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Rethinking Postmodernism(s) revisits three historical sites of American literary postmodernism: the early postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon's V. (1961), the emancipatory postmodernism of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and the late or post-postmodernism of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002). For the first time, it confronts these texts with the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, staging a conceptual dialogue between pragmatism and postmodernism that historicizes and recontextualizes customary readings of postmodern fiction. The book is a must-read for all interested in current reassessments of literary postmodernism, in new critical dialogues between seminal postmodern texts, and in recent attempts to theorize the 'post-postmodern' moment.

The novels of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer are increasingly regarded as representing a new trend, an ‘aesthetic sea change’ in contemporary American literature. ‘Post-postmodernism’ and ‘New Sincerity’ are just two of the labels that have been attached to this trend. But what do these labels mean? What characterizes and connects these novels? Den Dulk shows that the connection between these works lies in their shared philosophical dimension. On the one hand, they portray excessive self-reflection and endless irony as the two main problems of contemporary Western life. On the other hand, the novels embody an attempt to overcome these problems: sincerity, reality-commitment and community are portrayed as the virtues needed to achieve a meaningful life. This shared philosophical dimension is analyzed by viewing the novels in light of the existentialist philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Camus.

Under the strange gravity of the Anthropocene era, clinical medicine has begun to feel a bit weightless. What does it mean to engage with individual distress inside a hospital while bearing witness to cataclysmic distress outside it?

Like Foer, Englander associates Jewish identity with the capacity of storytelling to embrace multiple perspectives, yet Kaddish's understated and spontaneous narratives suggest that anyone able to summon sufficient honesty and imagination can show such openness to competing voices. By recasting Jewish identity to include a responsibility to strive for reconciliation, Englander and Foer are responsive both to a century shaken by violence and to a world in which cultural self-definition regularly transcends borders of religion, custom, and country.

Narrative Innovation in 9/11 Fiction demonstrates how certain novels create narratives about the 9/11 attacks that refuse to shy away from exploring and representing their difficult and problematic aspects and, in fact, insist on doing so as the only means of coming to terms with the events in all their cultural and historical specificity.

[...]not only did I enjoy it, but I gave this book to at least five friends and every single one thanked me profusely.\" The places and tastes take us deeper into the books, and the books enrich our experience of the flavors. The perfect now-and-tben table to discuss Chinatown and Flushing family memories from book group member Alvin Eng's own memoir, Our Laundry, Оги Town. [...]we go our separate ways, having taken one more bite of what might best be called, not the Big Apple but the Big Onion, with each book revealing a startling new layer of the City's history, humor, stinkiness, and tears. There are also those hearty and intrepid souls who risk opening neighborhood restaurants, bringing the flavors of myriad long-standing and new immigrant cultures to our lips, the way books bring those worlds to our minds.

As a composer, I am interested in the ways opera creators can borrow techniques from the theatrical subgenre of documentary theatre to create works that both convey greater authenticity and retain accountability to the people whose narratives we borrow for our librettos. I begin by engaging work by scholars across a variety of arts-related fields to theorize authenticity. I also examine texts on documentary theatre to construct a short list of common techniques documentary theatre creators have used to enhance the authenticity of their works. I then analyze two American operas that use interviews or memoirs as their primary source material (Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk and Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied) through the lenses of documentary-theatrical techniques and my theorization of authenticity. In this paper and my associated opera project, I demonstrate that opera derived from real people’s narratives has the potential to ofer audiences nuanced portrayals of human experience—portrayals that remain loyal to the spirit of the testimonies and ofer audience members with similar experiences moments of recognition and solidarity.

The US human rights narrative imagines crimes against humanity as foreign horrors that alternately require US intervention and eclipse discriminatory domestic policies. This fantasy proliferated after 9/11 as part of a national coming-of-age story that disregards how the US violates international human rights law and restricts civil liberties in the name of state protection. This article argues that the extent to which post-9/11 novels reinforce, revise, or undermine the traditional bildungsroman correlates with the degree to which they embrace, complicate, or upend a post-9/11 coming-of-age narrative that depoliticizes crimes against humanity and imagines the US overcoming its perceived victimhood to save a threatened nation-state system. It is useful to return to the literature that responds to 9/11 to contextualize current attempts to invoke fear of foreign violence and the accompanying narrative of victimization that distorts the human rights framework and increases systemic inequalities.

The primary focus of this paper is to explore the metaphorical representation of trauma in Jonathan Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” It investigates the way traumatic experiences are conceptualized in terms of experiences from other domains. This study is unique; it offers a stylistic examination of the metaphors of trauma which are used to communicate this negative experience. Although some previous studies have attempted stylistic investigations to this novel, very little research approached its metaphorical language from a cognitive perspective. Therefore, this study examines the conceptualization of traumatic experiences that are encountered by the main characters as they are exposed to disturbing events. The study applies insights from the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) to selected metaphors from the novel. The application of conceptual metaphor theory allows better understanding of how the abstract state of trauma is communicated. The experience of trauma is represented in this various ways throughout the novel; sometimes it is understood through idiosyncratic metaphors and sometimes it is represented through using conventional metaphors. The paper discusses the mapping process to see how conceptual structures are selected from different source domains and mapped onto the target domain of the abstract state of trauma to convey the effects of these distressing experiences.