Best known for his masterpiece Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace re-invented fiction and non-fiction for a generation with his groundbreaking and original work. Wallace's desire to blend formal innovation and self-reflexivity with the communicative and restorative function of literature resulted in works that appeal as much to a reader's intellect as they do emotion. As such, few writers in recent memory have quite matched his work's intense critical and popular impact. The essays in this Companion, written by top Wallace scholars, offer a historical and cultural context for grasping Wallace's significance, provide rigorous individual readings of each of his major works, whether story collections, non-fiction, or novels, and address the key themes and concerns of these works, including aesthetics, politics, religion and spirituality, race, and post-humanism. This wide-ranging volume is a necessary resource for understanding an author now widely regarded as one of the most influential and important of his time.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England's systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period.This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.

For decades scholarship on Federico Fellini has focused on the figure of the director himself, while formal analysis based on the craft of filmmaking has been largely ignored. Fellini spent countless hours in the studios of Cinecitta recording, mixing, and editing music, voices, and sound effects for his films, but his unique and often revolutionary uses of cinematic sound have never been systematically studied. This book reveals the singularly important role played by music in the construction of meaning in Fellini's black and white feature-length films, and presents a substantial re-reading of the seven films made during the most creative period of Fellini's artistic development: The White Sheik, I vitellini, La strada, Il bidone, The Nights if Cabiria, La dolce vita, and 8 1/2. The editing of music in Fellini's first films represents an entirely new approach to cinematic sound. The sophistication and complexity of Fellini's soundtracks far surpasses the neorealist models that are often assumed to form the practical foundation of Fellini's earliest works, and an analysis of the editing of music in these films reveals extraordinary innovation in the pairing of music and visual image. Although these films may often seem visually conventional, the soundtracks- characterized by abrupt cuts, comic synchronization with the visual image, unrealistic passages between nondiegetic and diegetic musical sources, and the coexistence of diegetic sources with nondiegetic musical accompaniment- undermine the verisimilitude of the projected image, facilitate aesthetic distance, and emphasize artifice at the expense of 'reality.' Functioning as an ironic, often dissonant counterpoint to the narrative structure of the visual images, the manifestly artificial editing of music in Fellini's films questions the verisimilitude of cinematic narration by revealing the interpenetratin of representation and reception, being and seeming, history and story, 'truth' and fiction.

This book examines the work of three major twentieth-century Caribbean poets: one Puerto Rican, one Martinician, and one Saint Lucian. Focusing on one major work by each poet, it follows their efforts to confront the Archipelagos historical legacy of racism and colonialism through the creation of poetic personae that unceasingly alternate between the open dialogism of political engagement and the monologic closure of lyric self-articulation.

This book examines how the hierarchical structures of taste implied by the term middlebrow were negotiated by the best-selling novelist, Warwick Deeping (1877 - 1950). Deeping is the focus for three reasons: he was immensely popular, prolific, and his popularity was perceived by such critics as Q. D. Leavis as a threat to the "sensitive minority". His sixty-eight novels from 1903 to 1950 give the cultural historian the unusual opportunity of tracing the develpment of an author's attempts to protect both himself and his readers from a process of cultural devaluation. After 1925, the best-selling Sorrell and Son and its successors established "a" Deeping as a product about which both admirers and detractors had certain expectations. His response to these provides an exemplary site within which to examine how cultural distinctions were being negotiated and contested in Britain between the two World Wars. The introduction traces the genealogy of Dr. Grover's theoretical approach. The theories of the Frankfurt school and of Pierre Bourdieu do not account adequately for the generation of texts in response to perceived cultural hierarchies. Deeping's texts are increasingly explicit in the ways they dramatize and address their own questionable cultural status. Grover uses this self-consciousness to test the limits of the usefulness of available theories of cultural production. Chapter 1 historicizes the emergenceof the term middlebrow, contrasting its use on either side of the Atlantic to demonstrate class and cultural context. Chapter 2 shows how Deeping represented his own class positioning as bestselling author. Chapter 3 examines a group of novels, preceding Sorrell and Son and before the term middlebrow had currency, in which the writer is depicted as feminized and declassified. Chapter 4 concerns the reception of Sorrell and Son and Deeping's fictionalization of its reception. The final chapter deals with the animosity to which Sorrell's success exposed the culturally beleaguered Deeping

Disenthralling Ourselves portrays contemporary Israel in a process of transition. Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli communities share a nation-state divided by the separate truths of its conflicting fundamental narratives. This book considers ways of converting those separate and antagonistic narratives from fuel for conflict to seeds of change. Its purpose is to undo the convenient coherence of collective memory and master narratives through fostering a capacious moral imagination able to apprehend diverse, even contentious, stories and truths. Contemporary Israel functions as a case study in an in-depth and interdisciplinary exploration of conflict resolution, viewing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli documentary film, poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, peace initiatives, and other elements of collective narrative-building through a prism of three analogously themed Shakespearean plays. This comparative methodology is integrated with theoretical perspectives on reconciliation, resilience, critical reflection, and peace education in presenting concrete alternatives to the convenient comforts of the inimical master narratives that perpetuate what can now be seen as a hundred-year war. The readings offered in this book generate perspectives that can be adopted and adapted in relation to each other in the process of moving from a single static narrative of incessant warfare. The first section, 'Seeing in the Dark,' considers rhetoric and identity formation of cultures in transition. Its first half focuses on revenge cultures and reads Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Juliano Mer Khamis's documentary 'Arna's Children' in a fictive and documentary pairing of people stripped of all but revenge. Its second half considers rhetoric and Israeli identities in transition through the prism of Hamlet. Three genre-challenging authors represent Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli narrative identity formation; Yaron Ezrahi, Emile Habiby,and Anton Shammas reflect a hybridity that emphasi

Cy-Borges-this compound word seems almost destined. It allows the associations of cyber-and cyborg to converge around the name of Jorge Luis Borges, many of whose writings are strangely prescient thought-experiments in the impossible and the unconfigurable. For though Borges speaks scantily of technology and hardly at all of the cyber-cultural futures that make it possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings contrive glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more typically associated with writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. Yet the posthuman, as that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once technology re-engineers human potential and institutes a new physics, is everywhere in Borges. As this collection shows through a series of close readings of his work, Borges is therefore the precursor whom posthumanism would have had to invent had he not existed.

This book explores Cervantes's connection with the representational schemes that dominated the political, moral, literary, and iconographic anxieties of the 1600s. Whereas most research on Cervantes's aesthetic and artistic models has focused on Southern sources (Italian and Spanish), this study expands this reference to include Northern (Flemish and Netherlandish) cultural influence. Through this artistic dialogue between North and South, the book investigates the interrelationship of politics and aesthetics, and how these are negotiated in Cervantes's works, especially in two novels, Don Quixote and The Dialogue of the Dogs.

Inspired by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo's work for memory and justice, Cry for Me, Argentina is an interdisciplinary study that draws on Latin American literary, trauma, performance, and cultural studies to analyze the narrative of three Argentine women writers/activists - Aida Bortnik, Griselda Gambaro, and Tununa Mercado - whose work reveals the traumatic repercussions of the Dirty War (1976-83) and cultivates a narrative space for working through traumatic impact of the era: the grave losses of human life (30,000 disappeared individuals), the breakdown of civil liberties, and the ongoing struggles these problems have perpetuated. Dr. Levine argues that the work of all three authors emphasizes the imperative to restore the dialogical principal obliterated by repressive authoritarian regimes. By doing so within their narrative, they cultivate a performance space in which they incite the reader to participate in the process of mourning, working toward social justice and healing.

This book expands traditional conceptions of the Enlightenment by examining the roles of wonder and Jesuit missionary conceptions of the Enlightenment by examining the century in a production of knowledge that serves both intellectual and religious functions. Ewalt analyzes a variety of classical and sacred rhetorical techniques for vivid persuasion that illuminate the simultaneously spiritual and scientific discourse employed by Joseph Gumilla in El Orinoco ilustrado (1741, 45), a text that concretizes an eclectic, Catholic Enlightenment that unites sentiment and reason, allows for emotion within scientific inquiry, and employs the strategy of wonder to accumulate, enumerate, and disseminate knowledge. Ewalt's work complements and extends studies proposing new and more inclusive Enlightenment models that challenge secular prejudices and reconsiders the assumption of European centrality by taking into account the Americas and other peripheral areas where modernity was redefined rather.

This is an historically comparative postcolonial study asserting the dialogic relation between Irish and Caribbean narrative form, relating Irish Big House and Caribbean Plantation novels, the "errantry" of Joyce's and Walcott's epic geographies, and the transition from traditional bildungsroman modes of exile to contemporary memoirs of 'diseased' emigration. The book focuses on the demise of empire and the role of geography in creating an "island imaginary" for writers from James Joyce and Jean Rhys to Jamaica Kincaid and Frank McCourt. The complex interplay of cultures that makes up both Ireland and the Caribbean, the islands they inhabit both literally and metaphorically, ensures that neither peoples nor cultures exist in anything less than a "meta-archipelago." The links in these chains of islands and peoples, dispersed geographically, economically, and politically, connect strongly, not simply throughout the North Atlantic but throughout the larger diasporic world.

This volume features thirty art-related travel articles by the American modern artist, Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887-1968), reprinted for the first time since they appeared in her hometown newspaper, the Fresno Morning Republican, from 1908-15, the period that corresponds to that when she was studying art in Paris at La Palette and traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her writings relate to the cities, museums, and cultures in her whirlwind Grand Tour to which she brought incisive and critical commentary. The accompanying essay examines her life in Paris, the people she met, and the art she was exposed to, and how all of this helped shape her own work and identity as a woman artist, a world traveler, and an American. In her travels and activities as an artist, Thompson pushed the perceived boundaries of gender conventions and stereotypes during the first decades of the twentieth century.

This book is the first in English to address contemporary Israeli poetry of the Holocaust. The unique character of the book consists in its capacity to approach simultaneously the fervent feelings and scalding, emotional scars associated with the Holocaust and the aesthetic 'infrastructure' that is inlaid and operates in the very depth of the poems under consideration. In this respect, the book functions on two simultaneous levels: it views the emotional strata engaged with the Holocaust while analyzing its literary mechanism from an artistic perspective. The book also turns to the congruence between the very collective nature of contemporary Israeli poetry and the capacity to cope with the Holocaus while enlisting literary means. Hence contemporary Israeli poetry tends to display a poetic might while being also emotionally oriented. Memory of the Holocaust should never be dimmed by passing years nor by the fact that the last survivors are saying farewell to all earthly things. There are numerous ways to commemorate the Holocaust. This book introduces a very effective way to do so. One may wonder about combining the Holocaust with art. That doubt, however, is proven wrong by this book. Accordingly, it deftly illustrates how an artistic text can deliver the most scorching emotions of the Holocaust. This aesthetic dexterity does not cloud the Holocaust but rather introduces it in the most artistically challenging fashion. The fact that the Holocaust poetry discussed here is also Israeli poetry makes the book even more important and relevant. One may cogently argue that the sate of Israel was established on the ashes of the Holocaust. If so, the fact that contemporary Israeli poetry is dedicated to the topic of the Holocaust celebrates the victory of humankind over Nazi atrocities. This book should be of interest to students, teachers and scholars of the Holocaust, modern Hebrew/Israeli poetry, and literature in general.

This study of color, space, and creativity focuses on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and A. S. Byatt. The author examines Woolf's structural use of color in To the Lighthouse and Lawrence's colorful visualizing of place in Sea and Sardinia and the Letters. Lawrence interprets the creative process in Apocalypse, tracing spiral rhythms that culminate in vision, while Cary, in The Horse's Mouth, dramatizes an artist's vision of 'the world of colour'. Durrell expands the power of color through metaphor in his island scapes and in The Alexandria Quartet distills the city's ethos in a 'cyclorama' that fuses sensations and memories. The final four chapters focus on Byatt's novels, starting with the creative-critical dialectic of The Shadows of the Sun and hyper-intense perception in The Virgin in the Garden. Painting comes to full bloom in Still Life, where Van Gogh's study of a breakfast table inspires a surrogate writer to compare words and paint. In The Matisse Stories Byatt improvises on the artist's color combinations and compositional philosophy. Highlighting interactions of color, space, and creativity that take on ontological dimensions, Stewart's study will lead to ongoing reflections on the roles of color and space in modernist texts.

Despite its debt to French thought for theoretical constructs, masculinity studies have been dominated by work on English-language texts and contexts. Entre Hommes lays the foundation for French and Francophone masculinity studies in both a cultural and theoretical sense. This ground-breaking volume considers what is meant by 'French' or 'Francophone' masculinities per se and how these identities have or have not changed over time, with essays spanning periods from the Middle Ages to the present. An introduction situates the study of masculinity within the work of recent French thinkers, and essays examine both key writers and recurring cultural images.

This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon with the effects of structures and networks of violence. Part Two tracks modes of intimacy - desires, loves, close friendships, romances, sexual relations, erotic contacts - that emerge in the face of neoimperialism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. Part Three traces the proliferation of genres in Asian American writing of the past quarter century in new and in well-worn terrains. Part Four surveys literary projects that speculate on future states of Asian America in domestic and global contexts.

Immigrant communities evince particular and deep relationship to place. Building on this self-evident premise, Walk the Barrio adds the less obvious claim that to write about place you must experience place. Thus, in this book about immigrants, writing, and place, Cristina Rodriguez walks neighborhood streets, talks to immigrants, interviews authors, and puts herself physically in the spaces that she seeks to understand. The word barrio first entered the English lexicon in 1833 and has since become a commonplace not only of American speech but of our literary imagination. Indeed, what draws Rodriguez to the barrios of Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and others is the work of literature that was fueled and inspired by those neighborhoods. Walk the Barrio explores the ways in which authors William Archila, Richard Blanco, Angie Cruz, Junot Di az, Salvador Plascencia, He ctor Tobar, and Helena Mari a Viramontes use their U.S. hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration. Asking how these writers innovate upon or break the rules of genre to render in words an embodied experience of the barrio, Rodriguez considers, for example, how the spatial map of New Brunswick impacts the mobility of Di az's female characters, or how graffiti influences the aesthetics of Viramontes's novels. By mapping each text's fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references in what she calls "barriographies," Rodriguez reveals connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy. This first-person, interdisciplinary approach presents an innovative model for literary studies as it sheds important light on the ways in which transnationalism transforms the culture of each Latinx barrio, effecting shifts in gender roles, the construction of the family, definitions of social normativity, and racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic identifications.

Between 1868 and 1898, three generations of Cubans fought to free Cuba from colonialist Spain. More than a century later, no other historical narrative is as beloved and ritualistically recited as the story of Cuba Libre and the citizen-soldier known as the mambi. In town festivals and cartoons, in textbooks and hymns, in the national currency and logos alike, the mambi is the foremost icon of Cuba's past and present. Scrutinizing how this figure has been aesthetically rendered in literature, historiography, cinema, and monuments, Eric Morales-Franceschini teases out the emancipatory promises that the story of Cuba Libre came to embody in the twentieth-century popular imagination.The story of Cuba Libre and the mambi is not, after all, a conventional epic. For how does one account for heroes that are neither demigods nor nobles? For tactics more sly than virtuous? Or verse more populist than eloquent? Analyzing the mambi as Afro-Cuban, woman, trickster, saboteur, and martyr, this critical exegesis shows how that heroic archetype has come to bear on issues such as racial justice, women's empowerment, populist humor, the ethics of violence, and the nationalist sublime. With an eye toward decolonial futures, The Epic of Cuba Libre illuminates the complexities and idiosyncrasies of an aesthetics of liberation.

For more than eighty years, Faulkner criticism has attempted to ""see all Yoknapatawpha,"" the fictional Mississippi county in which the author set all but four of his novels as well as more than fifty short stories. One of the most ambitious of these attempts is the ongoing Digital Yoknapatawpha, an online project that is encoding the texts set in Faulkner's mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations. In Digitizing Faulkner, the contributors to the project share their findings and reflections on what digital research can mean for Faulkner studies and, by example, other bodies of literature. The essays examine Faulkner's characters, events, locations, and visualizations, as well as offering more theoretical reflections on digitally mapping specific texts and stories, including the pedagogical implications of this digital approach. Digitizing Faulkner explores how a twenty-first-century research tool intersects with twentieth-century sensibilities, ideologies, behaviors, and material cultures to modify and enhance our understanding of Faulkner's texts.

In "A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology Elisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery's poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process through which people reach outside of themselves for sensory information, map that experiential information against what they have previously encountered and what is culturally inculcated in them, and articulate shifts in their internal repositories through encounters with new material. Joyce argues that this process reflects Ashbery's classic statement of poetry being the "experience of experience." Through incisive close readings of Ashbery's poems, Joyce examines how he explores this process of continual reverberation between what is sensed and what is considered about that sensation and, ultimately, how he renders these perceptions into the "serpentine gesture" of language.

Long studied for historical, biographical, or sociological purposes, George Herbert's The Country Parson has not received the literary appreciation it deserves. Through a literary analysis exploring genre, themes, topics, emphasis, context, and models, this study finds The Country Parson to be a carefully conceived and executed piece of literary prose. Herbert wrote this work after the popular Renaissance courtesy book rather than in the more common homiletic style of contemporary clerical manuals. While his techniques for artful self-fashioning might have been borrowed from the pages of Castiglione or Della Casa, his purposes could not. Herbert believed in the mimetic effects of outer behavior in shaping the inner man. In The Country Parson Herbert used 'all possible art' to both describe and inspire the 'Form and Character of a true Pastour', that he and his fellow clergy may have a 'Mark to aim at'. The Country Parson should be seen as a carefully crafted piece of literary prose working within, but also transforming, the popular genres of clerical manual and courtesy book, using "all possible art" to please and instruct both pastor and church member and ultimately (as Herbert hoped) to serve God. Literary historians, Herbert students, and cultural historians will all find this study worth their examination.

In this original contribution to the history of American poetry in the twentieth century, Bethany Hicok traces the influence of the women's college on the poetic development of three American poets - Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar, and Sylvia Plath at Smith. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hicok demonstrates how the women's colleges provided an important source of cultural and critical authority for American women poets and played a central role in their poetic development in the first half of the twentieth century. Hicok argues Moore, Bishop, and Plath were each part of a supportive but also competitive community of writers and scholars who honed their writing skills in college classes and in literary magazines. Her book offers theoretically and historically grounded new readings of their poetry within the specific cultural and literary context of the women's college in order to sharpen and deepen our understanding of women's poetic production.

This book of essays provides a significant reappraisal of discussions of anti-Semitism and philosemitism. An outstanding group of contributors from political theory, film, English, gender studies, and history demonstrates that analysis of philosemitic attitudes is as crucial as are investigations of anti-Semitism. Topics include F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hannah Arendt's politics, self-help guides such as Boy Vey! The Shiksa's Guide to Dating Jewish Men, and contemporary cinema. This pathbreaking book shows the necessity of studying philosemitism as a critical manifestation of anti-Semitism and as a principle way that Jews have been and still are set apart from non-Jews. These essays will enable us to rethink historical debates surrounding the 'Jewish question.'

This work compiles the history of the Donegal pilgrimage as presented in historical texts, guidebooks, popular writing, devotional treatises, and newspaper and journal accounts. This material_with its cultural, political, as well as religious associations_provides background for these poets' Lough Derg poems, which relate their own pilgrimage experiences. The book proceeds to examine Devlin's 'Lough Derg,' Kavanagh's 'Lough Derg,' and Heaney's 'Station Island.' The question is why do three mid-career Irish poets choose to write ambitious and problematic poems about the Lough Derg experience? The answer is found in the competing proprietary claims of what began as an early medieval imagining of Purgatory and becomes in the twentieth century a template for artistic and spiritual conversion.