The Contemporary Novel in France

1997 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 982
Author(s):  
Jean Duffy ◽  
William Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Novel

scholarly journals 'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Temporal Qualities

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

Człowiek podziemny w prozie konfesyjnej oraz wspomnieniowej Fiodora Dostojewskiego i Marii Komornickiej. Przypadek Notatek z podziemia i Biesów

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Anna Kargol
Keyword(s):  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Underground Space ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Universe

This paper considers the idea of an underground man. It attempts to answer why writers reach for such a type of heroes and their position in the face of contemporary novel solutions. Maria Komornicka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky see in fallen individuals a source of creative inspiration. The confessional prose of these writers is an attempt to talk about the nihilist heroes who have chosen to live in a place of the metaphorical underground. The underground space becomes a construct of these works, and it is also a symbolic place where individuals desire chaos and darkness. The heroes of Demons and Notes from the Underground escape from where “everyone” lives and go underground, devoting themselves to underground mysticism because only such space protects them against the total collapse of the universe. Underground imagery governs the research process and shows how it determines the structure of a work and influences the methodology and ways of reading these works

Introduction

Unmaking Love ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Ashley T. Shelden
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
The Creation

This chapter lays out the literary, theoretical, and conceptual terrain for the rest of the book in order to argue that the contemporary novel rewrites love as negative, building on the ambivalent account of love in modernism. Contemporary novelists significantly redefine love for both literary and queer theorists. The negative love of the contemporary novel is also a queered love in that it derails linear narrative movement, thwarts the creation of unities, and forestalls redemption. This argument traverses the conceptual and theoretical terrains of queer theory, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction in thinking through the non-redemptive love of the contemporary novel.

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