Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form

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Description

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites-supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums-that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background fo

Reviews

"Winner of the 2016 Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction, Media Ecology Association"
"Site Reading tells the genuinely exciting story not only of postwar American fiction but also of a young scholar coming to claim a voice of his own."---Jennifer L. Fleissner, Critical Inquiry
"With its antecedents placed firmly in the ecocritical tradition, Alworth's book proposes that our awareness of the world can be considerably enhanced if we set aside binarisms and appreciate the beauties of the moment, and thereby approach phenomena on their own terms free of prejudice. That process of self-discovery might be difficult but nonetheless worth pursuing."---Laurence Raw, Journal of American Culture
"Alworth seeks to revive the field of literary sociology in a new key and for a new era. By treating postwar US novels as sites rather than as aesthetic objects, he frames their representations of place and setting as networks of social engagement and interaction. . . . Ingenious."---Michael Davidson, Novel

Author Bio

David J. Alworth is assistant professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard University.