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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks
ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following
in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going a
rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential
of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence
in Dante's humanism (Ossola), which claims for European
civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in
the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of
an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in
which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the
conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of
eschatological overcoming (Mendonca); finally, the relationship
with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and
intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original
scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni,
Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the
reconstruction of Dante's presence in Portuguese literature
(Almeida, Espirito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho):
they attest to the innovative impact of Dante's work even in
literary traditions more distant from it.
In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that "everything in our social
life-from economic value and state power to practices and to the
very structure of the psyche itself-can be said to have become
'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense." The essays
in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty
years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics,
and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment
when interpretation (including "ideology critique" and "symptomatic
reading") has been variously supplanted by descriptivism,
empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue
the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is
attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism.
Spanning a wide range of cultural sites-from recent Hollywood
cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape
photography, contemporary West African art, and "new materialism"
in philosophy-they ask what the "formal tendencies" of contemporary
cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the
cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes
a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors.
Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller,
Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano,
Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue
This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today
offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory,
providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to
literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis;
Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and
semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism;
lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism;
postcolonial criticism, and ecocriticism. This new edition
features: * A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections
on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical,
Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial
ecocriticism and environmental justice * Considerable updates to
the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory,
postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including the terminology
and theoretical concepts * An extended explanation of each theory,
using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety
of literary texts * A list of specific questions critics ask about
literary texts * An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The
Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory * A list of questions
for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to
different literary works * Updated and expanded bibliographies Both
engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate
and graduate students new to critical theory and for college
professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical
approaches to literature.
Metaphysics of Children's Literature is the first sustained study
of ways in which children's literature confronts metaphysical
questions about reality and the nature of what there is in the
world. In its exploration of something and nothing, this book
identifies a number of metaphysical structures in texts for young
people-such as the ontological exchange or nowhere in
extremis-demonstrating that their entanglement with the workings of
reality is unique to the conditions of children's literature.
Drawing on contemporary children's literature discourse and
metaphysicians from Heidegger and Levinas, to Bachelard, Sartre and
Haraway, Lisa Sainsbury reveals the metaphysical groundwork of
children's literature. Authors and illustrators covered include:
Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Mac Barnett, Ron Brooks, Peter Brown,
Lewis Carroll, Eoin Colfer, Gary Crew, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle,
Imme Dros, Sarah Ellis, Mem Fox, Zana Fraillon, Libby Gleeson,
Kenneth Grahame, Armin Greder, Sonya Hartnett, Tana Hoban, Judy
Horacek, Tove Jansson, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Elaine
Konigsburg, Norman Lindsay, Geraldine McCaughrean, Robert
Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, Jill Paton
Walsh, Philippa Pearce, Ivan Southall, William Steig, Shaun Tan,
Tarjei Vesaas, David Wiesner, Margaret Wild, Jacqueline Woodson and
many others.
Vacillating between the longue duree and microhistory, between
ideological critique and historical sympathy, between the contrary
formalisms of close and distant reading, literary historians
operate with such disparate senses of what the term "history" means
that the field risks compartmentalization and estrangement. The
Romantic Historicism to Come engages this uncertainty in order to
construct a more robust, more capacious idea of history. Focusing
attention on Romantic conceptions of history's connection to the
future, The Romantic Historicism to Come examines the complications
of not only Romantic historicism, but also our own contemporary
critical methods: what would it mean if the causal assumptions that
underpin our historical judgments do not themselves develop in a
stable, progressive manner? Articulating history's minimum
conditions, Jonathan Crimmins develops a theoretical apparatus that
accounts for the concurrent influence of the various
sociohistorical forces that pressure each moment. He provides a
conception of history as open to radical change without severing
its connection to causality, better addressing the problem of the
future at the heart of questions about the past.
Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's
beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich
intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and
tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and
what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of
materials-from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies
of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to
C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove
Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri-Brittan moves with ease from personal
story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining
the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the
intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In
the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined
quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not
fundamental to anyone's existence or to the beliefs and practices
that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it
has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as
well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation
that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also
astonishing-always-as the enormously insightful readings in The Art
of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept's breadth as
sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in
so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace-social
but personal, pleasurable and essential.
Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling
historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with
challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period
not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the
Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in
migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the
history of science and technology. One can only come so close to
fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and
this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing,
deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing
different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates
historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the
last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism
debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with
Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies,
decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical
race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of
poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a
dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.
Narrative theory goes back to Plato. It is an approach that tries
to understand the abstract mechanism behind the story. This theory
has evolved throughout the years and has been adopted by numerous
domains and disciplines. Narrative therapy is one of many fields of
narrative that emerged in the 1990s and has turned into a rich
research field that feeds many disciplines today. Further study on
the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of narrative therapy is
vital to understand how it can be utilized to support society.
Narrative Theory and Therapy in the Post-Truth Era focuses on the
structure of the narrative and the possibilities it offers for
therapy as well as the post-modern sources of spiritual conflict
and how to benefit from the possibilities of the narrative while
healing them. Covering topics such as psychotherapy, cognitive
narratology, art therapy, and narrative structures, this reference
work is ideal for therapists, psychologists, communications
specialists, academicians, researchers, practitioners, scholars,
instructors, and students.
Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of
the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, "The Death of the
Author." This critique has given rise to a body of writing that
confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the
theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either
directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose
intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These
writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith
Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David
Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to
categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben
Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not
only a central motivating question - how to move beyond the
critique of the author-subject - but also a way of answering it: by
writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary
discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers
in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and
labor.
In this volume, we approach the phenomenon of slavery and other
types of strong asymmetrical dependencies from two methodologically
and theoretically distinct perspectives: semantics and lexical
fields. Detailed analyses of key terms that are associated with the
conceptualization of strong asymmetrical dependencies promise to
provide new insights into the self-concept and knowledge of
pre-modern societies. The majority of these key terms have not been
studied from a semantic or terminological perspective so far. Our
understanding of lexical fields is based on an onomasiological
approach - which linguistic items are used to refer to a concept?
Which words are used to express a concept? This means that the
concept is a semantic unit which is not directly accessible but may
be manifested in different ways on the linguistic level. We are
interested in single concepts such as 'wisdom' or 'fear', but also
in more complex semantic units like 'strong asymmetrical
dependencies'. In our volume, we bring together and compare case
studies from very different social orders and normative
perspectives. Our examples range from Ancient China and Egypt over
Greek and Maya societies to Early Modern Russia, the Ottoman Empire
and Islamic and Roman law.
The notion of the posthuman continues to both intrigue and confuse,
not least because of the huge number of ideas, theories and figures
associated with this term. More Posthuman Glossary provides a way
in to the dizzying array of posthuman concepts, providing vivid
accounts of emerging terms. It is much more than a series of
definitions, however, in that it seeks to imagine and predict what
new terms might come into being as this exciting field continues to
expand. A follow-up volume to the brilliant interventions of
Posthuman Glossary (2018), this book extends and elaborates on that
work, particularly focusing on concepts of race, indigeneity and
new ideas in radical ecology. It also includes new and emerging
voices within the new humanities and multiple modes of
communicating ideas. This is an indispensible glossary for those
who are exploring what the non-human, inhuman and posthuman might
mean in the 21st century.
A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in
Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers.
Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an
upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we
are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that
make up our intellectual modernity. The focus of the text is on
Bergson's conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to
'think beyond the human condition'. Not that we are caught up in an
existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the
human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human
condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply
creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a
creative evolution of becoming. Ansell-Pearson introduces the work
of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking;
examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the
self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on
religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.
Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more
prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it
remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let
alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a
comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a
development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental
questions about its status as literary theory and its continued
usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.
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Frameworks
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Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of
'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly
understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast
India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates
Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the
categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their
'political' lives. Fourteen essays by anthropologists, political
scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into
the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how
different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern
democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity
has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities,
and how forms and politics of indigeneity assume a life of its own
as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by
peoples.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people had to cope with
isolation due to lockdown policies that forced them to engage in
fewer social activities. People were confined to the small space of
their dwellings and felt constrained and socially isolated and
deprived of meaningful social interaction and affection, which
caused stress and anxiety. Several initiatives were put in place to
help diminish the effects of isolation, such as those involving
literature either through writing or reading. Managing Pandemic
Isolation With Literature as Therapy explains the positive medical
and psychological effects of literature and writing during a
pandemic at a time when isolation prevented people from engaging
with others socially. Covering topics such as clinical psychology,
brain neurology, and stress, this reference work is ideal for
psychologists, medical professionals, policymakers, government
officials, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners,
instructors, and students.
In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad
assessment of the ethical challenges of Critical Theory across the
humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp
dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical,
the analytical and the prescriptive. In a series of discrete but
interrelated interventions, Doran exposes the ethical underpinnings
of theoretical discourses that are often perceived as either
oblivious to or highly skeptical of any attempt to define ethics or
politics. Doran thus discusses a variety of themes related to the
problematic status of ethics or the ethico-political in Theory: the
persistence of existentialist ethics in structuralist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonial writing; the ethical imperative
of the return of the subject (self-creation versus social
conformism); the intimate relation between the ethico-political and
the aesthetic (including the role of literary history in Erich
Auerbach and Edward Said); the political implications of a
"philosophy of the present" for Continental thought (including
Heidegger's Nazism); the ethical dimension of the debate between
history and theory (including Hayden White's idea of the "practical
past" and the question of Holocaust representation); the "ethical
turn" in Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty; the post-1987 "political
turn" in literary and cultural studies (especially as influenced by
Said). Drawing from a broad range of Continental philosophers and
cultural theorists, including many texts that have only recently
become available, Doran charts a new path that recognizes the often
complex motivations that underlie the critical impulse, motivations
that are not always apparent or avowed.
How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the
dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its
hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun
culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the
collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and
anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim
Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux,
Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an
oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on
the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to
place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the
innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual
references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a
transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various
ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity
both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and
in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and
Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the
mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the
Cajun identity and collective memory.
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