Douglas CouplandThis book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century - amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty - Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future. |
Contents
Coupland and narrative | 38 |
junk culture | 73 |
Coupland and space | 107 |
JPod and Coupland in the future | 162 |
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Common terms and phrases
Accelerated Culture aesthetic AFAP Alan Bilton alternative Andy Andy Palmer apocalypse apparently become belief Canadian celebrity chapter Coma commercial consumer culture consumerism consumption Coupland's characters Coupland's fiction Coupland's narratives Coupland's novels Coupland's writing critique Dag's Dan's Dead denarration deployed desert Douglas Coupland Douglas Rushkoff dream Drummond echoes Eleanor Rigby encounter epiphany Essays Ethan everyday example experience explores Families are Psychotic film Flamingo future GIAC Girlfriend given parenthetically global Hey Nostradamus human identity images imagined John Johnson journey JPod landscape literary lives London memory Microserfs Miss Wyoming modern motif narrator Nicholas Blincoe nostalgia novelist number of Coupland's Polaroids political pop culture possibility postmodern reality reflects religion religious rubbish secular sensation sense Shampoo Planet Similarly simulated Souvenir of Canada space specific spiritual story storytelling subsequent references suburbs suggests Susan television tradition trash Tyler Ulrich University Press Vancouver vision wilderness Zygmunt Bauman