Talk fiction literature and the talk explosion / Irene Kacandes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kacandes, Irene, 1958-

Series:

Frontiers of narrative.

Frontiers of narrative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Radio talk shows.

Television talk shows.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxiii, 284 p. )

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2012

Place of Publication:

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Preface ix

Acknowledgments xxi

1. Secondary Orality: Talk as interaction

2, Storytelling: Talk as Sustenance 33

3. Testimony: Talk as Witnessing 89

4. Apostrophe: Talk as Performance 141

5. Interactivity: Talk as Collaboration 197

Notes 219

Works Cited 255

Index 277.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-275) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780803201293

080320129X

OCLC:

50753798