Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Not a Big Deal: Narrating to Unsettle

Not a Big Deal: Narrating to Unsettle

Ardoin, Paul

Hardcover

Series: Frontiers of Narrative

Literary CriticismGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1496221958
ISBN13: 9781496221957
Publisher: Univ Of Nebraska Pr
Published: Aug 1 2021
Pages: 318
Weight: 1.40
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Not a Big Deal asks how texts might work to unsettle readers at a moment when unwelcome information is rejected as fake news or rebutted with alternative facts. When readers already recognize defamiliarizing texts as a category, how might texts still work toward the goals of defamiliarization? When readers refuse to grapple with texts that might shock them or disrupt their extant views about politics, race, or even narrative itself, how can texts elicit real engagement?

This study draws from philosophy, narratology, social neuroscience, critical theory, and numerous other disciplines to read texts ranging from novels and short stories to graphic novels, films, and fiction broadcasted and podcasted--all of which enact curious strategies of disruption while insisting that they do no such thing.

Following a model traceable to Toni Morrison's criticism and short fiction, texts by Kyle Baker, Scott Brown, Percival Everett, Daniel Handler, David Robert Mitchell, Jordan Peele, and Colson Whitehead suggest new strategies for unsettling the category-based perceptions behind what Everett calls the insidious colonialist reader's eye which infects America. Not a Big Deal examines problems in our perception of the world and of texts and insists we do the same.

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