Background
Alan Singer was born on October 18, 1948, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States. He is the son of Bernard and Rhea (Green) Singer.
(Tells the story of a remote prairie town and its bizarre ...)
Tells the story of a remote prairie town and its bizarre inhabitants, including Moertle, who drives steers to the slaughterhouse, a doctor obsessed with death, and Dinah, a burlesque star.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0932511120/?tag=2022091-20
1988
(In The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in ...)
In The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics, Alan Singer posits "narrative aesthetics" as a crucial link between post Enlightenment philosophical skepticism about human subjectivity and literary-theoretical skepticism about the autonomy of the text or artwork. Observing a vital complementarity between the narrative and the aesthetic (two realms often alienated from each other), Singer argues for the relevance of narrative logic to the critique of post-Cartesian subjectivity. Reciprocally, he demonstrates the relevance of rational norms of human agency to the study of narrative art. On one hand, Singer wants to salvage the critique of the subject from the metaphysical abstraction of idealist philosophies. On the other hand, he wants to save literary narrative from the ahistoricism and apoliticism to which it is often consigned. Each chapter juxtaposes a set of philosophical arguments about the dynamics of human agency with close readings of narrative literature. Rather than sketch a historical overview of Western narrative, Singer focuses on formal innovations that give a strong theoretical warrant for linking narrative to the realm of human action. Singer examines aesthetic theories in the works of Aristotle, Baumgarten, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Sartre, Adorno, and Goodman as they converge with the goals of social theories espoused by Schutz, Lukacs, Althusser, Foucault, and Giddens. The philosophical arguments are then mapped onto a literary tradition through examination of texts by Thomas Nashe, Laurence Sterne, Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, William Gaddis, and John Ashbery. Alan Singer asserts that "narrative aesthetics" must be used as a critical tool in ultimately resolving the current conflict between postmodern aestheticists, such as Lyotard, and anti-aesthetic communitarian ethicists, such as Habermas, who posit the realms of the aesthetic and the political as mutually exclusive. The Subject as Action will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relation of narrative art to the spectrum of literary and philosophical theories that seek to define the human subject in modern culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472104713/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study t...)
It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that as it has moved toward greater interdisciplinarity it has grown sceptical of the aesthetic. This anthology works to reassert the continuing relevance of the aesthetic and to reintegrate it into the widening repertoire of contemporary literary critical practices.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631208690/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly mu...)
A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly murder of a young woman on Blackman's Heath, an ancient execution site in the Irish bogs. A pair of archaeologists, the obese and decadent Kraft Dundeed and his furious protégé, Roscoe Taste, each contest the other's self-justifying account of the crime while professing passionate love for the victim. Two silences frame their quarrel: Cinna McDermond, the brutalized subject of her lovers' confessions, and a nameless Investigator, whose invisible presence embodies the reader. Against this background of subterranean savagery, the competing monologues struggle to unearth a violence that neither can fully remember nor forget. Dirtmouth is the third in a triad of novels by Alan Singer which investigate the entanglements of memory, self, and duplicitous will. As in Singer's Memory Wax and The Charnel Imp, Dirtmouth's luxuriant prose enacts its narrators' labyrinthine rationalizations, entangling action in grotesque imagery and dark insinuation, much as Blackman's Heath engulfs its Bronze Age victims. Singer's writing recalls the stylistic virtuosity of John Hawkes and Djuna Barnes and the obsessive ruminations of Beckett's and Poe's narrators. Drawing readers into an interrogation room as vast and constricted as the mind, Dirtmouth explores the archaeology of passion, exhuming crimes that mirror our own. A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly murder of a young woman on Blackman's Heath, an ancient execution site in the Irish bogs. A pair of archaeologists, the obese and decadent Kraft Dundeed and his furious protégé, Roscoe Taste, each contest the other's self-justifying account of the crime while professing passionate love for the victim. Two silences frame their quarrel: Cinna McDermond, the brutalized subject of her lovers' confessions, and a nameless Investigator, whose invisible presence embodies the reader. Against this background of subterranean savagery, the competing monologues struggle to unearth a violence that neither can fully remember nor forget. Dirtmouth is the third in a triad of novels by Alan Singer which investigate the entanglements of memory, self, and duplicitous will. As in Singer's Memory Wax and The Charnel Imp, Dirtmouth's luxuriant prose enacts its narrators' labyrinthine rationalizations, entangling action in grotesque imagery and dark insinuation, much as Blackman's Heath engulfs its Bronze Age victims. Singer's writing recalls the stylistic virtuosity of John Hawkes and Djuna Barnes and the obsessive ruminations of Beckett's and Poe's narrators. Drawing readers into an interrogation room as vast and constricted as the mind, Dirtmouth explores the archaeology of passion, exhuming crimes that mirror our own.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573661171/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue...)
Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities. The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity. In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity. Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities. The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity. In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573661678/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remai...)
Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remain steeped in disagreement and controversy. In The Self-Deceiving Muse, Alan Singer proposes a radical revision of our commonplace understanding of self-deception. Singer asserts that self-deception, far from being irrational, is critical to our capacity to be acute "noticers" of our experience. The book demonstrates how self-deception can be both a resource for rational activity generally and, more specifically, a prompt to aesthetic innovation. It thereby provides new insights into the ways in which our imaginative powers bear on art and life. The implications—philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical—of such a proposition indicate the broadly interdisciplinary thrust of this work, which incorporates "readings" of novels, paintings, films, and video art.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0271048468/?tag=2022091-20
2013
Alan Singer was born on October 18, 1948, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States. He is the son of Bernard and Rhea (Green) Singer.
Singer received his education at the University of California at Los Angeles. He graduated from it in 1971 and then obtained his doctorate from the University of Washington in 1980.
Author and academician Alan Singer has had a steady career at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In addition to being a professor in that institution’s English department, he has also served as director of the graduate creative writing program there since 1980. Singer’s own writing efforts are divided between fiction and nonfiction, and he still continues writing his books.
(In The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in ...)
1994(Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue...)
2012(Tells the story of a remote prairie town and its bizarre ...)
1988(It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study t...)
2001(A mystery in two voices, Dirtmouth recounts the grisly mu...)
2004(Current philosophical discussions of self-deception remai...)
2013(Greek tragedy meets Descartes in this powerful philosophi...)
1996(Book by Singer, Alan.)
1984Singer married Nora Pomerantz on June 22, 1985. The couple has 2 children: Alexandra and Anna.