Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisMostafa Abedinifard is Assistant Professor without Review of Persian Literary Culture and Civilization at the University of British Columbia, Canada.Omid Azadibougar is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at Hunan Normal University, China. He is the author of World Literature and Hedayat's Poetics of Modernity (2020) and The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014).Amirhossein Vafa is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Shiraz University, Iran. He is the author of Recasting American and Persian Literatures (2016).Trade ReviewThe power and delight of literature in Persian is known to many readers, worldwide. But how is this magnificent literature related to recent debates on coloniality, nationalism, and world literature? With this collection of studies, we begin to know. The authors' rich scholarship explores both historical and contemporary problems. * Raewyn Connell, University Chair, University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics of Knowledge (2007) *This collection of essays is excellent because the theoretical and methodological issues they discuss are not just important for rethinking the study of Persian literature, but are highly relevant to the study of any non-Western literature. Anyone interested in literary studies, particularly in comparative and cross-cultural studies, will find a lot in this collection to be stimulating, thought-provoking, and beneficial. Highly recommended! * Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, and author of From Comparison to World Literature (2014) *The contributors to this volume approach Persian literary criticism with sensitivity and seek to liberate the field from nationalist frameworks that all too often have hindered the study of Persian literature in the west. The essays collected here open our eyes to the diverse ways in which the Persian literary system has influenced other transnational literary systems and how, in turn, it has been shaped by those encounters over the past millennium and more. * Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Associate Professor of Persian Literature, University of Oxford, UK *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Transliteration, Translation, and Dates Introduction: Decolonizing a Peripheral Literature Amirhossein Vafa (Shiraz University, Iran), Omid Azadibougar (Hunan Normal University, China), and Mostafa Abedinifard (University of British Columbia, Canada) Part One. Literary Worldliness 1. The Birth of the German Ghazal out of the Spirit of World Literature Amir Irani-Tehrani (West Point Military Academy, USA) 2. Otherworld Literature: Parahuman Pasts in Classical Persian Historiography and Epic Sam Lasman (University of Chicago, USA) 3. Globalization in Pre- and Postrevolutionary Iranian Literature: A Comparative Study of Authors inside and outside Iran Naghmeh Esmaeilpour (Humboldt University, Germany) 4. Contemporary Persian Literature and Digital Humanities Laetitia Nanquette (University of New South Wales, Australia) Part Two. Traveling Texts 5. Genres without Borders: Reading Modern Iranian Literature beyond "Center" and "Periphery" Marie Ostby (Connecticut College, USA) 6. Persian Epistemes in Naim Frashëri's Albanian Poetry Abdulla Rexhepi (University of Prishtina, Kosovo) 7. Ecumenism and Globalism in the Reception of Ferdowsi and His Shahnameh: Evidence from the "Baysonqori Preface" Olga M. Davidson (Boston University, USA) 8. Cats and Dogs, Manliness, and Misogyny: On the Sindbad-nameh as World Literature Alexandra Hoffmann (University of Chicago, USA) 9. Cinema Joins Forces with Literature to Form Canon: The Cinematic Afterlife of Sa'edi’s "The Cow" as World Literature Adineh Khojastehpour (University of New South Wales, Australia) Part Three. The Transnational Turn 10. Until a Shirt Blossoms Red: Proto-Third Worldism in Ahmad Shamlou’s Manifesto Levi Thompson (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) 11. Translocal Dreams of Justice and Mobility: Fariba Vafi’s Tarlan and Ali Mirdrekvandi’s No Heaven for Gunga Din Gay Jennifer Breyley (Monash University, Australia) 12. The Purloined Letter: Reconsidering Simin Daneshvar’s Dagh-e Nang and the Politics of Translation in the Landscape of World Literature Amy Motlagh (University of California Davis, USA) 13. World Literature as Persian Literature Navid Naderi (Independent Scholar, Iran) Notes on Contributors Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisClint Burnham is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the author of Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Bloomsbury, 2016).Trade ReviewClint Burnham does not merely apply psychoanalysis to the internet; he demonstrates how the unconscious itself is 'structured like the internet,' how our entanglement in the impenetrable digital web allows us to understand properly the way the unconscious overdetermines our thinking and activities. This is why Burnham’s path-breaking book reaches much deeper than the usual analyses of the social and psychological implications of the internet: it does not just socialize and historicise the internet, it throws a new light on the unconscious itself. * Slavoj Žižek, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and author of Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism *Clint Burnham has produced the definitive psychoanalytic account of digital culture. This is the book that those seeking to understand how the unconscious manifests itself in the digital universe have been waiting for. For too long, psychoanalytic theorists have confined themselves to analyses of film and literature, but now Burnham provides the breakthrough. Far from being an application of psychoanalysis to a foreign realm, the digital provides the privileged ground for encountering the unconscious. As Burnham’s delightful and witty prose indicates, the internet functions as an event with concrete ramifications for the psyches that emerge in its wake. * Todd McGowan, Professor of English, University of Vermont, USA, and author of Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy *Were there ever two formations with less in common than 'the Internet,' a machinic transmission of discrete data, and 'psychoanalysis,' a wild science of messy social relationality? Clint Burnham’s genius is to show how psychoanalysis is indispensable to any robust theory of digital culture, but as well to reveal the cybernetics already at work in psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Žižek. In readings of multiple media, he vividly demonstrates the ongoing necessity of concepts like negation, enjoyment, and disavowal for making sense of aesthetic productions like cinema, social experiences like Facebook, and the cyber mode of production that binds online pleasures to offline battery factories. This is an expansive, fascinating book, offering its readers a dazzling plenty of speculation and critique. * Anna Kornbluh, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (2013) *Table of ContentsList of Figures List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? 2. Slavoj Žižek as Internet Philosopher 3. Was Facebook an Event? 4. Is the Internet a Thing? 5. The Subject Supposed to LOL 6. Her: Or, There Is No Digital Relation (with Matthew Flisfeder) 7. The Selfie and the Cloud Conclusion Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisMatthew Harle is a writer, archive curator and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Barbican Centre, UK. His writing has appeared in a number of publications, such as Sight & Sound, Screen, CITY and Cineaste, and he is the co-editor of Of Mud and Flame: A Penda's Fen Sourcebook (2018).Trade ReviewOne of the foundational manoeuvres of the critical historian of culture is to turn finished works into unfinished ones. Matthew Harle has a head’s start here, and he capitalises on it brilliantly revealing the unrealised, the unmade and the abandoned as the ghostly DNA of the cultural sphere. * Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, UK *A glorious typology of the abandoned, failed and unfinished. Matthew Harle enthusiastically traces entropic utopias, ill-advised transport schemes, unraveled cinematic collaborations and unrealised literary projects in a compelling account of the enemies of promise that haunt fallible archives. It is a book that celebrates creative failure and thoughtfully explores the material spaces of incompletion. In a tour de force of intertextuality, it juxtaposes the infinite potential of the unfinished against the mundane inadequacies of the archive. Full of poignant foreclosures, this is a subtle, funny and excitingly original glimpse into the realms of arrested achievement. * Barry Curtis, Tutor in Critical and Historical Studies, Royal College of Art, UK *Most literary historians discuss abandoned art in doleful, pitying terms. Not Matthew Harle: he sees 'failure' as fertile. In this delightful and whip-smart cultural travelogue, he drifts across the 20th century and the institutions that (sometimes bathetically) try to archive it, offering a series of fascinating meditations on utopian colonies in Los Angeles, postwar British urban planning, Harold Pinter's efforts to bring Proust to the big screen. These projects, in their different ways unfinished and incomplete, emerge as zones of intellectual possibility, conceptual play, infinite and eccentric potential. * Sukhdev Sandhu, Associate Professor of English Literature and Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work 2. The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano del Rio 3. Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Postwar London 4. A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust 5. The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives 6. Remains to Be Seen: Afterword Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe place of the editor in literary production is an ambiguous and often invisible one, requiring close attention to publishing history and (often inaccessible) archival resources to bring it into focus. In The Art of Editing, Tim Groenland shows that the critical tendency to overlook the activities of editors and to focus on the solitary author figure neglects important elements of how literary works are acquired, developed and disseminated. Focusing on selected works of fiction by Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, authors who represent stylistic touchstones for US fiction of recent decades, Groenland presents two case studies of editorial collaboration. Carver's early stories were integral to the emergence of the Minimalist movement in the 1980s, while Wallace's novels marked a generational shift towards a more expansive, maximal mode of narrative. The role of their respective editors, however, is often overlooked. Gordon Lish's part in shaping the form of Carver's earlTrade ReviewThoroughly researched and elegantly written ... Groenland has done a service to scholars of both Carver and Wallace in telling the stories of their relationships with Lish and Pietsch in such intricate detail. * The Review of English Studies *A refreshing and overdue exercise in cultural iconoclasm ... [A] compelling study. * ASAP Journal *In this groundbreaking book, Tim Groenland shines a light on that most elusive figure, the literary editor. Digging deep into the work of two high-profile editors – Gordon Lish and Michael Pietsch – as they collaborated with two major writers – Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace – The Art of Editing combines in-depth archival research with perceptive close readings. The book not only offers a revelatory account of the editor’s art; it also tells a fresh story about the minimalist and maximalist styles of contemporary American fiction. We may live in an age of celebrity authors, but The Art of Editing shows us conclusively that, as Groenland memorably puts it, 'even extraordinary minds never work alone'. * Adam Kelly, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of York, UK, and author of American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) *Under precepts of genetic criticism and a conception of the social dimension of the production of literature, Tim Groenland reads closely in contrast the authorial-only versus the authorial-and-editorial prose of Raymond Carver with Gordon Lish and David Foster Wallace with Michael Pietsch. His study is a searching investigation of the convergence and overlap of authorial and editorial creativity in literary writing and commercial publishing. * Hans Walter Gabler, Professor Emeritus of English and Editorial Scholarship, Ludwig Maximilians Universität Munich, Germany *The Art of Editing is an outstanding account of the role of the modern editor from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, as well as a major contribution to scholarship on the work of Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace. Groenland offers an innovative approach to identifying the paradoxes of the fiction editor that will be an indispensable book for scholars interested in both the publishing history of modern fiction and in theoretical questions of authorship and literary production. * Alice Bennett, Senior Lecturer of English, Liverpool Hope University, UK, and author of Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bloomsbury, 2018) *Table of ContentsPreface: The Art of Editing Acknowledgments 1. “Stuff that editors do” 2. “My only fear is that it is too thin”: The Roots of the Carver Controversy 3. Minimalism in Action: Making What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 4. “It is His World and No Other”: Gordon Lish, Authorship, and Minimalism 5. “Your Devoted Editee”: David Foster Wallace and Michael Pietsch 6. Consider the Editor: Assembling The Pale King 7. “Magical Compression”: Wallace’s return to Minimalism 8. The Anxiety of Editorial Influence Bibliography Index

Read more less

Trade ReviewAuthorship’s Wake animates a new path for exploring the enduring legacy of the “authorship debates.” This lively and original book not only brilliantly elucidates the political stakes of proclaiming the “death of the author,” but also uses these insights to form novel and compelling arguments regarding a range of contemporary phenomena from campus speech debates to man-splaining. What the sole author leaves in his wake, we come to learn, are nothing less than the seeds for cultivating vital new practices of affect, agency, and collectivity. * Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College, USA *Inventive. Inspiring. Important. A passionate defense of the emancipatory post-war writing daring to stretch beyond authorship and the fiction/theory binary; a celebration, in the wake of Roland Barthes, of the wildly critical visions of such writers as Teju Cole, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace; and an invitation to form a new kind of study group with them all as we take on this startlingly strange and yet terrifyingly familiar 21st century. * Alice Jardine, Professor, Harvard University, USA, and author of At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) *Table of ContentsIntroduction: “Words Streaming in Your Wake” 1. Communication: Maggie Nelson and the Literary Text as Letter 2. Intention: The Inconsistent Anti-Intentionalism of Zadie Smith and Judith Butler 3. Agency: Roland Barthes and the Men Who Hold Forth 4. Labor: David Foster Wallace, Cowboy of Information Conclusion: Study Groups Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomáš Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects, Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experimentsthe faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Trade ReviewThrough a series of intriguing examples from literature, cinema, and contemporary arts, Jirsa’s book takes readers on a delightful cross-disciplinary journey into affectively driven generative deformations. Passionate and erudite, Disformations’s claim about the performative force of affects will be much debated in the contemporary media theory. * Pietro Conte, Associate Professor in Aesthetics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy *In this astonishingly inventive and wide-ranging book, Jirsa expertly traverses the domains of literature, painting, cinema, and video art for figures that push the formal limits of representation—the face destroyed by war, wallpaper patterns, the garbage dump, the empty chair—and thus reveal the dynamic force of affect at work in the secret heart of all formation. Arriving in the turbulent wake of the so-called affective and formal turns, Jirsa’s media-philosophical concept of disformation brilliantly shows us a new way through the all-too familiar impasses of both. This book should be read by anyone interested in thinking deeply about the affective operations of form in our contemporary mediated moment. * Abraham Geil, Senior Lecturer of Film Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands *The central project of Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature is to reactivate the vital question of the affective operations of aesthetic objects. Through close readings of a range of fascinating figures—from empty chairs to wallpaper patterns—Jirsa insists on treating representational limits neither as ineffable nor as deficient, but instead as generative processes that expose the speculative potential of disturbances to form. * Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *Disformations is admirable for its erudite close readings and unexpected comparisons that illuminate one another in a manner likely to engage both specialized and nonspecialized readers with different degrees of familiarity with literary and media studies, art history, and cinema. * Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture *Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements When Forms Fall Apart: An Introduction Disformations Open Form to New Formations Formal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite Form Aesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia Figures Chapter 1 Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration Shattering the Face in Modernism Toward the Affective Work of the Formless Inflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées Rewriting the Faceless Experience Chapter 2 Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper Pattern Nabokov’s Unruly Geometry of Wallpaper Rococo, or the Broken Frame Boredom, Fascination, and the Screen of Hallucination For a Morphological Reading of Gilman’s Wallpaper Between Excess and Absence: The Patterns of Madness Chapter 3 How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage Dump Speaking for Rubbish: Tournier’s Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste Studies The Media Archaeology of Garbage Reading a Figure, Trashing the Subject From Metatext to Diatext Chapter 4 The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get Crowded Chairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing Subject Tracing the Present Absence with Van Gogh, Derrida, and Nancy Chairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco’s The Chairs Decentered, Not Vanished Coda: Affective Compounds Make a Media Excess Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisMikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and former Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 30 books (in English and Russian), including The Transformative Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2012), and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991) and the Liberty Prize, awarded annually for the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations (New York, 2000).Trade ReviewFew books could be a better, more incisive and captivating guide to the intellectual richness of an important historical period than Mikhail Epstein’s history of Russian thought in the late Soviet period ... a treasure-trove of discovery, opening up a vault of riches that is vast and multi-leveled. * Slavic Review *The Phoenix of Philosophy benefits from its author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the many philosophical tendencies and the individual philosophers he describes. He is brilliant at summarising their ideas ... Epstein’s work is a great achievement * Marx and Philosophy Review of Books *Both a provocative analytical study and a philosophical dictionary of sorts, the book is absorbing and extremely valuable and should hopefully reach a large—and not just Slavic—audience. * Slavic and East European Journal *[T]his is a very helpful and stimulating work. * Slavonic & East European Review *Bold, comprehensive, and beautifully written, this book retrieves one of the best-forgotten parts of global intellectual history. While the lives of leading Soviet thinkers were tragic, Mikhail Epstein presents their philosophy as liberating: a sublime lesson of hope and resistance for our time. * Alexander Etkind, Professor of History of Russia-Europe Relations, European University at Florence, Italy *An impressive work of synthesis, this book offers a fascinating panorama of Soviet intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. Epstein writes with clarity and conviction that stem from his knowledge and immediate experience of the times he revisits in these often riveting pages. * Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK *This beautifully written book by one of our most eminent scholars of Russian culture confirms that even in the most inhospitable circumstances, such as Soviet ideocracy, Russian thought flourishes and liberates. It is a brilliant testimony to the power of ideas and of the human spirit. * Randall A. Poole, Professor of History, College of St. Scholastica, USA *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism Part 2. Neo-rationalism. Structuralism. General methodology Part 3. The philosophy of personality and of freedom Part 4. Culturology, or, the philosophy of culture Conclusion Works cited Appendix: Original Russian and other foreign-language titles Name index Subject index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAmy Allen is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016). Mari Ruti is Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of twelve books, including Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Distillations: Theory, Ethics, Affect (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).Trade ReviewThis vibrant conversation of two brilliant theorists gives readers a chance to understand why psychoanalytic theory matters for thinking about subjectivity, affect, creativity, and politics. In conversational mode, these interlocutors bring to life difficult and important concepts, exploring the tensions among psychoanalytic positions, and giving an acute sense of life to theoretical concepts. This book makes the case for thinking carefully and well about key dimensions of selfhood, relationality, psychic states, and social relations. It brings one into the living character of thought, the fecundity of dialogue, and provides a model for intellectual friendship for our times. The text speaks to the specialist and to the curious, and helps to illuminate key concepts about psychic and social life that prove to be indispensable for understanding ourselves in the world. * Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and author of The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) *I feel like I’ve pulled up a chair to the dining room table, strewn with all the texts that Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein have ever written, where Mari Ruti and Amy Allen sit immersed in conversation, intent on discovering—and explaining with erudite ease—the common touch points of two of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. * Noelle McAfee, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Emory University, USA *Everything you wanted to know about Melanie Klein but were legitimately afraid to ask Jacques Lacan! This extended staging of an encounter between Klein and Lacan is long overdue, a god-send and a necessity for our contemporary times. How is it that we have not put on fertile ground the two heavy weights of post-Freudian theory? The intimate exchange between Amy Allen and Mari Ruti guides us through the most difficult terrain, from alienation to paranoia and castration, from depressive anxieties to love and symbiosis. * Jamieson Webster, Psychoanalyst based in New York, USA, and author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (2018) *Allen and Ruti manage not only to bring into conversation two crucial theorists who had previously been regarded as being at odds with one another, they also enact in the structure of their book and the style of their discourse a new mode of engaging in critical theory: non-adversarial but differentiated, generous but rigorous. * Gail M. Newman, Harold J Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Williams College, USA *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Subjectivity 2. Fusion 3. Anxiety 4. Affect 5. Love 6. Creativity 7. Politics Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe 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

Read more less

Book SynopsisA new analysis of one of the most loaded terms in the German language: Heimat, or Homeland. The idea of Heimat (home, homeland, native region) has been as important to German self-perceptions over the last two hundred years as the shifting notion of the German nation. While the idea of Heimat has been long neglected in English studies of German culture--among other reasons because the word Heimat has no exact equivalent in English--this book offers us the first cross-disciplinary and comprehensive analysis, in English or German, of this all-pervasive German idea. Blickle shows how the idea of Heimat interpenetrates German notions of modernity, identity, gender, nature, and innocence. Blickle reminds us of such commonplace expressions of Heimat sentimentality as Biedermeier landscapes of Alpine meadows and castles on the Rhine, but also finds the Heimat preoccupation in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Always aware of the many literary representations of Heimat (for instance in Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), Blickle does not argue for the fundamental innocence of Heimat. Instead he shows again and again how the idealization of a home ground leads to borders of exclusion. Peter Blickle is associate professor of German at Western Michigan University.Trade ReviewThis volume will be a must for scholars working on Heimat and a welcome addition to any library. * MICHIGAN ACADEMICIAN *For anyone interested in German notions of Heimat, Blickle's study, an impressive scholarly accomplishment, is indispensable reading. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Blickle has rendered an important service in providing a lucid and provocative study on a topic that has elicited profuse commentary in recent years. * MONATSHEFTE *

Read more less

Book SynopsisRe-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.Table of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction - Song, Tree, and Spring: Environmental Meaning and the Environmental Humanities Part One: Backgrounds Chapter 2: The Ecopoetics of Creation: Genesis LXX 1-3 By Alfred Kentigern Siewers Chapter 3: Place and Sign: Locality as a Foundation for Ecosemiotics By Timo Maran Chapter 4: Learning from Temple Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject By Cary Wolfe Part Two: Medieval Natures Chapter 5: “The Secret Folds of Nature”: Eriugena's Expansive Concept of Nature By Dermot Moran Chapter 6: The Nature of Miracles in Early Irish Saints’ Lives By John Carey Chapter 7: Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages By Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Part Three: Re-Negotiating Native Natures Chapter 8: The Yua as Logoi By Fr Michael Oleksa Chapter 9: Intersubjectivity with “Nature” in Plains Indian Vision-seeking By Kathryn W. Shanley Chapter 10: The Experience of the World as the Experience of the Self: Smooth Rocks in a River Archipelago By Katherine M. Faull Chapter 11: Human Geographies and Landscapes of the Divine in Ibero-American Borderlands By Cynthia Radding Chapter 12: Call and Response: The Human/Non-Human Encounter in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms By Sarah Reese Suggested Reading Bibliography Index About the Contributors

Read more less

The general scope of the present volume is to present a variety of approaches and topics within the growing field of research on Byzantine aesthetics. Theurgy in Neoplatonic and Christian contexts is represented by the contributions of W.-M. Stock and L. Bergemann; theories of beauty are at the centre of interest of the papers by S. Mariev and M. Marchetto. A. Pizzone approaches Byzantine aesthetics by looking for aesthetic experience in the literary texts, while the remaining contributions explore issues related to the iconoclast controversy: An important moment in the development of Byzantine philosophy on the eve of iconoclasm is the primary interest of A. del Campo Echevarría, who looks at the question of universals in John of Damaskos. The relationship between image and text in Byzantine illustrated manuscripts occupies the attention of B. Crostini. D. Afinogenov explores from a philological perspective the fate of important iconophile terminology in Old Bulgarian, while L. Lukhovitskij reconstructs from historical and philological perspectives the historical memory of the iconoclast controversy during the Late Byzantine Period.

Read more less

Epic is dialectally mixed but Ionic at its core. The proper dialect for elegy was Ionic, even when composed by Tyrtaeus in Sparta or Theognis in Megara, both Doric areas. Choral lyric poets represent the major dialect areas: Aeolic (Sappho, Alcaeus), Ionic (Anacreon, Archilochus, Simonides), and Doric (Alcman, Ibycus, Stesichorus, Pindar). Most distinctive are the Aeolic poets. The rest may have a preference for their own dialect (some more than others) but in their Lesbian veneer and mixture of Doric and Ionic forms are to some extent dialectally indistinguishable. All of the ancient authors use a literary language that is artificial from the point of view of any individual dialect. Homer has the most forms that occur in no actual dialect. In this volume, by means of dialectally and chronologically arranged illustrative texts, translated and provided with running commentary, some of the early Greek authors are compared against epigraphic records, where available, from the same period and locality in order to provide an appreciation of: the internal history of the Ancient Greek language and its dialects; the evolution of the multilectal, artificial poetic language that characterizes the main genres of the most ancient Greek literature, especially Homer / epic, with notes on choral lyric and even the literary language of the prose historian Herodotus; the formulaic properties of ancient poetry, especially epic genres; the development of more complex meters, colometric structure, and poetic conventions; and the basis for decisions about text editing and the selection of a manuscript alternant or emendation that was plausibly used by a given author.

Read more less

Book SynopsisStuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and is thus the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home décor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object. Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.Trade ReviewBoscagli’s readings of objects are genuinely exciting ... For anyone interested in consumer capitalism, mediation, the cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, or objects in art, however, Stuff Theory is a necessary read. Boscagli’s writing throughout has verve, and the analyses are sharp, incisive, and often surprising. * U.S. Studies Online *The hinge between [modernist and new materialism] is supplied by the endlessly suggestive writing of Walter Benjamin who acts as the richest example of what can be gleaned when these two worlds are entangled ... Boscagli both follows Benjamin and pushes his work into new arenas ... Stuff Theory’s engagement with ‘new materialism’ is wide ranging. * New Foundations *New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading. -- Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, CanadaAt one point in David Fincher's 1999 cult film Fight Club, Brad Pitt's rascally Tyler Durden mocks a minor character who states vaguely that in college he studied "stuff." Maurizia Boscagli’s dazzling Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism shows how Tyler might have taken this utterance seriously: "stuff" is indeed worthy of study. Each page brimming with fresh examples drawn from literature, art, and culture, and carefully informed by intellectual precursors from Marx to the new materialists, Boscagli's theory ultimately illuminates the practice of stuff, and suggests that this practice may be due for revision. -- Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of FlightMatter is desire. Whether conceived as an object that can be represented and appropriated or as force whose unpredictability and vitality throws life wide open, matter never leaves us in peace. In this wonderful book Maurizia Boscagli explores how the everyday is shaped by these tantalizing movements of matter. Beyond the capitalocentricism of historical materialism and the detached hype of new materialism Stuff Theory proposes an experimental materialist practice that works with matter to remake the stuff that power and politics are made of. * Dimitris Papadopoulos, Reader in Sociology and Organisation, University of Leicester, UK, author of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century *Boscagli offers an exhilarating genealogy of the commodity in order to open up a questions that neither presuppose the old distinction between subject and object nor revel in the sheer plasticity of things. I especially admire the case that Stuff Theory makes for dialectic as the necessary means of thinking our way through and beyond the 19th-century opposition of materialism (which now includes cyborgian hybrids) to idealism (which has always included aesthetic expression). Bocagli's "radical materialism" shows that only a critique of post-commodity things can tell us how to read them as transformations of "stuff" that expresses the people and selves to which neo-liberalism denies subjectivity. * Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes—Matter in the Moment 1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter 2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault 3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution 4. “You Must Remember this:” Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory 5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff? Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera’s place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of “period pieces” that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera’s fiction. Building on theorist René Girard’s notion of “triangular desire,” he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive—and bitterly funny—understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera’s novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found “the One” at last—or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera’s novels and a witty introduction to Girard’s mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.Trade ReviewThe contribution that Trevor Merrill’s book makes is at least threefold: it sheds new light on the work of one of our era’s strongest novelists; it extends and confirms the literary reach of René Girard’s main hypotheses; and it helps us to better understand our own existence. And it does all of this in a style that’s clear, precise, and elegant. What more could be asked of a major work of literary criticism? -- François Ricard, McGill University, USAIn the same way that according to Galileo "Nature's great book is written in mathematical language", Trevor Merrill argues brilliantly that Milan Kundera’s oeuvre is written in terms of René Girard’s theory of mimetic, triangular desire. What is remarkable is that Kundera himself was unaware of the existence of the theory when he wrote his first novels. Had he been, he would by his own admission have found himself unable to write them. What is even more remarkable is that this structural kinship once revealed does add to the beauty of Kundera’s works in the same way that Newton’s or Einstein’s equations make Nature even more astounding. This is a great book about a great writer and a great theory, in which the three vertices of the triangle enhance one another. -- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor of Philosophy, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, FranceWith clear and persuasive style Trevor Cribben Merrill’s The Book of Imitation and Desire successfully rescues Milan Kundera from the unjust expulsion he suffered, at the hand of Harold Bloom, from the pantheon of the 20th century canonic authors. By compellingly arguing about the infinite perceptiveness of Kundera’s novels in relation to the Quixotesque adventures of our eternally mediated desires, Merrill offers an illuminating and enriching new perspective on the opus of the Czech writer. The Girardian lens, rather than straitjacketing the psychological complexity of Kundera’s works, as many have argued, opens up new critical perspectives and a new understanding of the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Pace Bloom, in the pantheon of the novelistic geniuses set by Girard’s seminal Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Merrill’s excellent book suggests, a place should now be reserved for Milan Kundera. -- Pierpaolo Antonello, University Senior Lecturer, Department of Italian, University of Cambridge, UKTable of ContentsForeword by Andrew McKenna Author’s Preface I. “WOMEN LOOK FOR MEN WHO HAVE HAD BEAUTIFUL WOMEN” II. INTO THE LABYRINTH OF VALUES 1. The Transfiguration of the Object 2. Metamorphoses of Kristyna 3. “An Imitation of Feeling” III. FROM IMITATION TO RIVALRY 1. The Shift from Admiration to Envy 2. Deceit, Desire, and the Plight of the Aging Don Juan 3. Rivalry and the Transfiguration of the Object 4. “The Younger Sister Imitated the Elder” 5. Publish or Perish IV. THE MODEL AS OBSTACLE 1. Strategies of Revelation 2. The Art of Polyphonic Comparison 3. A Little Theory of Resentment 4. Litost in the Underground V. JEALOUSY AND ITS METAPHORS 1. The Game Gone Awry 2. The Metaphors of Jealousy 3. “A Test That Gauged Her Susceptibility To Seduction” VI. THE QUADRILLE OF DESIRE 1. Sex as Theater 2. Acute Rivalry and Homosexual Attraction 3. The Geometry of Sadomasochism VII. AT THE HEART OF THE LABYRINTH 1. “The Thousand-Headed Dragon” 2. “The Cement of their Brotherhood” 3. The Two Temptations 4. “The Absolute Denial of Shit” 5. First Time As Tragedy, Second Time As Farce VIII. REPUDIATING THE MODEL 1. Eduard’s Smile 2. From Hatred to Compassion 3. Karenin’s Smile 4. The Birth of a Novelist 5. Liberating Exiles IX. TOMAS IN COLONUS, OR THE WISDOM OF THE NOVEL Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe second of a two volume set of books which looks at the work of all those who wish to understand the important of Italo Svevo's work

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."Table of ContentsIntroduction by Ian BrintonChapter 1: Summary & Introduction: Critical Reservations about "Modern" or Experimental Poetry Chapter 2: The Concept of Metre and the Relation of Prosody to MeaningChapter 3: Prose and Speech as Criteria for the Organisation of Poetic DiscourseChapter 4: The Influence of Humanist Notions of Organisation on Sixteenth Century PoeticsChapter 5: The Harmony of the World and the Harmony of Verse: an Idea in DegradationChapter 6: Sound and Sense: the Direct Action of Poetic Rhythm on the Passions and the Theory of ExpressionChapter 7: Natural Rhythmic Standards and the Demand for Prosodic VarietyChapter 8: Conclusion: Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of LanguageReport by J.H. Prynne

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limits of empathy. Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 The Permeability of Terms 1.2 The Benefits and Dangers of Empathy 1.3 The Poetry of Empathetic Dissonance after Three Contemporary Crises 1.4 The Chapters 2. Chapter 2: The Unsaid 2.1 & the Holocaust 2.2 & 9/11 2.3 & Hurricane Katrina 3. Chapter 3: The Unhere 3.1 & the Holocaust 3.2 & 9/11 3.3 & Hurricane Katrina 4. Chapter 4: The Ungod 4.1 & the Holocaust 4.2 & 9/11 4.3 & Hurricane Katrina 5. Conclusion 5.1 Challenges and Limitations 5.2 Empathy: Thread and Needle 5.3 Alternative Avenues 5.4 Future Directions 5.5. To the Reader 5.6 Unconclusion 

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is a close taxonomic study of the pivotal role of games in early modern drama. The presence of the game motif has often been noticed, but this study, the most comprehensive of its kind, shows how games operate in more complex ways than simple metaphor and can be syntheses of emblem and dramatic device. Drawing on seventeenth-century treatises, including Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, which only became available in print in 2003, and divided into chapters on Dice, Cards, Tables (Backgammon), and Chess, the book brings back into focus the symbolism and divinatory origins of games. The work of more than ten dramatists is analysed, from the Shakespeare and Middleton canon to rarer plays such as The Spanish Curate, The Two Angry Women of Abington and The Cittie Gallant. Games and theatre share common ground in terms of performance, deceit, plotting, risk and chance, and the early modern playhouse provided apt conditions for vicarious play. From the romantic chase to the financial gamble, and in legal contest and war, the twenty-first century is still engaging the game. With its extensive appendices, the book will appeal to readers interested in period games and those teaching or studying early modern drama, including theatre producers, and awareness of the vocabulary of period games will allow further references to be understood in non-dramatic texts.Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Introduction.2. Chapter 2: Games in Early Modern Culture.3. Chapter 3: Dice: the roll/role of chance and luck .4. Chapter 4: Cards: face cards, rules, and secrecy.5. Chapter 5: Tables: Backgammon and race games between the sexes.6. Chapter 6: Chess: war, harmony, sex and politics.- 7Chapter 7: Conclusion.

Read more less

Book SynopsisChildren’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind explores ways in which children’s literature becomes the object and catalyst of play that brings younger and older generations closer to one another. Providing examples from diverse cultural and historical contexts, this collection argues that children’s texts promote intergenerational play through the use of literary devices and graphic formats and that they may prompt joint play practices in the real world. The book offers a distinctive contribution to children’s literature scholarship by shifting critical attention away from the difference and conflict between children and adults to the exploration of inter-age interdependencies as equally crucial aspects of human life, presenting a new perspective for all who research and work with children’s culture in times of global aging.Table of Contents Chapter 1. Play, Children’s Literature, and Intergenerational Connectivity. - Chapter 2: The Child Reader’s Playful Adventures in Wonderland. - Chapter 3. The Nature of Play and Adult-Child Interaction in the Alice Books and Coraline. -Chapter 4. Embracing the Childlike: Play in Picturebook Poetics. - Chapter 5. Intergenerational Encounters in Contemporary Picturebooks. - Chapter 6. Rabindranath Tagore the Grandfather: Shey as a Playful Encounter between a Poet and His Granddaughter. - Chapter 7. How Fictional Representations of Intergenerational Play May Be Important for Child Readers: A Cognitive Approach. - Chapter 8. “How did Child of Light save me?” Engagement with a Children’s Multimodal Game Narrative as Adult play and Self-therapy. - Chapter 9. No Adults in the Woods: Relationships between Adults and Children during Outdoor Play in Award-Winning Picturebooks from the United States. - Chapter 10. Don’t Tell the Parents! The Illicitness of Intergenerational Play. - Chapter 11. Not Your (Ordinary) Grandma: Old Age in Three Contemporary Dutch Children’s Books. - Chapter 12. Barbie Unbound: The Satirical Representation of the Barbie Doll as an Exemplification of Realism and Crossover Attitude in Young Adult Literature. - Chapter 13. Deconstructing Stereotypes through Reading Children’s Literature as Intergenerational Play: The Case of the Stepmother. - Chapter 14. Family in Finnish Picturebooks: Playful Books Challenging Normative Representation of Family.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book takes a postcritical perspective on Joseph Conrad’s central texts, including Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Lord Jim. Whereas critique is a form of reading that prioritizes suspicion, unmasking, and demystifying, postcritique ascribes positive value to the knowledge, affect, ethics, and politics that emerge from literature. The essays in this collection recognize the dark elements in Conrad’s fiction—deceit, vanity, avarice, lust, cynicism, and cruelty—yet they perceive hopefulness as well. Conrad’s skepticism unveils the dark heart of politics, and his critical heritage can feed our fear that humanity is incapable of improving. This Conrad is a well-known figure, but there is another, neglected Conrad that this book aims to bring to light, one who delves into the politics of hope as well as the politics of fear. Chapters 1 and 2 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.comTable of ContentsChapter 1: IntroductionPart I: Finding Hope—Recuperative Reading, Reparative ReadingChapter 2: Quixotic Conrad: Betrayal, Conversion, and Flight, Jay ParkerChapter 3: "The new sun is rising": Conrad, Women, and Hope, Rachel HollanderPart II: Understanding the Politics of FearChapter 4: Doubling Down on the Politics of Fear, Opening Up the Politics of Hope, Joyce WexlerChapter 5: Joseph Conrad’s “Strange Air of Finality”: Negative Affect and the Politics of Fear in “The Tale, Jarica Linn WattsChapter 6: "Pulsating Wrongfully":Critique, Cliché, and The Secret Agent, James BrophyPart III: Ethics and AestheticsChapter 7: "Heart of Darkness" and the Memory of the Holocaust, Riccardo CapoferroChapter 8: The Beating Heart of Sublime Empire: The Secret Agent as Sequel to “Heart of Darkness”, Jana M. GilesChapter 9: Cross-cultural Accord in the Malay Fiction: The Performative Politics of Conrad’s Eastern World, Mark DegganChapter 10: "Some Knowledge of Yourself": “Heart of Darkness” in the Twenty-First Century Literature Classroom—An Ethical Approach, Anna Lindhé.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.Table of Contents1. Trauma and Recovery New Challenges to Motherhood.- Part I: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Trauma.- 2. Understanding the Trauma of Pervasive Pregnancy Denial in L’enfant que je n’attendais pas.- 3. Salvaging the Bones Means Fighting for Reproductive Justice: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Representations of the Trauma Produced by Attacks on Reproductive Rights, Comprehensive Sex Education, and Access to Maternal Health Care.- 4. Social Trauma and the Anti-Maternal Body in Diane a les épaule.- Part II: Trauma and Disrupted Mother-Child Bonds.- 5. Trauma Behind Bars: Maternal Dilemma in Rossella Schillaci’s Ninna nanna prigioniera.- 6. “Pour dire la souffrance des innocents?” Problematics of the Madonna-Son Trope in Representing Trauma in Philippe Aractingi’s Under the Bombs and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum.- 7. Traumatic Memory and Narrative Healing in Contemporary Diasporic Chinese British Women’s Writing.- Part III. New Challenges with ART.- 8. Tragedy, In Vitro: The Function of Reproductive Science in Simon Stone’s Adaptation of Yerma.- 9. “I have an enterprise:” Transnational Surrogacy, Neoliberal Repropreneurship, and the Potential Trauma of Clinical Labor in Zippi Brand Frank’s Google Baby.- 10. No Trauma for Artificial Women: Monstrous, Cybernetics, and Anomalous Mothers in Current Latin American Science Fiction

Read more less

Book SynopsisScience Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.Trade Review“Campbell’s volume is an indispensable collection of new voices and media spanning from at least the 1830s to the close of the 2010s, which … provides a tangible, though far reaching, web from which to choose a new vision for SF. … In a world where the lenses of SF and conscious reality seem to blur more and more, Campbell’s volume and the authors included are a beacon of hope.” (Alice G. Fulmer, SFRA Review, Vol. 53 (4), 2023)Table of Contents1: Introduction: Translation and SF: Theory and Practice.- 2: Translation of/and Speculative Fiction.- 3: Ponying the Slovos: A Parallel Linguistic Analysis of Translations of A Clockwork Orange.- 4: Is Jean-Pierre April’s Story a “Canadian Dream”, or a Linguistic Nightmare?- 5: Promoting the Science Fiction of Stateless Languages: Militant Translation and Translating the Catalan Masterpiece Typescript of the Second Origin.- 6: Censorship or cultural adjustment? Sexual violence in Hungarian translations of Asimov’s Second Foundation.- 7: A Feminist Utopia : Language, Translation & Reproduction in Chroniques du Pays des Mères.- 8: Ungendering the Women’s Language in the English Translation of Strugatsky’s Snail on the Slope.- Philip K. Dick in French: A Voice Changing in Time.- 9: Retranslating HG Wells into Turkish.- 10: Speculative Orientalism? On “Eastern” and “Western” Referents in Boualem Sansal’s 208.- 11: Otared and The Second Dog War : Two Arabic SF Novels.- 12: Social Technologies and Trauma in Two Novels.- 13: Alien Invasion, Brutalization and Hostile Takeover in the Enslavement Poetry of Juan Francisco Manzano 13: Ghosts, Aliens, and Machines: Epistemic Continuity and Assemblage in Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s Science Fiction.- 14: Pure of Heart and Strong of Stature: Retranslating the “Sick Man of Asia”.- 15: Translating the Chinese Monster in Waste.- 15: Missing Mars: Cosmic Homelessness and the Transfiguration of Anglo-American Science Fiction Tropes in Harry Martinson’s.- 16: Ménageries of an Unstable Canon: Some Notes on Three Portuguese SF Short Story Anthologies Compiled by Portuguese Editors.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.Table of ContentsIntroduction, Peter Marks, Fátima Vieira, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor.- Utopia Patricia Vieira.- Dystopia, Gregory Claeys.- Critical Dystopia, Ildney de Fátima Souza Cavalcanti.- Prefigurations, Francisco L. Lisi.- The Renaissance, Marie-Claire Phelippeau.- The Eighteenth Century, Brenda Tooley.- The Early Nineteenth Century (1800-1850), Peter Sands.- The Late Nineteenth Century (1848-1899), Matthew Beaumont.- The Twentieth Century, Dr. Adam Stock.- The Twenty-First Century, Matt Tierney.- Narrative, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor.- Science Fiction, Caroline Edwards.- Young Adult (YA) Fiction, Carire Hintz.- Apocalyptic Visions, Gib Prettyman, Utopian Realism, Sam McAuliffe.- Cinema, Peter Marks.- Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes.- Gaming, Brian Greenspan.- Deaftopias, Cristina Gil, Micronations and Hyperutopias, Fátima Vieira.- Humanism, Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel.- Eugenics, Claire C. Curtis.- Marxism, Antonis Balasopoulos.- Anarchism, Laurence Davis.- Labor, Peter Sands.- Race, Edward K. Chan.- Biopolitics, Christian P. Haines.- War, Andrew Byers.- Postcolonialism, Bill Ashcroft.- Human Rights, Miguel A Ramiro Avilés.- Animal Rights, José Eduardo Reis.- Food, Etta Madden.- Environment, Anne L. Melano.- Space, Phillip E. Wegner.- Urbanism, David Pinder.- Home, Jennifer Wgner-Lawlor.- Oceans, Killian Quigley.- Moons and Planets, Maria Luísa Malato and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor.- Geographical Poetics, Liam Benison.- Non-Western Cultures, Jaqueline Dutton.- Africa, Ainehi Ejieme Edoro.- South Asia, Barnita Bagchi.- Latin America, Kim Beauchesne and Alessandra Santos.- The Pacific and Australasia, Peter Marks.- China, Roland Boer.- Russia and the Soviet Union, Mikhail Suslov.- Psychoanalysis, Edson Luiz André De Sousa.- Education, Darren Webb.- Religion, Jose Eduardo Franco.- Hospitality, Goncalo Marcelo.- Sexualities, Quitterie de Beauregard.- Death, Paola Spinozzi , The Posthumanism, Naomi Jacobs.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis essay collection examines the theory and history of graphic narrative as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. Its contributions test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the ‘single work’, consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.This is the revised second edition of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, which was originally published in the Narratologia series.

Read more less

Book SynopsisRecent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses, the experiential level of their engagement with narrative remains relatively undertheorized. Building on theories of experience and embodiment within today's "second-generation" cognitive science, and opening a dialogue with so-called "enactivist" philosophy, this book sets out to explore how narrative experiences arise from the interaction between textual cues and readers' past experiences. Caracciolo's study offers a phenomenologically inspired account of narrative, spanning a wide gamut of responses such as the embodied dynamic of imagining a fictional world, empathetic perspective-taking in relating to characters, and "higher-order" evaluations and interpretations. Only by placing a premium on how such modes of engagement are intertwined in experience, Caracciolo argues, can we do justice to narrative's psychological and existential impact on our lives. These insights are illustrated through close readings of literary texts ranging from Émile Zola's Germinal to José Saramago's Blindness.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisGaia-Ästhetiken entwerfen Figurationen der Erde und ihrer Lebensformen, welche die Menschen dezentrieren und den Fokus auf die Verbindungen zwischen Lebewesen untereinander und dem Unbelebten richten. Diese Ästhetiken sind der Gaia-Theorie entlehnt. In den 1970er Jahren bei der NASA entwickelt, wird sie von Bruno Latour und Isabelle Stengers in den Kontext des Anthropozäns gesetzt. Die Erde als Gaia ist eine mehr-als-menschliche Assemblage, in der die Menschen Knotenpunkte der Verantwortlichkeit darstellen. Filmische Ästhetiken können diese Knotenpunkte wahrnehmbar werden lassen, wie die Spielfilme I Am Legend (2007) und Planet of the Apes (2011-2017) zeigen. Die Filme präsentieren ihren Zuschauer_innen eine Welt in der Post/Apokalypse, in der die Filmfiguren mit dem Eindringen Gaias konfrontiert sind. Sie werden in der Post/Apokalypse kompostiert: Viren dringen in ihre Körper ein, zersetzen ihre Menschlichkeit und lassen sie zum Teil des mehr-als-menschlichen Gaia-Komposts werden.Table of ContentsEinleitung: Welche Bedeutung haben mehr-als-menschliche Gaia-Ästhetiken für die Medienwissenschaft?.- Gaia und mehr-als-menschliche Verschränkungen in medialen Akteur-Netzwerken.- Gaias Eindringen in filmische Imaginationen der Apokalypse.- Die technowissenschaftliche Hervorbringung mehr-als-menschlicher Gaia-Ästhetiken.- Fazit: SF im Rahmen technokapitalistischer Reproduktion.- Bildmaterial.- Quellenverzeichnis.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTable of ContentsI-VI -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- PREFACE -- CONTENTS -- I. MARKING THE BOUNDARIES -- 1. RUSSIAN FORMALISM -- 2. NEW CRITICISM -- II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS -- 1. THE IDEALISTIC TREND -- 2. THE NEO-POSITIVIST TREND -- III. FROM CAUSALITY TO PURPOSlVENESS: A STORY OF PRACTICAL CRITICISM -- IV. RECAPITULATION AND PERSPECTIVES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Read more less