Batman and the Shadows of Modernity

Batman and the Shadows of Modernity

Author: Rafael Carrión-Arias

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-19

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1040046010

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This book aims to study the Batman narrative, or Bat-narrative, from the point of view of its nodal relationship to modern narrative. To this end, it offers for the first time a new type of methodology adequate to the object, which delves both into materials scarcely studied in this context and well-known materials seen in a new light. This is a multidisciplinary work aimed at both the specialist and the global reader, bringing together comic studies, philosophical criticism, and literary criticism in a debate on the fate of our current global civilization.


The Inward Gaze

The Inward Gaze

Author: Peter Middleton

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1040253512

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First published in 1992, The Inward Gaze looks at men’s fantasies and self-images from a wide range of texts (notably boy’s superhero comics, modernist literary classics, and a Freudian case-study) to discuss the theories of subjectivity, masculinity, and emotion. The author explores the split between the experience-based claims of the men’s movement and the discourse theories of postmodernism. Does this division reveal a continuing refusal of masculine self-awareness? Why does postmodernist theory investigate desire and ignore emotion? This is a ground-breaking and controversial book which seeks to reformulate the way we think about men’s subjectivity. Its interdisciplinary approach weaves together material from many different sources and will be of vital interest to students of literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis.


Detective Fiction on the Case of Community

Detective Fiction on the Case of Community

Author: Devin Fromm

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-25

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1040144535

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Detective Fiction on the Case of Community uses one of the most popular forms of modern literature to examine one of modernity’s most trenchant problems. The project rests on the argument that detective fiction emerges specifically from an awareness of the stress that modernization puts on the possibilities of communal life, as industrialization and urbanism accelerate the alienation and atomization we recognize as modern conditions. Here the detective appears as an image of thinking still able to perceive the threads that link such alienated people together, and therefore able to imagine solutions along the lines of these obscured connections. Reading the genre’s journey, from its origins in Poe to its most unorthodox form in Pynchon, allows fresh perspectives on the possibilities and limits of modern community, from its endurance as part of modernization to its meaning today as a sticking point in theoretical debate and political activism.


Transcending Postmodernism

Transcending Postmodernism

Author: Raoul Eshelman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-02

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1040253849

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Transcending Postmodernism: Performatism 2.0 is an ambitious attempt to expand and deepen the theory of performatism. Its main thesis is that, beginning in the mid-1990s, the strategies and norms of postmodernism have been displaced by ones that force readers or viewers to experience effects of aesthetically mediated transcendence. These effects include specific temporal strategies (“chunking”), stylizing separated subjectivity (the genius and the fool being its two main poles) and orienting ethics toward actions taken by centered agents bearing a sacral charge. The book provides a critical overview of other theories of post-postmodernism, and suggests that among five text-oriented theories there is basic agreement on its techniques and strategies.


Exploring Anne Frank and Difficult Life Stories

Exploring Anne Frank and Difficult Life Stories

Author: Kirsten Kumpf Baele

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-19

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1040160263

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This volume, grounded in the Diary of a Young Girl and its continued appeal to readers of all ages, sees both promise in the relevance of Anne Frank’s story in the twenty‐first century, and potential for new ways of teaching her story and those of other genocides and human right violations. Engaging Anne Frank with these other cases clarifies the distinct nature of the Holocaust, and we build on the fact that the diary touches areas of deep interest, especially to young people, and that it has been read as a monument to resisting hate, which is itself a prerequisite for educating citizens of more diverse and inclusive societies. The diverse contributions and viewpoints in this volume illustrate how rich the ongoing engagement with Anne Frank and her legacy remain.


Bangladeshi Novels in English

Bangladeshi Novels in English

Author: Umme Salma

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-08

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1040225845

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Bangladeshi Novels in English: Cultural Contact and Migrant Subjectivity is the first comprehensive study of Bangladeshi migration and diasporas through eight seminal Bangladeshi novels in English from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments and Spiral Road, Farhana H. Rahman’s The Eye of the Heart, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Manzu Islam’s Burrow, Nashid Kamal’s The Glass Bangles, Zia H. Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace. The book situates the study within the English-language literary history and linguistic ethnography of Bangladesh while unveiling the complexities of Bangladeshi Muslim migration from men, women, and children’s perspectives. It challenges the stereotyping of Bengali Muslim migrants as a failure of immigration and multiculturalism and offers a fresh view on cultural contact and the formation of migrant subjectivity at the intersections of gender, race, religion, class, culture, ethnicity, history, politics, and personality.


Language in Colonization, Renaissance Poetry and Shakespeare

Language in Colonization, Renaissance Poetry and Shakespeare

Author: Jonathan Locke Hart

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1040152090

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Language is the central concern of this book. Colonization, poetry and Shakespeare – and the Renaissance itself – provide the examples. I concentrate on text in context, close reading, interpretation, interpoetics and translation with particular instances and works, examining matters of interpoetics in Renaissance poetry and prose, including epic, and the Hugo translation of Shakespeare in France and trying to bring together analysis that shows how important language is in the age of European expansion and in the Renaissance. I provide close analysis of aspects of colonization, front matter (paratext) in poetry and prose, and Shakespeare that deserve more attention. The main themes and objectives of this book are an exploration of language in European colonial texts of the “New World,” paratexts or front matter, Renaissance poetry and Shakespeare through close reading, including interpoetics (liminality), translation and key words.


The Trickster in Contemporary Film

The Trickster in Contemporary Film

Author: Helena Bassil-Morozow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1136625267

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This book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin’s classics such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) to contemporary comedies and dramas with ‘trickster actors’ such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. The Trickster in Contemporary Film offers a fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives the trickster and personal relationships gonzo-trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, film semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture.


Reading Words into Worlds

Reading Words into Worlds

Author: J. Clayton McReynolds

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-19

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1040087000

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Reading Words into Worlds asks how it is that reading a novel can feel in some ways like being-in-a-world. The book explores how novels give themselves to readers in ways that mimetically resemble our phenomenological reception of given beings in reality. McReynolds refers to this process as phenomenological mimesis of givenness, and he draws on the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion to explore how masterful novels can make reading ink marks on a page feel like seeing things, feeling things, and meeting (even loving) others. McReynolds blends rigorous phenomenological study with a personable style, first laying out his theory in detail and then applying that theory through close studies of his reading experiences of four British realist masterpieces: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Ultimately, this book offers a grounded phenomenology of novel-reading, illuminating what gives novels such power to not only thrill readers—but to change them.


Language in Literature

Language in Literature

Author: Jonathan Locke Hart

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1040127703

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Language in Literature examines the overlap and blurring boundaries of English, comparative and world poetry and literature. Questions of language, literature, translation and creative writing are addressed as befitting an author who is a poet, literary scholar and historian. The book begins with metaphor, which Aristotle thought, in Poetics, was the key gift of the poet, and discusses it in theory and practice; it moves from the identity of metaphor to identity in translation and culture; it examines poetry in a comparative and world context; it looks at image and text; it explores literature and culture in the Cold War; it explores the role of the poet and scholar in translating poetry East and West; it places creative writing in theory and practice in context East and West; it concludes by summing up and suggesting implications of creation in language, translating and interpreting, and its expression in literature, especially in poetry.