Cloud Atlas Livre

Atlas international des nuages

The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction

The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within examine whether contemporary forms of literary fragmentation constitute a return to the modernist episteme or the fragmented literature of exhaustion of the 1960s, mark a continuity with postmodernist aesthetics or signal a deviation from past models and an attempt to reflect today’s accelerated culture of social media and over-communication. Contributors theorise and classify literary fragments, examine the relationship between fragmentation and the Zeitgeist (influenced by globalisation, media saturation and social networks), analyse the mechanics of multimodal and multimedial fictions, and consider the capacity of literary fragmentation to represent personal or collective trauma and to address ethical concerns. They also investigate the ways in which the architecture of the printed book is destabilised and how aesthetic processes involving fragmentation, bricolage and/or collage raise ontological, ethical and epistemological questions about the globalised contemporary world we live in and its relation to the self and the other. Besides the aforementioned authors, the volume makes reference to the works of J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Markson, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson and several others.

Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.