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The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis ava...
Dissertation im Fachbereich Nordamerikanische Literatur und Kultur der Universität des Saarlandes. The Implosion of Negativity ist die erste Monografie zu Paul Austers Frühwerk. Bis 1980 betätigte sich Auster zehn Jahre lang fast ausschließlich als Lyriker, um danach nie wieder ein Gedicht zu veröffentlichen. The Implosion of Negativity versucht zu ergründen, wie es zu diesem Bruch kam, und analysiert detailliert Austers poetisches Vorleben. Dabei werden bislang unbeachtete Einflüsse wie Martin Buber und Paul Celan zutage gefördert. Die abschließende Untersuchung von The New York Trilogy zeigt exemplarisch, welche neuen interpretatorischen Ansätze die Kenntnis von Austers vergessen...
New Hungers for Old is a remarkable achievement. Individually evocative and collectively superb, the poems illuminate an immense variety of Italian American voices and experiences. Yet they also extend well beyond the scope of a single ethnic category. This is that rare, thoughtful anthology for all readers wishing to reflect on the treasures and tragedies of the universal human condition.Chandra Prasad, author of On Borrowed Wings: A Novel end editor of Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial ExperienceDennis Barone has produced a book of great beauty and importance that should be read by anyone who cares about American as well as Italian American writing. It offers a cornuc...
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).
Uncovers an overlooked aspect of the Italian American experience. In Beyond Memory, Dennis Barone uncovers the richness and diversity of the Italian Protestant experience and places it in the context of migration and political and social life in both Italy and the United States. Italian Protestants have received scant attention in the fields of Italian American studies, religious studies, and immigration studies, and through literary sources, church records, manuscript sources, and secondary sources in various fields, Barone introduces such forgotten voices as the Baptist Antonio Mangano, the Methodist Antonio Arrighi, and his great-grandfather Alfredo Barone, a Baptist minister to congregat...
Adele Pietra has heard her mother say that her destiny is carved in the same brilliantly hued granite her father and brother cleave from the Stony Creek mine: she is to marry a quarryman. But when Adele's brother, Charles, dies in a mining accident, Adele sees the chance to change her life. Enrolling at Yale as Charles, Adele assumes his identity -- and gender -- as a way to leave behind her mother's expectations and the limitations of her provincial Connecticut town. To her own surprise, hair chopped and chest bound, Adele falls in naturally with a lively crew of undergraduates: the Jewish Harry Persky with his slick Manhattan know-how, the quiet and mysterious legacy student Phineas, and t...
Fiction. FIELD REPORT begins in affirmation and ends in doubt. Between start and finish there are archaic dictions and near-invented languages, simplistic jokes that a seven-year-old might tell and visions of what might be astonishments. One sentence states: What wondrous things words--what, the optimal word here, turns the statement toward a question, one left long unanswered. The twenty stories in this book comprise a field report filed by an anthropologist, providing a concise and complete outline of culture as seen through the tri-lens of sensation, perception and vision. Along the way some pancakes, frogs and gelato get mixed into our favorite pot--or is it plot? One particularly effusive informant offers a wealth of information--passionate in its despair, and the reader might find it--in response--not too late to consider the world presented in FIELD REPORT with a touch of mercy.
Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world. Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.
Through the close study of texts, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era examines the overlapping emphases and themes of two cosmopolitan and multiethnic cultural identities emerging in the early centuries CE – a trans-empire alliance of the Elite and the "Christians." Exploring the cultural representations of these social identities, Judith Perkins shows that they converge around an array of shared themes: violence, the body, prisons, courts, and time. Locating Christian representations within their historical context and in dialogue with other contemporary representations, it asks why do Christian representations share certain emphases? To what do they respond, and to whom ...
A collection of seventy-six poems inspired by poet Wallace Steven's life and work, written by a variety of modern poets.