In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novelThe Broom of the System.Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction, features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential elements of American culture - our entertainme...more
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.
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce C...more
This book analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers: Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin. Murakami Fuminobu uses the Euro-American theoretical framework of postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism to examine the work of these writers and also reconsiders the theory itself f...more
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this definitive study of the author’s fiction, Klin...more
A Poetics of Postmodernism is neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern. It continues the project of Linda Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both an historical and an ideological dimension. Modelled on postmodern architecture, postmodernism is the n...more
Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the notion of the postmodern. Beginning its exhilarating intellectual tour in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, it follows the changes in the meanings and usage of the concept through to the late 1970s, when its adoption by Jean-Franois Lyotar...more
A sequel of sorts to the classic (and bestselling) sendup of literary criticism, The Pooh PerplexThirty-seven years ago, a slim parody of academic literary criticism called The Pooh Perplex became a surprise bestseller. Now Frederick Crews has written a hilarious new satire in the same vein. Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh conv...more