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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > General
This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global
mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments
throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities
engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary
representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia
Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and
cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors'
concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these
literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar,
taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as
'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and
communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie
Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia
Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics
operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood
relationship, relationship to place and identification with
community.
This book begins with a reflection on dichotomies in comparative
studies of Chinese and Western literature and aesthetics.
Critiquing an oppositional paradigm, Ming Dong Gu argues that
despite linguistic and cultural differences, the two traditions
share much common ground in critical theory, aesthetic thought,
metaphysical conception, and reasoning. Focusing on issues of
language, writing, and linguistics; metaphor, metonymy, and
poetics; mimesis and representation; and lyricism, expressionism,
creativity, and aesthetics, Gu demonstrates that though ways of
conception and modes of expression may differ, the two traditions
have cultivated similar aesthetic feelings and critical ideas
capable of fusing critical and aesthetic horizons. With a two-way
dialogue, this book covers a broad spectrum of critical discourses
and uncovers fascinating connections among a wide range of
thinkers, theorists, scholars, and aestheticians, thereby making a
significant contribution to bridging the aesthetic divide and
envisioning world theory and global aesthetics.
This book analyzes the impact of abusive regimes of power on
women's lives and on their self-expression through close readings
of life writing by women in communist Romania. In particular, it
examines the forms of agency and privacy available to women under
totalitarianism and the modes of relationships in which their lives
were embedded. The self-expression and self-reflexive processes
that are to be found in the body of Romanian women's
autobiographical writings this study presents create complex
private narratives that underpin the creative development of
inclusive memories of the past through shared responsibility and
shared agency. At the same time, however, the way these private,
personal narratives intertwined with collective and official
historical narratives exemplifies the multidimensional nature of
privacy as well as the radical redefinition of agency in this
period. This book argues for a broader understanding of the
narratives of the communist past, one that reflects the complexity
of individual and social interactions and allows a deep exploration
of the interconnected relations between memory, trauma, nostalgia,
agency, and privacy.
"A fine example of everyone's favourite genre: the genre-defying
book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and
finished with a jeweller's eye for detail" JOHN SELF, Guardian "As
we deal with the consequences, emotional and material, of a
pandemic, it is hard to imagine a better guide to the resources of
hope than Schalansky's deeply engaging inventory" MICHAEL CRONIN,
Irish Times "Weaving fiction, autobiography and history, this
sumptuous collection of texts offers meditations on the diverse
phenomena of decomposition and destruction" Financial Times "Books
of the Year" Following the conventions of a different genre, each
of the pieces in Schalansky's Inventory considers something that is
irretrievably lost to the world, from the paradisal island of
Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger or the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, to
Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty or a painting by
Caspar David Friedrich. As a child of the former East Germany, it's
not surprising that "loss" and its aftermath should haunt
Schalansky's writing, but what is extraordinary and exhilarating is
the engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, ironic humour,
stylistic elegance, intensity of feeling and grasp of life's
pitiless vitality, that combine to make this one of the most
original literary works of recent times. Translated from the German
by Jackie Smith
This book examines the representation of dictators and
dictatorships in African fiction. It examines how the texts clarify
the origins of postcolonial dictatorships and explore the shape of
the democratic-egalitarian alternatives. The first chapter explains
the 'neoliberal' period after the 1970s as an effective
'recolonization' of Africa by Western states and international
financial institutions. Dictatorship is theorised as a form of
concentrated economic and political power that facilitates Africa's
continued dependency in the context of world capitalism. The
deepest aspiration of anti-colonial revolution remains the
democratization of these authoritarian states inherited from the
colonial period. This book discusses four novels by Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie in order to reveal how their themes and forms dramatize
this unfinished struggle between dictatorship and radical
democracy.
This edited book presents a cross-disciplinary and international
conversation about the discursive nature of 'populist' politics.
Based on the idea that language and meaning making are central to
the political process, the authors present research originating
from disciplines such as sociology, political science, linguistics,
gender studies and education, giving credence to the variety and
context dependence of both populist discourse and its analysis.
Using a variety of different theoretical frames, the volume
examines international case studies from Europe, Africa, Asia and
the Americas, looking at different modes of populism as well as the
interaction of populism with other ideologies and belief systems.
The chapters draw on several disciplines, and will be of interest
to scholars working in linguistics, political studies, journalism,
rhetoric and discourse analysis.
How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of
China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances
of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the
English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this
century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout
this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual
frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and
its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their
foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American
fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of,
for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal
Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It
commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with
another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in
between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue
unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic
field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal
drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much
so that even millennial China creates an "off-yellow," darker-hued
Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.
This book gathers a selection of essays on the multifaceted aspects
of cyber culture in India, both online and offline. It presents an
in-depth analysis of cyberspace and its components, while also
exploring its lived reality. The respective contributions highlight
theoretical perspectives that address questions of relationality
regarding all aspects of cyber culture in India, from the physical
to the virtual. Bearing in mind India's vast cultural diversity,
which is shaped by different levels of political, social, and
economic development, the book offers nuanced studies that analyze
the complexities of cyberspace and digital culture in India. The
book appeals to all readers interested in technology, cultural
studies, online communication networks, feminism, virtual
diasporas, and sociology.
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Vertelkunde
Andre P. Brink
Paperback
R110
Discovery Miles 1 100
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