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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > General
This edited volume offers a contemporary rethinking of the
relationship between love and care in the context of neoliberal
practices of professionalization and work. Each of the book's three
sections interrogates a particular site of care, where the
affective, political, legal, and economic dimensions of care
intersect in challenging ways. These sites are located within a
variety of institutionally managed contexts such as the
contemporary university, the theatre hall, the prison complex, the
family home, the urban landscape, and the care industry. The
geographical spread of the case studies stretches across India,
Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the US and
provides broad coverage that crosses the divide between the Global
North and the Global South. To address this transnational
interdisciplinary field of study, the collection utilises insights
from across the humanities and social sciences and includes
contributions from literature, sociology, cultural and media
studies, philosophy, feminist theory, theatre, art history, and
education. These inquiries build on a variety of conceptual tools
and research methods, from data analysis to psychoanalytic reading.
Love and the Politics of Care delivers an attentive and widely
relevant examination of the politics of care and makes a compelling
case for an urgent reconsideration of the methods that currently
structure and regulate it.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1976.
Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the
periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the
margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging.
Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a
subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his
fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant
scholarly attention. Erickson's obscurity comes in part from the
difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in
fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that
populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history,
time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His
dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and
paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an
appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but
difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once
thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these
twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and
political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses
the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that
America's triumphs and failures have been consistent since its
inception-and that he presciently described decades ago certain
features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the
remarkable consistency of Erickson's vision over time while
simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later
fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve
Erickson will deepen readers' understanding of how Erickson's books
work-and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater
attention.
The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the
history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of
rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George
Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical
discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the
first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the
conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward
criticism-and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood,
marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity
of a critic"-suggests that the position of the critic in this
period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance
England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English
Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from
Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in
response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors.
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the Talented Tenth in an
influential essay of the same name. The concept exalted
college-educated Blacks who Du Bois believed could provide the race
with the guidance it needed to surmount slavery, segregation, and
oppression in America. Although Du Bois eventually reassessed this
idea, the rhetoric of the Talented Tenth resonated, still holding
sway over a hundred years later. In Rethinking Racial Uplift:
Rhetorics of Black Unity and Disunity in the Obama Era, author
Nigel I. Malcolm asserts that in the post-civil rights era, racial
uplift has been redefined not as Black public intellectuals lifting
the masses but as individuals securing advantage for themselves and
their children. Malcolm examines six best-selling books published
during Obama's presidency-including Randall Kennedy's Sellout, Bill
Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People, and Ta-Nehisi
Coates's Between the World and Me-and critically analyzes their
rhetorics on Black unity, disunity, and the so-called "postracial"
era. Based on these writings and the work of political and social
scientists, Malcolm shows that a large, often-ignored, percentage
of Blacks no longer see their fate as connected with that of other
African Americans. While many Black intellectuals and activists
seek to provide a justification for Black solidarity, not all
agree. In Rethinking Racial Uplift, Malcolm takes contemporary
Black public intellectual discourse seriously and shows that
disunity among Blacks, a previously ignored topic, is worth
exploring.
When you drink rum, you drink history. More than merely a popular
spirit in the transatlantic, rum became a cultural symbol of the
Caribbean. While rum is often dismissed as set dressing in texts
about the region, the historical and moral associations of alcohol
generally-and rum specifically-cue powerful stereotypes, from
touristic hedonism to social degeneracy. Rum Histories examines the
drink in anglophone Atlantic literature in the period of
decolonization to complicate and elevate the symbolic currency of a
commodity that in fact reflects the persistence of colonialism in
shaping the material and mental lives of postcolonial subjects. As
a product of the plantation and as an intoxicant, rum was a central
lubricant of the colonial economy as well as of cultural memory.
Discussing a wide spectrum of writing, from popular contemporary
works such as Christopher Moore's Fluke and Joseph O'Neill's
Netherland to classics by Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, and other
luminaries of the Caribbean diaspora, Jennifer Nesbitt investigates
how rum's specific role in economic exploitation is muddled by
moral attitudes about the consequences of drinking. The centrality
of alcohol use to racialized and gendered norms guides Nesbitt's
exploration of how the global commodities trade connects disparate
populations across history and geography. This innovative study
reveals rum's fascinating role in expressing the paradox of a
postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism.
Through knowledge societies, people have capabilities to acquire
information and to transform that information into knowledge and
information, which empowers them to enhance their lives and to
contribute to the social-economic development. The practical
application of knowledge into innovation and how this process from
research to development to application can be achieved is a domain
that is not yet very well understood. Developing Knowledge
Societies for Distinct Country Contexts is an essential reference
source that documents methods, best practices, and case studies for
the development of global knowledge societies at the national,
regional, and local levels. Featuring empirical analysis on topics
such as smart governance, financial literacy, and globalization,
this book is ideally designed for business strategists, economists,
international researchers, anthropologists, politicians,
policymakers, governmental sectors, academics, and students seeking
coverage on the development of knowledge society policies and
strategies in various areas of the world.
Robert Kirkman (b. 1978) is probably best known as the creator of
The Walking Dead. The comic book and its television adaptation have
reinvented the zombie horror story, transforming it from cult
curiosity and parody to mainstream popularity and critical acclaim.
In some ways, this would be enough to justify this career-spanning
collection of interviews. Yet Kirkman represents much more than
this single comic book title. Kirkman's story is a fanboy's dream
that begins with him financing his irreverent, independent comic
book Battle Pope with credit cards. After writing major titles with
Marvel comics (Spider-Man, Captain America, and X-Men), Kirkman
rejected companies like DC and Marvel and publicly advocated for
creator ownership as the future of the comics industry. As a
partner at Image, Kirkman wrote not only The Walking Dead but also
Invincible, a radical reinvention of the superhero genre. Robert
Kirkman: Conversations gives insight to his journey and explores
technique, creativity, collaboration, and the business of comics as
a multimedia phenomenon. For instance, while continuing to write
genre-based comics in titles like Outcast and Oblivion Song,
Kirkman explains his writerly bias for complex characters over
traditional plot development. As a fan-turned-creator, Kirkman
reveals a creator's complex relationship with fans in a comic-con
era that breaks down the consumer/producer dichotomy. And after
rejecting company-ownership practices, Kirkman articulates a vision
of the creator-ownership model and his goal of organic creativity
at Skybound, his multimedia company. While Stan Lee was the most
prominent comic book everyman of the previous era of comics
production, Kirkman is the most prominent comic book everyman of
this dynamic, evolving new era.
How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From
the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of
the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept
of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and
intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney
investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation,
revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character
became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international
trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health,
the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the
works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk
Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new
history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks
how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help
secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In
these narratives-addressing imperial administrations, global
financial competition, women's entry into the professions, colonial
nationalism, and wartime espionage-we are shown the generative
power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the
present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive
involvement of individuals in collective life.
Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of
authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D.
Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg,
as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu,
and Gnostic texts. Crumb's genius, according to author David
Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of
literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them
within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal
his personal search for the meaning of life. R. Crumb: Literature,
Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that
chart Crumb's intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring
philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and
biographical works and the ways he responds to them through
innovative, dazzling compositional techniques. Calonne explores the
ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and
conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with
the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the
Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb's
illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and
Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb's love for
literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of
the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his
readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most
significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his
authentic self.
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