The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation

"Inflation affects literary occupations and preoccupations quite as much as it does financial scrip." Starting from this premise, Charles Newman ventures forth on an irreverent, wide-ranging discussion of the "Post-Modern" attitude in fiction, culture, and sensibility. Newman questions the "revolutionary" claims of avant-garde novelists and literary theorists, but he is no less critical of the arguments of neoconservatives, neorealists, and advocates of "moral fiction." Newman argues that neither of these groups has confronted the unprecedented break with tradition entailed by an economics and culture of inflation. A combination of cultural critique, literary criticism, economic forecast, and historical jeremiad, The Post-Modern Aura is finally a positive statement, celebrating "The Act of Fiction" and suggesting how the forces which have been devaluing it might be overcome.

Literature & Fiction

Newman, Charles

History & Criticism

Northwestern University Press

In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions of 20th century political and literary thought. More than twenty years in the making, this may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s. The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary—and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, or Péter Nádas’s Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s.

In Partial Disgrace

United States

Dalkey Archive Press

The long-awaited magnum opus of one of the United States's "best, and best-neglected" authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace chronicles the troubled history of a small Central European nation through the memoirs of its most flamboyant exile: a writer, triple-agent, and bon vivant whose childhood in the fairy-tale house of his dog-trainer father and pagan goddess mother are themselves "translated and edited" by a retired Allied spy. Splitting the difference between the philosophical fictions of Thomas Mann and the fever-dream playfulness of Nabokov, and featuring a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to put most contemporary novels to shame, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the '60s and '70s.

In Partial Disgrace (American Literature)

Food webs hold a central place in ecology. They describe which organisms feed on which others in natural habitats. This book describes recently discovered empirical regularities in real food webs: it proposes a novel theory unifying many of these regularities, as well as extensive empirical data. After a general introduction, reviewing the empirical and theoretical discoveries about food webs, the second portion of the book shows that community food webs obey several striking phenomenological regularities. Some of these unify, regardless of habitat. Others differentiate, showing that habitat significantly influences structure. The third portion of the book presents a theoretical analysis of some of the unifying empirical regularities. The fourth portion of the book presents 13 community food webs. Collected from scattered sources and carefully edited, they are the empirical basis for the results in the volume. The largest available set of data on community food webs provides a valuable foundation for future studies of community food webs. The book is intended for graduate students, teachers and researchers primarily in ecology. The theoretical portions of the book provide materials useful to teachers of applied combinatorics, in particular, random graphs. Researchers in random graphs will find here unsolved mathematical problems.

Community Food Webs: Data and Theory (Biomathematics)

Science & Math

COHEN, JOEL

Briand, Frédéric

Biological Sciences

Springer

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