Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: the dazzling international bestseller from the author of The Virgin Suicides . a rollicking family epic like no other!
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780747561620
Category: Fiction
Page: 546
View: 853
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: the dazzling international bestseller from the author of The Virgin Suicides . a rollicking family epic like no other!The novel charts the events leading up to this revelation, including the unusual history of Cal’s Greek family, and explores his struggles to fit in as either a man or a woman.
Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
ISBN: 9782808017909
Category: Study Aids
Page: 21
View: 656
Unlock the more straightforward side of Middlesex with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which tells the story of Calliope, or Callie, who is born and raised as a girl in an American family of Greek descent. However, as a teenager Callie is revealed to be intersex following a car accident, and decides to begin living as a man named Cal. The novel charts the events leading up to this revelation, including the unusual history of Cal’s Greek family, and explores his struggles to fit in as either a man or a woman. Although the novel is not strictly autobiographical, many elements of it reflect Eugenides’ own life, and the author garnered praise for his sensitive depiction of the immigrant and intersex experiences. The novel was both a popular and critical success, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. Find out everything you need to know about Middlesex in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its ...
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9781408825693
Category: Fiction
Page: 545
View: 597
'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974 ...My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license ... records my first name simply as Cal.' So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Point, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.INTRODUCTION The novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Price in 2002. If you endeavour to sum up the story in one sentence, you could say it is an epic tale of an hermaphrodite of Greek origin, of his genealogy and of ...
Author: Kathrin Ehlen
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783640942374
Category:
Page: 53
View: 807
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, language: English, abstract: The novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Price in 2002. If you endeavour to sum up the story in one sentence, you could say it is an epic tale of an hermaphrodite of Greek origin, of his genealogy and of the first forty years of his life in the USA and in Berlin, told by himself. The question is: Why did Eugenides choose the title "Middlesex" for his novel? and: How can the motive "Middlesex" be traced in the text? In trying to answer this, I used different ways of appraoch. First I strived to get some explanations from the outside, using dictionaries, the internet, and also referring to "Middlemarch" by George Eliot, because the title bears a resemblance to "Middlesex". Next I found some interviews on the internet in which Eugenides speaks about his book. Then I turned to the novel itself. It is obvious that I looked into the chapter "Middlesex" first. Then I tried to find out whether there was any connection between the hermaphrodite status of Cal and the title. The last step I took was to analyze the relations of the four couples who make up Cal's entourage in order to learn, if there was anything that linked them to the title. A short evaluation of the results of this quest shall be given in the conclusion of this paper.Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, language: English, abstract: The novel Middlesex by ...
Author: Kathrin Ehlen
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783640942459
Category: Literary Collections
Page: 22
View: 139
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, language: English, abstract: The novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Price in 2002. If you endeavour to sum up the story in one sentence, you could say it is an epic tale of an hermaphrodite of Greek origin, of his genealogy and of the first forty years of his life in the USA and in Berlin, told by himself. The question is: Why did Eugenides choose the title “Middlesex” for his novel? and: How can the motive “Middlesex” be traced in the text? In trying to answer this, I used different ways of appraoch. First I strived to get some explanations from the outside, using dictionaries, the internet, and also referring to “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, because the title bears a resemblance to “Middlesex”. Next I found some interviews on the internet in which Eugenides speaks about his book. Then I turned to the novel itself. It is obvious that I looked into the chapter “Middlesex” first. Then I tried to find out whether there was any connection between the hermaphrodite status of Cal and the title. The last step I took was to analyze the relations of the four couples who make up Cal’s entourage in order to learn, if there was anything that linked them to the title. A short evaluation of the results of this quest shall be given in the conclusion of this paper.Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,5, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), 36 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Instead of investigating the most obvious ...
Author: Anika Götje
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783638714716
Category:
Page: 97
View: 983
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,5, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), 36 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Instead of investigating the most obvious aspect of the novel, namely gender identity, this work focuses on the ethnic novel Middlesex with its particular interpretation of ethnicity and ethnic identity. These assumed marginal aspects are of unique importance when it comes to their relationship with the main theme of the book - gender identity. The concept of Greekness in the novel is not just a side effect or accidentally connected to the hermaphrodite story: the connection is clear as the hermaphrodite myth goes back to the Greeks. What Americanness means to the protagonist and the individual characters in the novel; whether they would see themselves as hyphenated Americans or not are questions tangled in this paper. Middlesex is a novel that overflows with different notions of ethnic representation, ethnic identity, ethnic struggle and self-fashioning. Identity is nothing fixed but always changing as it is subject to choice and self-invention. Eugenides depicts an overarching concept of the new man/woman in the sense that the hermaphrodite Zora's statement "'Because we're what's next.'" (552) is the central message.In interviews, Draesner points out that she did extensive research on intersex before writing the novel that she ... The audiobook was released in 2002, a Book-Club-in-a-Box companion to Middlesex was published in 2005 and US talk show ...
Author: Michaela Koch
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 9783839437056
Category: Social Science
Page: 290
View: 593
Life narratives and fiction that represent experiences of hermaphroditism and intersex are at the core of Michaela Koch's study. The analyzed texts from the 19th to the early 21st century are embedded within and contrasted with contemporary debates in medicine, psychology, or activism to reveal the processes of negotiation about the meaning of hermaphroditism and intersex. This cultural studies-informed work challenges both strictly essentialist and constructivist notions. It argues for a differentiated perspective on intersex and hermaphrodite experiences as historically contingent, fully embodied, and nevertheless discursive subject positions.21 At novel's close, Cal, the novel, and its readers remain poised on the doorstep of the house, Middlesex, with its door open to these familiar and unfamiliar, neoliberal circulations unsure of what is to come, unsure what direction ...
Author: Laura Shackelford
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472052387
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 275
View: 108
"Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction examines the ways contemporary American fiction develops digital cultures through the creative transposition of digital rhetorics and technological practices, incorporating devices such as the hyperlink, network, and recursive processing into print or in translating a classic print narrative into a digital hypertext fiction. These literary experiments with early digital cultures from the 1990s comparatively retrace and speculate on the digital's transformative influence on prior understandings of the human, of social lives, and of individuals' relations to material lifeworlds, exploring the consequences of the apparent plasticity of the boundaries of the human, particularly for women, subaltern subjects, and others already considered liminally human. As these texts query the digital technics entering into textual practices, subjectivity, spatial practices and social networks, lived space, nation, and economic circulation, they reconceive their own literary print narrative methods and material modes of circulation in order to elaborate on unnoticed potentialities and limits of digital technics, providing a crucial means to reorient digital cultures of the present"--In my paper I would like to try to find out if the similarities between the novels are a mere coincidence or maybe they ... Jeffrey Eugenides who is himself a descendant of a Greek immigrant describes in his novel “Middlesex” Greek ...
Author: Alina Polyak
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783638655293
Category:
Page: 52
View: 427
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Contemporary american novels, 16 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Comparison of three novels: : "The Time of our Singing" by Richard Powers, "Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri and "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides. The authors, sharing the common cultural space, share also similar experiences and face similar problems. Coming from quite different backgrounds they might have more in common than it could seem at a first glance.