SBT/A 19 features selected papers from the Borderless Beckett / Beckett sans frontieres Symposium held in Tokyo at Waseda University in 2006. The essays penned by eminent and young scholars from around the world examine the many ways Beckett's art crosses borders: coupling reality and dream, life and death, as in Japanese Noh drama, or transgressing distinctions between limits and limitlessness; humans, animals, virtual bodies, and stones; French and English; words and silence; and the received frameworks of philosophy and aesthetics. The highlight of the volume is the contribution by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, the special guest of the Symposium. His article entitled "Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett" introduces a variety of novel approaches to Beckett, ranging from a comparative analysis of his work and Melville's Moby Dick to a biographical observation concerning Beckett's application for a lectureship at a South African university. Other highlights include innovative essays by the plenary speakers and panelists - Enoch Brater, Mary Bryden, Bruno Clement, Steven Connor, S. E. Gontarski, Evelyne Grossman, and Angela Moorjani - and an illuminating section on Beckett's television dramas. The Borderless Beckett volume renews our awareness of the admirable quality and wide range of approaches that characterize Beckett studies.

The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients and, in doing so, forged their social and professional identities. The chapters in this book explore rituals for success at court, the social classes who made use of such rituals, and depictions of technical specialists on seal impressions and in later Greco-Roman iconography. Several essays focus on Egalkura: rituals of entering the court, meant to invoke a favorable impression from the sovereign. These include detailed surveys and comparative studies of the genre and its roots in the emergent astrological paradigm of the late first millennium BC. The different media and modalities of interaction between technical specialists and their clients are also a central theme explored in detailed studies of the sickbed scene in the iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the transmission of specialized pharmaceutical knowledge from the Mesopotamian to the Greco-Roman world. Offering an encyclopedic survey of ritual clients attested in the cuneiform textual record, this volume outlines both the Mesopotamian and the Greco-Roman social contexts in which these rituals were used. It will be of interest to students of the history of medicine, as well as to students and scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Netanel Anor, Siam Bhayro, Strahil V. Panayotov, Maddalena Rumor, Marvin Schreiber, JoAnn Scurlock, and Ulrike Steinert.

This intimate collection of essays addressed to the common reader pays tribute to one of the twentieth century s major poets. Encompassing every phase of A. R. Ammons s oeuvre, from his beginnings in the 1950s to his late masterpieces, Garbage and Glare, this book of essays explores the personal side of a poet often still seen as forbiddingly abstract and intellectual. Included are essays by Helen Vendler, Alice Fulton, Harold Bloom, and John Ashbery, among others."

While a number of recent works have linked magical realism to postcolonial trauma, this book expands the trauma-theory-based analysis of magical realism. Borrowing from the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, the study adapts his concept of chronotope to that of shock chronotope in order to describe unstable time-spaces marked by extreme events. Besides trauma theory, contemporary theories of representation formulated by Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj i ek, among others, corroborate specific literary analyses of magical realist novels by Caribbean, North American, and European authors. The study discusses a series of concepts, such as "spectacle" and "hyperreality," in order to create an analogy between the hyperreal, a spectacle without origins, and magical realism, a representation of events without a history, or a recreation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. Magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction of events that were "missed" in the first place because of their traumatic nature. While the magical realist hyperreal might not explain the unspeakable event, if only to avoid the risk of an amoral rationalization, it makes the ineffable be vicariously felt and re-experienced. This study establishes a somewhat unorthodox nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood both as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant), and proposes the concept of "traumatic imagination" as an analytical tool to be applied to literary texts struggling to represent the unpresentable and to reconstruct extreme events whose forgetting has proven just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination defines the empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. Corroborated by elements of trauma theory, postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and contemporary theories of representation, the work posits that the traumatic imagination is an essential part of the creative process that turns traumatic memories into narratives. Magical realism lends traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because the magical realist writing mode and the traumatized subject share the same ontological ground: being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Over more than half a century now, magical realism has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. This book examines novels by traumatized and vicariously traumatized authors who make extensive use of fantastic/magical elements in order to represent slavery, postcolonialism, the Holocaust, and war. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction is an important book for magical realism- and trauma theory-based critical collections.

A Companion to Soviet Children's Literature and Film offers a comprehensive and innovative analysis of Soviet literary and cinematic production for children. Its contributors contextualize and reevaluate Soviet children's books, films, and animation and explore their contemporary re-appropriation by the Russian government, cultural practitioners, and educators. Celebrating the centennial of Soviet children's literature and film, the Companion reviews the rich and dramatic history of the canon. It also provides an insight into the close ties between Soviet children's culture and Avant-Garde aesthetics, investigates early pedagogical experiments of the Soviet state, documents the importance of translation in children's literature of the 1920-80s, and traces the evolution of heroic, fantastic, historical, and absurdist Soviet narratives for children.

The tropes of fear, horror and terror have come to play a dominant role the analysis of contemporary social life. The predominance of fear, as the frame through which we narrativize experience, can be perceived readily echoing across various fields from theoretical research, to the mass media, to the quotidian. Despite the commonly held view that fear is a primitive and universal affect, its definition, potential value, and perceived effects vary wildly in each instance. From literary theory to psychoanalysis to politics to philosophy, this collection of research attempts to both flesh-out these tropes and to complexify them. Individually, the essays reflect a diversity of approaches to the constellation: fear, horror and terror. Taken as a whole, they produce the ground for an analysis of the dominance of fear.

"The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries "re-enacts the canonical issues current in the '90s from a new perspective, triggered by the changes that occurred worldwide in understanding the concepts and the status of theory, in the legacy of literary studies within the field of humanities, and in cultural production and reception. During the last decade discussions of globalization mostly took into account its impact on the status of academic disciplines such as comparative literature or cultural studies, or the reconfiguration of national literary fields. These debates do not dispense with canonicity altogether but make it more urgent and necessary. Canons seen as sets of norms or regulatory practices are central to the formation of disciplines, to the recognition and transmission of values, even to the articulation of discourses on identity on various levels. The three sections of the volume deal with three interrelated subjects: theories and applicable contexts of the canon ("Canons and Contexts"); recent transformations in the area of literary studies in response to the task of canon formation ("Reshaping Literary Studies"); and the challenges brought to the understanding of the canon(s) by the current process of re-defining literary and cultural boundaries ("Transgressing Literary and Cultural Boundaries"). This volume will appeal to researchers, teachers, and students of cultural studies, comparative literature, and literary theory.

This collected volume focuses on the history of Western translation of premodern Chinese texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Divided into three parts, nine chapters feature close readings of translated texts, micro-studies of how three translations came into being, and broad-based surveys that inquire into the causes of historical change. Among the specific questions addressed are: What stylistic, generic, and discursive permutations were undergone by Chinese texts as they crossed linguistic borders? Who were the main agents in this centuries-long effort to transmit Chinese culture to the West? How did readership considerations affect the form that particular translations take? More generally, the contributors are concerned with the relevance of current research paradigms, like those of World Literature, transcultural reception, and the rewriting of translation history.

This book focuses on a relatively neglected aspect of African literature. Tijan M. Sallah is a Gambian, and arguably the best known of the second generation of writers from that country. To date, he has published ten books: five collections of poetry, a volume of short stories, two edited anthology of poetry (the second one with Tanure Ojaide, the Nigerian poet), a literary biography of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist (coauthored with Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, currently Nigeria's Minister of Finance), and an ethnographic book on Wolof, the dominant ethnic group of the Senegambian people. Tijan M. Sallah won the Francis Hutchins award for literature in Berea College. Lenrie Peters, arguably the best-known Gambian author, and mentor to most members of the country's second-generation of writers including Sallah himself, Ebou Dibba, Nana Grey-Johnson, Sheriff Sarr and Gabriel Roberts, described Sallah as the most prolific, the most consistent, and the most original Gambian writer of his generation. This opinion is widely shared; for example, in reviewing Sallah's When Africa was a Young Woman for World Literature Today, Charles Larson, the American scholar of African literature, opined that "there is little question about Sallah's talents." Sallah writes using simple, accessible language but also demonstrates his adventurous side in his works (e.g., "Harrow Poems" in which he experiments with rhymes and quatrains). Gambian literature has suffered some neglect in African literary criticism. The reason for this lies in the erroneous belief that the country has produced little that is worthy of serious scholarly attention. To be sure, there already exists a fairly substantial body of critical works on the writings of Tijan Sallah; and many of them, again, are by well-known names in the field of literary criticism. Some of these scholars are Charles Larson, Tanure Ojaide, Emmanuel Obiechina, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Gareth Griffiths, Samuel Garren, Victoria Arana, Stewart Brown, Odun Balogun, Peter Nazareth, Ali Malhani, and Siga Fatima Jagne. As insightful as these writings are however, it is not often easy to access them, scattered as they are in disparate journals, edited books, and compendiums of essays. This book fills the gap by as the first book-length critical study both on Tijan M. Sallah and Gambian literature. The first part of the book delves into the background of the literature with a discussion of works by leading Gambian authors, including Lenrie Peters, Ebou Dibba and then Tijan Sallah. The core of the book then turns the focus on the works of Tijan Sallah. These chapters explore his growth and development as a writer and provide critical analyses into his major works. While some of the chapters take the works together in general thematic and stylistic discussion, others focus on specifically selected works, analyzing and studying them closely. At least two of the chapters adopt a specifically linguistic approach; another two locate the works within the trend of ecopoetry, an emerging genre of nature poetry; one explores Sallah's poems of convalescence, pointing out the therapeutic nature of the writings; and yet another employs the theory of phenomenology in carrying out an investigation of Sallah's poetry in comparison with the works of other major African poets. The final chapter is a detailed interview conducted with Sallah. It sheds light on his life, his Gambian background, and how this affects and influences his writings. Contemporary Literature of Africa: Tijan M. Sallah and Literary Works of The Gambia is important for all those interested in Gambian and African literatures, postcolonial writings and world literatures in general.

- How do actors prepare a script of a Shakespeare play for performance? - Where do directors begin? - What do Shakespeare's plays offer a designer or choreographer? - How do the cast and creative team work together in rehearsals? With Shakespeare in Action, Jaq Bessell presents thirty interviews with theatre practitioners from some of the larger producing theatres in the UK and the US, exploring the various processes which bring Shakespeare's plays to the stage. Actors, designers, directors and choreographers, including Eve Best, Bunny Christie, Gregory Doran and Lindsay Kemp, share their collective wisdom and experience, and reveal how training and practice informs productions of Shakespeare plays. These first-hand accounts provide students of Shakespeare in performance and practitioners with a critical toolkit with which to study the plays in performance.

Time holds an enduring fascination for humans. Time and Trace investigates the human experience and awareness of time and time's impact on a wide range of cultural, psychological, and artistic phenomena, from reproductive politics and temporal logic to music and theater, from law to sustainability, from memory to the Vikings. The volume presents selected essays from the 15th triennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Time from the arts (literature, music, theater), history, law, philosophy, science (psychology, biology), and mathematics. Taken together, they pursue the trace of time into the past and future, tracing temporal processes and exploring the traces left by time in individual experience as well as culture and society. Contributors are: Michael Crawford, Orit Hilewicz, Rosemary Huisman, John S. Kafka, Erica W. Magnus, Arkadiusz Misztal, Carlos Montemayor, Stephanie Nelson, Peter Ohrstrom, Jo Alyson Parker, Thomas Ploug, Helen Sills, Lasse C. A. Sonne, Raji C. Steineck, and Frederick Turner.

Women Telling Nations highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, we examine how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, we deal with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth we analyse how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country's borders. Women Telling Nations underlines the quantitative importance of the circulation of these women's writings and demonstrates the extent as well as the impact of the international cross-fertilisation of nations, especially by and for women: focusing on routes rather than roots.

The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world. Watch our talk with the editors Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek here: https://youtu.be/RBMwXah_Om8

Offers a comprehensive overview of the most important authors, movements, genres, and historical turning points in Latino literature. More than 60 million Latinos currently live in the United States. Yet contributions from writers who trace their heritage to the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Mexico have and continue to be overlooked by critics and general audiences alike. Latino Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students gathers the best from these authors and presents them to readers in an informed and accessible way. Intended to be a useful resource for students, this volume introduces the key figures and genres central to Latino literature. Entries are written by prominent and emerging scholars and are comprehensive in their coverage of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Different critical approaches inform and interpret the myriad complexities of Latino literary production over the last several hundred years. Finally, detailed historical and cultural accounts of Latino diasporas also enrich readers' understandings of the writings that have and continue to be influenced by changes in cultural geography, providing readers with the information they need to appreciate a body of work that will continue to flourish in and alongside Latino communities. Provides an overview of Latino literature and its myriad contributions to American cultures Showcases the diversity in modern Latino literary styles and narrative themes Includes writing by authors from several countries and distinct cultural traditions and explains how these have been integrated into the canon of Latino literature Shines a spotlight on emerging, lesser known, and understudied Latino scholars and writers

The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

a) Provides basic concepts of Natural Language Processing for getting started from scratch. b) Introduces advanced concepts for scaling, deep learning and real-world issues seen in the industry. c) Provides applications of Natural Language Processing over a diverse set of 15 industry verticals. d) Shares practical implementation including Python code, tools and techniques for a variety of Natural Language Processing applications and industrial products for a hands-on experience. e) Gives readers a sense of all there is to build successful Natural Language Processing projects: the concepts, applications, opportunities and hands-on material.