Not a Big Deal: Narrating to Unsettle (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781496221957)

Not a Big Deal asks how texts might work to unsettle readers at a moment when unwelcome information is rejected as fake news or rebutted with alternative facts. When readers already recognize "defamiliarizing texts" as a category, how might texts still work toward the goals of defamiliarization? When readers refuse to grapple with texts that might shock them or disrupt their extant views about politics, race, or even narrative itself, how can texts elicit real engagement?

This study draws from philosophy, narratology, social neuroscience, critical theory, and numerous other disciplines to read texts ranging from novels and short stories to graphic novels, films, and fiction broadcasted and podcasted--all of which enact curious strategies of disruption while insisting that they do no such thing.

Following a model traceable to Toni Morrison's criticism and short fiction, texts by Kyle Baker, Scott Brown, Percival Everett, Daniel Handler, David Robert Mitchell, Jordan Peele, and Colson Whitehead suggest new strategies for unsettling the category-based perceptions behind what Everett calls "the insidious colonialist reader's eye which infects America." Not a Big Deal examines problems in our perception of the world and of texts and insists we do the same.

Author: Paul Ardoin
ISBN-10: 1496221958
ISBN-13: 9781496221957
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 08/01/2021
Pages: 318
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.88d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2022