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Inventions of Reading : Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination /
Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction...
| Call Number: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | Inglés |
| Published: |
Ithaca, NY :
Cornell University Press,
[2019]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Texto completo |
| Summary: | Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well. Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression-and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (296 pages) |
| ISBN: | 9781501743979 150174397X |