Terri Jane Hennings
Writing Against Aesthetic Ideology
Tom Sharpe’s The Great Pursuit
and Paul Auster’s City of Glass
libri nigri Band 42
Klappentext
This book aims to offer a retrospective "slice" of the debate between modernism and postmodernism that dominated academia in the 1980's, particularly in the United States. Looking at two works of fiction from two different authors from this period I hope to show how the debate and the influence of postmodernism was not confined to academic ivory towers but rather became "mainstream"; spreading postmodern ideas among the general reading public even if the public was not consciously aware of it. Although postmodernism itself was highly sceptical of narrative linearity, my strategy will be quintessentially narrative: to offer a flashback. What follows reflects the thinking of a certain period in critical and literary theory that raised heretofore unheard of questions: what exactly is a "text" and where are its boundaries? How are these boundaries produced and policed? Who has the authority to decide what is a "proper" literary text? In short, the last 40 years witnessed a radical transformation in the way literary scholars conceive of the terms "text" and "meaning," and not without fierce controversy. By looking back at this raging debate we can better understand where we are today in literary criticism and theory. But before diving into the work a bit of background is in order.
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motw/Writing Against Aesthetic Ideol - Terri Jane Hennings.pdf

Hennings, Terri Jane; Sepp, Hans Rainer;

Libri nigri, Nordhausen [Germany, 2016

Germany, Germany

1995

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Memory of the World Librarian: Slowrotation

This book aims to offer a retrospective "slice" of the debate between modernism and postmodernism that dominated academia in the 1980's, particularly in the United States. Looking at two works of fiction from two different authors from this period I hope to show how the debate and the influence of postmodernism was not confined to academic ivory towers but rather became "mainstream"; spreading postmodern ideas among the general reading public even if the public was not consciously aware of it. Although postmodernism itself was highly sceptical of narrative linearity, my strategy will be quintessentially narrative: to offer a flashback. What follows reflects the thinking of a certain period in critical and literary theory that raised heretofore unheard of questions: what exactly is a "text" and where are its boundaries? How are these boundaries produced and policed? Who has the authority to decide what is a "proper" literary text? In short, the last 40 years witnessed a radical transformation in the way literary scholars conceive of the terms "text" and "meaning," and not without fierce controversy. By looking back at this raging debate we can better understand where we are today in literary criticism and theory. But before diving into the work a bit of background is in order.
Erscheinungsdatum: 04.11.2016

libri nigri, Band 42
Cover 1
Titelei 4
Impressum 5
Table of Contents 8
Foreword 10
Introduction 16
Chapter One: The Institution of the Aesthetic 24
“It’s Greek to Me” or The Foundation of European Philosophy 29
Historical vs. Fictional and the Modern Nation State 32
Kant and Aesthetics 33
The Kantian Enterprise 36
The Beautiful and the Sublime 38
History versus Language 41
Kant and the Institutionalization of Art 43
The Influence of Sign Theory 49
Chapter Two: The Historical Dimension of the Aesthetics 65
The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited 70
Value and Traditional Narrative 72
The Great Pursuit 82
The Interpretive Community 85
Chapter Three: The Great Pursuit 102
Commodification, Derivation, and Desire: Baby Hutchmeyer 121
Chapter Four: City of Glass 133
Afterword 153
Selected Bibliography 158

2025-10-27