An edition of Understanding Jonathan Lethem (2015)

Understanding Jonathan Lethem

Locate

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list

Check-In

×Close
Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
Today


Buy this book

Last edited by ImportBot
April 16, 2023 | History
An edition of Understanding Jonathan Lethem (2015)

Understanding Jonathan Lethem

"Understanding Jonathan Lethem is a study of the novels, short fiction, and nonfiction on a wide range of subjects in the arts by American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Motherless Brooklyn, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Gun, with Occasional Music. Matthew Luter explores the key contemporaries of and influences on Lethem, who is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Luter begins this volume by explaining how Lethem's innovative and provocative essay on creative appropriation "The Ecstasy of Influence" differs from other writing about influence, suggesting an artistic mode that celebrates thoughtful borrowing. Readings of Lethem's three major novels follow: taken together, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City present a novelist coming to terms with the joys and downsides of artistic influence. Motherless Brooklyn pays tribute to and subverts traditional hardboiled detective novels as Lethem plays with the conventions of a favorite (and influential) genre. Fortress dwells obsessively on appreciation and criticism of influential art, as Lethem's main character spends a lifetime contemplating the complexities of the art he loves, interrogating his own reactions to it, and thinking through the political implications of the ways he has been influenced by that which he consumes. Chronic City depicts the cost of fandom and the dangers of giving over too much of oneself to the art that one loves, dramatized via a character brought nearly to ruin not by the demands of artistic creation, but by obsessive cultural consumption. Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low (experimental fiction, comic books, art film, detective novels), Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary originality might mean in a postmodern age. Some suggest that such borrowings indicate a literary well that has run dry, making writers such as Lethem mere patchwork artists. Luter argues instead that Lethem's propensity for wearing his influences and obsessions on his sleeve encourages new thought about originality itself. Out with "it's all been done" and in with "look at all that's been done, and all that we can still do with it!""--

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
126

Buy this book

Edition Availability
Cover of: Understanding Jonathan Lethem
Understanding Jonathan Lethem
2015, University of South Carolina Press
in English

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Published in
Columbia
Series
Understanding contemporary American literature

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
813/.54
Library of Congress
PS3562.E8544 Z75 2015, PS3562.E8544 Z75 201, PS3562.E8544Z75 2015

The Physical Object

Pagination
pages cm.
Number of pages
126

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL30393306M
ISBN 13
9781611175127, 9781611175134
LCCN
2015010048
OCLC/WorldCat
893455814

Community Reviews (0)

Feedback?
No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

This work does not appear on any lists.

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
April 16, 2023 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
September 18, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
September 21, 2020 Created by MARC Bot import new book