Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk ExplosionEverywhere you turn today, someone (or something) is talking to you?the television, the radio, cell phones, your computer. If you think some of the novels and stories you read are talking to you too, you're not alone, and you're not mistaken. In this innovative, multidisciplinary work, Irene Kacandes reads contemporary fiction as a form of conversation and as part of the larger conversation that is modern culture. ø Within a framework of talk as interaction, Kacandes considers texts that can be classified as "statements," that is, texts that wholly or in part ask for their readers to react? to talk back?to them in certain ways. The works she addresses?from writers as varied as Harriet O. Wilson, Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, G_nter Grass, John Barth, Julio Cort¾zar, and Italo Calvino?conduct their interactions in certain modes to accomplish different sorts of cultural work: storytelling, testimony, apostrophe, and interactivity. By focusing on texts within these groupings, Kacandes is able to relate the different modes of talk fiction to extraliterary cultural developments in our oral age?and to show how such interactions, however contrary to the dominant twentieth-century view of literature as art for art's sake, help to keep literature alive and speaking to us. |
Contents
Talk as Interaction | 1 |
Talk as Sustenance | 33 |
Talk as Witnessing | 89 |
Talk as Performance | 141 |
Talk as Collaboration | 197 |
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Common terms and phrases
actual readers analysis apostrophe audience Butor Calvino's chapter characters child choice circuit Cocoa consider context conversation conversation analysis Cortázar's cowitness create cultural deixis describe discourse Ekávi example experience feel first-person Frado gender George Gertrud Kolmar Goffman graffiti Günter Grass hear hearers Hopscotch hypertext identify Interactive Story interpret Jewish Mother Kolmar's language Laub lexia listening literate literature Lukís Mahlke Mahlke's Mama Day Martha Michel Butor mode narrative Narratology narrator night a traveler Nína Nína's novel orientation to exchange passage Phantom Tollbooth Pilenz pronoun prose fiction Quintilian quoted radio refer relationship reply response role scene second person secondary orality sense society someone speak speaker specific speech statement storytelling suggest talk fiction talk radio talk shows television tell testimony textual tion translation trauma turn Ursula verbal Vikélas's Weimar Republic Willow Springs Wilson winter's night witnessing words writing