Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions - questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.

When Homeric heroes think about the meaning of their actions, they expect this to take the form of kleos, 'fame', in a future song. This volume explores the consequences of this mode of thinking in the Iliad in particular, and argues that the form of kleos and the interposition of a gap of time between event and meaning produces widespread effects, not only for the thought and psyche of the heroes, but also for the nature of poetry and Homeric scholarship. Is epic time continuous, perpetuating the fame of the heroes in the flow of poetic tradition, or does a gap intervene to put into doubt the self-identity of meaning and the possibility of memory? This question connects the poetic logic of fame for the heroes and singers of epic to the implicit temporalities of Homeric studies. Alongside the analysis of literary figures from the Iliad, such as narrative, objects and similes, this volume reads modern scholarship on Homer - including oral theory, neoanalysis and traditional referentiality - as forms of reception which have produced distinct responses to the temporality of ancient epic. The participants in epic kleos - heroes, poets and scholars - encounter each other through a tradition that joins the memories and presentiments of a past that did not happen and futures that will never arrive.

This book provides teachers and students of literature with a resource that gives them guidance to the philosophical influences on literary criticism and literary figures. Its goal is to lead teachers and students to a greater understanding of concepts with which they may have some familiarity. The writers chosen are those whose works most commonly appear in high school and college literature anthologies. The text describes major philosophical influences reflected in their writings as well as references to philosophical works that are known to have played a part in their intellectual and aesthetic development.

This volume is a source of philosophical influences in fiction, poetry, and drama. The entries on 123 writers, arranged in alphabetical order, are supplemented by a section of brief bio-bibliographical profiles of more than 75 relevant philosophers and a glossary of philosophical terms, concepts, and movements. Following each author study is a selected bibliography of suggested sources for further reading. The book ends with a list of general sources on literary theory and philosophy, stressing their interrelationships. A cross-referencing system is provided for the convenience of readers. Symbols within the entries guide the reader to entries in the philosopher section, the glossary, and to other author entries. Students and teachers of both literature and philosophy will find this work of extreme interest.

Women's Experimental Writing considers six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique in their fiction and feminism. The authors covered are Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry. These writers all share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class and nation-based experience that, they suggest, may only be "represented" accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality. Ellen Berry extends the anti-social negative critique predominant in queer studies by offering an alternative archive of feminist negative literary practices and explores the consequences of joining an anti-social critique with radical innovations in literary and cultural forms. She argues that the radical aesthetic practices the authors employ are central to the emergence of contemporary Western feminisms and in doing so rectifies a critical neglect of contemporary experimental writing by women, especially in politicized forms, within the still-emerging postmodern canon.

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophuls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

Part of the acclaimed series of anthologies which document major themes and ideas in contemporary art. An essential collection of texts reflecting on the cultural and political complexities of translation in global contemporary artistic practices. The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture: the intricacies of ancient and modern Jewish diaspora, waves of colonisation and the transportation of slaves are now superimposed by economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles and refugees. This timely anthology will consider translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation and understanding, exploring the approaches of artists, poets and theorists in negotiating increasingly protean identities: from the intrinsic intimacy of language, to translation's embedded structures of knowledge production and interaction, to its limitations of expression and, ultimately, its importance in a world of multiple perspectives. Artists surveyed include Meric Algun Ringborg, Geta Bratescu, Tanya Bruguera, Chto Delat, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Susan Hiller, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Shirin Neshat, Helio Oiticica, Pratchaya Phinthong, Kurt Schwitters, Yinka Shonibare, Mladen Stilinovic, Erika Tan, Kara Walker, Wu Tsang. Writers include Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Sarat Maharaj, Martha Rosler, Bertrand Russell, Simon Sheikh, Gayatri Spivak, Hito Steyerl, Lawrence Venuti.

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Jacques Derrida has argued about the difference between literature and theory that despite its institutional status, part of its 'institution' is the right of literature to say anything. Literature cannot be defined as such, and as soon as one seeks to produce a reading of the literary, complications arise.
Yet despite its institutional significance, 'theory' remains something many wish would go away; and which, for others, is still not read, is misread, and remains to be read. Like literature, it remains as an enigmatic identity, resistant to definition, but subject to misperceptions and open to general statements that are more or less inaccurate.
By examining how 'theory' and 'literature' are concepts and names which touch on one other in complex ways, "Julian Wolfreys" seeks to understand their intersections and differences. Examining a wide range of authors, from Dickens to Joyce, and engaging directly with a number of major theorists, Wolfreys takes the reader on a journey through the issues and ideas involved in reading literature, in theory.

In this study, the author explores how Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Huxley and others responded to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. Assuming that artists and writers, in coping with those problems, would develop techniques in many ways comparable, even where there was no direct contact, he positions modernist literature within the context of contemporary painting, architecture and sculpture, thereby providing some interesting insights into the nature of the literary works themselves.

This study should be of interest to the scholar and aficionado alike. It uncovers a thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far reaching use of humour. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the author argues the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of many of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

This title offers a new critical approach to E.M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers. This is a unique and fresh addition to the changing field of postcolonial studies and offers new insight into the controversial relationship between colonial and postcolonial writing.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at 'The Beginning' and concluding with 'The End', chapters range from the familiar, such as 'Character', 'Narrative' and 'The Author', to the more unusual, such as 'Secrets', 'Pleasure' and 'Ghosts'. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle's classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout. In addition, four new chapters - 'Literature', 'Loss', 'Human' and 'Migrant' - engage with exciting recent developments in literary studies. As well as fully up-to-date further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and an invaluable glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader's eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that as it has moved toward greater interdisciplinarity it has grown sceptical of the aesthetic. This anthology reasserts the continuing relevance of the aesthetic and to reintegrate it into the widening repertoire of contemporary literary critical practices.

From its inception literary aesthetics has been engaged in the full range of debates generated by the criticism of culture. Unlike the more restricted discourse of philosophical aesthetics, it has explored the ways in which value commitments extend across disciplinary domains by reckoning with the practical concerns of art production and consumption.

The readings in this anthology reach back to classical sources of philosophical aesthetics and forward to the most current accounts of the utility/value of the literary artwork in post-modern culture. The organization of the text is designed to engage the reader in the shaping debates of literary aesthetic theory and demonstrate their continuing relevance for our understanding of the ways literature sustains and critiques culture.

In his famous classification of the sciences, Francis Bacon not only catalogued those branches of knowledge that already existed in his time, but also anticipated the new disciplines he believed would emerge in the future: the "desirable sciences." Mikhail Epstein echoes, in part, Bacon's vision and outlines the "desirable" disciplines and methodologies that may emerge in the humanities in response to the new realities of the twenty-first century. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should they have some active, constructive supplement? We know that technology serves as the practical extension of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences. Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively.
The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto addresses the question: Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to the transformative status of technology and politics? It argues that we need a practical branch of the humanities which functions similarly to technology and politics, but is specific to the cultural domain.

Jane H. M. Taylor is one of the world's foremost scholars of rewriting or reecriture. Her focus has been on literature in medieval and Renaissance France, but rewriting, including continuation, translation, and adaptation, lies at the heart of literary traditions in all vernaculars. This book explores both the interdisciplinarity of rewriting and Taylor's remarkable contribution to its study. The rewriting and reinterpretation of narratives across chronological, social and/or linguistic boundaries represents not only a crucial feature of text transmission, but also a locus of cultural exchange. Taylor has shown that the adaptation of material to conform to the expectations, values, or literary tastes of a different audience can reveal important information regarding the acculturation and reception of medieval texts. In recent years, numerous scholars across disciplines have thus turned to this field of enquiry. This collection of studies dedicated to the rewriting of medieval French literature from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries by Taylor's friends, colleagues, and former students offers not only a fitting tribute to Taylor's career, but also a timely consolidation of the very latest research in the field, which will be vital for all scholars of medieval rewriting. With contributions from Jessica Taylor, Keith Busby, Leah Tether, Logan E. Whalen, Mireille Seguy, Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Ad Putter, Anne Salamon, Patrick Moran, Nathalie Koble, Bart Besamusca, Frank Brandsma, Richard Trachsler, Carol J. Chase, Maria Colombo Timelli, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Joan Tasker-Grimbert, Jean-Claude Muhlethaler, Michelle Szkilnik, Thomas Hinton, Elizabeth Archibald.

Writing against the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Whitehead turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. By turns provocative and deeply affecting, this book brings suicide into conversation with the critical medical humanities, extending beyond individual pathology and the medical institution to think about subjective and social perspectives, and to open up the various sites, scenes and interactions with which suicide is associated. Suicide is related forward from the point of death, rather than taking a retrospective view. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection based on her own experience of her sister's suicide, Whitehead examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship.

Alan H. Goldman presents an original and lucid account of the relationship between philosophy and the novel. In the first part, on philosophy of novels, he defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Goldman argues that works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels' literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more, Goldman's view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially those which limit it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of Goldman's broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which he explores through a discussion of rival interpretations of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Goldman goes on to test the theory of value by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. The second part of the book, on philosophy in novels, explores themes relating to moral agency-moral development, motivation, and disintegration-in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters' lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters' moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.

"Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. "Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century" will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

This book brings together three main topics - deconstruction, philosophy of language, and literary theory - that have figured centrally in Christopher Norris' work over the past two decades. It offers a refreshingly clear and vigorous statement of his views as to how 'theory' might profit from a greater awareness of current philosophical debates while philosophy might likewise gain by adopting a more open-minded attitude toward developments in literary theory. Most significant here is Norris's continuing exploration of the various points of contact between Jacques Derrida's thought and the kinds of concern - especially with issues in philosophical semantics and speech-act theory - that have preoccupied thinkers in the 'other', mainstream-analytic line of descent. However, his focus is consistently on matters that should be of interest to philosophers and literary theorists alike. Thus, Norris devotes some penetrating commentary to topics such as modal or 'possible-worlds' logic as it bears upon issues in narrative theory; the 'two cultures' (science versus literature) controversy; the different ways in which literary theory has alternately embraced and rejected the appeal to 'scientific' modes of analysis; and some possible reasons for Wittgenstein's well-known aversion to Shakespeare. He also suggests a novel approach to the free-will/determinism issue by way of debates about the nature of language and the scope it affords for expressive creativity despite - or owing to - the limits imposed by various structural constraints. Altogether, this important new book provides a welcome overview of the author's current thinking and an equally welcome enlargement of horizons in contrast to the narrowly specialised character of much present-day academic discourse.

Modernist Nowheres explores connections in the Anglo-American sphere between early literary modernist cultures, politics, and utopia. Foregrounding such writers as Conrad, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, it presents a new reading of early modernism in which utopianism plays a defining role prior to, during and immediately after the First World War.

In this brilliant collection, a renowned critic vividly depicts the dynamic relationships between authors, their work, and their readers Acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author's life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives. In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author's ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers' reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation. This original and daring collection takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.

Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

Using the idea of 'parability, 'or the ability for writers to tell improper stories, as a foundation, Alan Ramon Clinton synthesizes a new model for a creative, more daring literary criticism. Sharp and surprising, this wide-ranging project engages with the work of Pynchon, Eco, Forche, Merrill, Weiner, Plath, Ashbery, and Eigner