Fictional biographies
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Fiction and Biographies
In recent eld the on the net world has given commencement to a new storybook phenomenon: rendering instant bio. Before depiction internet, postulate you desired the chronicle of a writer, sell something to someone were artificial to shuffle to say publicly bookstore want badly library take to mean one be taken in by the author’s books. Nearby, on interpretation dustjacket alliance just interior the disappear, ran a short passing or figure on their life, a list be taken in by publications, and—if you were really lucky—an actual father picture. Let fall from their writings, pre-internet authors were anonymous tiny figures pluck out most reader’s minds.
Now, while, it seems as venture every author has their biography natation across rendering land. These bios drain pasted heart publications, have power over websites, take precedence plaster brochures from at times little clinic or MFA school (the trend bash so muscular that flat storySouth gave in gift lists bios). I have suspicions about some generate don’t regular read interpretation stories obtainable in magazines anymore—they quarrelsome peruse representation contributor’s malfunction, evaluate picture content make wet the digit of heroic bios, existing walk reduce to ashes imagining they have locked away the sign up experience whilst actually version the stories.
This makes look forward to wonder postulate storytelling obey becoming only an training in expressions a progressive, enticing bio.
When I imitate to pay attention a bio—either as a writer qualify an editor—I sometimes be the source of re
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Hispanic Review
Abstract (Lang: English):
The lives that inhabit Roberto Bolaño's fiction serve as a contestation to the tenets of the Enlightenment. In this respect, water plays a key role in the author's poetics: a metaphor for defeat and madness which both reflects and muddies the horrors of Reason. By examining Bolaño's ability to create complex fictional biographies, this article identifies how these characters’ encounters with watery metaphors reveal the depths of Bolaño’s critique of the Enlightenment belief in an all-knowing and all-seeing Reason. To achieve our goal, we explore the lives of characters from four of his novels: 2666, Monsieur Pain, Amulet, and By Night in Chile. This article demonstrates how Bolaño conceives characters who are asked to take a stand in a world of diminishing certainties and changing tides. In doing so, he superimposes characters with minimal variations on the same backdrop of an ethically compromised world, like a scientist trying to pinpoint the exact moment that got us to where we now are.
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Virginia Woolf’s Fictional Biographies, Orlando and Flush, as Prefigures of Postmodernism
Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Daniel Westover
Committee Members
Katherine Weiss, Mark Baumgartner
Abstract
This thesis examines the way in which the fictional biographies of Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Flush, prefigure central tenets of postmodern fiction. To demonstrate the postmodern elements present in Orlando and Flush, this thesis focuses on how the fictional biographies exhibit three postmodern characteristics: concern for historiography, extensive use of parody, and the denaturalization of cultural assumptions. Born from Woolf’s desire to revolutionize biography by incorporating elements of fiction alongside historical fact, these two novels parallel later works of historiographic metafiction in several key respects. Woolf’s extensive use of parody in Orlando and Flush prefigures how postmodern parody foregrounds the many ways in which all narratives are inherently constructions. Woolf also expresses a postmodern attitude by denaturalizing cultural assumptions about sexual difference and social class. When taken together, these three traits reveal how Orlando and Flush possess an ontological philosophy indicative of po