Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel

by L. Caton

Overview

Using romantic theories, Caton analyzes America's contemporary novel. Organized through the two sections of "Theory" and "Practice," Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics begins with a study of aesthetic form only to have it reveal the content of politics and history. This presentation immediately offers a unified platform for an interchange between multiple cultural and aesthetic positions. Romantic theory provides for an integrated examination of diversity, one that metaphorically fosters a solid, inclusive, and democratic legitimacy for intercultural communication. This politically astute cosmopolitan appreciation will generate an intriguing "cross-over" audience: from ethnic studies to American studies and from literary studies to romantic studies, this book will interest a range of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349540129
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/15/2007
Edition description:	1st ed. 2008
Pages:	265
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lou Freitas Caton is Assistant Professor of English atWestfield State College.

Table of Contents

Samuel Coleridge and European Romanticism: An Interpretive Strategy for America’s Literary Canon * Dialectical and Transcultural Contexts: Otherness, Subjectivity, and Coleridge’s Vision * Historical and Ideological Contexts: The Burden of F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance * Multicultural and Postcolonial Contexts: Philosophy’s Self and Other * Poststructual Contexts: Paul de Man’s Uncertainty Anxiety and the Allegory of Division * A South Western Laguna Native American Perspective: Western Eyes and Indian Visions in Leslie Marmon Silkos’s Ceremony * A Korean American Perspective: Tolerating Truth and Knowledge in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker * A South Los Angeles Mexican American Perspective: Empty Hope and Full Sensuality in Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A * An Antigua Caribbean American Perspective: The Quest for Empowerment in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John * A White European American Perspective: Imagining Family and Community in Don DeLillo’s White Noise * Feeling Romantic, Thinking Postmodern: Last Words on Form in a Multicultural Age

Editorial Reviews

"Compelling and sometimes startling." - American Literary History

"In our globalizing era, when migrant communities, refugees, and exiles increase ethnic diversity, the concept of a distinctively American literary identity is critically weakened; authors can no longer be said to constitute a national canon. Caton responds to this challenge to American literary studies with a bold polemic that revives the universalist themes of Romantic philosophy. A formidable and highly original contribution to ethnocritical scholarship. Caton explains, with cogent argument and canny insight, how Romantic theory can overcome the impasse between critics advocating multicultural diversity and those who wish to preserve the sense of a unifying literary aesthetics." - Paul Maltby, West Chester University, Author of Dissident Postmodernists

"Caton promotes a 'multiculturalism of exchange and communication' that seems to promise an end to the 'either/or' debate between Formalism's aesthetics or New Historicism's social investigations. Caton's template follows the romantic writings of Samuel Coleridge and Immanuel Kant which propose a 'first cause' approach to human knowledge-the acknowledgement of a 'shared, universal acceptance of 'not knowing,'' and a true acquiescence to the 'finite limitations of human knowledge.' Caton's promise of a 'dialectic occur[ing] in and through different cultures' by way of their shared awareness in the human state of 'not knowing' opens up the 'possibility for both an ideal commonality and a respectful recognition of another's alterity.'" - Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside

From the Publisher