California And The Melancholic American Identity In Joan Didions Novels

Author : Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429655312
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels written by Katarzyna Nowak McNeice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

Author : Joan Didion
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679752862
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Where I Was From written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline” (The Baltimore Sun), Didion—a native Californian—reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours. Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

Author : Mark Royden Winchell
Publisher : Boston : Twayne Publishers
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Joan Didion written by Mark Royden Winchell and published by Boston : Twayne Publishers. This book was released on 1980 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winchell examines the work of Joan Didion who has been called everything from a "fantastically brilliant writer" to an "entrepreneur of anxiety."--Amazon.com.

Author : Joan Didion
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679754857
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1995-04-25 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean—a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life. Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase. Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam. As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class.

Author : Matthew R. McLennan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350149608
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Joan Didion and the Ethics of Memory written by Matthew R. McLennan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the breadth of Joan Didion's writing, from journalism, essays, fiction, memoir and screen plays, it may appear that there is no unifying thread, but Matthew R. McLennan argues that 'the ethics of memory' – the question of which norms should guide public and private remembrance – offers a promising vision of what is most characteristic and salient in Didion's works. By framing her universe as indifferent and essentially precarious, McLennan demonstrates how this outlook guides Didion's reflections on key themes linked to memory: namely witnessing and grieving, nostalgia, and the paradoxically amnesiac qualities of our increasingly archived public life that she explored in famous texts like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking and Salvador. McLennan moves beyond the interpretive value of such an approach and frames Didion as a serious, iconoclastic philosopher of time and memory. Through her encounters with the past, the writer is shown to offer lessons for the future in an increasingly perilous and unsettled world.

Author : Joan Didion
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307700518
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blue Nights written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound.

Author : Gerri Reaves
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 9780786450688
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mapping the Private Geography written by Gerri Reaves and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2001-01-10 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of autobiographical writing and its reflection of personal and national identity analyzes the different ways in which these authors balance individual American identity with collective identities and reinvent their familial, cultural, and national engenderings. In each of the works discussed, a private geography - a psychological map, a myth, an ideology, or a fiction - is posited, while its author explores claims to the ownership of memory, history, and the self.

Author : Rough Guides (Firm)
Publisher : Rough Guides
ISBN 13 : 9781843530497
Total Pages : 892 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rough Guide to California written by Rough Guides (Firm) and published by Rough Guides. This book was released on 2003 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated guide that covers urban hotspots such as San Francisco and LA to the natural beauty of the Yosemite National Park and the Lake Tahoe area. Camping and hiking information in Sequoia, Death Valley and the other great National Parks is included as well as the highlights of the east - Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Hotel and restaurant details are given to suit all budgets together with the lowdown on the coolest (or, failing that, the most interesting) clubs and bars. Comprehensive contexts sections featuring the best books and movies on California, as well as extracts from two best-selling authors are also included.

Author : Susan Choi
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062365282
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Woman written by Susan Choi and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Susan Choi…proves herself a natural—a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn’t put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again.” —Joan Didion A novel of impressive scope and complexity, “American Woman is a thoughtful, meditative interrogation of…history and politics, of power and racism, and finally, of radicalism.” (San Francisco Chronicle), perfect for readers who love Emma Cline’s novel, The Girls. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell. "A brilliant read...astonishing in its honesty and confidence,” (Denver Post) American Woman explores the psychology of the young radicals, the intensity of their isolated existence, and the paranoia and fear that undermine their ideals.

Author : Dana Spiotta
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743272986
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Eat the Document written by Dana Spiotta and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description