Narralogues
Truth in Fiction
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These "narralogues" combine story and argument, moving from Socratic dialogue to outright narrative, and ultimately making the case that fiction is a medium for telling the truth.
Description
In Narralogues, Ronald Sukenick continues his important and original contributions to the cutting edge of contemporary fiction. Here he proposes fiction as a medium for telling the truth, while recognizing that the implicit contradiction in these terms is more than cheap paradox. The "narralogues," simultaneously narrative and argument, story and rhetorical pleading, exemplify and argue for fiction as persuasion in a sequence that moves from Socratic dialogue to outright narrative, using throughout all the traditional techniques of fiction, from comedy and irony to suspense and the erotic.
One of the founders of the Fiction Collective, Ronald Sukenick is Professor of English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including his most recent novel, Mosaic Man.
Reviews
"…the cutting edge of prose in America … In both Narralogues and Mosaic Man, Sukenick gives us work that is fresh, new and vital. Through his own brilliant and visionary work, he demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that fiction is dead. Rather, it is alive and thriving." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Under its engaging dialogic guise, this book rethinks critically numerous aspects of contemporary culture, from its main terminological and aesthetic debates, to its intellectual and discursive practices. This book makes an important contribution to the understanding and critique of our cultural 'Zeitgeist,' defining new approaches and responses to it. Sukenick's 'narralogues' are provocative, unconventional, yet easy to read." — Marcel Cornis-Pope, author of Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism
"For over thirty years Ronald Sukenick has been on the leading edge of developments within and about contemporary fiction. Indeed, for most of this period he has been the leading edge himself, crafting a literary personality that puts forward his behavior on the page as an example of the argument his art makes. Readers have come to appreciate him in the tradition of Emerson and Whitman, not to mention Henry Miller, and Narralogues is a fitting climax to this development." — Jerome Klinkowitz, author of Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers since the Sixties