Browsing by Subject "contemporary literature"
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Item Open Access Feedback Exhaust: Money and the Novel at the End of the Contemporary(2019) Huber, NicholasIn the contemporary context of global financialization, the distance between the categories of money and fiction has been theorized as narrowing. This dissertation uses a Marxist analytic to argue that financialized money and fiction, as two modes of accounting, should be approached as competing forms of what Marx and Engels described as “world literature” and, therefore, as sites of ideological and material contestations understood as a manifestation of class struggle. Financial and monetary accounting functions are found to be used by contemporary novels to reconstitute the form’s traditional modes of expression in accordance with the historical changes in global economic structures. At the same time, contemporary approaches to money, debt, and accounting are found to exploit tropes and functions familiar to scholars of literary fiction. This dissertation attempts to sketch the stakes of a contest over narrative possibility in a period in which historical narratives tend toward the catastrophic, apocalyptic, and dystopian.
Item Open Access Sympathy for the Devil: Volatile Masculinities in Recent German and American Literatures(2011) Knight, Mary LeslieThis study investigates how an ambivalence surrounding men and masculinity has been expressed and exploited in Pop literature since the late 1980s, focusing on works by German-speaking authors Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert and American author Bret Easton Ellis. I compare works from the United States with German and Swiss novels in order to reveal the scope - as well as the national particularities - of these troubled gender identities and what it means in the context of recent debates about a "crisis" in masculinity in Western societies. My comparative work will also highlight the ways in which these particular literatures and cultures intersect, invade, and influence each other.
In this examination, I demonstrate the complexity and success of the critical projects subsumed in the works of three authors too often underestimated by intellectual communities. At the same time, I reveal the very structure and language of these critical projects as a safe haven for "male fantasies" of gender difference and identity formation long relegated to the distant past, fantasies that continue to lurk within our cultural currencies.