Overview

Full Product Details

9781622737291

Table of Contents

Reviews

A dominant but deeply undertheorized feature of serious contemporary writing is its fragmentary nature. This book powerfully, intelligently, and rigorously fills that lack (lack being, of course, what fragmentation is forever exploring). David Shields Professor at the University of Washington, author of 'Reality Hunger' 'The Poetics of Fragmentation' offers a wide-ranging and original exploration of the many forms and aims of fragmentation in contemporary fiction from Great Britain and the US. Reading the art of the fragment against a long history of literary experimentation with broken forms, collage and montage, it turns to some of the most prominent figures of contemporary fiction -- from David Mitchell to David Foster Wallace, David Markson or Jeanette Winterson. More than a panorama of contemporary fiction, the volume also offers a bracing reminder that fiction cannot be read in isolation from its cultural context. Essays devoted to the architecture of fiction, the impact of transmediality or the shuffle narrative also propose new readings of fiction's inspiring capacity to constantly remediate itself. 'The Poetics of Fragmentation' will convince any reader passionate about contemporary fiction that experimentation remains an urgent concern of literature. Appropriating plural semiotic systems, from digital media to music, literature is still analyzed as pushing at the frontiers of it own language and one can only be grateful to the editors of the volume for making room for those often debated experimentations with multimodality; an emphasis on multimodality that will no doubt appeal to a different set of readers. A clearly-argued, erudite, efficient and well-paced volume that will offer many varied points of entry into the issue of fragmentation and that offers a welcome take on aesthetic categories that seemed to have lost some of their critical purchase. Dr Catherine Bernard, Professor of British literature and art history, Paris Diderot University, France

"A dominant but deeply undertheorized feature of serious contemporary writing is its fragmentary nature. This book powerfully, intelligently, and rigorously fills that lack (lack being, of course, what fragmentation is forever exploring). David Shields Professor at the University of Washington, author of 'Reality Hunger' 'The Poetics of Fragmentation' offers a wide-ranging and original exploration of the many forms and aims of fragmentation in contemporary fiction from Great Britain and the US. Reading the art of the fragment against a long history of literary experimentation with broken forms, collage and montage, it turns to some of the most prominent figures of contemporary fiction -- from David Mitchell to David Foster Wallace, David Markson or Jeanette Winterson. More than a panorama of contemporary fiction, the volume also offers a bracing reminder that fiction cannot be read in isolation from its cultural context. Essays devoted to the architecture of fiction, the impact of transmediality or the ""shuffle narrative"" also propose new readings of fiction's inspiring capacity to constantly remediate itself. 'The Poetics of Fragmentation' will convince any reader passionate about contemporary fiction that experimentation remains an urgent concern of literature. Appropriating plural semiotic systems, from digital media to music, literature is still analyzed as pushing at the frontiers of it own language and one can only be grateful to the editors of the volume for making room for those often debated experimentations with multimodality; an emphasis on multimodality that will no doubt appeal to a different set of readers. A clearly-argued, erudite, efficient and well-paced volume that will offer many varied points of entry into the issue of fragmentation and that offers a welcome take on aesthetic categories that seemed to have lost some of their critical purchase. Dr Catherine Bernard, Professor of British literature and art history, Paris Diderot University, France"

Author Information

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. She published The Fiction of Julian Barnes (2006) and Conversations with Julian Barnes (co-edited with Ryan Roberts, 2009). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (2012) as well as monographs on B.S. Johnson (2009) and Jonathan Coe (2015). She is the editor of several books on contemporary literature in English, including a collection of interviews with eight contemporary writers, Novelists in the New Millennium (2012) and The B.S. Johnson - Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (2015). Wojciech Drąg is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw. He is the author of Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (2014) and co-editor of War and Words: Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and the Media (2015) and Spectrum of Emotions: From Love to Grief (2016). In 2018, he received The Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship at the University of Utah.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available