Interrogating stories told about life after deconstruction, and discovering instead a kind of afterlife of deconstruction, Daniel Punday draws on a wide range of theorists to develop a rigorous theory of narrative as an alternative model for literary interpretation. Drawing on an observation made by Jean-François Lyotard, Punday argues that at the heart of narrative are concrete objects that can serve as "lynchpins" through which many different explanations and interpretations can come together. Narrative after Deconstruction traces the often grudging emergence of a post-deconstructive interest in narrative throughout contemporary literary theory by examining critics as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, and Edward Said. Experimental novelists like Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Kathy Acker likewise work through many of the same problems of constructing texts in the wake of deconstruction, and so provide a glimpse of this post-deconstructive narrative approach to writing and interpretation at its most accomplished and powerful.
This book examines the common metaphor that equates computing and writing, tracing it from the naming of devices (“notebook” computers) through the design of user interfaces (the “desktop”) to how we describe the work of programmers (“writing” code). Computing as Writing ponders both the implications and contradictions of the metaphor. During the past decade, analysis of digital media honed its focus on particular hardware and software platforms. Daniel Punday argues that scholars should, instead, embrace both the power and the fuzziness of the writing metaphor as it relates to computing—which isn’t simply a set of techniques or a collection of technologies but also an idea that resonates throughout contemporary culture. He addresses a wide array of subjects, including film representations of computing (Desk Set, The Social Network), Neal Stephenson’s famous open source manifesto, J. K. Rowling’s legal battle with a fan site, the sorting of digital libraries, subscription services like Netflix, and the Apple versus Google debate over openness in computing. Punday shows how contemporary authors are caught between traditional notions of writerly authority and computing’s emphasis on doing things with writing. What does it mean to be a writer today? Is writing code for an app equivalent to writing a novel? Should we change how we teach writing? Punday’s answers to these questions and others are original and refreshing, and push the study of digital media in productive new directions.
Argues that digital media allows us to see unresolved tensions, ambiguities, and gaps in core narrative concepts, revealing complexity and unexplored potential.
Fictions, we are so often told, are everywhere in America today. The extravagant claims of advertising are everywhere, much of the day's news concerns "pseudo-events" like rallies or ceremonies staged so that they can be reported on, and philosophers doubt even the possibility of any knowledge being objective. Thus we seem less and less able to distinguish between the real and the invented. In Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the "postmodern" expansion of fictionality--the feeling today that the line between the real and the invented is harder to draw--and argues that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups to define how we tell and use "literary" stories. He discusses the literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed; paraliterary forms like science fiction and electronic writing; and resolutely nonliterary texts, especially role-playing games, in terms of how each responds to the institution of literature through its definition of fictionality. For too long, postmodernism has been described by easy generalizations--relativist, indeterminate, commercialized--that have rendered the term nearly worthless. Punday applies a more nuanced understanding of fictionality to a variety of contemporary narrative forms that occupy different locations within postmodern literary culture. Approaching postmodernism as a configuration of institutions that legitimize fictionality, he illuminates the nature of creative writing and the conflicts between different literary groups in America today.
Interrogating stories told about life after deconstruction, and discovering instead a kind of afterlife of deconstruction, Daniel Punday draws on a wide range of theorists to develop a rigorous theory of narrative as an alternative model for literary interpretation. Drawing on an observation made by Jean-François Lyotard, Punday argues that at the heart of narrative are concrete objects that can serve as "lynchpins" through which many different explanations and interpretations can come together. Narrative after Deconstruction traces the often grudging emergence of a post-deconstructive interest in narrative throughout contemporary literary theory by examining critics as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, and Edward Said. Experimental novelists like Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Kathy Acker likewise work through many of the same problems of constructing texts in the wake of deconstruction, and so provide a glimpse of this post-deconstructive narrative approach to writing and interpretation at its most accomplished and powerful.
This book examines the common metaphor that equates computing and writing, tracing it from the naming of devices (“notebook” computers) through the design of user interfaces (the “desktop”) to how we describe the work of programmers (“writing” code). Computing as Writing ponders both the implications and contradictions of the metaphor. During the past decade, analysis of digital media honed its focus on particular hardware and software platforms. Daniel Punday argues that scholars should, instead, embrace both the power and the fuzziness of the writing metaphor as it relates to computing—which isn’t simply a set of techniques or a collection of technologies but also an idea that resonates throughout contemporary culture. He addresses a wide array of subjects, including film representations of computing (Desk Set, The Social Network), Neal Stephenson’s famous open source manifesto, J. K. Rowling’s legal battle with a fan site, the sorting of digital libraries, subscription services like Netflix, and the Apple versus Google debate over openness in computing. Punday shows how contemporary authors are caught between traditional notions of writerly authority and computing’s emphasis on doing things with writing. What does it mean to be a writer today? Is writing code for an app equivalent to writing a novel? Should we change how we teach writing? Punday’s answers to these questions and others are original and refreshing, and push the study of digital media in productive new directions.
While some cultural critics are pronouncing the death of the novel, a whole generation of novelists have turned to other media with curiosity rather than fear. These novelists are not simply incorporating references to other media into their work for the sake of verisimilitude, they are also engaging precisely such media as a way of talking about what it means to write and read narrative in a society filled with stories told outside the print medium. By examining how some of our best fiction writers have taken up the challenge of film, television, video games, and hypertext, Daniel Punday offers an enlightening look into the current status of such fundamental narrative concepts as character, plot, and setting. He considers well-known postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, more-accessible authors like Maxine Hong Kingston and Oscar Hijuelos, and unjustly overlooked writers like Susan Daitch and Kenneth Gangemi, and asks how their works investigate the nature and limits of print as a medium for storytelling. Writing at the Limit explores how novelists locate print writing within the contemporary media ecology, and what it really means to be writing at print’s media limit.
Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary theory through formal experimentation in the modernist BildungsromanModernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.Key FeaturesProvides a unique perspective on the Bildungsroman (novel of formation), one of the most discussed genres in recent scholarly work on modernismApproaches the study of science and literature with exceptionally close attention to the details of scientific models, their cultural appropriations, and their political implicationsMakes the first thoroughgoing argument for twentieth-century biology as a positive influence on modernist poetics and ethicsModels how narrative theory can serve the goals of interdisciplinary research
Creating Deviance is a basic text introducing deviance from an interactionist perspective, placing the study of deviant behavior within the broader terrain of cultural meaning. By examining the persistence of gender inequality, the formation of youth subcultures, and other issues Dotter provides a valuable resource for the study of deviance and crime and for introductory courses in sociology on deviance and social control.
With annual gross sales surpassing 100 billion U.S. dollars each of the last two years, the digital games industry may one day challenge theatrical-release movies as the highest-grossing entertainment media in the world. In their examination of the tremendous cultural influence of digital games, Daniel Reardon and David Wright analyze three companies that have shaped the industry: Bethesda, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA; BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and CD Projekt Red in Warsaw, Poland. Each company has used social media and technical content in the games to promote players' belief that players control the companies' game narratives. The result has been at times explosive, as empowered players often attempted to co-op the creative processes of games through discussion board forum demands, fund-raising campaigns to persuade companies to change or add game content, and modifications (“modding”) of the games through fan-created downloads. The result has changed the way we understand the interactive nature of digital games and the power of fan culture to shape those games.
What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question? This query is the driving force behind Daniel Grausam’s On Endings, which seeks to show how the core texts of American postmodernism are a response to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and especially to the new potential for total nuclear conflict. Postwar American fiction needs to be rethought, he argues, by highlighting postmodern experimentation as a mode of profound historical consciousness. In Grausam’s view, previous studies of fiction mimetically concerned with nuclear conflict neither engage the problems that total war might pose to narration nor take seriously the paradox of a war that narrative can never actually describe. Those few critical works that do take seriously such problems do not offer a broad account of American postmodernism. And recent work on postmodernism has offered no comprehensive historical account of the part played by nuclear weapons in the emergence of new forms of temporal and historical experience. On Endings significantly extends the project of historicizing postmodernism while returning the nuclear to a central place in the study of the Cold War.
This book offers an accessible, comprehensive resource to practitioners who wish to incorporate RPGs into their client-work. Tabletop role-playing games, RPGs, have long been associated with various unique emotional, cognitive, and social benefits, but only recently has the term 'RPG Therapy' entered into the mental-health lexicon. Presenting simple game- and storytelling mechanics, and demonstrating how they may be utilized in accordance with specific professional modalities, this supportive guide explores every step of the implementation process, from underlying therapeutic principles to initial creative exercises to actual in-session play, and encourages readers to have confidence in their own imaginative abilities. Written for practitioners of all levels of client- and RPG experience, this groundbreaking and authoritative book provides case examples and practical tools, along with pragmatic and straightforward advice on how to implement this exciting new form of intervention.
Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Bookmarking his analysis with the conflict leading to the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz on one end and the 1815 bid for Greek independence on the other, he follows the fortunes of notable British, Dutch, and French diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire as they lived and worked according to the capitulations surrendered to the Sultan. Closely reading a mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, O'Quinn demonstrates the extent to which the Ottoman state was not only the subject of historical curiosity in Europe but also a key foil against which Western theories of governance were articulated. Juxtaposing narrative accounts of diplomatic life in Constantinople, such as those contained in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, with visual depictions such as those of the costumes of the Ottoman elite produced by the French-Flemish painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour, he traces the dissemination of European representations and interpretations of the Ottoman Empire throughout eighteenth-century material culture. In a series of eight interlocking chapters, O'Quinn presents sustained and detailed case studies of particular objects, personalities, and historical contexts, framing intercultural encounters between East and West through a set of key concerns: translation, mediation, sociability, and hospitality. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.