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Author: John Beverley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780816622498
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs there a way of thinking about literature that is 'outside' or 'against' literature? In Against Literature, John Beverley brilliantly responds to this question, arguing for a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony.
Author: Emily Apter
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-06-17
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1784780022
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAgainst World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Author: Martin Paul Eve
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Published: 2016-10-17
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 1783742763
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Paul Eve’s engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it.
Author: Michael W. Clune
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-09
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 0804784825
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers—Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery—have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding of some of our most important literature.
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
Publisher: Gingko Library
Published: 2015-11-15
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 1909942782
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNaguib Mahfouz is one of the most important writers in contemporary Arabic literature. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1988 (the only Arab writer to win the prize thus far), his novels helped bring Arabic literature onto the international stage. Far fewer people know his nonfiction works, however—a gap that this book fills. Bringing together Mahfouz’s early nonfiction writings (most penned during the 1930s) which have not previously been available in English, this volume offers a rare glimpse into the early development of the renowned author. As these pieces show, Mahfouz was deeply interested in literature and philosophy, and his early writings engage with the origins of philosophy, its development and place in the history of thought, as well its meaning writ large. In his literary essays, he discusses a wide range of authors, from Anton Chekov to his own Arab contemporaries like Taha Hussein. He also ventures into a host of important contemporary issues, including science and modernity, the growing movement for women’s rights in the Arab world, and emerging ideologies like socialism—all of which outline the growing challenges to traditional modes of living that we saw all around him. Together, these essays offer a fascinating window not just into the mind of Mahfouz himself but the changing landscape of Egypt during that time, from the development of Islam to the struggles between tradition, modernity, and the influences of the West.
Author: Gerald Graff
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781566630979
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first and still one of the best critiques of post-1960s cultural radicalism, analyzing why and how the defenders of literature have gone wrong. "A wonderfully trenchant and illuminating inquiry.--Virginia Quarterly Review.
Author: Mark Edmundson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995-06-15
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780521485326
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.
Author: Joanne Halleran McMullen
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 172
ISBN-13: 9780865544888
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReaders approaching Flannery O'Connor's work without knowledge of her Catholicism may find little evidence of it in her fiction. Yet readers who come to O'Connor's work with a prior awareness of her faith (as evidenced, for example, in her essays and correspondence) believe that her Catholicism suffuses every sentence of her fictional canon. Writing against God explores the difficulty of reconciling O'Connor's private and public insistence on the importance of Catholicism in her work with the fiction her readers encounter on the printed page. O'Connor's linguistic choices often move her fiction out of her control, producing a message in conflict with the one she stated she intended. Through a detailed examination of O'Connor's language in her two novels and in short stories that span her career, McMullen exposes a pervasive spiritual environment often in opposition to the Roman Catholic tenets O'Connor professed. Blending a reader-response approach with linguistic analysis, Writing against God offers explanations for the mysteries surrounding and the mysteries within O'Connor's fiction.
Author: Nicols Fox
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-04-15
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 159726833X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the cars we drive to the instant messages we receive, from debate about genetically modified foods to astonishing strides in cloning, robotics, and nanotechnology, it would be hard to deny technology's powerful grip on our lives. To stop and ask whether this digitized, implanted reality is quite what we had in mind when we opted for progress, or to ask if we might not be creating more problems than we solve, is likely to peg us as hopelessly backward or suspiciously eccentric. Yet not only questioning, but challenging technology turns out to have a long and noble history. In this timely and incisive work, Nicols Fox examines contemporary resistance to technology and places it in a surprising historical context. She brilliantly illuminates the rich but oftentimes unrecognized literary and philosophical tradition that has existed for nearly two centuries, since the first Luddites—the ""machine breaking"" followers of the mythical Ned Ludd—lifted their sledgehammers in protest against the Industrial Revolution. Tracing that current of thought through some of the great minds of the 19th and 20th centuries—William Blake, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Graves, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and many others—Fox demonstrates that modern protests against consumptive lifestyles and misgivings about the relentless march of mechanization are part of a fascinating hidden history. She shows as well that the Luddite tradition can yield important insights into how we might reshape both technology and modern life so that human, community, and environmental values take precedence over the demands of the machine. In Against the Machine, Nicols Fox writes with compelling immediacy—bringing a new dimension and depth to the debate over what technology means, both now and for our future.
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 24
ISBN-13:
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