2 results
Context Rocks!
- Amy J. Elias
-
- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 134 / Issue 3 / May 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 579-587
- Print publication:
- May 2019
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?
1 - Postmodern metafiction
- from PART I - POETICS AND GENRES
-
- By Amy J. Elias
- Edited by John N. Duvall, Purdue University, Indiana
-
- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945
- Published online:
- 28 March 2012
- Print publication:
- 08 December 2011, pp 13-29
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Metafiction is fiction that calls attention to its representational techniques and knowledge claims. However, metafiction is something neither new nor inherently American. As Gerald Prince has noted, the novel, as a genre, harbors a range of possible narrative strategies that include metanarrative constructions such as self-reflexivity, and this accounts for why novels with metafictional elements appear at different historical moments, well before the second half of the twentieth century. Citing fiction from numerous literary periods, Robert Alter defines metafiction within the larger category of “self-conscious fiction,” as does Brian Stonehill, who defines metafiction as “an essentially ludic art form” that includes books in which narrators are clearly engaged in the act of composition or which point to the author behind a succession of narrators, or novels that feature ostentatious and nonmimetic style, conspicuous structural architecture, flat characters often aware of their status as characters, or self-parody and skepticism concerning the satirical efficacy of language. For instance, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), with its self-conscious eponymous narrator and comically digressive disruptions of linear plot, is an exemplary work of metafiction. But one can turn to even earlier prose fiction for other examples. Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615) plays with notions of authorship in ways that have inspired twentieth-century metafictionists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. And American postmodernist John Barth has made it clear that his use of tale-within-tale structure derives in part from his fascination with the storyteller Scheherazade in Richard F. Burton's 1885 translation of the tenth-century Persian epic, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.