Ethics in Postmodern Fiction
Donald Barthelme and William Gass
by Barbara Schwerdtfeger
Hardback (Published)
(January 2005)
ISBN: 9783825315740
5.28 x 8.27 inches
Price: $50.00
In stock
Postmodern texts have generally been associated with a radical challenge of established conventions and with an “anything goes” mentality, which seems to exclude serious ethical discussion. While the postmodern texts of the American novel and short-story writers Donald Barthelme and William Gass indeed challenge traditional ethical rules, they are nonetheless deeply concerned with moral questions. Using contemporary ethics as its theoretical framework, the study shows that the fiction of Barthelme and Gass not only makes readers aware of the complexity of ethical issues but also argues that the premise for good ethical behavior is to have the right – postmodern – attitude: to be open-minded, flexible, and able to deal with the ambiguities of life. Retrospectively, these findings can also be applied to other postmodern writers to reveal the hidden ethical dimensions of their fictions.
- By (author) Barbara Schwerdtfeger
Other Titles in this Series
Aesthetics & Ethics
Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' to 'House Made of Dawn
Volume 163
Gender – Voice – Vernacular
The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker
Volume 77
Comic Art and Avant-Garde
Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes' and the Art of American Newspaper Comic Strips
Volume 295
MexAmerica
Genealogien und Analysen postnationaler Diskurse in der kulturellen Produktion von Chicanos/as
Volume 127
Zwischen Tradition und Innovation
Das Sonett in der amerikanischen Dichtung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts
Volume 93
The Kitchen and the Factory
Spaces of Women's Work and the Negotiation of Social Difference in Antebellum American Literature
Volume 280
A River of ‘Han’: Eastern Tragedy in a Western Land
A Study of Korean American Literature
Volume 259
Modernist Authenticities
The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams
Volume 245
Transatlantic Crossings Between Paris and New York
Pan-Africanism, Cultural Difference and the Arts in the Interwar Years
Volume 133
Authentizitat und Inszenierung
Die Vermittlung von Geschichte in amerikanischen 'historic sites'
Volume 112
Time(s) of Lives
(Non-)Normative Temporalities, Age(ing), and Kinship Narratives in Contemporary U.S. American Culture
Volume 310
New England Forefathers’ Day Orations, 1770-1865
An Annotated Edition of Selected Plymouth Anniversary Addresses
Volume 240
Differenz und Gesellschaft
Ethnische Dramen im Englischunterricht am Beispiel von Israel Zangwills 'The Melting Pot' und Angelina Weld Grimkes 'Rachel'
Volume 154
The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period
Volume 78
Reshaping the Maze – Rewriting the Minotaur
Transformationen des Labyrinthmythos in der zeitgenossischen amerikanischen Erzahlliteratur
Volume 235
Similar Books
Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance
Deconstructing Memory Legacies in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic
Tools of Control or Seeds of Liberation?
Reformed Evangelism and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum American South
Die Erinnerung der Hydra
Das Quilombo von Palmares in Geschichte und Gedächtnis (ca. 1595–1995): Sklaverei, Rassismus und Freiheit in Brasilien und entlang des Atlantiks
Literature, Translation, and the Politics of Meaning
Polish, American, and German Literary Traditions
Perspectives on Values
The Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode
Volume 323
Writing during the Disasters
Modes of Rendering Suffering in Contemporary Experimental American Poetry
Volume 320
Renegotiating American Nationalism
The Proxy War over Marriage Equality through the Lens of Un-Americanism
Volume 317
Through the Bars of My Memory
Prison Life Writing and the Prison Movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Volume 319