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4 books match the query 'Contemporary American Literature'

cover of Bearing the Bad News: Contemporary American Literature and Culture

Bearing the Bad News

Contemporary American Literature and Culture

Sanford Pinsker

University of Iowa Press, 1990

For a number of years Sanford Pinsker has been one of our most incisive and spirited observers of contemporary American literature. His books have been widely and enthusiastically reviewed and his essays have appeared regularly in such intellectual quarterlies as the Georgia Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Gettysburg Review.
Now Pinsker focuses on the current American world of letters in this volume of essays to explore what literary culture in America was and what it too often has become, the ways in which cultural politics shapes our sense of contemporary values, and how the resources of American humor and the work of our best writers can help us maintain our equilibrium in “what can only be described as a bad cultural patch.”
The eleven essays in this insightful volume take on such subjects as the decline and fall of "formative reading"; the difficulties of identifying themes that unify American literature; the cultural value of such humorists as Robert Benchley, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen; versions of cultural politics—from the rise of the neoconservatives to the steady course held by social critics such as Irving Howe; and the place of the college novel in American literature. Pinsker concludes with some sobering thoughts about the current state of American intellectuals.
Ultimately, Bearing the Bad News reaffirms certain principles that have come under powerful attack during the last few decades—for example, that literature is a human and humanistic enterprise, one which speaks both to individual moral value and to our larger cultural health. It reflects Pinsker's commitment to the clarity and significance of the literary essay and his belief that what we read, and what we say about what we read, matters deeply.
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cover of Hope Isn't Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature

Hope Isn't Stupid

Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature

Sean Austin Grattan

University of Iowa Press, 2017

Hope Isn’t Stupid is the first study to interrogate the neglected connections between affect and the practice of utopia in contemporary American literature. Although these concepts are rarely theorized together, it is difficult to fully articulate utopia without understanding how affects circulate within utopian texts. Moving away from science fiction—the genre in which utopian visions are often located—author Sean Grattan resuscitates the importance of utopianism in recent American literary history. Doing so enables him to assert the pivotal role contemporary American literature has to play in allowing us to envision alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism.

Novelists William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, John Darnielle, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead are deeply invested in the creation of utopian possibilities. A return to reading the utopian wager in literature from the postmodern to the contemporary period reinvigorates critical forms that imagine reading as an act of communication, friendship, solace, and succor. These forms also model richer modes of belonging than the diluted and impoverished ones on display in the neoliberal present. Simultaneously, by linking utopian studies and affect studies, Grattan’s work resists the tendency for affect studies to codify around the negative, instead reorienting the field around the messy, rich, vibrant, and ambivalent affective possibilities of the world. Hope Isn’t Stupid insists on the centrality of utopia not only in American literature, but in American life as well. 
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cover of Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature

Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature

Edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro

Dartmouth College Press, 2019

Neoliberalism is the rare buzzword that has fully crossed over from academic theorizing into mainstream discussion. Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature is the first book to examine the ways that US literature has responded to the dominance of our neoliberal regime. The essays collected here reveal how contemporary American writers have both propped up and interrogated the foundations of neoliberalism. The contributors look at a host of literary genres and styles, from the utopian sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson and the dark fantasy of Karen Russell to the poetic memoir-fiction hybrids of Ben Lerner, exploring how the relationships between politics, economics, and literary form have become both distorted and revitalized in the age of neoliberalism. Most pressingly, they ask if contemporary literature can still imagine either the end of capitalism or any realistic alternative to it.
 
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cover of Remembering Is Not Enough: The Unfinished Korean War in Contemporary American Literature

Remembering Is Not Enough

The Unfinished Korean War in Contemporary American Literature

A. J. Yumi Lee

Temple University Press, 2027

Remembering Is Not Enough traces the emergence of a critical consciousness of the Korean War in American literature and culture over the past seventy-five years. A. J. Yumi Lee provides close readings of key texts from the post-Cold War era that remember and represent the “forgotten” Korean War, including Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Toni Morrison’s Home, Marie Myung-ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters. She argues that rather than simply revisiting a known and settled history, contemporary Korean War literature is actively processing an unresolved conflict that is both past and not past.

Lee shows how literary works have challenged common understandings of the war as an American victory for freedom, from soldiering narratives that address the violence of U.S. imperialism to Korean diasporic novels that depict the surfacing of memory across generations. These examples ask readers to process, analyze, and critique as they remember, and Lee emphasizes that how and why we remember matters as much as what is being recalled.

Reflecting on the Korean War in new and often unexpected ways, Remembering Is Not Enough prompts us to reorient our memories, our storytelling, and our actions toward a more just and peaceful future.

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