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Joseph McElroy | |
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| Born | August 21, 1930 New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, professor |
| Education | Poly Prep Williams College Columbia University (PhD) |
| Literary movement | Postmodern |
| Notable works | Lookout Cartridge , Women and Men |
| Website | |
| josephmcelroy | |
Joseph Prince McElroy [1] (born August 21, 1930) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. [2] He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as Women and Men .
McElroy was born on August 21, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Brooklyn Heights. He graduated from Poly Prep Country Day School in 1947 and was given an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 from the school's Board of Governors. [3] He graduated from Williams College in 1951. The following year, McElroy earned a master's degree from Columbia University. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952 to 1954, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. [4]
In 1961, McElroy married Joan Leftwich, of London, in London. She is the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews; her father, Joseph Leftwich, was a translator and anthologizer of Yiddish poetry. [5] The McElroys' only child, Hanna, was born in 1967. McElroy assisted with the birth. [4]
McElroy taught English and Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire from 1956 to 1962 [4] and at Queens College, City University of New York from 1964 to 1995, when he retired. McElroy's first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, was published in 1966. McElroy said A Smuggler's Bible "is like everybody's first novel, trying to put too much between covers. ...[I]t's a young book, and young people still seem to like it." [6]
McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, due to the encyclopedic quality of his novels, especially Women and Men (1987). His short fiction was first published in literary journals. Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; [7] Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books. [8]
In 1980, McElroy and his class at Queens College interviewed Norman Mailer. [9] [10] He interviewed Harry Mathews in 2002 for the Village Voice . [11] McElroy wrote about his fiction and influences in his essay "Neural Neighborhoods". [12]
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world, and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is the fourth novel by American writer John Barth. It is a metafictional comic novel in which the universe is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of both the hero's journey and the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah. The book was a surprise bestseller for the previously obscure Barth, and in the 1960s had a cult status. It marks Barth's leap into American postmodern fabulism.
Matthew Hillsman Taylor, Jr., known professionally as Peter Taylor, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Born and raised in Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri, he wrote frequently about the urban South in his stories and novels.
Peter Rock is an American novelist born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. His fiction often focuses on characters on the fringe of society — outsiders, wanderers — and allows his readers to see into the minds of these otherwise invisible characters.
Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist.
Ancient History: A Paraphase is Joseph McElroy's third novel, published in 1971. It presents itself as a hastily written essay/memoir/confession. The character Dom is sometimes described as a fictionalized Norman Mailer.
Women and Men is Joseph McElroy's sixth novel. Published in 1987, it is 1192 pages long. Somewhat notably, because of its size, the uncorrected proof was issued in two volumes.
Lookout Cartridge is Joseph McElroy's fourth novel, published by Knopf in 1974.
Plus is Joseph McElroy's fifth novel. Set in some unspecified future, it tells the story of Imp Plus, a disembodied brain controlling IMP, the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform, in earth orbit. The novel consists of Imp Plus's thoughts as he tries to comprehend his limited existence, while struggling with language, limited memories, and communicating with Ground Control. The plot is driven by Imp Plus's recall of fragments of his past and of language, his improving comprehension of his present, all while his medical condition gradually deteriorates.
A Smuggler's Bible is Joseph McElroy's first novel. David Brooke—who talks of himself in a split-personality manner—narrates a framing tale that consists of him "smuggling" his essence into eight autobiographical manuscripts, although their connection with Brooke is not always clear. Brooke seems to deteriorate, while his fictions become more real.
The Letter Left to Me is Joseph McElroy's seventh novel. A letter from father to son is delivered to the son shortly after the father's death. The letter receives wider and wider circulation, and its continued effect on the son's life is described.
Cannonball is Joseph McElroy's ninth novel. Set in Southern California and Iraq, it tells the story of Zach, a young and naive military photographer who stumbles upon a secret network of underground water pipes in Iraq used to smuggle what are apparently scrolls containing the original prosperity Gospel, an interview with Jesus peddling free market doctrine.
The Lost Scrapbook (1995) is a novel by the American writer Evan Dara. It won the 12th Annual FC2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann.
Systems novel is a literary genre named by Tom LeClair in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, and explored further in LeClair's 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction LeClair used systems theory to critique novels by authors including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Ursula Le Guin. Citing Fritjof Capra's description of systems theory as a "new vision of reality" LeClair invoked ideas from thinkers such as James Lovelock, Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hofstadter to analyse how the novels in question depicted processes and relationships within social, cultural, economic and political systems. LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect."
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