This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers. Olsen's approach is eclectic, bringing to each text or textual complex those forces he feels most interestingly stir up its sediment--be they biographical, structural, psychoanalytic, philosophical, reader-response, or otherwise. Finally he argues that postmodern fantasy is the literary equivalent of deconstructionism, for it interrogates all we take for granted about language and experience, giving these no more than shifting and provisional status. It may be seen as a mode of radical skepticism that believes only in the possiblilty of total intelligibility.

Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy)

Literature & Fiction

Olsen, Lance

History & Criticism

Praeger

Tells the story of the relationship between budding writer Bink, and art student Clare, through life, death, and beyond

Live from Earth

United States

Ballantine Books

Series Editor: Robert Lecker, McGill University.Written in an easy-to-read, accessible style by teachers with years of classroom experience, MASTERWORK STUDIES are guides to the literary works most frequently studied in high school. Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature. Each volume: illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text; uses clear, conversational language; is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages; includes a chronology of the authors life and era; provides an overview of the historical context; offers a summary of its critical reception; and lists primary and secondary sources and index.

Lolita (Masterwork Studies Series)

Twayne Publishers

Lolita: A Janus Text (Twayne's Masterwork Studies)

Twayne Pub

Much has been made over the potentially dark and dangerous side of postmodernism - its antihumanism, its attack on basic assumptions about language and experience, its denial of selfhood. For Lance Olsen, however, there are points of convergence between postmodernism and the comic vision.
Both the comic and the postmodern attempt to subvert all centers of authority - including their own. Both ultimately deride univocal visions. Through radical incongruity of form and vision, both seek to short-circuit the dominant culture's repressive impulses.
After a lively introductory chapter that maps the confluence of postmodernism and the comic vision, Olsen focuses on seven British and American fiction writers, using their works to examine various aspects of the rise and fall of postmodern humor in our culture.

Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision (Humor in Life and Letters)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Wayne State University Press

Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor—this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including Sewing Shut My Eyes.

10: 01

Literary

Chiasmus Press

HIDEOUS BEAUTIES is a collection of a dozen outrageous fictions, each based on a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an equally outrageous artist (Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, et alia), that explores the amphibious edge where language and image splice. 
Death is a village of mermaids, suburbia a hunchbacked dwarf at the door who just won't go away, identity a self that can't stop cleaving, millennial sex a radical form of digestion. 
In other words, Lance Olsen is at it again, and with a vengeance, inviting us into his absurd, unsettling, tender, and formally disruptive fever-dream worlds so that we might wake up, and wake up changed.

Hideous Beauties

Olsen, Andi

Contemporary

Eraserhead Pr

Head in Flames is an astonishing collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic / political / existential space. The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent’s brother’s great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo’s murderer, outraged by the filmmaker’s collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women. The aggregate: a restless, haunting exploration of art’s purpose, religion’s increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and passion, the complexities of foreignness and assimilation, and the limits of tolerance.

Head in Flames

Questions crucial to the development and outcome of WW2 are a blind spot in the conventional wisdom on, and histories of, WW2: Why did Japan invade China and what difference did it make to WW2? Japan intended to invade Siberia (USSR) at the time of Operation Barbarossa but attacked Pearl Harbor instead - what made Japan change its target? What saved Russia (USSR) from having to fight - and being defeated in - a 2-front war against Germany and Japan at the same time in WW2? Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor forced the US to join the war against Japan and Germany in WW2 - what made Japan attack the US (Pearl Harbor) instead of the USSR (Siberia)? This saved the USSR from having to fight a 2-front war. And it forced the US into joining China, the British and the USSR in the war against Japan and Germany. This decided the final alignment of belligerents in WW2 which ultimately decided the result of WW2. "Taierzhuang 1938 - Stalingrad 1942" provides an insight into the blind spot in histories of World War 2 - the Sino-Japanese War. Lance Olsen addresses the elephant in the room in histories of WW2, focusing on the Battle of Taierzhuang. Japan contrived the Mukden Incident to invade China in September 1931 starting the war in Asia. Germany contrived the Gleiwitz incident to invade Poland in September 1939 starting the war in Europe. In a desperate bid to break the stalemate in China, Japan extended the Sino-Japanese War into the Greater East Asia War by attacking British and US territories in East Asia and the Pacific, including Pearl Harbor, in December 1941 - merging the wars in Asia and Europe into a worldwide war of Axis versus Allies. This book puts it all into perspective. In WW2, the basis of British and US strategy was Europe First or Germany First, but the elementary factor of the victory of the Allied Powers against the Axis Powers was - attrition - first deliberately applied at Taierzhuang. The major portion of Japan's military might was consumed in China and similarly later the major portion of Germany's military might was consumed in Russia. The Nanjing Massacre in China foreshadowed the Holocaust in Europe. Japan had its "Kill All", "Burn All" and "Loot All" (三光作戦) Policy in its Holy War (Seisen) in China, Germany had its "Einsatzgruppen" (death squads) in its Operation Barbarossa in Russia. Japan was waging Holy War by divine commandment in invading China - hence, the use of terror (for example: the Rape of Nanjing) and suicide bombing (Kamikaze) attacks. Again, this book puts it all into perspective. However, Stalingrad is often pointed out as the turning point of World War 2, but Taierzhuang 1938 - the model for Stalingrad 1942 - is in the blind spot of WW2 histories. This book provides a detailed insight into the Battle of Taierzhuang: how a hodgepodge of troops inferior in almost every aspect - crushed elite divisions of crack troops superior in logistics, training, equipment and weaponry. It points out the startling similarity in the modus operandi for victory between it and the Battle of Stalingrad 4½ years later.

Taierzhuang 1938 - Stalingrad 1942

History

Military

Clear Mind Publishing

Written during Olsen's five-month stay at the American Academy in Berlin, [[ there. ]] is part critifictional meditation and part trash diary exploring what happens at the confluence of curiosity, travel, and innovative writing practices. A collage of observations, facts, quotations, recollections, and theoretical reflections, it touches on a wide range of authors, genres, and places, from Beckett and Ben Marcus to David Bowie and Wayne Koestenbaum, film and architecture to avant-garde music and hypermedia, the Venezuelan jungle and Bhutanese mountains to New Jersey mall culture and the restlessness known as Berlin. [[ there. ]] is an always-already bracketed performance about how, by inhabiting unstable spaces, we continually unlearn and therefore relearn what thought, experience, and imagination feel like.

There

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Anti-Oedipus Press

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Books by Olsen, Lance