False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American ModernismFrom Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. David Ball’s magisterial study addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning, and authority that run counter to well-rehearsed claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature. The rhetoric of failure was used at various times to engage artistic ambition, the arrival of advanced capitalism, and a rapidly changing culture, not to mention sheer exhaustion. False Starts locates a lively narrative running through American literature that consequently queries assumptions about the development of modernism in the United States. |
Contents
| 3 | |
Modern Sentiments in Susan Warner and Herman Melville | 27 |
The Culture of Antisemitism in Henry Adams and Edith Wharton | 67 |
Signifying Documents in William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison | 113 |
Other editions - View all
False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism David M. Ball Limited preview - 2014 |
False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism David M. Ball No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
Absalom Adams’s aesthetic African American ambivalence American literary American literature American modernism American Renaissance antisemitism anxiety argue Arran’s artistic authors authorship Bon’s Cambridge canon century chapter characters Chris Ware claims comics contemporary critical degeneration discourse documents economic Edith Wharton Ellen essay failed figure Fitzgerald’s graphic narrative Hawthorne Hawthorne’s Henry Adams Herman Melville House of Mirth Hundred False Starts insistence intellectual Invisible language letter Lily Lily’s literary history literary modernism Man’s mass culture Melville’s modernism’s modernist Mungold narrator narrator’s nineteenth-century notion paratext Pierre Pierre’s popular culture Pot-Boiler production race racial radical Ralph Ellison readers remains resistance rhetoric of failure role Rosedale Rosedale’s scenes Scott Fitzgerald Selden’s sentimental sentimental literature Shepson short fiction signify social Stanwell Stanwell’s story story’s stove polish success Susan Warner Sutpen textual theory throughout the novel tion twentieth-century University Press Ware’s Wide World William Faulkner women writing York