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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > General
This book is not designed to define the sacred. It is, rather, a
bringing together of case histories (a rich, varied collection from
medieval, early modern and nineteenth-century contexts in England
and Wales) that goes beyond familiar paradigms to explore the
dynamic, protean interaction, in different times and places,
between sacred space and text. Essentially an interdisciplinary
enterprise, it focuses a range of historical and critical
methodologies on that complex process of transformation and
transmission whereby spiritual intuitions, experiences and
teachings are made palpable 'in art and architecture, poetry and
prayer, in histories, scriptures and liturgies, even landscapes. So
the sacred, variously constructed and inscribed, makes itself felt
'on the pulse'; is a presence, a voice even now not stilled.
Early modern anger is informed by fundamental paradoxes: qualified
as a sin since the Middle Ages, it was still attributed a valuable
function in the service of restoring social order; at the same
time, the fight against one's own anger was perceived as
exceedingly difficult. And while it was seen as essential for the
defence of an individual's social position, it was at the same time
considered a self-destructive force. The contributions in this
volume converge in the aim of mapping out the discursive networks
in which anger featured and how they all generated their own
version, assessment, and semantics of anger. These discourses
include philosophy and theology, poetry, medicine, law, political
theory, and art. Contributors: David M. Barbee, Maria Berbara,
Tamas Demeter, Jan-Frans van Dijkhuizen, Betul Dilmac, Karl
Enenkel, Tilman Haug, Michael Krewet, Johannes F. Lehmann, John
Nassichuk, Jan Papy, Christian Peters, Bernd Roling, Paolo
Santangelo, Barbara Sasse Tateo, Anita Traninger, Jakob Willis, and
Zeynep Yelce.
The Reformation is often alluded to as Gutenberg's child. Could it
then be said that the Counter-Reformation was his step-child? The
close relationship between the Reformation, the printing press and
books has received extensive, historiographical attention, which is
clearly justified; however, the links between books and the
Catholic world have often been limited to a tale of censorship and
repression. The current volume looks beyond this, with a series of
papers that aim to shed new light on the complex relationships
between Catholicism and books during the early modern period,
before and after the religious schism, with special focus on trade,
common reads and the mechanisms used to control readership in
different territories, together with the similarities between the
Catholic and the Protestant worlds. Contributors include: Stijn Van
Rossem, Rafael M. Perez Garcia, Pedro J. Rueda Ramirez, Idalia
Garcia Aguilar, Bianca Lindorfer, Natalia Maillard Alvarez, and
Adrien Delmas.
Ruth Kluger (1931 - 2020) passed away on October 5, 2020 in the
U.S. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt, she survived
Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in
Germany for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York.
She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English
literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the
University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American
universities. She has numerous scholarly publications to her
credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary
history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an
essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she
was a guest professor in Goettingen and Vienna. Her memoir,
entitled weiter leben (1992), which she translated and revised in
an English parallel-text as Still Alive, was a major bestseller and
highly regarded autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor.
It was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It
has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right.
Ruth Kluger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other
distinctions. The present volume, The Legacy of Ruth Kluger and the
End of the Auschwitz Century, aims to honor her memory by assessing
critically her writings and career. Taking her biography and
writings as points of departure, the volume includes contributions
in fields and from perspectives which her writings helped to bring
into focus acutely. In the table of contents are listed the
following contributions: Sander L. Gilman, "Poetry and Naming in
Ruth Kluger's Works and Life"; Heinrich Detering, "'Spannung':
Remarks on a Stylistic Principle in Ruth Kluger's Writing"; Stephan
Braese, "Speaking with Germans. Ruth Kluger and the 'Restitution of
Speech between Germans and Jews'"; Irene Heidelberger-Leonard,
"Writing Auschwitz: Jean Amery, Imre Kertesz, and Ruth Kluger";
Ulrike Offenberg, "Ruth Kluger and the Jewish Tradition on Women
Saying Kaddish; Mark H. Gelber, "Ruth Kluger, Judaism, and Zionism:
An American Perspective"; Monica Tempian, "Children's Voices in the
Poetry of the Shoah"; Daniel Reynolds, "Ruth Kluger and the Problem
of Holocaust Tourism"; Vera Schwarcz, "A China Angle on Memory and
Ghosts in the Poetry of Ruth Kluger."
In Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun adopts a new approach
to examining the early Chinese women's periodical press. Rather
than seeing this new print and publishing genre as a gendered site
coded as either "feminine" or "masculine," this book approaches it
as a mixed-gender public space where both men and women were
intellectually active and involved in dynamic interactions to
determine the contours of their discursive encounters. Drawing upon
a variety of novel textual modes such as polemical essays,
historical biography, public speech, and expository essays, this
book opens a window onto men's and women's gender-specific
approaches to a series of prominent topics central to the Chinese
woman question in the early twentieth century.
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.
Decolonization and White Africans examines how African
decolonization affected white Africans in eight countries -
Algeria, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe), Angola, Mozambique, South West Africa (Namibia), and
South Africa - and discusses their varied responses to
decolonization, including resistance, acquiescence, negotiations,
and migration. It also examines the range of mechanisms used by the
global community to compel white Africans into submitting to
decolonization through such means as official pressure, diplomatic
negotiations, global activism, sanctions, and warfare. Until now,
books about African decolonization usually approached the topic
either from the perspective of the colonial powers or from an
anti-colonial black African perspective. As a result, white African
perspectives have been marginalized, downplayed, or presented
reductively. Decolonization and White Africans adds white African
perspectives to the story, thereby broadening our understanding of
the decolonization phenomenon.
By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video,
experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates
works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research
recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often
overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and
hermeneutics help understand 'appropriation' in art in terms of a
dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian
Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from
literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on
'appropriation' that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural
memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the
collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect
on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual
close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William
Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Pawel Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They
appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo,
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and
Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in
cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation
studies, and art history.
The anthology of essays & some one-liners laid out in this book
are nothing more than the author's perceptions on how he looks at
things or wants people to believe what his out-look is though that
may not always be true. They should not be construed of some-one
trying to sermonize or push through with his opinion of things.
They are not an expert's word though someone like an expert does
not really exist at all. At times the author's ideas may confuse
the reader to begin with but as they say great confusion leads to
great awakening. The motive of the author is not to confuse the
reader but to arise doubt only to be enlightened profusely. The
essays though ostentatiously named "Golden Words" may not seem that
golden to some, rather they may look at it as if old wine has been
packaged in a new bottle which is what basically they are. The
essays range from abstract philosophical issues to some
contemporary real life issues & even though they are some
body's perceptions, they are open to debate. The author claims to
have taken the inspiration for these pieces from his life
experiences at the same time laying no claim to living life the way
these pieces are propounding. Hope they make for a good reading.
The author can be reached at [email protected]
This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental
issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative
discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and
ecocriticism are brought together.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and
globalization as depicted in an array of international works of
fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at
two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda's
"The Heart of Redness "(South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's
"Petals of Blood" (Kenya), that deal with the potentially
devastating effects of development, particularly through
deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European
varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" (South
Africa), Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" (India and Canada), and Joy
Williams's "The Quick and the Dead" (United States) to explore the
use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals.
The third chapter deals with India's water crisis via Arundhati
Roy's activism and her novel, "The God of Small Things." Finally,
Wright looks at three novels--Flora Nwapa's "Efuru" (Nigeria), Keri
Hulme's "The Bone People" (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona's
"Mother to Mother" (South Africa)--that depict women's
relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout "Wilderness into Civilized Shapes," Wright
rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as
environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between
animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential
perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western
commodification and resource-based imperialism.
In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white-checked diary
for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family
went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two
years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that
has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history.
But Anne Frank's diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of
art as it is a historical record. Through close reading, she
marvels at the teenage Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice,
at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into
characters.
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the
extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world.
Along the way, Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was
not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler but a
writer of prodigious talent and ambition.
"In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue
that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal
flaw: the inability to think "an after" to globalization. After
establishing seven theses (on education, morality, history, future,
capitalism, nation, and common sense) that challenge the false
promises that sustain this time-limit, After Globalization examines
four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul
Krugman and Naomi Klein) and how their work is dulled by these
promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the
globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises
and who understand the world very differently than the way it is
popularly represented. After Globalization argues that a true
capacity to think an after to globalization is the very beginning
of politics today"--
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