E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture

E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture

Author: Nilgun Bayraktar

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031608582

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Variously translated as “estrangement,” “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization,” Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie is more relevant than ever. This collection offers new insights into the theories and practices of ostranenie across various languages and cultures, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries. Our current era is marked by a dramatic redefinition of the normal and the strange, the familiar and the weird. The rise of far-right populism has increasingly normalized xenophobic and nativist stances previously confined to the fringes of the political spectrum. Additionally, the climate crisis has led to the ongoing renegotiation of the concepts of normalcy and emergency amid widespread efforts to adapt to the “new (ab)normal.” Exploring defamiliarization provides a unique perspective to comprehend and question these processes and their profound cultural implications. Focusing on ostranenie also offers valuable insights into how aesthetic forms serve a political function. Defamiliarization can take on various forms, including retro-futuristic dystopias, stylized films, and darkly humorous cartoons and memes. It can be an effective tool for political activation that relies on formal innovation rather than superficial emotional engagement. This collection brings together the work of a group of scholars examining defamiliarization across different media. It explores questions such as: How can we differentiate between various forms of defamiliarization and analyze their effects on the reader/viewer? How is defamiliarization connected to the weird, the eerie, or the uncanny? As a result, the collection offers an updated theoretical framework for understanding the wide range of emergent artistic and literary practices of e(n)strangement in the current era and their significant political affordances.


No Other Planet

No Other Planet

Author: Mathias Thaler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1009034553

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Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.


Ostrannenie

Ostrannenie

Author: Annie van den Oever

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9089640797

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Summary: Defamiliarisation or ostrannenie, the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar, ihas become one of the central concept of modern artistic practice, ranging over movements including Dada, postmodernism, epic theatre, and science fiction, as well as our response to arts. Coined by the Soviet literary critic Victor Shklovskii in 1917, ostrannenie has come to resonate deeply in film studies, where it entered into dialogue with the French philosopher Derrida's concept of differance, bordering on 'differing' and 'deferring'. Striking, provocative and incisive, the essays of the distinguished film scholars in this volume recall the range and depth of a concept that since 1917 changed the trajectory of theoretical inquiry.


A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory

Author: Raman Selden

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13:

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Unsurpassed as a text for upper-division and beginning graduate students, Raman Selden's classic text is the liveliest, most readable and most reliable guide to contemporary literary theory. Includes applications of theory, cross-referenced to Selden's companion volume, Practicing Theory and Reading Literature.


Fiction Without Humanity

Fiction Without Humanity

Author: Lynn Festa

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0812251318

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Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices— the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting— Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.


Cultural Criticism

Cultural Criticism

Author: Arthur Asa Berger

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780803957343

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Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism. Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' styles and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length. Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.


The Handbook of Media Audiences

The Handbook of Media Audiences

Author: Virginia Nightingale

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 111872139X

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This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies in the advent of digital media. Details the study of audiences and how it is changing in relation to digital media Recognizes and appreciates valuable traditional approaches and identifies how they can be applied to, and evolve with, the changing media world Offers diverse perspectives from which being an audience, theorizing audiences, researching audiences, and doing audience research are approached today Argues that the field works best by identifying particular 'audience problems' and applying the best theories and research methods available to solving them Includes contributions from some of the most outstanding international scholars in the field


Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0593318188

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?


Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011

Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011

Author: Martin Moling

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1793647240

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Can rock music help us understand literature? Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011 argues that a close analysis of the rock music incorporated into a literary text–an investigation of the lyrics, a musicological exploration of the sounds and rhythms, a cultural-historical inquiry into the production and reception of a song–may yield exciting new insight into and expand our understanding of American literary production from the mid-20th century onwards. Reading major works by Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sherman Alexie and Jennifer Egan from such a rock-musicological vantage point, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing adds a new dimension to recent work in American literary criticism by seeking to establish rock music as an analytical tool for literary investigation. The book concentrates on the way these literary artists have struggled to come to terms with the dichotomies inherent in rock music–its liberating and revolutionary impulses as well as its adherence to the bleakest laws of consumer capitalism–in their work. By combining a musicological with a literary analysis, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing highlights the crucial and complex role rock music has played in shaping the artistic outlook and cultural sensibilities of literary artists since the 1960s in America and beyond.