Book

Site reading : fiction, art, social form

Alworth, David J., author

Overview

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites--supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums--that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: 1900 - 1999 / American fiction 20th century History and criticism. / Setting (Literature) / Art and literature. / Literature and society. / American fiction.
• ISBN: 9780691164496, 0691164495

Item info:

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Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PS169.S45 A49 2016	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE