Ebook: Site reading: fiction, art, social form
Author: Alworth David J
- Tags: 20e siècle (2e moitié)-21e siècle (début), Art, Art américain, Art et littérature, Cadre du récit, Lieux imaginaires, Littérature, Littérature américaine, Roman américain--20e siècle--Histoire et critique, Sociologie, Thèmes motifs, Littérature, Littérature américaine, Art américain, Thèmes motifs, 20e siècle (2e moitié)-21e siècle (début), Cadre du récit, Roman américain -- 20e siècle -- Histoire et critique, Art et littérature
- Year: 2016
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- City: Princeton;NJ
- Language: English
- epub
Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid- twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life.
Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the...