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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary 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.
Best International Debut in 2017 (awarded by Romanian General and Comparative Literature Association) Most Prestigious Publication in the Humanities (awarded by the Senate of the University of Bucharest) Surrealism began as a movement in poetry and visual art, but it turned out to have its widest impact worldwide in fiction-including in major world writers who denied any connection to surrealism at all. At the heart of this book are discoveries Delia Ungureanu has made in the archives of Harvard's Widener and Houghton libraries, where she has found that Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were greatly indebted to surrealism for the creation of the pivotal characters who brought them world fame: Pierre Menard and Lolita. In From Paris to Tloen: Surrealism as World Literature, Ungureanu explores the networks of transmission and transformation that turned an avant-garde Parisian movement into a global literary phenomenon. From Paris to Tloen gives a fresh account of surrealism's surprising success, exploring the process of artistic transfer by which the surrealist object rapidly evolved from a purely poetic conception to a mainstay of surrealist visual art and then a key element in late modernist and postmodern fiction, from Borges and Nabokov to such disparate writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, and Orhan Pamuk in the 21st century.
This volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to six examples of West Indian fiction, combining symbolic anthropology with traditional literary criticism. Focusing on works by George Lamming and Wilson Harris, two vastly dissimilar Caribbean writers, Joyce Jonas identifies an emerging West Indian aesthetic, stressing the conflict between oral and written communication, and between folk culture and imperialist domination. By applying post-modernist literary theories to the texts, Dr. Jonas explores colonization as a key metaphor for exploitation of gender, class, race, and environment. The six novels surveyed all describe a "plantation landscape" within which the action takes place, and which provides a context for a study of the polarized world of colonizer and colonized. Two icons are employed in the analysis: the Great House, a colonial world view of binary oppositions, and Anancy, a trickster-figure of West Indian folklore. The first of the three essays focuses on the collision between imperialist culture and the submerged folk heritage. The second explores the phenomenon of exile through the artist-in-the-text, a feature common to all six novels that places the artist at the crossroads of a colonized world. Finally, the third essay blends the anthropological concept of liminality with a feminist perspective, widening the discussion to embrace all types of oppressive exploitation. With its subtle literary readings and its philosophical commentary, this volume will be a significant resource for courses in West Indian and Third World literature, literature and culture, and race and gender in literature. It will also be an important addition to academic and public libraries.
Until recently, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to have faded out of fashion. Existentialism was replaced by structuralism and poststructuralism, and Sartrean philosophy was relegated to anthologies. In France and the United States, real confrontation with his work has been virtually missing. This collection of essays addresses this absence by shedding light on Sartre's contribution to critical trends that have been developing over the last twenty years, including feminism, gender studies and post-colonial studies. In addition, the essays combine to reassess Sartre's importance in such traditional fields as literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. An essential, comprehensive volume of work, Situating Sartre in Twentieth-Century Thought and Culture updates and expands the scope of Sartrean studies.
This book charts the history of the concept of nihilism in some of the most important philosophers and literary theorists of the modern and postmodern periods, including Wyndham Lewis, Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, and Vattimo. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these thinkers produces a theory of the literary as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism, Weller offers the first in-depth analysis of nihilism's key role in the thinking of the aesthetic since Nietzsche.
Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent
developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive
science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields.
While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris
also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic
"disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of
recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing
divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some
exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such
as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and
John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of
bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while
none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific
relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role
of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way
beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind
and language.
With the diminished influence of intellectuals outside the academy and a marked decline in the quality of public discourse, many observers have called for the return of the "public intellectual." At the same time, religion is playing an increasingly public role in the modern world. This collection of essays examines the possibility that both religion and literature, in their complex interactions, are capable of reentering and renewing what the eminent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas refers to as "the public sphere."
Ousselin sets out to show that Europe is essentially a literary fiction and that the ongoing movement towards European unity cannot be understood without reference to the literary works that helped bring it about.
Drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of internal distantiation, " Reconstituting Americans" reads post-1960s U.S. literature to reveal the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood. This engaging study uses historicist and formalist methodologies within Marxist, psychoanalytic, and critical race frameworks to discuss the formal techniques in the work of Arturo Islas, Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and Audre Lorde. Megan Obourn deftly looks at the historical and social realities of social identities, while simultaneously bringing to the fore the limitations of liberal multicultural ways of conceptualizing identity and difference.
'Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field' proposes and demonstrates a new digital approach to literary history. Drawing on bibliographical information on the Australian novel in the AustLit database, the book addresses debates and issues in literary studies through a method that combines book history's pragmatic approach to literary data with the digital humanities' idea of computer modelling as an experimental and iterative practice. As well as showcasing this method, the case studies in 'Reading by Numbers' provide a revised history of the Australian novel, focusing on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and engaging with a range of themes including literary and cultural value, authorship, gender, genre and the transnational circulation of fiction. The book's findings challenge established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them. More broadly, by demonstrating critical ways in which the growing number of digital archives in the humanities can be mined, modelled and visualised, 'Reading by Numbers' offers new directions and scope for digital humanities research.
"Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics" combines the fields of queer and diasporic writing. It opens up an entire new domain where social and cultural meanings of sexuality within Caribbean space become objects of historical, colonial and literary investigations. By juxtaposing queerness, nation and belonging, this book unlocks both disciplines, making them permeable to other contexts and perspectives. Exploring the works of writers such as Shani Mootoo, Jamaica Kincaid and Lawrence Scott, this book investigates the Western notions of sexual identity and belongingness alongside postcolonial deployments of nation, diaspora and sexuality. The book adds to the abundant fields of queer and diaspora studies by intersecting them, in order not only to render their ability to work together but also to expose their weaknesses and highly contested underpinnings.
Major study in literary theory, criticism and psychology.
Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.
This ground-breaking study argues that literature and criminology share a common concern to understand modernity and that this project is often focused upon gender-specific criminality. Central to this concern is duplicity masquerade and performance. These subjects are explored for the first time in relation to criminality with reference to a range of literary and popular texts, from Dickens and Poe through to Toni Morrison and Easton Ellis, in which the traditional boundaries between different genders and sexualities are made more fluid and complex than in traditional criminal narratives.
Contributors to this special issue evaluate the influence of Western critical theory on the development of Chinese literary studies since the mid-twentieth century. By examining the development of hermeneutic systems such as gender studies, semiotics, cultural studies, and space theory, the authors discuss the possibility of modern critical discourse intervening in the study of ancient Chinese literature and culture.
If there is any English critic worth reading on Modernism it is Ford Madox Ford, whose Critical Essays remind us that he was one of the first to admire Joyce's Ulysses and one of the bravest to argue with E.M. Forster. --The Times (London) This collection contains more unexpected fun, more delighted, chatty wisdom, than any other book of criticism you could think of. --The Guardian In Critical Essays, a new selection of Ford's previously uncollected writings on literature and art, there are sweeping dicta aplenty. --The American Scholar Critical Essays showcases a critic whom Ezra Pound called in 1914, the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance. This volume provides access to the best of Ford Madox Ford's essays. The essays are arranged chronologically and span nearly forty years--covering most of Ford's writing life. Saunders and Stang have included essays, literary portraits, and book reviews that Ford published in the English Review, The Tribune, The Bystander, The Outlook, Piccadilly Review, the Transatlantic Review, and the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, among other places.
Ensayos (en inglâes) sobre importantes figuras literarias del siglo XX - Nancy Morejâon, Alejo Carpentier, Virgilio Piänera, Dulce Marâia Loynaz, Josâe Lezama Lima, y Severo Sarduy - y la creaciâon imaginativa de Cuba y su historia a travâes de sus textos. Los capâitulos finales contienen un apretada sâintesis histâorica que ayudan al lector no familiarizado con el paâis a situar a estos escritores y su obra dentro de su contexto"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been credited with influencing Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many other key modern philosophers. That approach is the so-called "Hegelian dialectic" - an open-ended sequence of reasoning and argument in which contradictory concepts generate and are incorporated into a third, more sophisticated concept. While the Phenomenology does not always clearly use this dialectical method - and it is famously one of the most difficult works of philosophy ever written - the Hegelian dialectic provides a perfect template for critical thinking reasoning skills. A hallmark of good reasoning in the construction of an argument, and the searching out of answers must necessarily consider contradictory viewpoints or evidence. For Hegel, contradiction is key: it is precisely what allows reasoning to progress. Only by incorporating and overcoming contradictions, according to his method, is it possible for thought to progress at all. While writing like Hegel might not be advisable, thinking like him can help take your reasoning to the next level.
This set of 37 volumes is a revival of the original Critical Idiom series. First published between 1969 and 1979, the volumes in this series provide concise and accessible introductions to a range of critical terms which are key to the study of literature. This set will be a valuable resource for students working with complex literary terminology.
They were homeless wanderers, prostitutes, orphans, and factory
girls. They hurdled terrible obstacles, reinvented themselves as
men, goddesses, witches, and princesses to become legends in their
own right as England rose to world power. No other group of people
rivaled their inventiveness or their grip on the nation's
imagination. Debbie Lee unfolds the small stories of six women,
with a cast of supporting characters such as Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Stamford Raffles, and Napoleon,
against the grand narrative of England's eighteenth-century empire
building. "Romantic Liars: Obscure Women who Became Impostors and
Challenged an Empire" is a meticulously researched, spellbinding
tale of tragedy, transformation and triumph in the age of reason.
New historicism and cultural materialism emerged in the early 1980s as prominent literary theories and came to represent a revival of interest in history and in historicising literature. Their proponents rejected both formalist criticism and earlier attempts to read literature in its historical context and defined new ways of thinking about literature in relation to history. This study explains the development of these theories and demonstrates both their uses and weaknesses as critical practices. The potential future direction for the theories is explored and the controversial debates about their validity in literary studies are discussed.
This study uncovers a vital thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far-reaching use of humor. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, 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 Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.
Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950-70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films and theories enriched and shed light upon one another. One early response to Filmspeak was the question 'Why theory?', a remark that provides the title of this new and exciting exploration of literature. In pursuit of an answer, Tomarken turns to the 'second generation' of critics (1970-2000), and analyses television programmes as well as films. He considers scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Martha Nussbaum who saw themselves as working in the field of cultural studies. Why theory? thus has a dual focus - on both culture and literary theory. The result of integrating cultural ideas with media interpretation sees Tomarken grapple with the question of the title: theory has become a part of our cultural life. -- .
This work examines both the emergence of African literature and its institutionalization within nationalist African academies. Amoko analyzes the relationship between such institutions of literature and the processes of nationalist legitimization and between colonial and postcolonial school cultures and national cultures.
C. G. Jung understood the anima in a wide variety of ways but especially as a multifaceted archetype and as a field of energy. In Anima and Africa: Jungian Essays on Psyche, Land, and Literature, Matthew A. Fike uses these principles to analyze male characters in well-known British, American, and African fiction. Jung wrote frequently about the Kore (maiden, matron, crone) and the "stages of eroticism" (Eve, Mary, Helen, Sophia). The feminine principle's many aspects resonate throughout the study and are emphasized in the opening chapters on Ernest Hemingway, Henry Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner. The anima-as-field can be "tapped" just as the collective unconscious can be reached through nekyia or descent. These processes are discussed in the middle chapters on novels by Laurens van der Post, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. The final chapters emphasize the anima's role in political/colonial dysfunction in novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Chinua Achebe/Nadine Gordimer, and Aphra Behn. Anima and Africa applies Jung's African journeys to literary texts, explores his interest in Haggard, and provides fresh insights into van der Post's late novels. The study discovers Lessing's use of Jung's autobiography, deepens the scholarship on Coetzee's use of Faust, and explores the anima's relationship to the personal and collective shadow. It will be essential reading for academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies, and postcolonial studies, and will also appeal to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training. |
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