In 2007 Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz entered the literary spotlight with a much appreciated debut novel. In four loosely connected episodes he transposed the peculiar and sometimes tragic relationship between fathers and sons into the astronomical and surrealist allegory of Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten, 2007, Residenz)[1]. The rhetoric span between modernist dichotomies, scientific …
As this inclement and balmy London summer draws to a close, the ICA plays host to Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace’s darkly comic collection of short stories, adapted for stage by artists Andy Holden and David Raymond Conroy. Penned in the late 90s, Wallace’s text employs a variety of literary techniques to …
David Foster Wallace’s Hideous Men & London’s Olympic Epiphany Read More »
Most people who are interested in Literature in a theoretical or academic way have points in their careers when they encounter a personal disappointment about their object of study; a nagging feeling about the literature that fascinates them. To engage in literary criticism requires a lot of enthusiasm. Sometimes, working with literature, this enthusiastic feeling …
We’ve stumbled upon a very interesting review of Stephen Burns’ Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008), written by the Danish scholar Tore Rye Anderson for Politics and Culture. “Despite (…) lavish praise”, he writes Franzen’s novels have been largely neglected by literary scholars, at least compared to contemporaries like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who …
In Rethinking Postmodernism(s) Katrin Amian declares that “Postmodernism, it seems, is history”[1] for the simple reason that “the term appears to have exhausted its potential as a means of describing and understanding the shifting alliances of literary and cultural production in the new millennium.”[2] I, too, believe contemporary literature can not be understood as …
In the late 1980s, Joost Zwagerman’s (1963) debut novel Gimmick[1] caused a sensation in press and public as a novel that defined the Zeitgeist and spoke for a generation, the postmodern generation. Recently he wrote Duel[2] (2010), a shorter novel published as the traditional gift of the annual week-of-books, which can be considered as a …
