This book takes Roland Barthes's famous proclamation of 'The Death of the Author' as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of 'the author' as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of 'authorial death' by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

The reputation of the Marquis de Sade is well-founded. The experience of reading his works is demanding to an extreme. Violence and sexuality appear on almost every page, and these descriptions are interspersed with extended discourses on materialism, atheism, and crime. In this bold and rigorous study William S. Allen sets out the context and implications of Sade's writings in order to explain their lasting challenge to thought. For what is apparent from a close examination of his works is the breadth of his readings in contemporary science and philosophy, and so the question that has to be addressed is why Sade pursued these interests by way of erotica of the most violent kind. Allen shows that Sade's interests lead to a form of writing that seeks to bring about a new mode of experience that is engaged in exploring the limits of sensibility through their material actualization. In common with other Enlightenment thinkers Sade is concerned with the place of reason in the world, a place that becomes utterly transformed by a materialism of endless excess. This concern underlies his interest in crime and sexuality, and thereby puts him in the closest proximity to thinkers like Kant and Diderot, but also at the furthest extreme, in that it indicates how far the nature and status of reason is perverted. It is precisely this materialist critique of reason that is developed and demonstrated in his works, and which their reading makes persistently, excessively, apparent.

Sharing Common Ground makes a compelling contribution to an important emerging field that affects a broad swath of humanities. It uses historical, photographic, and literary examples, including an entirely new translation of a little known work by Marguerite Duras, presented here in full, to showcase the ethical capacity of art. Robert Harvey deploys critical tools borrowed from literature, aesthetics, and philosophy to mobilize the thought of several seminal figures in literature and theory including Michel Foucault, Marguerite Duras, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Giorgio Agamben, among a host of others. Construction sites, concentration camps, cemeteries, slums-such are only a few of the spaces that impel our imagination naturally toward what we commonly call "cultural memory." Sharing Common Ground reveals how the endeavor to think and imagine in common, and especially about the spaces we inhabit together, is critically important to human beings, artistically, culturally, and ethically.

Multimodality's popularity as a semiotic approach has not resulted in a common voice yet. Its conceptual anchoring as well as its empirical applications often remain localized and disparate, and ideas of a theory of multimodality are heterogeneous and uncoordinated. For the field to move ahead, it must achieve a more mature status of reflection, mutual support, and interaction with regard to both past and future directions. The red thread across the disciplines reflected in this book is a common goal of capturing the mechanisms of synergetic knowledge construction and transmission using diverse forms of expressions, i.e., multimodality. The collection of chapters brought together in the book reflects both a diversity of disciplines and common interests and challenges, thereby establishing an excellent roadmap for the future. The contributions revisit and redefine theoretical concepts or empirical analyses, which are crucial to the study of multimodality from various perspectives, with a view towards evolving issues of multimodal analysis. With this, the book aims at repositioning the field as a well-grounded scientific discipline with significant implications for future communication research in many fields of study.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture's engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.

Translation studies and humour studies are disciplines that have been long established but have seldom been looked at in conjunction. This volume looks at the intersection of the two disciplines as found in the media -- on television, in film and in print. From American cable drama to Japanese television this collection shows the range and insight of contemporary cross-disciplinary approaches to humour and translation.
Featuring a diverse and global range of contributors, this is a unique addition to existing literature in translation studies and it will appeal to a wide cross-section of scholars and postgraduates.

This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair's respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London "psychogeographically" to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore's psychogeography consists of bird's-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd's aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair's conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London's disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize "London-ness" as estranging.

Everywhere you look in Hawai'i, you might see the military. And yet, in daily life few residents see the military at all -- it is hidden in plain sight. This paradox of invisibility and visibility is the subject of Oh, Say, Can You See?, which maps the power relations involving gender, race, and class that define Hawai'i in relation to the national security state.

Authors Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull locate and "excavate" cemeteries, memorials, monuments, and museums, to show how the military constructs its gendered narrative upon prior colonial discourses. Among the sites considered are Fort DeRussy, Pearl Harbor, and Punchbowl Cemetery.

This semiotic investigation of ways the military marks Hawai'i necessarily explores the intersection of immigration, colonialism, military expansion, and tourism on the islands. Attending to the ways in which the military represents itself and others represent the military, the authors locate the particular representational elements that both conceal and reveal the military's presence and power.

How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth? Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in and informs theories of the body in performance, race, queer, disability, trans, gender, and new media studies. Throughout the 20th century, theories of the body have shifted from understanding the body as irrefutable material evidence of race, sex, and gender, to a social construction constituted in language. In the same period, theatre has struggled with representing ideas through live bodies while calling into question assumptions about the body. This volume demonstrates how theatre contributes to understanding the historical, contemporary and burgeoning theories of the body. It explores how theories of the body inform debates about labor conditions and spatial configurations. Theatre allows performers to shift an audience's understandings of the shape of the bodies on stage, possibly producing a reflexive dynamic for consideration of bodies offstage as well. In addition, casting choices in the theatre, most recently and popularly in Hamilton, question how certain bodies are "cast" in social, historical, and philosophical roles. Through an analysis of contemporary case studies, including The Balcony, Angels in America, and Father Comes Home from the Wars, this volume examines how the theatre theorizes bodies. Online resources are also available to accompany this book.

Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity explores the notion of subjectivity implicated in and articulated by Said in his writings. Analyzing several of his major works, Pannian argues that there is a shift in Said's intellectual trajectory that takes place after the composition of Orientalism. In so doing, Said forthrightly attempts to retrieve a theoretical and political humanism, as Pannian identifies, despite the difficult and sanguinary aspects of its past. He elaborates upon Said's understanding that only after recognising the structures of violence and coming to discern strategies of interpellation, may the individual subject effectively resist them. Pannian also explores Said's ideas on exilic subjectivity, the role of intellectuals, acts of memory, critical secularism, affiliation and solidarity before dwelling on his interface with Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams. This engagement marks Said's own subject formation, and shapes his self-reflexive mode of knowledge production.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

This book examines South Africa's post-apartheid culture through the lens of affect theory in order to argue that the socio-political project of the "new" South Africa, best exemplified in their Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings, was fundamentally an affective, emotional project. Through the TRC hearings, which publicly broadcast the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the African National Congress government of South Africa, represented by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, endeavoured to generate powerful emotions of contrition and sympathy in order to build an empathetic bond between white and black citizens, a bond referred to frequently by Tutu in terms of the African philosophy of interconnection: ubuntu. This book explores the representations of affect, and the challenges of generating ubuntu, through close readings of a variety of cultural products: novels, poetry, memoir, drama, documentary film and audio anthology.

How does literature represent, challenge and help us understand our experience of globalization? Taking literary globalization studies beyond its traditional political focus, Literature and the Experience of Globalization explores how writers from Shakespeare through Goethe to Isak Dinesen, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Bruce Chatwin engage with the human dimensions of globalization. Through a wide range of insightful close readings, Svend Erik Larsen brings contemporary world literature approaches to bear on cross-cultural experiences of migration and travel, translation, memory, history and embodied knowledge. In doing so, this important intervention demonstrates how literature becomes an essential site for understanding the ways in which globalization has become an integral part of everyday experience.

Both comparative criticism and translation cross borders, yet borders that have been crossed still exist. Even a border that has been dismantled is likely to reappear in a different place, or as a less obvious set of limiting practices: migrant texts and migrant ideas, like migrant people, may not achieve full citizenship in their new locations. Of course, there is a creative aspect to borders too, as postcolonial theory in particular has emphasized. Borders are contact zones, generators of hybridity, spaces of exchange, cross-fertilization, and enrichment. For all these reasons, borders require minding - thinking about, managing, even in a sense policing. Rather than celebrating the crossing of borders, or dreaming of their abolition, Minding Borders traces their troubling and yet generative resilience. It explores how borders define as well as exclude, protect as well as violate, and nurture some identities while negating others. The contributors range comparatively across geography, politics, cultural circulation, creativity, and the structuration of academic disciplines, hoping that the analysis of borders in one domain may illuminate their workings in another. Whatever other form a border takes it is always also a border in the mind.

This book considers metaphor as a communicative phenomenon in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, in light of the relevance theory account of communication first developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the 1980s. The first half of the book introduces relevance theory, situating it in relation to literary criticism, and then surveys the history of metaphor in literary studies and assesses relevance theory's account of metaphor, including recent developments within the theory such as Robyn Carston's notion of 'the lingering of the literal'. The second half of the book considers the role of metaphor in the work of three nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets through the lens of three terms central to relevance theory: inference, implicature and mutual manifestness. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary studies, pragmatics and stylistics, as well as to relevance theorists.

"Milton, Evil and Literary History" addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables the agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalism system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read.Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question.

"Encountering Derrida" explores the points of engagement between Jacques Derrida and a host of other European thinkers, past and present, in order to counter recent claims that the era of deconstruction is finally drawing to a close. The book rereads Derrida in order to renew deconstruction's various conceptions of language, poetry, philosophy, institutions, difference and the future.This impressive collection of essays from the world's leading Derrida scholars re-evaluates Derrida's legacy and looks forward to the possible futures of deconstruction by confronting various challenges to Derrida's thought. Collectively, the essays argue that Derrida must be read alongside others, an approach that produces some surprising new accounts of this challenging critical thinker.

The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere.

Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand's works and her wider Objectivist philosophy. While Rand's texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology promoted within them, these essays argue instead that they need to be taken seriously and analysed in detail. Rand's influential worldview does not tolerate uncertainty, relying as it does upon a notion of truth untroubled by doubt. In contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that any progressive response to Rand should resist the dubious comforts of a position of ethical or aesthetic purity, even as they challenge the reductive individualistic ideology promoted within her writing. Drawing on a range of sources and approaches from Psychoanalysis to The Gold Standard and from Hannah Arendt to Spiderman, these essays consider Rand's works in the context of wider political, economic, and philosophical debates.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.