Reading Chuck Palahniuk American Monsters and Literary Mayhem [Hardcover]

Reading Chuck Palahniukexamines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Clubthrough Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin, Introduction Part I. Genres, Structures, and Modes1. Sidney L. Sondergard, Chuck Palahniuk and the Semiotics of Personal Doom: The Novelist as Escape Artist 2. Andrew Ng, Destruction and the Discourse of Deformity: Invisible Monsters and the Ethics of Atrocity 3. Cynthia Kuhn, I Am Marlas Monstrous Wound: Fight Club and The Gothic 4.Christina Angel, This Theatre of Mass Destruction: Medieval Morality and Jacobean Convention in Palahniuks Novels 5. Andrew Slade, On Mutilation: The Sublime Body of Chuck Palahniuks Fiction 6. Sherry R. Truffin, This is what passes for free will: Chuck Palahniuks Postmodern Gothic 7. Joshua Parker, Where youre supposed to be: Apostrophe and Apocalypse in Chuck Palahniuk Part II. Politics, Cultures, and Philosophies8. Jesse Kavadlo, With Us or Against Us: Chuck Palahniuks 9/11 9. David Simmons and Nicola Allen, Reading Chuck Palahniuks Survivor and Haunted as a Critique of The Culture Industry 10. Lance Rubin, The Politics of Boredom: Punk, the Situationist International and Chuck Palahniuks Rant 11. Alex E. Blazer, The Phony Martyrdom of Saint Me: Choke, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Problem of Postmodern Narcissistic Nihilism 12. Peter Mathews, ThlÓL