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Inventions of A Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization
Par Fredric Jameson. 2024
The giant of literary theory analyses the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and…
moreA novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation, and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living.The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try – and sometimes succeed – in awakening our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience; opening up a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and class or community. But even if this happens (rarely!), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the mere awakening of a feeling of multitude.And, since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, it is urgent to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these nationalisms.This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politicality of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the old Soviet Union; from East Germany to Japan, Latin America and the Nordic countries. Like any such voyage, it is an arbitrary movement across the world of historical situations which, however, seeks to dramatize their common kinship in late capitalism itself.Beckett and Cioran (Elements in Beckett Studies)
Par Null Steven Matthews. 2024
This Element discusses the association between Samuel Beckett, and the Romanian-born philosopher, E. M. Cioran. It draws upon the known…
biographical detail, but, more substantially, upon the terms of Beckett's engagement with Cioran's writings, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Certain of Cioran's key conceptualisations, such as that of the 'meteque', and his version of philosophical scepticism, resonate with aspects of Beckett's writing as it evolved beyond the 'siege in the room'. More particularly, aspects of Cioran's conclusion about the formal nature that philosophy must assume chime with some of the formal decisions taken by Beckett in the mid-late prose. Through close reading of some of Beckett's key works such as Texts for Nothing and How It Is, and through consideration of Beckett's choices when translating between English and French, the issues of identity and understanding shared by these two settlers in Paris are mutually illuminated.Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
Par Katherine Ebury, Christin M. Mulligan. 2024
This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of…
Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.Ancient Western Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration: Proceedings of the NYU-PSL International Colloquium, Paris Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, April 16–17, 2019 (ISAW Monographs)
Par Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault, Ilaria Calini, Robert Hawley, and Lorenzo d’Alfonso. 2024
New results and interpretations challenging the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Late Bronze Age Eastern MediterraneanAncient Western…
Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200–900 BCE) presents select essays originating in a two-year research collaboration between New York University and Paris Sciences et Lettres. The contributions here offer new results and interpretations of the processes and outcomes of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in three broad regions: Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and the Levant. Together, these challenge the notion of a uniform, macroregional collapse throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by the regeneration of political powers. Current research on newly discovered or reinterpreted textual and material evidence from Western Asia instead suggests that this transition was characterized by a diversity of local responses emerging from diverse environmental settings and culture complexes, as evident in the case studies collected here in history, archaeology, and art history. The editors avoid particularism by adopting a regional organization, with the aim of identifying and tracing similar processes and outcomes emerging locally across the three regions. Ultimately, this volume reimagines the Late Bronze–Iron Age transition as the emergence of a set of recursive processes and outcomes nested firmly in the local cultural interactions of western Asia before the beginning of the new, unifying era of Assyrian imperialism.Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American JewsThroughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified…
position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today’s vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century. Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents—from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism—Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews’ participation in coalitions working for justice.At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper—and deeply contested—history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History
Par Jessica Kirzane, Rachel Rubinstein, Josh Lambert, Tahneer Oksman, Karen Skinazi, Jennifer Glaser, Alex Ullman. 2024
Bridging literary studies and cultural history, this edited volume examines Jewish women writers’ wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture from…
the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Matrilineal Dissent features innovative considerations of contemporary autofiction, graphic narratives, and novels by Mizrahi writers as well as middlebrow, Progressive Era, and second-wave feminist literature. Authors discussed herein—such as Roz Chast, Erica Jong,Annie Nathan Meyer, and Adrienne Rich—challenge monolithic representations of Jewishness and gender while imagining radical alternatives. By drawing attention to the politics of these authors and their readers, texts emerge as tools and living practices rather than as ends in themselves. Collectively, contributors reframe Jewish American literary history through feminist approaches that have revolutionized the field, from intersectionality and the #MeToo movement to queer theory and disability studies. Examining both canonical and lesser-known texts, this collection invites questions about conventional understandings of Jewish American literature when we center women’s writing and acknowledge women as dominant players in Jewish cultural production.Reading the Impossible: Sexual Difference, Critique, and the Stamp of History
Par Elizabeth Weed. 2024
Reading the impossible has never seemed less possible. A few decades ago, critical readings could view the collapse of foundationalism…
optimistically. With meaning no longer soldered onto being, there was hope for all those beings whose meaning had been forever ordained by Nature or the Divine. Critical reading thus became a way of exploring the devious workings of knowledge and power. But as non-foundational systems of meaning have proven to be so perfectly suited to the transactional logics of the market, reading for the impasses of meaning has come to be seen as quixotic, impractical, and dated. To concur with that view, Elizabeth Weed argues, is to embrace the fantasy told by the neoliberal order. To read the impossible is to disrupt that fantasy, with its return to stable categories of marketable identity, in order to contest the inexorable workings of misogyny and racism. This book seeks to disturb the positivity of identity in the hope of retrieving the impossibility of sexual difference, an impossibility that has its effects in the Real of misogyny.A return to the famous debate between Derrida and Lacan on the impossibility of sexual difference yields two different readings of the impossible. In reconsidering these questions, Weed shows how the practice of reading can powerfully stage the wiles of language and the unconscious. In returning to that earlier moment in the context of current debates on the role of reading and interpretation, Weed offers a fresh perspective on what is at stake for critical reading in the neoliberal university.English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of…
the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers’ fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet
Par Julia Gordon-Bramer. 2024
• Decodes the alchemical, Qabalistic, hermetic, spiritual, and Tarot-related references in many of Plath&’s poems• Based on more than 15…
years of research, including analysis of Plath&’s unpublished personal writings from the Plath archives at Indiana University• Examines the influences of Plath&’s parents, her early interests in Hermeticism, and her and husband Ted Hughes&’s explorations in the supernatural and the occultSharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath&’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath&’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. She examines Plath&’s early years growing up in a transcendentalist Unitarian church under a brilliant, if stern, Freemason father and a mother who wrote her master&’s dissertation on the famous alchemist Paracelsus. She reveals Plath&’s early knowledge of Hermeticism, how she devoured books on the occult throughout her life, and how, since adolescence, Plath regularly wrote of premonitory dreams. Examining Plath&’s tumultuous marriage with poet Ted Hughes, she looks at their explorations in the supernatural and Hughes&’s mentoring of Plath in meditation, crystal-gazing, astrology, Qabalah, tarot, automatic writing, magical workings, and use of the Ouija board.Looking at Plath&’s writing and her evolution as a person through mystical, political, personal, and historical lenses, Gordon-Bramer shows how Plath&’s poems take on radically new, surprising, and universal meanings—explaining why Hughes perpetually denied that Plath was a &“confessional poet.&” Contrasting the versions in Letters Home with those held in the Plath archives at Indiana University, the author also shows how all occult influences have been rigorously excised from the letters approved for publication by the Plath and Hughes estates. Revealing previously undiscovered meanings deeply rooted in her mystical and occult endeavors, the author shows how Plath&’s writings are much broader than the narrow lens of her tragic autobiography.A Summer with Pascal
Par Antoine Compagnon. 2024
From an eminent scholar, a spirited introduction to one of the great polymaths in the history of Europe.Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)…
is best known in the English-speaking world for his contributions to mathematics and physics, with both a triangle and a law in fluid mechanics named after him. Meanwhile, the classic film My Night at Maud’s popularized Pascal’s wager, an invitation to faith that has inspired generations of theologians. Despite the immensity of his reputation, few read him outside French schools. In A Summer with Pascal, celebrated literary critic Antoine Compagnon opens our minds to a figure somehow both towering and ignored.Compagnon provides a bird’s-eye view of Pascal’s life and significance, making this volume an ideal introduction. Still, scholars and neophytes alike will profit greatly from his masterful readings of the Pensées—a cornerstone of Western philosophy—and the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal advanced wry theological critiques of his contemporaries. The concise, taut chapters build upon one another, easing into writings often thought to be forbidding and dour. With Compagnon as our guide, these works are not just accessible but enchanting.A Summer with Pascal brings the early modern thinker to life in the present. In an age of profound existential doubt and assaults on truth and reason, in which religion and science are so often crudely opposed, Pascal’s sophisticated commitment to both challenges us to meet the world with true intellectual vigor.Why we read: On bookworms, libraries, and just one more page before lights out
Par Shannon Reed. 2024
A hilarious and incisive exploration of the joys of reading from a teacher, bibliophile, and Thurber Prize Semifinalist We read…
to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to make us more fully human. Shannon Reed, a longtime teacher, lifelong reader, and New Yorker contributor, gets it. With one simple goal in mind, she makes the case that we should read for pleasure above all else. In this whip-smart, laugh-out-loud-funny collection, Reed shares surprising stories from her life as a reader and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students. From the varied novels she cherishes (Gone Girl, Their Eyes Were Watching God) to the ones she didn't (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Reed takes us on a rollicking tour through the comforting world of literature, celebrating the books we love, the readers who love them, and the ways in which literature can transform us for the betterWork, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction
Par Evelyn Tsz Chan. 2022
This book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation…
in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, “inheritance” gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrad’s fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work.The book explores how Conrad’s fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrad’s fiction critiques claims of desert arising from both work and inheritance, while also vividly portraying the emotional costs and existential angst that these beliefs in desert entailed. The argument speaks to and illuminates today’s debates on moral desert arising from work and inheritance, in particular from meritocratic ideals. Its new approach to Conrad’s works will appeal to students and scholars of Conrad and literary modernism, as well as a wider audience interested in philosophical and social debates on desert deriving from inheritance and work.This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture – canonical literature, children’s fiction, scientific texts, and writing by…
children – to argue that precocity challenges the idea of progress. It considers how practitioners of literature and science from Wordsworth to Freud represented human development, and the way in which Darwin’s “non-progressive model of evolution” troubled the existing model of progression by stages (from childhood inexperience to adult maturity and understanding). Roisín Laing argues that the precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress, and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development. The idea represented by the precocious child in Victorian culture – that the adult is not necessarily an improvement on the child, the human not necessarily an improvement on the ape – still troubles us today.Applications of Palynology in Stratigraphy and Climate Studies (Society of Earth Scientists Series)
Par Bandana Samant, Deepali Thakre. 2024
This book highlights the importance of palynology in understanding floral biodiversity, paleoclimate and depositional environments in deep time and recent sediments.…
It includes contributions from renowned Indian palynologists who work on the applied aspects of palynology. The book focuses on the significance of palynology in solving various geological problems, ranging from the Precambrian to the Recent. This book will be useful to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and academicians working in geology and botany, as well as international researchers interested in palynological research work in India.Gender and Change in Archaeology: European Studies on the Impact of Gender Research on Archaeology and Wider Society (Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology)
Par Nona Palincaş, Ana Cristina Martins. 2024
This volume presents the various ways in which the study of gender makes a difference in archaeological research, the archaeological…
academic milieu and the wider public’s thinking about gender and considers avenues of future development. It addresses questions such as why gender matters for archaeology, while examining gender from various angles (including aspects such as subjectivity, embodiment, diet, multifaceted perspectives and intersectionality) and in various periods (prehistory, Ancient Egypt, Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern and contemporary periods). It also discusses the relationship between archaeology and other academic fields involving the study of gender, as well as representations and debates on gender in the media. The theme ‘gender and change in archeology’ emerged out of concerns voiced within the ‘Archaeology and Gender in Europe’ (AGE) working community of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) with respect to thefuture of gender archaeology. This book unites researchers of gender archaeology from two perspectives: that of gender archaeologists from academic milieus where the study of gender has long been established and who in the meantime came to feel that this avenue of inquiry had become predictable and lost its provocative power, and that of gender archaeologists from countries where this field was only recently introduced and who, while more enthusiastic about the utility of gender archaeology, are concerned with how to disseminate it among skeptical peers. Both groups of archaeologists mainly argue that, four decades on, the study of gender in archaeology is still able to generate considerable change in our understanding of past and present-day societies. The volume is primarily of interest to archaeologists and researchers of gender studies.The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain
Par Seth Kimmel. 2024
A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge. Medieval scholars imagined the library as…
a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian’s Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco—close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps—Kimmel reveals how the booklover’s dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.Shakespeare's Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty
Par Joseph Campana. 2024
A study of Shakespeare’s child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are…
fond of saying that “children are the future.” How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana’s book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare’s works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.Converting the Missionaries: The Wheeler Family and the Ojibwe
Par Nancy Bunge. 2024
This book tells the uncommon story of a missionary family in the Midwestern United States, and their interactions with the…
indigenous Ojibwe. When Leonard and Harriet Wheeler arrived at La Pointe, Wisconsin in July of 1841, hoping to help the Ojibwe understand and accept the value of Christian civility, they did not expect such a profound transformation of their own lives. The Wheelers’ empathy for the Ojibwe not only grew during their twenty-five years of mission work in Northern Wisconsin, much of it spent trying to protect the Ojibwe from predatory whites, it also influenced the lives of their children.Primo Levi's Universe: A Writer's Journey
Par Sam Magavern. 2009
Primo Levi is best known as a memoirist of Auschwitz, but he was also a scientist, fiction writer, and poet:…
in short, a Renaissance man. Primo Levi's Universe offers a multi-faceted portrait of the heroic man who turned the concentration camp experience into beautiful yet terrifying literature. Over time, Levi developed an original world-view which he conveyed in his writing. Through careful readings of Levi's works, Sam Magavern finally does justice to his calm rationality, dark poetry, essential beliefs and wit. Levi's art and life are inextricably intertwined, and this book presents them together, allowing each to shed light on the other.Why to Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee's Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today
Par Tom Santopietro. 2018
Tom Santopietro, an author well-known for his writing about American popular culture, delves into the heart of the beloved classic…
and shows readers why To Kill a Mockingbird matters more today than ever before.With 40 million copies sold, To Kill a Mockingbird’s poignant but clear eyed examination of human nature has cemented its status as a global classic. Tom Santopietro's new book, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters, takes a 360 degree look at the Mockingbird phenomenon both on page and screen.Santopietro traces the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird, the impact of the Pulitzer Prize, and investigates the claims that Lee’s book is actually racist. Here for the first time is the full behind the scenes story regarding the creation of the 1962 film, one which entered the American consciousness in a way that few other films ever have. From the earliest casting sessions to the Oscars and the 50th Anniversary screening at the White House, Santopietro examines exactly what makes the movie and Gregory Peck’s unforgettable performance as Atticus Finch so captivating.As Americans yearn for an end to divisiveness, there is no better time to look at the significance of Harper Lee's book, the film, and all that came after.