
- 342 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Not a Big Deal asks how texts might work to unsettle readers at a moment when unwelcome information is rejected as fake news or rebutted with alternative facts. When readers already recognize "defamiliarizing texts" as a category, how might texts still work toward the goals of defamiliarization? When readers refuse to grapple with texts that might shock them or disrupt their extant views about politics, race, or even narrative itself, how can texts elicit real engagement? This study draws from philosophy, narratology, social neuroscience, critical theory, and numerous other disciplines to read texts ranging from novels and short stories to graphic novels, films, and fiction broadcasted and podcasted—all of which enact curious strategies of disruption while insisting that they do no such thing. Following a model traceable to Toni Morrison's criticism and short fiction, texts by Kyle Baker, Scott Brown, Percival Everett, Daniel Handler, David Robert Mitchell, Jordan Peele, and Colson Whitehead suggest new strategies for unsettling the category-based perceptions behind what Everett calls "the insidious colonialist reader's eye which infects America." Not a Big Deal examines problems in our perception of the world and of texts and insists we do the same.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part 1
- 1. Seeing and Settled Seeing
- 2. Not Unfamiliar
- 3. Obligations to Unsettle Sight
- 4. Not Showing and Not Seeing Race
- Part 2
- 5. Case Studies in Unsettling Narration
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- About Paul Ardoin
- Series List