The Verificationist
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The Verificationist
''The Verificationist'' is a 2000 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The novel follows the conversations, fantasies, and the emotionally dissociated states of a group of psychoanalysts gathered during a nocturnal pancake supper. The narrator’s predilection for starting food fights and instigating mayhem leads Bernhardt, the most grotesque and overbearing from among his colleagues, to hold him around his midsection almost for the duration of the novel while the narrator (named 'Tom') hallucinates himself hovering over the crowd. The New York Times called it, "A Freudian free-for-all," and George Saunders hailed it as, "one of the most pleasure-giving, perverse, complicated, and addictive novels in the past 20 years," in his article for ''Salon'', which later became the book's introduction. Plot summary The Verificationist is set in early spring in an undisclosed New England city, at a pancake house where Tom—the novel's protagonist—has called together his fellow psy ...
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Donald Antrim
Donald Antrim (born 1958) is an American novelist. His first novel, '' Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World'', was published in 1993. In 1999, ''The New Yorker'' named him as among the 20 best writers under the age of 40. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Life Antrim was born in Sarasota, Florida. After graduating from Woodberry Forest School in 1977, Antrim graduated from Brown University, taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University, and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in Spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to ''The New Yorker'' and has written two other critically acclaimed novels, '' The Verificationist'' and '' The Hundred Brothers'', the latter of which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of '' The Afterlife'', a 2006 memoir about his ...
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United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ...
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Salon (website)
''Salon'' is an American politically progressive/liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events. Content and coverage ''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, including reviews and articles about books, films, and music; articles about "modern life", including friendships, human sexual behavior, and relationships; and reviews and articles about technology, with a particular focus on the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement. According to the senior contributing writer for the ''American Journalism Review'', Paul Farhi, ''Salon'' offers "provocative (if predictably liberal) political commentary and lots of sex." In 2008, ''Salon'' launched the interactive initiative ''Open Salon'', a social content site/blog network for its readers. Originally a curated site with some of its content being featured on ''Salon'', it fell into editorial neglect and was closed in March 2015. Responding to the question ...
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Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a ...
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Magical Realism
Magical is the adjective for magic. It may also refer to: * Magical (horse) (foaled 2015), Irish Thoroughbred racehorse * "Magical" (song), released in 1985 by John Parr * '' Magical: Disney's New Nighttime Spectacular of Magical Celebrations'', a 2009–2014 summer fireworks show at Disneyland * Magical Company , also known as Mahō, is a Japanese entertainment company. History Established in Kobe in 1983 to design and develop video games, the company was incorporated on May 29, 1985 as Home Data. During the 80's they developed and published various ...
, a Japanese entertainment company {{Disambig ...
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Hysterical Realism
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood (critic), James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism. History Wood introduced the term in an essay on Zadie Smith's ''White Teeth'', which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of ''The New Republic''. Wood uses the term pejoratively to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being." He decried the genre as an attempt to "turn fiction into social theory," and an attempt to tell readers "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." Wood points to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as the forefathers of the g ...
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Verificationism
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic ( tautologies). Verificationism thus rejects statements related to metaphysics, as well as fields such as theology, ethics and aesthetics, as "cognitively meaningless". Such statements may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behaviour, but not in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Verificationism was a central thesis of logical positivism, a movement in analytic philosophy that emerged in the 1920s by philosophers who sought to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. Origins Although verificationist principles of a general sort—grounding scientific theory in some verifiable experience—are found retrospectively eve ...
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American Magic Realism Novels
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * ...
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