Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism: Contemporary Satire

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Description

What is the significance of writing in the wake of postmodernism The previous decade has seen a growing interest in criticism of postmodern ethics and aesthetics from theorists and writers. This book begins to answer what art form or critical methodology might take its place. Exploring the work of six contemporary novelists - Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Michel Houellebecq, Tama Janowitz and Chuck Palahniuk - Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism delivers a series of interventions into six key areas of contemporary debate: fear, nihilism, revolution, ethics, enjoyment and feminism. The book goes on to develop an innovative critical methodology which reinvigorates the ability of art and literature to engage in ideological critique. Rather than valorising separatism, plurality or indeterminacy, this approach delivers a critical framework which enacts a radical de-centering of the fundamental coordinates of contemporary society.

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Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism offers a rare combination of theoretical agility, and concentrated close reading of literary fiction. It is at once a fresh and exciting reading of six major contemporary novelists, and a reappraisal of the critical contexts within which they have been understood. In reading contemporary literature and theory together, this is an important intervention into ongoing debates about postmodernism and its afterlives.' -- Professor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex, UK

Author Bio

Graham Matthews is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK.