Contemporary Drift

Author : Theodore Martin
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231543891
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contemporary Drift written by Theodore Martin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to call something “contemporary”? More than simply denoting what’s new, it speaks to how we come to know the present we’re living in and how we develop a shared story about it. The story of trying to understand the present is an integral, yet often unnoticed, part of the literature and film of our moment. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin argues that the contemporary is not just a historical period but also a conceptual problem, and he claims that contemporary genre fiction offers a much-needed resource for resolving that problem. Contemporary Drift combines a theoretical focus on the challenge of conceptualizing the present with a historical account of contemporary literature and film. Emphasizing both the difficulty and the necessity of historicizing the contemporary, the book explores how recent works of fiction depict life in an age of global capitalism, postindustrialism, and climate change. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction, and the postapocalyptic novel, Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers. Martin argues that genre provides these artists with a formal strategy for understanding both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Genre writing, with its mix of old and new, brings to light the complicated process by which we make sense of our present and determine what belongs to our time.

Author : Russell Banks
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062123165
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Continental Drift written by Russell Banks and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.”— James Atlas, The Atlantic Monthly A reissue of Russell Banks’ classic novel about love and sex, racism and poverty, and the failures of the American dream, now with P.S. and as a Harper Perennial Modern Classic. Russell Bank’s searing tale of uprootedness, migration, and exploitation in contemporary America brings together two of the dominant realms of his fiction—New England and the Caribbean—skillfully braided into one taut narrative. Continental Drift is the story of a young blue-collar worker and family man who abandons his broken dreams in New Hampshire and the story of a young Haitian woman who, with her nephew and baby, flees the brutal injustice and poverty of her homeland.

Author : Caroline Bergvall
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781937658205
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drift written by Caroline Bergvall and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting new volume exploring the power and provocation of medieval English and the trope of the seafarer

Author : Arthur Kroker
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816679169
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Body Drift written by Arthur Kroker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, the writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a "writing machine" in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species. According to Arthur Kroker, the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body, in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented. Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, Kroker reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.

Author : Jeremy Rosen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231542402
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Minor Characters Have Their Day written by Jeremy Rosen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

Author : Jeff Ferrell
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520968271
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drift written by Jeff Ferrell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This book was written late in the North American night, with the rumbling thuds and booming train horns of the nearby rail yard echoing through my windows, reminding me of the train hoppers and gutter punks out there rolling through the darkness.” In Drift, Jeff Ferrell shows how dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Examining the history of drifting, he situates contemporary drift within today’s economic, legal, and cultural dynamics. He also highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping hobo—by tracing the hobo’s legal and political history and by detailing his own immersion in the world of contemporary train-hoppers. Along the way, Ferrell sheds light on the ephemeral intensity of drifting communities and explores the contested politics of drift: the strategies that legal authorities employ to control drifters in the interest of economic development, the social and spatial dislocations that these strategies ironically exacerbate, and the ways in which drifters create their own slippery forms of resistance. Ferrell concludes that drift constitutes a necessary subject of social inquiry and a way of revitalizing social inquiry itself, offering as it does new models for knowing and engaging with the contemporary world.

Author : Phillip Lopate
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0525567321
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Contemporary American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century—from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate. The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing. Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang An Anchor Original.

Author : Kate Zambreno
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593087216
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drifts written by Kate Zambreno and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Drifts is a dazzling and enjoyable book. Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup. I've never read truer pages on the subject of pregnancy. No writer has come so close to achieving a total grasp of life: the entanglement of everyday things, a writing project, and a pregnant body, in a single work.” —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Named a Best Book of the Year by The Paris Review, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Vulture, and Refinery29 “Reading all Zambreno feels like the jolt one gets from a surprise cut or burn in the kitchen, that sudden recognition that you’re in a body and the body can be hurt.” —Alicia Kennedy, Refinery29 Haunting and compulsively readable, Drifts is an intimate portrait of reading, writing, and creative obsession. At work on a novel that is overdue, spending long days walking neighborhood streets with her restless terrier, corresponding ardently with fellow writers, the narrator grows obsessed with the challenge of writing the present tense, of capturing time itself. Entranced by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Albrecht Dürer, Chantal Akerman, and others, she photographs the residents and strays of her neighborhood, haunts bookstores and galleries, and records her thoughts in a yellow notebook that soon subsumes her work on the novel. As winter closes in, a series of disturbances—the appearances and disappearances of enigmatic figures, the burglary of her apartment—leaves her distracted and uncertain . . . until an intense and tender disruption changes everything. A story of artistic ambition, personal crisis, and the possibilities and failures of literature, Drifts is the work of an exhilarating and vital writer.

Author : Sidney Dekker
Publisher : CRC Press
ISBN 13 : 1351942913
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drift into Failure written by Sidney Dekker and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. We have trouble grasping the complexity and normality that gives rise to such large events. We hunt for broken parts, fixable properties, people we can hold accountable. Our analyses of complex system breakdowns remain depressingly linear, depressingly componential - imprisoned in the space of ideas once defined by Newton and Descartes. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gotten ahead of our theories. We are able to build things - deep-sea oil rigs, jackscrews, collateralized debt obligations - whose properties we understand in isolation. But in competitive, regulated societies, their connections proliferate, their interactions and interdependencies multiply, their complexities mushroom. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.

Author : Alexander Maksik
Publisher : Bond Street Books
ISBN 13 : 0385679181
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Marker to Measure Drift written by Alexander Maksik and published by Bond Street Books. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander Maksik's electrifying novel tracks a woman's journey from the horrors of Charles Taylor's Liberia to abject poverty and self-exile on a Greek island, where she must grapple with a haunted past and find a way back into human society. On an island somewhere in the Aegean, Jacqueline, a young Liberian woman, veers between starvation and satiety, between the brutality of her past and the precarious uncertainty of her present in the aftermath of experiences so unspeakable that she prefers homeless numbness to the psychological confrontation she knows is inevitable. Hypnotic, highly sensual, exquisitely written, and extraordinary in its depiction of both pleasure and pain, of excruciating physical and spiritual hungers, A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about memory, how we live with what we know, and whether and how we go forward, intact and whole, after the ravages of loss. It is beautiful, lacerating, impossible to put down. A breakthrough work from a prodigiously gifted young writer.