I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars's latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world. When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chene. His sister Marylene has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist's model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Eliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.

This book brings together interdisciplinary scholars from history, theology, folklore, ethnology and meteorology to examine how David Cranz's Historie von Groenland (1765) resonated in various disciplines, periods and countries. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the reach of the book beyond its initial purpose as a record of missionary work, and into secular and political fields beyond Greenland and Germany. The chapters also reveal how the book contributed to broader discussions and conceptualizations of Greenland as part of the Atlantic world. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume allows for a layered reading of Cranz's book that demonstrates how different meanings could be drawn from the book in different contexts and how the book resonated throughout time and space. It also makes the broader argument that the construction of the Artic in the eighteenth century broadened our understanding of the Atlantic.

"A woman is more than just her exterior. The lingerie is also important." "The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span." "Art serves to rinse out our eyes." Uniquely combining humor with profundity and venom with compassion, Dicta and Contradicta is a bonanza of scandalous wit from Vienna's answer to Oscar Wilde. From the decadent turn of the century to the Third Reich, the acerbic satirist Karl Kraus was one of the most famous-and feared-intellectuals in Europe. Through the polemical and satirical magazine Die Fackel (The torch), which he founded in 1899, Kraus launched wicked but unrelentingly witty attacks on literary and media corruption, sexual repression and militarism, and the social hypocrisy of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Kraus's barbed aphorisms were an essential part of his running commentary on Viennese culture. These miniature gems, as sharp as diamonds, demonstrate Kraus's highly cultivated wit and his unerring eye for human weakness, flaccidity, and hypocrisy. Kraus shies away from nothing; the salient issues of the day are lined up side by side, as before a firing squad, with such perennial concerns as sexuality, religion, politics, art, war, and literature. By turns antagonistic, pacifistic, realistic, and maddeningly misogynistic, Kraus's aphorisms provide the sting that precedes healing. For Dicta and Contradicta, originally published in 1909 (with the title Spruche und Widerspruche) and revised in 1923, Kraus selected nearly 1,000 of the scathing aphorisms that had appeared in Die Fackel. In this new translation, Jonathan McVity masterfully renders Kraus's multilayered meanings, preserving the clever wordplay of the German in readable colloquial English. He also provides an introductory essay on Kraus's life and milieu and annotations that clarify many of Kraus's literary and sociohistorical allusions.

This book addresses different forms of discourse by analysing the emergence of power dynamics in communication and their importance in shaping the production and reception of messages. The chapters focus on specific cognitive aspects, such as the verbal expression of reasoning or emotions, as well as on linguistic and discursive processes. The interaction between reasoning, feelings, and emotions is described in relation to several fields of discourse where power dynamics may emerge and includes, among others, political, media, and academic discourse. This volume aims to include representative instances of this heterogeneity and is deeply rooted, both theoretically and methodologically, in the acknowledgment that the investigation of the complex interaction between reason and emotion in discursive productions cannot be exempt from the adoption of a multi-disciplinary perspective. By providing a critical reflection of their methodological decisions, and describing the implications of their research projects, the contributors offer insights which are relevant for students, researchers, and practitioners operating in the broad field of discourse studies.

Between 1761 and 1780 the Contes moraux of the self-proclaimed inventor of the moral tale, Jean-Francois Marmontel, were republished more times than Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise. They were an instant success throughout Europe and imitators quickly capitalised on readers' enthusiasm for the moral tale. In fact Marmontel was merely exploiting a growing tendency towards using short fiction in the periodicals of the time and his achievements can only be understood in a wider context. The moral tale came into being in the 1750s in response to a new cultural climate in both France and Germany which focussed on morality and virtue as a means to regenerate society. Authors soon came to see the potential for social comment in their depiction of contemporary society and the moral tale became a form of popular expression of enlightened ideas about injustice, the position of women in society, poverty, the relationship between the growing middle classes and the aristocracy, between citizens and the state. This move towards greater political comment took place against the backdrop of literary developments, as writers exploited the vogue for sensibility and became more aware not only of the specific nature of short fiction, but also of the demands of a growing reading public who had changing tastes and expectations. Realism in terms of plot, structure, characterisation and narration in the moral tale all undergo transformation as the century progresses, primarily because many of the leading literary figures of the period wrote moral tales, from Diderot to Wieland, Louis-Sebastien Mercier to Sophie von La Roche. But the moral tale does not just reflect the development of literary, social and political issues, it also evolves in its own right. By the 1780s the German moral tale had become distinct from the French model, and increasingly its focus on frameworks and other narrative devices prepared the way for the Novelle.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

This collection of eighty-nine letters written by Parisian and other European map publishers to the London map firm of Jefferys & Faden represents one of the few business archives left to us from the eighteenth-century map trade. Thomas Jefferys (c.1720-1771) and William Faden (1749-1836) both enjoyed the title of 'Geographer to the King of England' and were well respected by other geographers of the period. Like many of his contemporaries in the map trade, Jefferys had difficulty making a financial success of his map business; his successor Faden, by contrast, was able to expand the firm into a flourishing business which continued well into the nineteenth century. Their correspondents included important European map and print publishers such as Covens & Mortier in Amsterdam and Lattre, Julien and Desnos in Paris, as well as the French geographers d'Anville and Robert de Vaugondy. Other persons mentioned in the correspondence provide links between Faden's London firm and the Depot de la Marine, the French Navy's cartographic department, an important connection in the tumultuous decade of 1773-1783 when England found itself at war with France in North America, in the English Channel, and in India. The letters also provide a detailed view of the costs of doing business - prices, discount, payment, schedules and methods, shipping costs and arrangements- in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and further increase our knowledge of the economics of map production and sales in this period. The letters are now in the Manuscript Division of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. In this edition they have been transcribed and fully annotated and are preceded by an introduction placing the correspondence in the context of the print and book trade and the role of cartography in eighteenth-century politics.

This articles collected in this volume explore aspects of Andre Morellet's productive and representative career in the republic of letters before, during, and after the French Revolution. The topics covered include: his reliance on the principle of order in his writings in many formats and on many subjects; his reflections on culture, society, and politics during his five months among the English in 1772; his conception of economics as a science based on the methods and objectives endorsed by the philosophes; his use of letters to editors to persuade the literate public to embrace the cause of reason and reform; his public responses to Chateaubriand's published criticisms of the Enlightenment; and his compilation and modification of his own literary and philosophical works late in life. The collection also includes additions and corrections to the recently published edition of Morellet's letters to friends, relatives, colleagues, and patrons.

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo-segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post-civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo-segregation narrative tradition one that developed in tandem with neo-slave narratives by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present. Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner's representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin's notorious account of crossing the color line from white to black in his 1961 work Black Like Me.

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Quebecois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.

Emotions, creativity, aesthetics, artistic behavior, divergent thoughts, and curiosity are both fundamental to the human experience and instrumental in the development of human-centered artificial intelligence systems that can relate, communicate, and understand human motivations, desires, and needs. In this book the editors put forward two core propositions: creative artistic behavior is one of the key challenges of artificial intelligence research, and computer-assisted creativity and human-centered artificial intelligence systems are the driving forces for research in this area. The invited chapters examine computational creativity and more specifically systems that exhibit artistic behavior or can improve humans' creative and artistic abilities. The authors synthesize and reflect on current trends, identify core challenges and opportunities, and present novel contributions and applications in domains such as the visual arts, music, 3D environments, and games. The book will be valuable for researchers, creatives, and others engaged with the relationship between artificial intelligence and the arts.