This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors.
Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work:
* text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed,
* situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and
* the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities to the patterns of thought which characterized the Victorian's views of race. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialized thinking of the past, "Colonial Desire" illustrates how we are operating "in complicity" with historical ways of viewing "the other," both sexually and racially.
"Colonial Desire" is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and "culture." Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. "Englishness," Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

" A clear and accessible demonstration of how contemporary literary theories can be applied to a wide range of texts, from Shakespeare, Bunyan, Sterne, Keats, to James, Stevens, Joyce, Pinter, Updike, and Arthur Miller."

In this important new book, Laura Gillman suggests that by acknowledging differences among feminists, it is possible to enhance knowledge and feminist/womanist solidarity. Gillman refutes postmodern feminist approaches that dismantle identity while advancing a material account of social identity, emerging from within spatial-temporal relations. Focusing on womanist and mestiza feminist thought, literary writings, and cultural representations, "Unassimilable Feminisms" offers a compelling analysis of the debates around identity politics in late twentieth century theoretical discourse.

The Politics and Poetics of Camp is a radical reappraisal of the meaning and discourse of camp. The contributors look at both the meaning and the uses of camp performance, and ask: is camp a style, or a witty but nonetheless powerful cultural critique? The essays investigate camp from its early formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to its present manifestations in queer theatre and literature. They also take a fascinating look at the complex relationship between queer discourse and decidedly un-queer pop culture appropriations on film and on the stage. The Politics and Poetics of Camp is an incisive, uncontainable and entertaining collection of essays by some of the foremost critics working in queer theory, from a number of disciplinary perspectives. This book makes a well-timed intervention into an emerging debate.

Combining literary analysis with a practical introduction to interdisciplinary literary geography, Literary Geograp hie s examines key elements of Colum McCann's 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spi n . Hones examines concepts such as narrative space, literary and academic collaboration, and the geographies of creation, production, and reception.

"Literature cultivates "deep selves" for whom books matter because they take over from religion fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. This volume embraces and questions this perspective, while also developing a "new humanist' critical vocabulary which specifies, and therefore opens to debate, the human significance of literature"--

In this introduction to the semiotic theory of one of the most innovative theorists of the twentieth century, the Russian literary scholar and semiotician Yuri Lotman, offers a new look at Lotman's profound legacy by conceptualizing his ideas in modern context and presenting them as a useful tool of cultural analysis. Semenenko demonstrates how Lotman's holistic theory, transcending the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, offers a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to culture. This study covers a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to the role of an individual in history.

As the first study to examine the concept of uncertainty of meaning as it relates to modern and contemporary literature and literary theory, Literary Theories of Uncertainty demonstrates how this notion functions as a literary feature, narrative device and theoretical concept in 20th and 21st-century texts. Calling upon theories of interpretation and challenging the distinction between literature and theory, this exploration is broken down into three sections: Poststructuralist legacies of uncertainty; life-writing and uncertainty; and contemporary literary uncertainties. The volume takes into account related terms such as undecidability, indeterminacy, ambiguity, unreadability, and obscurity, and the topics examined include: undecidability and the motif of suspension in deconstruction; Derrida and Bataille; poetry as a mode of critical discourse and point of convergence between logico-mathematical ideas of undecidability and literary forms of uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to speech and the impact of Robert Antelme on Mascolo and Blanchot; Proust and temporal uncertainty; uncertainty in relation to death, trauma and autobiography; moral uncertainty in the Scandinavian welfare state and Nordic Noir; the aesthetically disruptive and anti-authorian effect of uncertainty in in the works of German-Turkish writer Emine Sevgi Ozdamar; uncertainty in the form of 'the double' and in relation to meta-fiction; and many more. Literary Theories of Uncertainty collates original and diverse discussions by some of the most prominent, inquiring minds in literary, cultural and critical theory today to map out the contours of the field of 'theory of uncertainty'.

In "English Inside Out" prominent proponents of literary studies take a close look at the current state of the discipline and envisage its future. How has the rise of "political correctness" or "the closing of the American mind" affected the study of literature? Amid diverse theoretical debates about the canon in the media and in academia, these essays explore where the profession is going and what its responsibilities are. The collected essays range through a variety of topical issues: the problem of negotiating between intellectual and political forces; current controversies within Afro-American and feminist criticism; the influence of cultural and gay studies on the profession. Together they explore the interaction of literary studies with modern cultural developments and present the state of the art in literary criticism. Selected contributors are Henry Louis Gates Jr, Jane Gallop, Jonathon Goldberg, Stanley Fish, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Geoffrey Hartman.

The Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a historical overview and comprehensive examination of haiku across the world in numerous languages, poetic movements, and cultural contexts. Offering an extensive critical perspective, this volume provides leading essays by poets and scholars who explore haiku's various global developments, demonstrating the form's complex and sometimes contradictory manifestations from the twentieth century to the present. The sixteen chapters are carefully organized into categories that reflect the salient areas of practice and study: Haiku in Transit, Haiku and Social Consciousness, Haiku and Experimentation, The Future of Global Haiku. An insightful introduction surveys haiku's influence beyond Japan and frames the collection historically and culturally, questioning commonly held assumptions about haiku and laying the groundwork for new ways of seeing the form. Haiku's elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which this global verse form has evolved. The Routledge Global Haiku Reader ushers haiku into the twenty-first century in a critically minded and historically informed manner for a new generation of readers and writers and will appeal to students and researchers in literary studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies and creative writing.

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students - from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic. Addressing the impact on students' ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses: Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux. This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

How can we develop a cultural theory starting with the basic insight that human beings are "storytelling animals"? Within literary studies, narratology is a highly developed field. However, literary historians have not paid much attention to the large and small stories abounding in everyday discourse, guiding all kinds of social activity, and providing common ground for whole societies-but also fueling controversies and hostilities. Moreover, "narrative" is not only a scholarly category but has come into use in many fields of social activity as a tool for cultural self-fashioning. This book is based on the assumption that to a large extent, social dynamics is modeled in an aesthetic manner via narratives. It explores the narrative organization of cultural spaces and time-frames, the mythological shaping of communities and adversaries, and the co-production of narratives and institutions aimed at stabilizing social life. In this framework, the epistemological problem looms large of how an instrument as unreliable as narrative can participate in the creation of a social consensus regarding truth. This problem endows the general topics explored in this book with a particularly contemporary dimension.

Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America is organized around the critical and theoretical "turn" known as hydro-criticism, an innovative approach to the study of the ways in which bodies of water (oceans, seas, rivers, archipelagos, lakes, etc.) impact the study of history, culture, and society. This volume proposes a hydro-critical approach to issues related to the colonial period. The analysed texts demonstrate not only the presence of water and oceanic trajectories as metaphorical devices, but the inherent implication of navigation, ports, islandic territories, drainage systems, floodings and the like in configuration of collective imaginaries, from colonial times to the present. This book encompasses studies of the decisive role water played in the world view from/about the "New World" since the discovery, both for the monarchy and the church, and the impact of oceanic journeys for the advancement of colonization and slavery. In chapters that combine historical, linguistic, literary and ethnographic approaches, this volume constitutes an attempt to expand the scope and methodology of colonial studies. At the same time, the continuity of maritime perspectives reaches the analysis of contemporary literature, thus demonstrating the importance of this critical paradigm for the study of Caribbean cultures. In this respect, studies particularly illuminate the connection between popular beliefs and oceanic dimensions, as well as on issues of gender and ethnicity.

Most modern literary theory is explicitly anti-theological. This book states the case for a contemporary literary theory whose principles derive from Christian theology. Luke Ferretter argues that it remains rationally and ethically legitimate to use theological language in literary theory despite the objections to such a theory posed by deconstruction, Marxism and psychoanalysis. He concludes with an assessment of how such a theory can be formulated and used in contemporary cultural analysis.

The principle aim of this work is to explore the relationship between contemporary literary theory and analytic philosophy. The volume addresses this issue in two ways: first, through four exchanges between, on the one hand, proponents of avant-garde literary theory and, on the other, proponents of analytic philosophy (or of related literary critical positions); and second, through three cross-disciplinary essays on the relationship in question. Central topics in the volume include self, ethics, interpretation, language and characterizations of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy. Recent decades have witnessed profound changes within some areas of Anglo-American literary studies. The most influential of these changes have been associated with the emergence of contemporary literary theory. Such theory comprises a range of approaches to literature (and other communicative forms) many of which derive from or are heavily indebted to continental philosophy. At the same time, there has been resistance to these changes, or counter proposals for change, from more traditional "humanist" literary critics and scholars and, to a lesser degree, from analytic philosophers. Debates about thes

Winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award (established jointly by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an "unconscious." On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures-architecture, objects from earlier cultural epochs ("antiquities"), paintings, and illustrated books-played in that process. Diane O'Donoghue introduces, often using unpublished archival sources, the ways in which material phenomena profoundly informed Freud's decisions about what would, and would not, constitute the workings of an inner life. By returning to view content that Freud treated as forgettable, as distinct from repressed, O'Donoghue shows us a realm of experiences that Freud wished to remove from psychical meaning. These erasures form an amnesic core within Freud's psychoanalytic project, an absence that includes difficult aspects of his life narrative, beginning with the dislocations of his early childhood that he declared "not worth remembering." What is made visible here is far from the inconsequential surface of experience; rather, we are shown a dangerous ground that exceeds the limits of what Freud wished to include within his early model of mind. In Freud's relation to visual cultures we find clues to what he attempted, in crafting his unconscious, to remove from sight.

This "Encyclopedia" is the most comprehensive guide yet to both the nature and content of literature and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars such as Catherine Belsey, Terrence Hawker, Catherine Hayles, Cora Kaplan, Christopher Norris and Don E. Wayne, the volume covers traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and newer topics, including the production and reception of literature. Current critical ideas are clearly and provocatively discussed, while the volume's arrangement reflects in a dynamic way the rich diversity of contemporary thinking about literature.
The "Encyclopedia" includes important sections on criticism, the contexts of English literature and "other literatures" in English. Individual essays cover subjects as diverse as feminist theatre, postmodernism, medieval literature, romantic poetry, Marxist criticism, censorship, realism and the novel, contemporary American poetry, New Historicism, the origins of the modern stage, the renaissance, women and the poetic tradition, the printed book, and Shakespeare and eighteenth-century fiction. Each essay seeks to provide the reader with a clear sense of the full significance of its subject as well as guidance for further reading.
An essential work of reference, the "Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism" is a stimulating guide to the central preoccupations of contemporary critical thinking about literature.

This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in which issues such as the atomic bomb, double agents, paranoia, propaganda and megalomania manifest themselves within the genre. The book examines the ongoing marginalization of women within spy fiction texts, exploring the idea that this unique period in global history is responsible for the active promotion and celebration of masculinity and male superiority. From James Bond to Jason Bourne, the book evaluates the ongoing enforcement of patriarchal ideas and oppressions that, in the name of national security and patriotic duty, have contributed to the development of a genre in which discrimination and bias continue to dominate.

This collection of essays explores celebrated Canadian author Carol Shields's experimentation with the essay genre in relation to her fiction. Shields's essays clarify her iconoclastic approach to rules of narrative and illuminate her revisionist policies, elucidating the development of her fiction, both novels and stories, as her writing gradually becomes more explicitly feminist, as well as more daringly postmodernist. The dozen essays by the eminent Canadianists included in this edition throw fresh light on Shields's writing, inviting us to read it with new eyes by revealing how her essays reflect and refract the brilliance of her fiction. These essays read Shields's fiction through the lens of her essays, including those contained in the recent Giardini edition, wherein the author explains the creative methodologies involved in her fiction and also offers specific advice to writers of fiction.

Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.

An effective tool for reading postcolonial con/texts, ideology also provides a matrix to grasp the world, enabling collective political action. This interdisciplinary volume reflects that each position is subject to asymmetrical power relations, with critiques of ideological manifestations occurring in intersecting cultural, social, and political configurations.

Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive, even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after the opening of the USSR's spekstrahn, those enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and book banning in colonial countries also demonstrates censorship's formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines these and other developments across twelve countries, from the Enlightenment to the present day, offering case studies from the French revolution to Internet China. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final, failed version of national control?