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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics. These connections range from mathematics and poetic meter to mathematics and modernism to mathematics as literature. Some chapters focus on a single author, such as mathematics and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Charles Dickens, while others consider a mathematical topic common to two or more authors, such as squaring the circle, chaos theory, Newton's calculus, or stochastic processes. With appeal for scholars and students in literature, mathematics, cultural history, and history of mathematics, this important volume aims to introduce the range, fertility, and complexity of the connections between mathematics, literature, and literary theory. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].
This volume collects four sharp philosophical essays by Ilan Stavans on the acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that dictionaries play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the electronic age, and the uses of censorship. In the second part of the volume, Veronica Albin engages Stavans in a series of four conversations in which he expounds on the arguments he developed in the essays.
This fascinating study explores the multifarious erotic themes associated with the magic lantern shows, which proved the dominant visual medium of the West for 350 years, and analyses how the shows influenced the portrayals of sexuality in major works of Gothic fiction.
Die Schwerpunkte des 50. Bandes sind vielfaltig und reichen von der Analyse einer Reihe literarischer Texte aus unterschiedlichen theoretischen Perspektiven uber die Bewertung des Sprachgebrauchs in verschiedenen soziopolitischen Kontexten bis hin zu Untersuchungen des DaF-Unterrichts und der DaF-Theorie in Sudafrika und anderswo. Literarische Werke von Uwe Timm, Joseph Roth, Dirk Fleck, Daniel Kehlmann, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Grete von Urbanitzky, Natascha Wodin und Mithu Sanyal werden aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven betrachtet. Die jeweiligen Beitrage berucksichtigen unter anderem, wie kulturelles und autobiografisches Gedachtnis zum Ausdruck kommt. Postkoloniale Perspektiven und OEko-Kritik bilden weitere Ansatze, wie auch das Werk von Bruno Latour. Schliesslich werden Genretypologien und auch die Herausforderungen der UEbersetzung analysiert. Der Sprachgebrauch in der Medienberichterstattung und in der Politik sowie eine vergleichende Untersuchung sprachlicher Weltanschauungen bilden die Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft. The focus of the 50th volume is diverse, covering a spectrum from the analysis of a number of literary texts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, to the evaluation of language use in different socio-political contexts and examinations of DaF-teaching and theory both in South Africa and elsewhere. Literary works by Uwe Timm, Joseph Roth, Dirk Fleck, Daniel Kehlmann, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Grete von Urbanitzky, Natascha Wodin and Mithu Sanyal are examined from different perspectives. The respective contributions consider, among other things, how cultural and autobiographical memory is expressed. Postcolonial perspectives and ecocriticism represent further approaches, as does the work of Bruno Latour. Finally, genre typologies and the challenges of translation are analysed. Language use in media reporting and politics, as well as a comparative study of linguistic worldviews represent the contributions to language studies.
This book explores the concept of the end of literature through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of art. In his version of Hegel's 'end of art' thesis, Arthur Danto claimed that contemporary art has abandoned its distinctive sensitive and emotive features to become increasingly reflective. Contemporary art has become a question of philosophical reflection on itself and on the world, thus producing an epochal change in art history. The core idea of this book is that this thesis applies quite well to all forms of art except one, namely literature: literature resists its 'end'. Unlike other arts, which have experienced significant fractures in the contemporary world, Campana proposes that literature has always known how to renew itself in order to retain its distinguishing features, so much so that in a way it has always come to terms with its own end. Analysing the distinct character of literature, this book proposes a new and original interpretation of the 'end of art' thesis, showing how it can be used as a key conceptual framework to understand the contemporary novel.
This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts. Exploring Animal Encounters encourages us to think about the richness and complexity of animal lives and human-animal relations, foregrounding the intricate roles nonhuman creatures play in the always already more-than-human sphere of ethics and politics. In this way, the essays in this volume can be understood as a contribution to alternative imaginings of interspecies coexistence in a time in which the issue of human relations with earth and earth others has come to the fore with unprecedented force and severity.
Die Schwerpunkte des 49. Bandes sind vielfaltig und decken Literaturanalysen, Aspekte des Sprachunterrichts und linguistische Themen (unter Bezugnahme auf Diskursanalyse, Lexikografie, Transferenz und Interferenz) ab. Die Darstellung des Genozids an den Herero in deutschen Diskursgemeinschaften und eine Analyse der Corona-Ansprachen von Cyril Ramaphosa und Angela Merkel werden abgeloest von Beitragen zu einsprachigen DaF-Woerterbuchern, lexikalischer Transferenz in Oberschlesien und der graphemisch-phonetischen Interferenz in ausgewahlten Eidesformeln. Die berufliche Weiterbildung von Lehrkraften des Faches DaF, die Foerderung von kritischem Denken beim Unterrichten von DaF-Landeskunde und die Vorstellung von einem "Complex Adaptive Blended Language Learning System of German Studies" vervollstandigen die Beitrage zum Sprachunterricht im sudlichen Afrika. Beitrage zur Literatur schliessen eine diskurslinguistische Analyse von Arnold Zweigs essayistischem Werk, eine Analyse von Peter Handkes "Versuch uber die Mudigkeit" und eine Untersuchung nach der Relevanz von Umweltethik und -asthetik in ausgewahlter Kinder- und Jugendliteratur ein. The focus of the 49th volume is diverse, covering literary analysis, aspects of language teaching, and linguistic topics (with reference to discourse analysis, lexico-graphy, transference, and interference). An account of the genocide of the Herero in German discourse communities and an analysis of the Corona speeches of Cyril Ramaphosa and Angela Merkel are followed by contributions on monolingual DaF dictionaries, lexical transference in Upper Silesia, and grapheme phonetic interference in set phrases found in selected oaths. The professional development of teachers of DaF, the promotion of critical thinking in teaching DaF "Landeskunde," and the presentation of a "Complex Adaptive Blended Language Learning System of German Studies" complete the contributions on language teaching in Southern Africa. Contributions on literature include a discourse-linguistic analysis of Arnold Zweig's essayistic work, an analysis of Peter Handke's "Versuch uber die Mudigkeit," and an inquiry into the relevance of environmental ethics and aesthetics in selected children's and youth literature.
Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual" means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry's increasing hunger for "translatable" novels.
The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994 book Tom Cohen shows how, in an era of representational criticism and cultural studies, the role of close reading has been overlooked. Arguing that much recent criticism has been caught in potentially regressive models of representation, Professor Cohen undertakes to counter this by rethinking the 'materiality' of the text itself. Through a series of revealing new readings of the work of writers including Plato, Bakhtin, Poe, Whitman and Conrad, Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and demonstrates how 'the materiality of language' operates to undo the representational models of meaning imposed by the literary canon.
Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others defines a pivotal line as "a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play ... a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres." Homan offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach "ground-breaking." Another observes that his "experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable" since it allows us to find "a wedge into such ironic texts." Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.
This volume investigates 11 contemporary environmental justice narratives from Kerala, the south-western state in India. Introducing a detailed review of environmental literature in Malayalam, the selected eco-narratives are presented through two key literary genres: life narratives and novels, conveying the socio-environmental pressures, problems, and anxieties of modern, globalising Kerala. This text also entails primary investigations of ‘toxic fictions’ and ‘extractivist fictions,’ including Malayalam novels that narrate the disastrous consequences of the permeation of toxic pollutants in human and ecosystemic bodies, and novels that chronicle the impact of exploitative mining activities on the environment. All eco-narratives analysed in the book exhibit the familiar pattern of the Global South environmental narratives, namely, a close imbrication of the ecological and social spheres. Reading Contemporary Environmental Justice argues that these selected eco-texts offer inspiring scenarios where the subaltern people show thantedam, or courage, to claim thante idam, one’s own space in society and on the Earth. This volume will be essential for those looking to expand their understanding of environmental justice and the harmful effects of development and modernisation.
This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Eric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.
In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps, one proclaiming that Milton was of the devil's party, the other proclaiming that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him. The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are and therefore the fact of their divided responses makes perfect sense. Thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.
Charting shared advances across the emerging fields of medical humanities and health humanities, this book engages with the question of how biomedical knowledge is constructed, negotiated, and circulated as a cultural practice. The volume is composed of a series of pathbreaking inter-disciplinary essays that bring sociocultural habits of mind and modes of thought to the study of medicine, health and patients. These juxtapositions create new forms of knowledge, while emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies, anti-essentialist approaches to biology, a sensitivity to language and rhetoric, and an attention to social justice. These essays dissect the ways that cultural practices define the limits of health and the body: from the body's place and trajectory in the world to how bodies relate to one another, from questions about ageing and sex to what counts as health and illness. Considering how these and other concepts are shaped by a negotiation between medico-scientific knowledge and ways of knowing derived from other domains, this book provides important new insights into how biomedical frameworks become settled forms for broader cultural understanding.
• Covers all the essentials students need when starting out on a literary studies degree – ideal for first year, introductory courses • A comprehensive glossary (with terms in bold) and clear text mean it is accessible to beginners as well as non-native English readers • Sections on researching and writing papers and citation information mean students will refer to the book throughout their studies – it has a long life • New edition is in a larger format and contains 20 new illustrations, making the book more user-friendly for students and helping to enhance their understanding through images
The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.
Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.
Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Uniting fragmented disciplines under the framework of semiotic theory, this set emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. Providing comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines, chapters are written by leading international experts. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates before casting a vision for future research priorities, identifying unanswered questions and fresh openings for participation. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the entire field for semioticians, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research.
This book sheds light on aspects of the Korean Wave and Korean media products that are less discussed-Korean literature, webtoon, and mukbang. It explores the making of these Korean popular cultural products and how they work and engage media recipients regardless of their different national, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. Drawing on narrative theory and cultural studies, the book makes a compelling argument about how to analyze the production and consumption of Korean media within and beyond its national boundary with critical eyes. The author shows how transmedial narrative studies (narrative studies across media) offers analytical and theoretical lenses through which one can interpret new and emerging media forms and contents. Furthermore, she explores how these forms and contents can be better understood when they are contextualized within specific time and place using the cultural, social, and political concepts and precepts of the region. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Asian Studies, popular culture, contemporary cyberculture, media and culture studies, and literary theory.
For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov
introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here,
collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which
include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a
Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike;
illustrations.
Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.
The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud presents the parallels between The Guide of the Perplexed and The Interpretation of Dreams, considering how Maimonides might be perceived as anticipating Freud's much later work. In this volume, Nathan M. Szajnberg suggests that humankind has secrets to hide and does so by using common mechanisms and embedding revealing hints for the benefit of the true reader. Using a psychoanalytic approach in tandem with literary criticism and an in-depth assessment of Judaica, Szajnberg demonstrates the similarities between these two towering Jewish intellectual pillars. Using concepts of esoteric literature from the Torah and later texts, this book analyses their ideas on concealing and revealing to gain a renewed perspective on Freud's view of dreams. Throughout, Szajnberg articulates the challenges of reading translated works and how we can address the pitfalls in such translations. The book is a vital read for psychoanalysts in training and practice, as well as those interested in Judaica, the history of ideas and early Medieval studies.
The stories of lived experience offer powerful representations of a nation’s complex and often fractured identity. Personal narratives have taken many forms in American literature. From the letters and journals of the famous and the lesser known to the memoirs of former slaves to hit true crime podcasts to lyric essays to the curated archives we keep on social media, life writing has been a tool of both the influential and the disenfranchised to spark cultural and political evolution, to help define the larger identity of the nation, and to claim a sense of belonging within it. Taken together, individual stories of real American lives weave a tapestry of history, humanity, and art while raising questions about the veracity of memory and the slippery nature of truth. This volume surveys the forms of life writing that have contributed to the richness of American literature and shaped American discourse. It examines life writing as a rhetorical tool for social change and explores how technological advancement has allowed ordinary Americans to chronicle and share their lives with others.
More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life. The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency-as the unnecessary and law-defying-in or for ethics? What would an alternative "ethics of contingency"-one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence-look like? The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws. From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today's most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself. Contributors: Etienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Zizek |
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