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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
Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Widiss, Benjamin

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 080477322X
ISBN13: 9780804773225
Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
Published: Sep 1 2011
Pages: 220
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Literary studies in the postwar era have consistently barred attributing specific intentions to authors based on textual evidence or ascribing textual presences to the authors themselves. Obscure Invitations argues that this taboo has blinded us to fundamental elements of twentieth-century literature. Widiss focuses on the particularly self-conscious constructions of authorship that characterize modernist and postmodernist writing, elaborating the narrative strategies they demand and the reading practices they yield. He reveals that apparent manifestations of the death of the author and of the free play of language are performances that ultimately affirm authorial control of text and reader. The book significantly revises received understandings of central texts by Faulkner, Stein, and Nabokov. It then discusses Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the films Seven and The Usual Suspects, demonstrating that each is a highly self-aware rebuttal of the notion of authorial absence.

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