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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
The collection of essays in this text demonstrates how novels are not only comparable, but often superior to the case histories used in business education. As many novelists have had personal experience of working in organizations, their work combines introspective insight with analytical skill. Fiction overcomes the drawbacks of organizational theory and economics; it combines the subjective and the objective, the fate of individuals with that of institutions, and the micro events with the macro systems. Many parts of Europe are now in danger of splitting into societies that draw energy from sources obscured by a century of rationalist ideology. It is on this subject that novels discussed in this book, by authors as diverse as Zola, Conrad, Musil and Stindberg, make their greatest contribution, describing the provenance and impact of modernity. Essays published in this volume relate novels to economics, business administration and public management. They range across different cultures and historical periods, focusing mainly on the realist novel. At the same time they aim to convince the reader that many kinds of fictional literature might be of help in understanding the complexit
The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.
"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"--
Gold-guarding griffins, Cyclopes, killer lakes, man-eating birds, and "fire devils" from the sky-such wonders have long been dismissed as fictional. Now, thanks to the richly interdisciplinary field of geomythology, researchers are taking a second look. It turns out that these and similar tales, which originated in pre-literate societies, contain surprisingly accurate, pre-scientific intuitions about startling or catastrophic earth-based phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the unearthing of bizarre animal bones. Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events provides an accessible, engaging overview of this hybrid discipline. The introductory chapter surveys geomythology's remarkable history and its core concepts, while the second and third chapters analyze the geomythical resonances of universal earth tales about dragons and giants. Chapter 4 narrows the focus to regional stories and discusses the ways these and other myths have influenced legends about griffins, Cyclopes, and other iconic creatures. The final chapter considers future avenues of research in geomythology, including geohazard management, geomythology databases, geomythical "cold cases," and ways the discipline might eventually set, rather than merely support, research agendas in science. Thus, the book constitutes a valuable asset for scientists and lay readers alike, particularly in a time of growing interest in monsters, massive climate change, and natural disasters.
The book is a biographical study establishing Ernie McClintock as a leading figure of the Black Theatre Movement In this contemporary moment in education and political consciousness, McClintock's biography and the impact on the Black Arts Movement will resonate with undergraduate students and serve as a powerful case study for theatre professors to integrate into their course curriculum. Contributes to the growing discourse of Black Arts Movement scholarship, Black acting theory, and queer studies.
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.
Generative Worlds. New Phenomenological Perspectives on Space and Time accounts for the phenomenological concept of generativity. In doing so, this book brings together several recent phenomenological studies on space and time. Generative studies in phenomenology propose new ways of conceiving space, time, and the relation between them. Edited by Luz Ascarate and Quentin Gailhac, the collection reveals new dimensions to topics such as the generation of life, birth, historicity, intersubjectivity, narrativity, institution, touching, and places, and in some cases, the contributors invert the classical definitions of space and time. These transformative readings are fruitful for the interdisciplinary exchange between philosophy and fields such as cosmology, psychology, and the social sciences. The contributors ask if phenomenology reaches its own concreteness through the study of generation and whether it manages to redefine certain dimensions of space and time which, in other orientations of the Husserlian method, remain too abstract and detached from the constitutive becoming of experience.
The book presents an ethnolinguistic study on lexical expressions of honor in the Language of Early Arabic Poetry. It is the first application of Cultural-Linguistic methodology in research on the language and culture of al-Jahiliyya Arabs. Consequently, it is one of the first cultural cognitive linguistic studies on Classical Arabic semantics and lexicology. The book examines the use of Arabic honor-related lexis in the oral-formulaic pre-Islamic poetry, and interprets lexical expressions as encoding cultural conceptualizations: cognitive schemata and categories, and conceptual metaphors and metonymies. An exhaustive description of pre-Islamic Arabic cultural models of honor and social evaluation is offered alongside semantic frames for discourses of honor available to pre-Islamic Arabs.
This book focuses on health humanities in application. The field reflects many intellectual interests and practical applications, serving researchers, educators, students, health care practitioners, and community members wherever health and wellness and the humanities intersect. How we implement health humanities forms the core approach, and perspectives are global, including North America, Africa, Europe, and India. Emphasizing key developments in health humanities, the book's chapters examine applications, including reproductive health policy and arts-based research methods, black feminist approaches to health humanities pedagogy, artistic expressions of lived experience of the coronavirus, narratives of repair and re-articulation and creativity, cultural competency in physician-patient communication through dance, embodied dance practice as knowing and healing, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, eye tracking, ableism and disability, rethinking expertise in disability justice, disability and the Global South, coronavirus and Indian politics, visual storytelling in graphic medicine, and medical progress and racism in graphic fiction.
Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.
an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this book explores the understudied "intertextual dialogism" between American literature and Iranian cinema, providing an intertextual link between the two seemingly separate departments of literature and cinema. Foregrounding "the textuality of history, and the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. This book pinpoints how Iranian cinema appropriates and recontextualizes instances of modern American literature to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Watching Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman in Iran adds a new intertextual level to their dialogic textuality.
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.
Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yael Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period. This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives' usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory. Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.
Overlap between psychoanalysis and the arts is a perennially hot topic * Uses literature to inform psychoanalytic theory and practice * Fresh take on understanding key psychoanalytic topic of unconscious processes
Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication - a momentous time for genre publishing - and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.
How did the Victorians think about disasters such as famines and epidemic diseases? What was the relationship between such cataclysmic events and literary forms, styles and genres? In what way was thinking about disasters also crucial to practices of governance? Does the legacy of such Victorian thinking still shape our contemporary responses to 'natural' disasters? This book seeks to answer such questions by looking at a wide range of administrative, medical, historical, journalistic and literary texts written about Britain's key imperial possession in the 19th-century - south Asia. In doing so, it expands our ideas about Victorian literature, just as it reshapes our definitions of 'natural' disasters themselves.
This book looks at Margaret Atwood's use of food motifs in speculative fiction. Focusing on six novels - The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, the Maddaddam trilogy, and The Heart Goes Last - Katarina Labudova explores the environmental, ecological, and cultural questions at play and the possible future scenarios which emerge for humanity's survival in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic conditions. Labudova argues that food has special relevance in these novels and that characters' hunger, limited food choices, culinary creativity and eating rituals are central to Atwood's depictions of hostile environments. She also links food to hierarchy, dominance and oppression in Atwood's novels, and foregrounds the problem of hunger, both psychological or physical, caused by pollution and loss of contact with the natural and authentic. The book shows how Atwood's writing draws from a range of genres, including apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, utopia, fairy tale, myth, and thriller - and how food is an important, highly versatile motif linking these intertextual threads.
In Roland Barthes's eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as a force of invention and discovery, as a resource and an encyclopaedia. They met regularly, exchanged many letters and fought many battles together, against every kind of academicism, every political and ideological regression. Barthes shed light on Sollers's work in a series of articles that are still of great relevance today. Sollers, in turn, assumed the role of Barthes's publisher at Le Seuil from the publication of his Critical Essays in 1964, and was left deeply shocked and saddened by Barthes's death in 1980. In short, they were very close to each other, despite their differences, and Sollers expresses here what this meant at the time and what it continues to represent, highlighting the themes that sustained their friendship. The book also contains some thirty letters from Barthes to Sollers, completing our image of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in French literary life.
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.
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.
Problematic assumptions which see humans as special and easily defined as standing apart from animals, plants, and microbiota, both consciously and unconsciously underpin scientific investigation, arts practice, curation, education, and research across the social sciences and humanities. This is the case particularly in those traditions emerging from European and Enlightenment philosophies. Posthumanism disrupts these traditional humanist outlooks and interrogates their profound shaping of how we see ourselves, our place in the world, and our role in its protection. In Posthumanism in Practice, artists, researchers, educators, and curators set out how they have developed and responded to posthumanist ideas across their work in the arts, sciences, and humanities, and provide examples and insights to support the exploration of posthumanism in how we can think, create, and live. In capturing these ideas, Posthumanism in Practice shows how posthumanist thought can move beyond theory, inform action, and produce new artefacts, effects, and methods that are more relevant and more useful for the incoming realities for all life in the 21st century. |
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