Don DeLillo, American Original is a startlingly original and provocative reinterpretation of one of the most important novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adopting a direct approach that steers clear of debates with secondary literature and covering the full arc of Don DeLillo's career from A to Z - Americana (1971) to Zero K (2016) - Michael Naas shows that the extraordinary power, authority, insight, and inventiveness of DeLillo's fiction are the result of the way it traffics everywhere in contraband goods and narratives, in doubleness or duplicity of every kind, in multiple voices, story lines, times, places, and media that at once interrupt and complement one another. This is a book that invites skimming and dipping, structured into easily digestible sections on everything from weapons and drugs to erotica, nuclear waste, and secret societies, each preceded by humorous and incisive epigraphs from DeLillo's novels. Michael Naas reads DeLillo's fiction as a way of life or as equipment for living, rather than as a critical puzzle to be solved - and thereby opens up new horizons for thinking about why literature matters in the 21st century.

Offers a new perspective on Joyce. Examines replacement children in psychotherapy. Examines themes including survivor's guilt, transgenerational trauma, fear and passion, and phobias.

Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980-2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women's writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women's writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature addresses the role of young adult (YA) Irish literature in responding and contributing to some of the most controversial and contemporary issues in today's modern society: gender, and conflicting views of power, sexism and consent. This volume provides an original, innovative and necessary examination of how "rape culture" and the intersections between feminism and power have become increasingly relevant to Irish society in the years since Irish author Louise O'Neill's novels for young adults Only Ever Yours and Asking For It were published. In consideration of the socio-political context in Ireland and broader Western culture from which O'Neill's works were written, and taking into account a selection of Irish, American, Australian and British YA texts that address similar issues in different contexts, this book highlights the contradictions in O'Neill's works and illuminates their potential to function as a form of literary/social fundamentalism which often undermines, rather than promotes, equality.

Includes a first-hand account of the experience of depersonalization Examines depersonalization in relation to well-known literary texts, including Camus's The Strange and Sartre's Nausea, and shows how the concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky Explores how creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from the study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing

1) This volume questions the colonially structured interpretations and binaries in understanding post-colonial history and myths. 2) It contains articles written by scholars based in South Asia, Latin America and Europe. 3) Interdisciplinary and challenging the stereotypes, this book will be of interest to departments of post-colonial studies and cultural studies across UK and USA.

Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has gained global prominence in the course of last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the research and teaching of law with a considerable body of new and valuable knowledge and understanding. Most of the knowledge and insights generated by the movement concern either a thematic overlap between legal and literary discourses - suggesting they deal with the same moral concerns - or a rhetorical, semiotic or general linguistic comparability or 'sameness' between them - imputing to both the same or very similar narrative structures. The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law recognises the wealth of knowledge generated by this approach to the relationship between law and literature, and acknowledges its debt to this genre of scholarship. It nevertheless also proposes, on the basis of a number of revealing phenomenological inquiries, a different approach to law and literary studies: one that emphasises the irreducible difference between law and literature. It does so with the firm believe that a regard for the very different and indeed opposite discursive trajectories of legal and literary language allows for a more profound understanding of the unique and indeed separate roles that the discourses of law and literature generally play in the sustenance of relatively stable legal cultures. This important rethinking of the relationship between law and literature will appeal to scholars and students of legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy, politics and literary theory.

How can Clarice Lispector's writings help us make sense of the Anthropocene? How does race intersect with the treatment of animals in the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? What can Indigenous philosopher and leader Ailton Krenak teach us about the relationship between environmental degradation and the production of knowledge? Literature Beyond the Human is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to an investigation of Brazilian literature from the viewpoint of the environmental humanities, animal studies, Anthropocene studies, and other critical and theoretical perspectives that question the centrality of the human. This volume includes 15 chapters by leading scholars covering two centuries of Brazilian literary production, from Goncalves Dias to Astrid Cabral, from Euclides da Cunha to Davi Kopenawa, and others. By underscoring the vast theoretical potential of Brazilian literature and thought, from the influential Modernist thesis of "cultural cannibalism" (antropofagia) to the renewed interest in Amerindian perspectivism in culture. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil shows how the theoretical strength of Brazilian thought can contribute to contemporary debates in the anglophone realm.

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899-1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923-1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia examines the growing significance of the eco-implications of the increasing militarism of East Asia. As a transcultural image and metaphor, mushroom clouds signify anthropogenic violence and destruction, as exemplified by wars and nuclear bombings. Immediately evoking memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds metaphor has deep roots and implications in East Asia, and this volume explores these roots and implications from the perspectives of a variety of scholars and artists from different parts of East Asia. The chapters that comprise Mushroom Clouds respond to the increasingly dangerous developments in the world that led up to and have occurred since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, developments that threaten the stability of the region and the world. In the wake of the 70th anniversary of the division of Korea, increasing attention has been focused on the legacy of the Cold War, on the one hand, and on the continuing militarization of East Asia, on the other. After the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the truce across the 38th parallel, after the shelling of Kinmen and Matsu, East Asia became (and remains) one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. Under the shadow of war, however, the concern about environmental impacts has been growing, not only in social discourse but also in literature and the visual arts. The first of its kind, Mushroom Clouds gathers ecocritics from East Asia to examine issues such as militarization, militarized islands, military tourism, military villages, post-war environments, nuclear accidents, and the demilitarized sone (DMZ) wildlife, among others, in East Asia.

Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book's detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen's career-from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony-these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen's language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways.

Occupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one's life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric's indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival. Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory "in question" and receptive to alternative futures to come. Hoag likewise demonstrates how one might occupy memory through insights gleaned from analyzing artifacts, media, events, and tropes from the Occupy Movement, a contemporary national and international movement for socioeconomic justice.

The first comprehensive critique of the critical and cultural theories after postmodernism by a Chinese scholar in a international and comparative manner. Offers a panoramic overview of the critical and cultural theories in the 20th century in a theoretical way. Offers non-EuroAmerican perspectives on Western literary theories and cultural trends.

The system of "seven states of consciousness" articulated by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi forms the basis of this unusual critique of modern literature. In seven chapters, "Invitation to the Dance," "Absurdity," "Transcendence," "Enlightenment," "Celebration," "Unity," and "The Enlightened Artist," Douglas Mackey here examines fourteen well-known writers and their equally well-known works.

Spiritual Grammar identifies a genre of religious literature that until now has not been recognized as such. In this surprising and theoretically nuanced study, F. Dominic Longo reveals how grammatical structures of language addressed in two medieval texts published nearly four centuries apart, from distinct religious traditions, offer a metaphor for how the self is embedded in spiritual reality. Reading The Grammar of Hearts (Nahw al-qulub) by the great Sufi shaykh and Islamic scholar 'Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri (d. 1074) and Moralized Grammar (Donatus moralizatus) by Christian theologian Jean Gerson (d. 1429), Longo reveals how both authors use the rules of language and syntax to advance their pastoral goals. Indeed, grammar provides the two masters with a fresh way of explaining spiritual reality to their pupils and to discipline the souls of their readers in the hopes that their writings would make others adept in the grammar of the heart.

This is the first full commentary on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator,". the essay is very popular and widely taught at p/g level, but is also cryptic and misunderstood, hence the need for this detailed and nuanced treatment. It is also the only commentary on Benjamin's essay at book or article length ever to experiment with the mode of translating that he himself championed.

This book is the first to develop a Baudrillardian critique of the problematic way Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a clinical practice and by extension as a source of socio-cultural and philosophical theory, continues its vain attempt to (re)animate a subject of the unconscious. The text throws into question Lacan's notion of the 'real,' the unconscious 'structured as a language,' and his construct of surplus, while interrogating the links between psychoanalysis and Marxism. It shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its questionable ethics, transpires as an endlessly recursive simulation model. Lacan's clinical seminar was influential in the intellectual milieu of Paris while Baudrillard was writing. Although frequently referring to psychoanalysis, Baudrillard never wrote a detailed critique of psychoanalysis; the scaffolding of such a work, however, transpires throughout the extent of his writing. The text also outlines Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis stressing how the alternative they propose remains within the oppressive terms of our current world. This book is an essential resource for social, critical, cultural, literary, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. While of interest to students, researchers, and scholars of Jean Baudrillard's work and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this book particularly addresses those for whom not all is well with psychoanalysis, opening towards renewed directions through questioning.

The rise of Creative Writing has been accompanied from the start by two questions: can it be taught, and should it be taught? This scepticism is sometimes shared even by those who teach it, who often find themselves split between two contradictory identities: the artistic and the academic. Against Creative Writing explores the difference between 'writing', which is what writers do, and Creative Writing, which is the instrumentalisation of what writers do. Beginning with the question of whether writing can or ought to be taught, it looks in turn at the justifications for BA, MA, and PhD courses, and concludes with the divided role of the writer who teaches. It argues in favour of Creative Writing as a form of hands-on literary education at undergraduate level and a form of literary apprenticeship at graduate level, especially in widening access to new voices. It argues against those forms of Creative Writing that lose sight of literary values - as seen in the proliferation of curricular couplings with non-literary subjects, or the increasing emphasis on developing skills for future employment. Against Creative Writing, written by a writer, is addressed to other writers, inside or outside the academy, at undergraduate or graduate level, whether 'creative' or 'critical'.

1. The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. 2. This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau's Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime. 3. Readers who think they know who and what 'Pierrot' is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race. 4. There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth. 5. Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can't necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.

Adopting an intersectional lens, this timely volume explores the lived experiences of members of the queer and trans community in post-secondary STEM culture in the US to provide critical insights into progressing socially just STEM education pathways. Offering contributions from students, faculty, practitioners, and administrators, the volume highlights prevailing issues of heteronormativity and marginalization across a range of STEM disciplines. Autoethnographic accounts place minority experiences within the broader context of social and cultural phenomena to reveal subtle and overt forms of exclusion, and systematic barriers to participation in STEM professions, academia, and research. Finally, the book offers key recommendations to inform future research and practice. This volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, engineering education, and the sociology of education more broadly. Those involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion within education, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies will also benefit from this volume.

Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Novel responds to the critical need for transdisciplinary research on the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe. It represents the first sustained analysis of the connection between colonial legacy and present-day ecological catastrophe in postcolonial fiction. Analyzing contemporary South Asian and South Pacific novels that grapple with climate change and catastrophe, environmental exploitation and instability, and human-nonhuman relationships in degraded environments, it offers a much-needed corrective to dominant narratives about climate, crisis, and the everyday. Highlighting the contributions of literary fiction from the postcolonial South to the growing field of the environmental humanities, this book reconsiders the novel's relationship with climate change and the contemporary environmental imaginary. Counter to dominant current theoretical discourses, it demonstrates that the novel form is ideally suited to literary and imaginative engagements with climate change and ecological catastrophe. The six case studies it examines connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies, reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary imaginations of post-catastrophe recovery, and together constellate a decolonial perspective on ecological catastrophe in the era of climate change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous authors and scholars who write about and against the Anthropocene, this book displaces conventional ways of thinking about the relationship between the mundane and the catastrophic and promotes greater dialogue between the largely siloed fields of postcolonial, Indigenous, and disaster studies.

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood - Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor - and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of "to-be-looked-at-ness" is countered by a hermeneutics of "to-be-seen-through-ness." The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw-Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice-in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers-in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.

Bridging the gap between decadence as it is traditionally understood in literary and cultural studies and its relevance to current phenomena, this interdisciplinary collection examines literary texts and movies from Europe and the United States since 1945.