ELT & Literary Studies Books
The University of Chicago Press Poetic Justice Rereading Platos Republic
Book SynopsisWhen Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs as written texts to be read and reread. At the center of these insights are two distinct ways of learning to read in the dialogs. One approach that appears in the Statesman, Sophist, and Protagoras, treats learning to read as a top-down affair, in which authoritative teachers lead students to true beliefs. Another, recommended by Socrates, encourages trial and error and the formation of beliefs based on students' own fallible experiences. In all of these dialogs, learning to read is likened to coming to know or understand something. Given Plato's repeated presentation of the analogy between reading and coming to know, what can these two approaches tell us about his dialogs' representations of philosophy and politics? With Poetic Justice, Ji
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Poetic Justice
Book SynopsisWhen Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs as written texts to be read and reread. At the center of these insights are two distinct ways of learning to read in the dialogs. One approach that appears in the Statesman, Sophist, and Protagoras, treats learning to read as a top-down affair, in which authoritative teachers lead students to true beliefs. Another, recommended by Socrates, encourages trial and error and the formation of beliefs based on students' own fallible experiences. In all of these dialogs, learning to read is likened to coming to know or understand something. Given Plato's repeated presentation of the analogy between reading and coming to know, what can these two approaches tell us about his dialogs' representations of philosophy and politics? With Poetic Justice, Ji
£24.70
The University of Chicago Press Poetry in a World of Things Aesthetics and
Book SynopsisWe have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a mental space between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as things in themselvesthings, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance discovery of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Authoritarianism Three Inquiries in Critical
Book Synopsis
£24.70
The University of Chicago Press Senses of Style
Book Synopsis
£22.80
The University of Chicago Press Stendhal Fiction and the Themes of Freedom
Book SynopsisVictor Brombert is a lion in the study of French literature, and in this classic of literary criticism, he turns his clear and perspicacious gaze on the works of one of its greatest authors Stendhal. Best remembered for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal is a writer of extraordinary insight into psychology and the many shades of individual and political liberty. Brombert has spent a lifetime reading and teaching Stendhal and here, by focusing on the seemingly contradictory themes of inner freedom and outer constraint within Stendhal's writings, he offers a revealing analysis of both his work and his life. For Brombert, Stendhal's work is deeply personal; elsewhere, he has written about the myriad connections between Stendhal's ironic inquiries into identity and his own boyhood in France on the brink of World War II. Proceeding via careful and nuanced readings of passages from Stendhal's fiction and autobiography, Brombert pays particular attention
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press Salome and the Dance of Writing
Book SynopsisHow does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portraitthe painted portrait, framedappears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing. Meltzer'sreadings of textual portraitsin the Gospel writers and Huysmans,Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayettereveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of meaning, while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to life, resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation ofrepresentation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power. Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, actingthe extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become consciously unconscious. In the textualportrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press For Fear of the Fire Joan of Arc and the Limits
Book SynopsisWhy are secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated important thinkers of the 20th century? This text uses the story of Joan of Arc as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent.
£30.40
University of Chicago Press Seeing Double
Book SynopsisThe poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) has been labeled the icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. This title reconsiders this literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life.Trade Review"Perceptive and powerfully imaginative, this book will interest all scholars and students of nineteenth-century thought, as well as those investigating the philosophical questions that arose from the emergence of a newly technologized world." (Marie-Helene Huet, Princeton University)"
£57.79
The University of Chicago Press Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Book SynopsisElizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was the first major woman poet in the English literary tradition. Her significance has been obscured in this century by her erasure from most literary histories and her exclusion from academic anthologies. Dorothy Mermin's critical and biographical study argues for Barrett Browning's originative role in both the Victorian poetic tradition and the development of women's literature. Barrett Browning's place at the wellhead of a new female tradition remains the single most important fact about her in terms of literary history, and it was central to her self-consciousness as a poet. Mermin's study shows that Barrett Browning's anomalous situation was constantly present to her imagination and that questions of gender shaped almost everything she wrote. Mermin argues that Barrett Browning's poetry covertly inspects and dismantles the barriers set in her path by gender and that in her major worksSonnets from the Portuguese, Aurora Leigh, her best political
£26.60
The University of Chicago Press Blank Darkness Africanist Discourse in French
Book SynopsisBlank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have . . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world.James Olney, Louisiana State University
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Blank Darkness Africanist Discourse in French
Book SynopsisBlank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have . . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world.James Olney, Louisiana State University
£25.65
The University of Chicago Press The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy
Book SynopsisIn 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch's encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others to show how the classical genre of the familiar letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden's important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.
£29.45
The University of Chicago Press Joyces Ghosts
Book SynopsisFor decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In Joyce's Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a powerful argument that this view is mistaken: Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism, informing his most distinctive literary experiments. Ireland, Gibbons shows, is not just a source of subject matter or content for Joyce, but of form itself. Joyce's stylistic innovations can be traced at least as much to the tragedies of Irish history as to the shock of European modernity, as he explores the incomplete project of inner life under colonialism. Joyce's language, Gibbons reveals, is haunted by ghosts, less concerned with the stream of consciousness than with a vernacular interior dialogue, the shout in the street, that gives room to outside voices and shadowy presences, the disruptions of a late colonial cult
£29.45
