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In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, edited by
Ranjan Ghosh, PhD, puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett s
most popular and widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Chapters are
envisaged as dialogues with Godot, keeping in mind the event of
waiting and other issues related to this Godot-Waiting phenomenon.
The merit of this book lies in exploring this play from thirteen
fresh perspectives introducing some important themes that have not
been dealt previously. Contributors explore the play in reference
to topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva,
Derrida, the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in
structural reading, and anti-existentialism. Essays ask, can we
make claims to read this play outside the absurd tradition ? Is it
an anti-existential play? Can Beckett possibly be Indianised ? How
can the dialectic between waiting and delay be problematized? If
Beckett was up to de-structure conventional modes of drama-writing,
what connection could he possibly have with Aristotle and his
normative modes? Can the Vladimir-Estragon relationship be
critiqued psychoanalytically? Can questions of political commitment
be challenged anew, resisting easy propositions to considering it a
Resistance play? Can the Godot / Resistance collocation be examined
through torture (the series of beatings that structures the play),
through relationship (the pseudo-couple), and finally through
language (the insistent coupling of violence and meaning)? In
Dialogue with Godot offers a refreshingly new and varied approach
to Samuel Beckett s most popular play."
The postmodern condition has delivered us into a world where our
"humanity" can no longer be taken for granted. Whether his place is
ceded to nature or technology, "man" is no longer "the measure of
all things," rather, he is locked into processes in which the only
permanence is change. Becoming Human offers a sustained engagement
with these and other paradoxes about human being and its nature in
the 21st-century world. Beginning with the notion that the human is
not an immutable "given" but rather an ever-changing entity, this
collection of essays considers our multifarious condition through
the perspective of a variety of fields, including philosophy,
sociology, literature, and film studies. In this book, the authors
make coherent and accessible a sprawling field. The diversity of
writers and approaches challenges current thinking about humanity,
providing material for future scholars and researchers and
prompting us to ponder these questions more deeply, while at the
same time offering the reader a comprehensive, intelligible survey
of recent inquiries into a potentially bewildering field.
In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, Ranjan Ghosh
puts together thirteen new essays on Beckett's most popular and
widely read play, Waiting for Godot. Chapters are envisaged as
dialogues with Godot, keeping in mind the event of waiting and
other issues related to this Godot-Waiting phenomenon. The merit of
this book lies in exploring this play from thirteen fresh
perspectives introducing some important themes that have not been
dealt previously. Contributors explore the play in reference to
topics as varied as Hindu philosophy, Agamben, Kristeva, Derrida,
the absence of women in the play, Aristotleanism in structural
reading, and anti-existentialism. Essays ask, can we make claims to
read this play outside the "absurd tradition?" Is it an
anti-existential play? Can Beckett possibly be "Indianized?" How
can the dialectic between "waiting" and "delay" be problematized?
If Beckett was up to de-structure conventional modes of
drama-writing, what connection could he possibly have with
Aristotle and his normative modes? Can the Vladimir-Estragon
relationship be critiqued psychoanalytically? Can questions of
political commitment be challenged anew, resisting easy
propositions to considering it a Resistance play? Can the Godot /
Resistance collocation be examined through torture (the series of
beatings that structures the play), through relationship (the
pseudo-couple), and finally through language (the insistent
coupling of violence and meaning)? In Dialogue with Godot offers a
refreshingly new and varied approach to Samuel Beckett's most
popular play.
In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to
redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For
Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the
fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist
writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he
shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman
potential. He examines the development of narrative during the
modernist period and sets it against, among others, the
nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin
and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad,
Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers'
mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations
and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link
between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its
philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling
interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.
Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine Modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. According to Sheehan, Modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key Modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how Modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He reveals the crucial link between the Modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of interest to scholars of Modernism and literary theory.
"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be
rewritten." (George Santayana)Enquiries into the relationship
between literature and history continue to stir up intense critical
and scholarly debate. Alongside the new hybrid categories that have
emerged out of this ferment life-writing, ficto-criticism, "history
from below", and so on there has been a welter of new literary
histories, new ways of tracking the connections between the written
word and the historically bound world. This has resulted in renewed
discussion about distinguishing the literary from the non-literary,
about dialogues taking place between different national
literatures, and about ascertaining the relative status of the
literary text in relation to other cultural forms.Remaking Literary
History seeks to clarify the diversity of issues and positions that
have arisen from these debates. Central to the book's approach is a
rigorous and constructive questioning of the past, across
disciplinary boundaries. This is carried out through four detailed
and engrossing sections that explore the relationship between
memory and forgetting; what it means to be 'subject' to history;
the upsurge of interest in trauma and redemption; and the question
of historical reinvention, which demonstrates how the overwriting
of history continues to reinvigorate the literary imagination. As
well as readers of literature and history, Remaking Literary
History will be of interest to students of literary theory, legal
studies and cultural and media studies.
The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can
serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist
literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist
fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth
century, when certain French and English writers sought to
celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan
presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression
gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and
upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through
which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging
with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound,
as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch,
Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often
associated with creative well-being and communicative
self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose
ends.
"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train" (Oscar Wilde). Literature has
always treated the sensational: crime, passion, violence, trauma,
catastrophe. It has frequently caused, or been at the centre of
scandal, censorship and moral outrage. But literature is also
intricately connected with sensation in ways that are less well
understood. It mediates between the sensory world, perception and
cognition through rich modes of thought allied with perceptions and
emotions and makes sense of profound questions that transcend the
merely rational. And at its boundaries, literature engages with the
uncanny realm in which knowledge, presentiment or feeling is prior
to articulation in words. This book reviews the sensational
dimension of literature according to themes that have too often
been left to one side. Literary theory has often privileged
perception over sensation, cognition over raw experience, in
focusing on semantics rather than sense. The essays in this volume
cover literature and sensation in all its facets, drawing upon a
range of approaches from evolutionary theory, theories of mind,
perception, philosophy and aesthetics. The works considered are
drawn from various literary periods and genres, from the nineteenth
century to contemporary prose and poetry, including experiments in
new media. Literature and Sensation offers detailed and subtle
readings of literature according to the sensations they represent,
incite, or evoke in us, and will be of interest to readers of
literary theory, ethics and aesthetics, and theorists of new media
art.
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