstrates how texts from different cultural and historical periods can be read to examine the workings of 'transgression' and the way in which it has changed over time.

Deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. This work features articles that approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a reading of literary texts from a variety of literatures, including French, Italian, German, British, Dutch and Polish.

Through the twentieth century, from colonial Ireland to the United States, and from Franco's Spain to late Soviet Russia, to include sexuality in a novel signaled social progressiveness and artistic innovation, but also transgression. Certain novelists--such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Martín-Santos, and Viktor Erofeev--radicalized the content of the novel by incorporating sexual thoughts, situations, and fantasies and thus portraying repressed areas of social, cultural, political, and mental life. In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content--Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels' plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship's status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century's growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.

Genette uses Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a work to identify and name the basic constituents and techniques of narrative. Genette illustrates the examples by referring to other literary works. His systemic theory of narrative deals with the structure of fiction, including fictional devices that go unnoticed and whose implications fulfill the Western narrative tradition.

This book offers tested practices for successful design, implementation and teaching of blended and online courses in French and cultural studies. Founded on recent research, it promotes a contextualized, accessible environment through increased online access to authentic materials, face-to-face creative interaction, and embedded formative assessment. Each chapter focuses on major pedagogical issues associated with teaching blended and online courses, including instructional design, teaching tools adapted to a media-rich learning environment, and formative evaluation techniques through rubric-based assessment, self-evaluation and peer interaction. The book will appeal to humanities faculty and teaching assistants who plan the transition from the traditional classroom environment to blended and online teaching. The examples provided throughout clearly indicate that a good combination of proven pedagogies and technology-supported strategies will greatly enhance the quality of students’ learning through the acquisition of advanced linguistic skills and cultural competence in preparation for bilingual career certification, work and study abroad, and will lead to a deeper understanding of blended and online teaching and the future use of technology in higher education. Designed for use in small and large undergraduate courses in colleges and universities around the world, the book will be a major asset to any library collection looking to expand its humanities and education collections and reference sections.

A Thematic Approach to French Cultural Studies: Love, Sex and Desire in French Literature and Cinema introduces a selection of major literary texts and film adaptations to students at the intermediate college and university level. The goal of this book is to provide a theme-based approach for teaching French Cultural Studies by enabling undergraduate students to contextualise and to think conceptually about French culture and its place in the Western culture and tradition. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this book is that it includes a collection of effective hands-on activities, multimedia resources and teaching suggestions which will stimulate students to develop their cultural and literary competency. The text-based method is designed to encourage close reading of three representative novels in English translation and foster an independent approach to formulating problems and arguments related to specific cultural norms and patterns.

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.