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
Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion

Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion

Kacandes, Irene

Paperback

Series: Frontiers of Narrative

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0803278012
ISBN13: 9780803278011
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Sep 1 2001
Pages: 285
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.77 Width: 5.69 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Everywhere you turn today, someone (or something) is talking to you--the television, the radio, cell phones, your computer. If you think some of the novels and stories you read are talking to you too, you're not alone, and you're not mistaken. In this innovative, multidisciplinary work, Irene Kacandes reads contemporary fiction as a form of conversation and as part of the larger conversation that is modern culture. Within a framework of talk as interaction, Kacandes considers texts that can be classified as statements, that is, texts that wholly or in part ask for their readers to react-- to talk back--to them in certain ways. The works she addresses--from writers as varied as Harriet O. Wilson, Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Günter Grass, John Barth, Julio Cortázar, and Italo Calvino--conduct their interactions in certain modes to accomplish different sorts of cultural work: storytelling, testimony, apostrophe, and interactivity. By focusing on texts within these groupings, Kacandes is able to relate the different modes of talk fiction to extraliterary cultural developments in our oral age--and to show how such interactions, however contrary to the dominant twentieth-century view of literature as art for art's sake, help to keep literature alive and speaking to us.

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