Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, 20th Century American Literature - Post WWII - Literary Criticism, Postmodernism - Literary Movements, 20th Century Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, Women Authors - British - Literary Cri

Text/countertext

Name: Text/countertext
Author: Marie F. Danziger
ISBN: 9780820428710

by Marie F. Danziger

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Overview

Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth analyzes the psychological and structural dynamic of three postmodern novels: Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Philip Roth's The Counterlife. Storytelling becomes here the dangerous activity of a guilty outsider who has come to expect hostile disapproval from all quarters. The result is a sadomasochistic confrontation between these postmodern writers and their imagined audiences: the pleasure of storytelling is linked to the pain the authors inflict upon their readers in retaliation for their anticipated disapproval. The structural consequence is "serial negation" - the constant agonistic oscillation between text and countertext, reflecting the authors' determined efforts to sidestep criticism and maintain artistic control.

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Analyzes the psychological and structural dynamics of three postmodern novels: Beckett's "Malone Dies", Lessing's "The Golden Notebook", and Roth's "The Counterlife". Links the pleasure of storytellng to the pain the authors inflict on their readers in retaliation for their anticipated disapproval and explores the constant agonistic oscillation between text and countertext which reflect the authors' efforts to sidestep criticism and maintain artistic control. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.