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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General
In Conscious Theatre Practice: Yoga, Meditation, and Performance,
Lou Prendergast charts a theatre research project in which the
notion of Self-realisation and related contemplative practices,
including Bikram Yoga and Vipassana meditation, are applied to
performance. Coining the term 'Conscious Theatre Practice',
Prendergast presents the scripts of three publicly presented
theatrical performances, examined under the 'three C's' research
model: Conscious Craft (writing, directing, performance; Conscious
Casting; Conscious Collaborations. The findings of this
autobiographical project fed into a working manifesto for socially
engaged theatre company, Black Star Projects. Along the way, the
research engages with methodological frameworks that include
practice-as-research, autoethnography, phenomenology and
psychophysical processes, as well immersive yoga and meditation
practice; while race, class and gender inequalities underpin the
themes of the productions.
Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan
Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O'Connor, Allan
Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel
Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn Willmott Lynda Barry
(b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice,
first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook's
Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including
numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring
the creative process. Barry's work is genre- and form-bending,
often using collage to create what she calls "word with drawing"
vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to
discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal,
everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry
examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record
and examine their own lives. The essays in Contagious Imagination:
The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the
pedagogy of Barry's work and its application academically and
practically. Examining Barry's career and work from the point of
view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry's
unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the
very form of the volume, exploring Barry's imaginative praxis and
offering readers their own. With a foreword by Frederick Luis
Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the
impact of Barry's work in and out of the classroom. Divided into
four sections-Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical
pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices
of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two
extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a
challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative,
synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry's own mixed
academic and creative investments-this book offers numerous inroads
into Barry's idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us
about ourselves.
This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The
description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to
a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a
novel. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of
possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work,
that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century
Paris, to the final disclosure that Pip returns home too late to
marry Biddy but is now free to pursue his lost love Estella.
Through careful examination of the plots of such classics as
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte's Villette,
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
Henry James's The Ambassadors, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and
others, Glatt argues for the central role of these "unwritten
plots" in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the
allegorical mode-in which characters are bound by fixed identities
to reach a predetermined conclusion-and turning away from classical
and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the
realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the
openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are
invested in these stories of David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet
or Lucy Snowe in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those
stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is
characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired
radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec
Connection, Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links and
parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa
imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to
articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that
marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue
both enabled and delimited connections between these writers,
restricting their potential with the language's own imperial
history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality
of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a
single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse
range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for
transformative independence.Importantly, the book expands the
"francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean
literatures to Quebecois literature, attending to their
interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec
Connection's analysis of transnational francophone solidarities
radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the
racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come
to be called the postcolonial world.
Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and
contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of
dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been
an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation.
Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized
in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the
nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the
development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican
popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth
century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution
(1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety
of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales,
themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national
nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the
following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling
functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship
of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study?
Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds)
have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories
defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand
some of the possible answers to these questions through five case
studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different
media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two
hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important
insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to
larger notions of how national identities are created through
narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political
implications.
Who has the right to decide how nature is used, and in what ways?
Recovering an overlooked thread of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century environmental thought, Erin Drew shows that
English writers of the period commonly believed that human beings
had only the "usufruct" of the earth the "right of temporary
possession, use, or enjoyment of the advantages of property
belonging to another, so far as may be had without causing damage
or prejudice." The belief that human beings had only temporary and
accountable possession of the world, which Drew labels the
""usufructuary ethos,"" had profound ethical implications for the
ways in which the English conceived of the ethics of power and use.
Drew's book traces the usufructuary ethos from the religious and
legal writings of the seventeenth century through
mid-eighteenth-century poems of colonial commerce, attending to the
particular political, economic, and environmental pressures that
shaped, transformed, and ultimately sidelined it. Although a study
of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary
debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in
the face of climate change and mass extinction.
As a socialist monarchist, Jewish Catholic, skeptical mystic, and
humorous sage, Roth has never fitted neatly into any one literary
or historical category. The essays in this volume, devoted to the
Austrian writer Joseph Roth on the occasion of the fiftieth
anniversary of his death in Paris in 1939, take a fresh look at his
apparent contradictions and demonstrate his contemporary relevance
as an acute analyst of the relationship between private life and
political change.
Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and
contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of
dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been
an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation.
Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized
in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the
nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the
development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican
popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth
century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution
(1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety
of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales,
themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national
nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the
following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling
functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship
of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study?
Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds)
have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories
defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand
some of the possible answers to these questions through five case
studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different
media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two
hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important
insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to
larger notions of how national identities are created through
narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political
implications.
Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry
Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne
Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria
Richard Eudora Welty's ingenious play with readers' expectations
made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story
artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In
her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar
genres and then delights readers with her transformations and
nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in
Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and
detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended
to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout
her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories'
secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions.
Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her
story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and
thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays
in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and
plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas
hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings
continue Welty's investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern
narratives of race-outlining these in chalk as outright crime
stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of
the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery
writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with
the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also
discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her
career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre's greatest
double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald's novels to
her inventiveness with the form, she is its "underground woman,"
its unexpected "sleeping beauty.
In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little
attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general
receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In
Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and
Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the
work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that
representations of the American South on stage are complicated by
difficulties of identity, genre, and region. Through analysis of
the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well
as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and
productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that
playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These
strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl
Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman,
and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead
audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and
southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.
In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture,
author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary
texts that range from Beyonce's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage
the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to
nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return
to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that
incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers
an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and
nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these
texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the
Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close
readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of
artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals
a call for what Jared Sexton calls ""the dream of Black
Studies""-abolition. Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings
that advance an emerging body of critical and creative work at the
nexus of Blackness, gender, and nature. Written in a clear,
approachable, and multilayered style that aims to be as poignant as
nature itself, the volume offers a unique combination of
theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader perspective that
suggests it will be a foundational text in a new critical turn
towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.
Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping-crucial to
understanding life in the southern United States-from Emancipation
to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of
literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates
how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to
resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery,
sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a
practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched
power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited
the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural
commodities. Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in the South's
social structure, and the region's political system, race
relations, and cultural practices were inextricably linked with
this peculiar form of tenant farming from the end of the Civil War
through the civil rights movement. Driven to the Field analyzes
literary portrayals of this system to explain how it defined the
culture of the South, revealing multiple genres of literature that
depicted sharecropping, such as cotton romances, agricultural
uplift novels, proletarian sharecropper fiction, and sharecropper
autobiographies-important works of American literature that have
never before been evaluated and discussed in their proper context.
It's been barely twenty years since Dave Eggers (b. 1970) burst
onto the American literary scene with the publication of his
memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In that time, he
has gone on to publish several books of fiction, a few more books
of nonfiction, a dozen books for children, and many
harder-to-classify works. In addition to his authorship, Eggers has
established himself as an influential publisher, editor, and
designer. He has also founded a publishing company, McSweeney's;
two magazines, Might and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern; and several
nonprofit organizations. This whirlwind of productivity, within
publishing and beyond, gives Eggers a unique standing among
American writers: jack of all trades, master of same. The
interviews contained in Conversations with Dave Eggers suggest the
range of Eggers's pursuits-a range that is reflected in the variety
of the interviews themselves. In addition to the expected
interviews with major publications, Eggers engages here with
obscure magazines and blogs, trade publications, international
publications, student publications, and children from a mentoring
program run by one of his nonprofits. To read the interviews in
sequence is to witness Eggers's rapid evolution. The cultural
hysteria around Staggering Genius and Eggers's complicated
relationship with celebrity are clear in many of the earlier
interviews. From there, as the buzz around him mellows, Eggers
responds in kind, allowing writing and his other endeavors to come
to the fore of his conversations. Together, these interviews
provide valuable insight into a driving force in contemporary
American literature.
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