This book considers pornography as a bridge between screen cultures and screen memories. The screen as a conceptual apparatus, in both pornographic production/viewership and psychoanalysis, becomes important to unpack as such-what does the screen hold in with respect to desire and pleasure? What does it keep out? Are sex and memory interconnected? And if so, what is the status of memory as it informs sexual choices, practices, and fantasies and, thereby, inform the use of porn? Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, might there be the possibility for a reparative or redemptive reading of pornography that is informed by a psychoanalytic emphasis on the study of desire? Who or what are the subjects and objects of desire in the visual field of pornography? What sorts of psychoanalytic readings are possible of pornographic texts (in any media) and to what end might we undertake such an interpretative approach? How do well-worn psychoanalytic categories, such as loss, lack, mourning, melancholia, attachment, trauma, and the fetish, inform pornographic interpellation in both the producer and viewer? What are the ethical and methodological implications connected to thinking psychoanalytically about pornography? These are but some of the questions that this collection of essays explores. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Mental Health. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Porn Studies.

This book, first published in 1988, is the most comprehensive annotation of Bleak House ever undertaken. It provides authoritative background information about the topical issues of the novel that interested Dickens as a social critic and activist. It also describes the novel's literary antecedents and identifies the sources of its hundreds of literary and historical allusions. The annotation is based on a wide range of nineteenth-century sources - from newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary papers to travel guides and cookery books - and gives the modern reader unprecedented access to both Bleak House - Dickens's tract for the times - and the period when it was written.

This book offers a critical study of Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), the world's bestselling science fiction novel. Kara Kennedy discusses the novel's exploration of politics and religion, its influential ecological messages, the focus on the human mind and consciousness, the complex nature of the archetypal hero, and the depiction of women's influence and control. In Dune, Herbert demonstrated that sophistication, complexity, and a multi-layered world with three-dimensional characters could sit comfortably within the science fiction genre. Underneath its deceptively simple storyline sits a wealth of historical and philosophical contexts and influences that make it a rich masterpiece open to multiple interpretations. Kennedy's study shows the continuing relevance of the novel in the 21st century due to its classic themes and its concerns about the future of humanity, as well as the ongoing nature of issues such as ecological disruption and conflicts over resources and religion.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts-in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

This book interrogates the concept of the subject in the poem, against the broader background of literary-theoretical issues related to the lyric subject. Specifically, what kind of subject is the subject in the poem? What relation does it have to other forms of subjectivation that human beings experience in their life practices? What is its singularity? "The Lyric Subject is a most impressive achievement: a shrewd evaluation of a wide range of writings (philosophical, linguistic, literary) bearing on the question of the lyric subject. With myriad poetic examples, Varja Balz alorsky Antic develops a rich, multileveled mapping of the various forms of subjectivity and agency in the lyric." Jonathan Culler, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

"African American Literary Theory is an extraordinary gift to literary studies. It is necessary, authoritative and thorough. The timing of this book is superb "
--Karla F.C. Holloway, Duke University

"The influence of African American literature can be attributed, in no small part, to the literary theorists gathered in this collection. This is a superb anthology that represents a diversity of voices and points of view, and a much needed historical retrospective of how African American literary theory has developed."
--Marlon B. Ross, University of Michigan

"A volume of great conceptual significance and originality in its focus on the development of African American literary theory."
--Farah Jasmine Griffin, University of Pennsylvania

African American Literary Theory: A Reader is the first volume to document the central texts and arguments in African American literary theory from the 1920s through the present. As the volume progresses chronologically from the rise of a black aesthetic criticism, through the Blacks Arts Movement, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the rise of queer theory, it focuses on the key arguments, themes, and debates in each period.

By constantly bringing attention to the larger political and cultural issues at stake in the interpretation of literary texts, the critics gathered here have contributed mightily to the prominence and popularity of African American literature in this country and abroad. African American Literary Theory provides a unique historical analysis of how these thinkers have shaped literary theory, and literature at large, and will be a indispensable text for the study of African American intellectual culture.

Contributors include Sandra Adell, Michael Awkward, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Hazel V. Carby, Barbara Christian, W.E.B. DuBois, Ann duCille, Ralph Ellison, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Addison Gayle Jr., Carolyn F. Gerald, Evelynn Hammonds, Phillip Brian Harper, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Stephen E. Henderson, Karla F.C. Holloway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Joyce A. Joyce, Alain Locke, Wahneema Lubiano, Deborah E. McDowell, Harryette Mullen, Larry Neal, Charles I. Nero, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Marlon B. Ross, George S. Schuyler, Barbara Smith, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Sherley Anne Williams, and Richard Wright.

This book discusses the ethical dimension of the interpretation of texts and events. Its purpose is not to address the neutrality or ideological biases of interpreters, but rather to discuss the underlying issue of the intervention of interpreters into the process of interpretation. The author calls this intervention the "ethical" aspect of interpretation and argues that interpreters are neither neutral nor necessarily activists. He examines three models of interpretation, all of which recognize the role that interpreters play in the process of interpretation. In these models, the question of the truth or validity of interpretation is dependent upon the attitude of interpreters. These three models are: (1) the principle of charity in interpretation in the two different versions defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson; (2) the production of truth, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault; and (3) the regulative principle in interpretation as formal validity claims-as presented by Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas-and as benevolence or love as an epistemic virtue-as defended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The critical discussion of these three models, which brings to the fore the different manners in which interpreters intervene in the process of interpretation as persons, lays the foundations for an ethics of interpretation. The Ethics of Interpretation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory.

This volume takes a deep dive into the philosophical hermeneutics of Shakespearean tradition providing insight into the foundations, theories, and methodologies of hermeneutics in Shakespeare. Central to this research, this volume investigates fundamental questions including: what is philosophical hermeneutics, why philosophical hermeneutics, what do literary and cultural Hermeneutics do, and in what ways can literary and cultural hermeneutics benefit the interpretation of Shakespearean plays? Hermeneutic Shakespeare guides the readers through two main discussions. Beginning with the understanding of "Philosophical Hermeneutics," and the general principles of literary and cultural Hermeneutics, the volume includes philosophers such as Fredrich Ast, Daniel Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and more recently, Steven Connor. Part two of this volume applies universal principles of philosophical hermeneutics to explicate the historical, philosophical, acquired, and applied literary interpretations through the critical practices of Shakespeare's plays or their adaptations, including The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Comedy of Errors. Aimed at scholars and students alike, this volume aims to contribute to contemporary understanding of Shakespeare and literature hermeneutics.

This collection is founded on the premise that the physical book is far from exhausted as informational medium, art object, or conceptual resource. The contributors to The Unfinished Book identify the many ways in which study of books - of their compounding of matter and meaning, of their global travels and historical transitions, of their shaping of and by new media technologies - remains unfinished business for humanist scholarship generally, and literary studies in particular. The collection's 32 chapters demonstrate in tandem how much book history has to gain in turn from engaging the most vital and innovative literary-critical modes of the 21st-century. Book studies thus intersects here with scholarship on empire, the environment, disability, and affect, as well as with work in African-American and Indigenous studies. Literary study is uniquely positioned, this collection asserts, to honour books' distinctive ways of both meaning things and being things. The chapters span a terrain that extends from the earliest surviving writings of the Indus Valley to Cicero's 1st-century B.C.E. library to the latest videogames. Some model new ways of thinking about the form, edges, and boundaries of the book as they demonstrate how seldom the book's history as a material object is terminated at the moment of its manufacture. Other chapters highlight the provisionality that makes the book's conceptual boundaries fuzzy, unfinished, and variable; many seek to overturn triumphalist histories that recount the story of the book as though it were Western and white. Overall, this collection launches a new generation of scholarship as it introduces provocative new approaches about the nature, place, and time of books.

Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cerebral functions, seek to assemble the elements of one's own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination creates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it "memorable," both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, images, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts.

This companion presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives. In response to the oversaturation of sociological, governmental, and journalistic narratives about refugees, this book examines the narratives refugees tell to, for, and about themselves. Engaging a rich variety of genres-fiction, autobiography, prose, poetry, graphic novels, film, photography, performance, social media-the chapters included in this anthology examine how conditions of forced displacement and encounters with different asylum regimes shape the form and content of refugee cultural production. Chapters are organized around three key forms-storytelling, testimony, (auto)ethnography-and four key themes-memory (and forgetting), human rights (and its limitations), border-crossing (and nation-states), and cartographies (of displacement and diaspora). This volume will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners. In addition to analyzing refugee narratives, contributors offer pedagogical strategies for how to teach, discuss, and engage refugee narratives in the contemporary political moment.

Representations of violence surround us in everyday life - in news reports, films and novels - inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence

This text discusses Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Butor and Ricardou, analyzing both the interaction of their own theory and fiction, and their reactions to the work of Sartre, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Sollers and Kristeva. The nouveau roman writers have been involved in the theory as well as the practice of fiction, participating in a series of debates on issues such as the political significance of literature, formalism and structuralism and the status of the author. The book is an introduction to the relationship between theory and practice.

This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors' insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing tracks Australian women authors' varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.

This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children's historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of almost forty books - novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, ones showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All of the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children's literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering. This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multi-dimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers - both present-day and future - not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers, and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities.

Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider patterns of significance. Of interest to researchers and scholars in autobiography, world literature, and psychology.

The Ecrits was Jacques Lacan's single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan's Ecrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan's Ecrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the 20th Century, Lacan's Ecrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan's Ecrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries - by some of the world's most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars - on the complete edition of the Ecrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as 'Kant with Sade', 'The Youth of Gide', 'Science and Truth', 'Presentation on Transference' and 'Beyond the "Reality Principle"'. The originality and importance of Lacan's Ecrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text's notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan's Ecrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan's Ecrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan's pivotal work.

Offering innovative, psychoanalytic readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's mature novels, this volume expertly applies Freudian theory to present new insights into the psychology of Hawthorne's characters and their fates. By critically examining scenes in which protagonists confront past traumas, Diamond underscores the transformative potential which Hawthorne attributes to confrontations with the unconscious. Psychoanalytic narrative technique is used to illuminate psychological crises of the protagonists in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, showing the transformations they undergo to be central to our understanding of the trajectory and resolution of Hawthorne's romances. The text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in applied psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic technique, and Freud in particular. Since its conclusions challenge many currently held critical views, this volume is especially relevant to those interested in interdisciplinary literary studies, Hawthorne studies, 19th century literature and romanticism.

Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain's reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary criticism of recent prose fiction, this book offers a provocative analysis of the work of Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, situating her output in comparative contexts. The chapters making up the volume range from myth-critical focused readings, to interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives. Tokarczuk's fiction is explored as mythopoeic and heterotopian experimentation, as well as being read alongside other arts and other authors of various national and linguistic backgrounds. This wide-ranging collection is the first monograph on Tokarczuk in English.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present epoque. The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing. Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current epoque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies and posthumanities.

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukacs, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of "hotel modernisms" as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars' engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent "humanities turn" in mobilities studies. The book's scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography's vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.

The most comprehensive volume on the intersections between Gender and Affect Global and Interdisciplinary A key volume in this emerging area