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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
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.
1) This book presents a comprehensive account of the eminent Bengali writer and activist, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre in its full range and versatility. 2) It draws attention to Devi's role as a woman writer with a difference and her image outside Bengal. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian Literature and Cultural studies across UK.
Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker's poem "Obsession" (1992) and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (1997) most strongly extend Bronte's dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush's music video "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and Peter Kosminsky's film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart's novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath's poem, "Wuthering Heights" (1961). Bronte's Wuthering Heights and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold's film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.
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.
This study, first published in 1945, gives a precise description of the unfolding of a great poet's craftsmanship and suggests alignments of the technical progression with the changes of the mind. Metrical analysis is given in order to throw light on Keats' general stylistic development using the simplest terminology and in a traditional manner. Earlier English prosodic writings are referred to throughout in order to place the style and development in the context of the period. Arranged chronologically, each chapter looks at a particular work or group of works drawing together evidence about Keats' poetic direction. This classic work from a well-known Keats scholar is an important enlightening contribution within the extensive study of Keats' poetry and letters.
Focusing mainly upon language, communication, textuality, etc., as is overwhelmingly today's fashion, we miss the very raison d'etre of literature and language itself. Moving a step further in our investigation of the anthropologico-ontopoietic sources of the life-significance of literature by unravelling the function of imaginatio creatrix in man's self interpretation-in-existence, this collection seeks to bring forth the royal role of allegory in the fostering of culture. A conjoint work of human elemental passions and of the human spirit, allegory mediates between lofty ideals of the highest human strivings and the pedestrian realm of facts. Interpretative or theoretical studies encompass allegory -- mediaeval, modern and post-modern -- in various literatures. Among the authors are: Tymieniecka, Kronegger, Jorge Garcia Gomez, V. Osadnik, H. Hellerstein, H. Rudnick, R. Kiefer, V. Fichera, K. Haney, Ch. Raffini, J. Williamson, B. Ross and Sitansu Ray. "
This book examines Uncreative Writing-the catch-all term to describe Neo-Conceptualism, Flarf and related avant-garde movements in contemporary North American poetry-against a decade of controversy. David Kaufman analyzes texts by Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, Ara Shirinyan, Craig Dworkin, Dan Farrell and Katie Degentesh to demonstrate that Uncreative Writing is not a revolutionary break from lyric tradition as its proponents claim. Nor is it a racist, reactionary capitulation to neo-liberalism as its detractors argue. Rather, this monograph shows that Uncreative Writing's real innovations and weaknesses become clearest when read in the context of the very lyric that it claims to have left behind.
This innovative volume establishes autofiction as a new and dynamic area of theoretical research in English. Since the term was coined by Serge Doubrovsky, autofiction has become established as a recognizable genre within the French literary pantheon. Yet unlike other areas of French theory, English-language discussion of autofiction has been relatively limited - until now. Starting out by exploring the characteristic features and definitions of autofiction from a conceptual standpoint, the collection identifies a number of cultural, historical and theoretical contexts in which the emergence of autofiction in English can be understood. In the process, it identifies what is new and distinctive about Anglophone forms of autofiction when compared to its French equivalents. These include a preoccupation with the conditions of authorship; writing after trauma; and a heightened degree of authorial self-reflexivity beyond that typically associated with postmodernism. By concluding that there is such a field as autofiction in English, it provides for the first time detailed analysis of the major works in that field and a concise historical overview of its emergence. It thus opens up new avenues in life writing and authorship research.
This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. The phallic eye is analyzed as a spectacle of the obscene, the scene and the sin, a visualization of guilty pleasures and outrageous lusts that evoke anxiety, guilt, satisfaction, intimacy and intimidation. The phallic eye is a powerful and useful metaphor for a radical investigation of the interrelations between spectatorship, authorship, dominance, Mulvey's theorization of voyeurism/exhibitionism/Looked-at-ness, and surveillance of human desires and visual pleasures. This volume suggests a broad perspective on the phallus as passionate, dynamic and energetic force, which is more than the consuming, predatory eye of the beholder who yearns for sensational spectacles. The chapters focus on thrillers, horror cinema, pornography, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics, queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and phallic ethnicities.
In its first edition, this book was a new opening in the study of the Arabian Nights as an index of literary taste, a case study for the engagements of poets and writers, along with the common reading public, with an art that took Europe by surprise, and forced new patterns of response and writing. Borges thought of its advent as a dynamic that helped generate the romantic mode and sensibility. It certainly disturbed old habits of thought and made significant cultural inroads throughout European cultures. Almost no one in 18th-19th century literatures remained oblivious to that sweeping phenomenal appearance. The book analyzes and studies modes and patterns of reading, response, engagement, commentary, translations, claims to authentication, abridgements, and illustrations. It focuses on debates and controversies around the Arabian Nights, and shows how these happened to be at the center of a growing colonial culture. This book can never lose its significance for students, scholars, and general readership, not only in the field of comparative and cultural studies, English and French departments, but also in postcolonial studies and the basics of narrative and narratology.
This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.
Aaron Hillyer considers the fate and implications of Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic formulation of literature's future: Literature is heading to its essence, which is its disappearance. The Disappearance of Literature's primary theoretical objective is to highlight a previously neglected difference between Blanchot's and Agamben's philosophies. These philosophical and literary arguments proceed by examining a series of related concepts: study, sexuality, language, mysticism, and friendship. Despite the fact that Blanchot and Agamben often serve today as primary points of reference for literary theory, no significant critical work has yet examined their works in a sustained dialogue. Hillyer initiates this new trajectory of research through readings of Blanchot's The Unavowable Community and Agamben's The Open, which are followed by encounters with books by contemporary writers Vila-Matas, Aira, and Carson. The juxtaposition of these two different forms of writing (philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy) shows that the new kind of writing analyzed here holds both literature and philosophy at a certain distance from each other as well as from themselves.The primary means of this distantiation is the gesture of deactivation performed by the act of study. The narrators and authors examined here often study both literature and philosophy in order to remove them from their perilous metaphysical foundations. In this way, Hillyer argues, the study-novel emerges as a basic paradigm of the disappearance of literature, a new category of literary creation marked by Agamben's dispute with Blanchot.
First published in 1992, Authorship and Copyright traces the history of constructions of authorship as a legal reality. It offers an alternative to the two mainstream interpretations that have traditionally been assigned to authorship: the Romantic dialectical 'birth of the author' or the language-based post-structuralist 'death of the author.' Saunders examines the shortcomings of both schemes by arguing that they impose an arbitrary philosophical direction on the history of authorship and the law of copyright. Saunders addresses the issues relating to copyright and the construction of authorship as a legal status. Combining information and polemic, the author explores such matters as the historical and theoretical relations of copyright and the droit moral, the aestheticization of the law and the juridification of aesthetics, and the argument that authorship as a legal reality is a historically contingent and variable arrangement that cannot be separated from its cultural and juridical context. This book will be of interest to students of law, literature and philosophy.
This book introduces Elite Theory to the literary study of class as a framework for addressing issues of the nature of governance in political fiction. The book describes the historical development and major tenets of Elite Theory, and shows how each of four post-war Washington novels-Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C.; Allen Drury's Advise and Consent; Joan Didion's Democracy; and Ward Just's Echo House-illustrates the way class-based political elites exhibit forms of "ruling-class consciousness" and maintain their legitimacy in an ostensibly democratic form of government by promoting themselves as models of behavior, promulgating an ideology that justifies their rule through their control of the media, and accepting new members from the lower classes. Reading these novels through a socio-political lens, David Smit offers suggestions for ways to work for a more just and equitable society in light of what this analysis reveals about the "culture" that produces our political elites.
First published in 1989, this book analyses fiction and long narrative, drawing on a broad range of writing from earlier periods and on recent narrative theory. Gillian Beer looks at the work of writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Philip Sydney, Samuel Richardson, and George Eliot. Three chapters on Virginia Woolf demonstrate how Woolf's reading of past literature, philosophy, and science gave her an intellectual and emotional purchase on problems of feminism and modernism. Beer examines how writers create dialogues with past writing, how readers of the present day engage with the difference of past literature, and how we make contact with the desires and debates of past readers.
This book expands upon a range of economic insights within the overall context of critical theory, particularly with respect to the question of socioeconomic inequalities, and presents an explanation of how critical theory provides a number of interesting perspectives for economists. Economic agents, deliberately imprisoned in their instrumental rationality as a means to survive under competitive relationships, are microscopic constituents of systemic forces which exist beyond their will. Despite the subjective rationality of such agents in terms of formally-logical consistency and transitivity, aggregate market distributional mechanisms also display non-rational patterns. The crucial aspect of the dynamics of this system consists of the paralysing effect of the high level of socioeconomic inequality, which is driven by a permanent struggle for self-preservation under competitive rules; it is a reminiscence of natural, uncivilised relationships that constituted the reproduction process of the whole. These reified agents thus become instruments of their socially constructed powers on the one hand, and objects of their existential conditionality on the other. Hence, the dialectical approach adopted by the author aims to uncover the way in which structurally-genetic market forces govern individual behaviour, as well as how individual behaviour shapes these structurally-genetic forces, which, together, form the transcending principles of unequal distribution. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the political economy, philosophy and the methodology of the social sciences, especially those concerned with inequality issues. This book includes a preface written by Professor Martin Jay.
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
Essays covering a broad range of genres and ranging from the late Ottoman era to contemporary literature open the debate on the place of Turkish literature in the globalized literary world. Explorations of the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman literary scene are complemented by examples of cross-generational intertextual encounters. The renowned poet Nazim Hikmet is studied from a variety of angles, while contemporary and popular writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak are contextualized. Turkish Literature as World Literature not only fills a significant lacuna in world literary studies but also draws a composite historical, political, and cultural portrait of Turkey in its relations with the broader world.
With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.
Honorable Mention, Harry Levin Prize, 2022 (American Comparative Literature Association) Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia. Tiwari argues that Indic words for world (vishva, jagat, sansar) offer a nuanced understanding of world literature that is antithetical to a commodified and standardized monolingual globe. She develops a comparative study of the concept of "world literature" (vishva sahitya) in Rabindranath Tagore's works, the desire for a new world in the lyrics of the Hindi shadowism (chhayavaad) poets, and world-making in Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen (1956) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). By emphasizing the centrality of "literature" (sahitya) through a close reading of texts, Tiwari orients world literature toward comparative literature and comparative literature toward a worldliness that is receptive to the poetics of a world in its original language and in translation.
This stimulating volume brings together an international team of emerging, mid-career, and senior scholars to investigate the relations between philosophical approaches to language and the language of literature. It has proven easy for philosophers of language to leave literary language to one side, just as it has proven easy for literary scholars to discuss questions of meaning separately from relevant issues in the philosophy of language. This volume brings the two together in mutually enlightening ways: considerations of literary meaning are deepened by adding philosophical approaches, just as philosophical issues are enriched by bringing them into contact or interweaving them with literary cases in all their subtlety.
This book is a fierce argument against social and caste discrimination in India, especially untouchability and emphatic call for social justice. Written by a first-generation Kannada Dalit writer, the book provides an insider's view of caste discrimination as the author has lived through and experienced it. It traces the roots of present-day activism against caste discrimination, the influence of Ambedkar, the rise of Hindutva, and the role of Dalit literatures in shaping discourses around caste in India. An invigorating collection of essays and speeches by Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of discrimination, literature, politics and political philosophy, exclusion studies, race, social justice, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.
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 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. |
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