Both an intellectual autobiography and a chronicle of the ideological and methodological upheaval in textual studies during the last two decades, this book presents provocative essays by one of the foremost textual scholars of our day. As founder and executive director of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship, Professor Greetham has had the opportunity to observe and engage with the main players of the textual revolution during its most turbulent years and enlivens his account with revealing character sketches.
It is often claimed that we know ourselves and the world through narratives. In this book, Robert D. Newman portrays narrative engagement as a process grounded in psychoanalytic theory to explain how readers (or listeners or viewers) manage to engage with specific narratives and derive from them a personal experience. Newman describes this psychodrama of narrative engagement as that of exile and return, an experience in which narrative becomes a type of homeland, beckoning and elusive, endlessly defining and disrupting the borders of a reader's identity. Within this paradigm, he considers a fascinating variety of narrative texts: from the Jim Jones episode in Guyana to Freud's repression of personal history in his story of Moses; from a surrealistic collage novel by Max Ernst to the horror films of Alfred Hitchcock; from the works of James Joyce, Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera, and D. M. Thomas to the tales of abjection in pornography. Transgressions of Reading is itself an engaging work, as interesting for its provocative readings of particular works as for its theoretical insights. It will appeal to readers from all fields in which narrative plays a crucial role, in the study of film and art, modern and contemporary literature, popular culture, and feminist, psychoanalytic, and reader response theory.
Transgression(s) in Twenty-First-Century Women's Writing in French analyses the literary transgressions of women’s writing in French since the turn of the twenty-first century in the works of both established figures and the most exciting and innovative authors from across the francosphère. Transgression(s) in Twenty-First-Century Women's Writing in French étudie les transgressions littéraires dans l’écriture des femmes en français depuis le début du XXIe siècle dans les œuvres de figures bien établies aussi bien que chez les auteures les plus innovantes de la francosphère.
Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present develops an innovative overview of the interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic that have emerged in recent years. Alongside exemplary model analyses of key periods and representative primary texts, this exciting new anthology of critical essays has been specifically designed to fill a major gap in the field of literary and cultural studies. This book traces the complex dynamic and ongoing negotiation of notions of transgression and taboo as an essential, though often neglected, facet to understanding the development, production, and conception of literature from the early modern Elizabethan period through postmodern debates. The combination of a broad theoretical and historical framework covering almost fifty representative authors and uvres makes this essential reading for students and specialists alike in the fields of literary studies and cultural studies.
Volume 15 continues to offer international perspectives on textual scholarship, including contributions by Adrian Armstrong, Ronald Broude, Danielle Clarke, A.S.G. Edwards, Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones, David Leon Higdon, Chris Jones, John Jowett, Barbara Oberg, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Manuel Portela, Damian Judge Rollison, Helen Smith, Dirk van Hulle, Andrew van der Vlies, and H.T.M. van Vliet, on topics ranging from the textuality of Thomas Jefferson to the gendering of the Early Modern British book trades. Items under review include The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1, edited by Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Huggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turnville-Petre; Material Modernism, by George Bornstein; Textual Transgressions and Theories of the Text, by David Greetham; Electronic Texts in the Humanities, by Susan Hockey; Problems of Editing, edited by Christa Jansohn; From Author to Text, edited by Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner; Text und Edition, edited by Rüdiger Nutt-Koforth, Bodo Plachta, H.T.M. van Vliet and Heermann Zwerschina; Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories, by Martin Ray; The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2, edited by Thorlac Turnville-Petre and Hoyt Duggan; and editions of Georg Büchner, Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Spenser, and Oscar Wilde. W. Speed Hill is Professor of English, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Through close examination of references to gender identity, female sexuality and corporeality, this book is the first of its kind to shed light on the complexities of translating the recent transgressive turn in contemporary women’s writing in French. Via four case studies, namely, the translations into English of Nelly Arcan’s Putain (2001), Catherine Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Nancy Huston’s Infrarouge (2010) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000), this book explores how transgressive topoi such as prostitution, anorexia, matrophobia, rape, female desire, and transgenderism are translated. The book considers how (auto)fictional female selves portrayed are dis/placed by translation at both a textual and paratextual level. Combining feminist phenomenological perspectives on female lived experience with feminist translation theory, this interdisciplinary study offers an insight into how the experiential is brought into language, how it journeys via language into new cultural contexts via translation and creates a dialogical space in which the subjectivities of those involved (author, narrator, protagonist, translator) become open to the porosity of encounters with alterity. The volume will appeal to scholars in translation studies, French Studies, and gender and sexuality studies, particularly those interested in feminist translation and literary translation.
In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century. Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on the critical work address such issues as Blanchot's ambivalent attitude toward the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, his thematization of literature's involvement with death, and the mythical and Biblical figures he uses to portray the acts of reading and writing. Gregg also performs extended close readings of two representative works of fiction, Le Très-Haut and L'Attente l'oubli, in an effort to trace Blanchot's evolution as a creator of narratives and to ascertain how his fiction can be seen as constituting a mise en oeuvre of the concerns he treats in his criticism. The book concludes with an assessment of Blanchot's place in the recent history of French critical theory.
Voice, Text, Hypertext illustrates brilliantly why interest in textual studies has grown so dramatically in recent years. For the distinguished authors of these essays, a “text” is more than a document or material object. It is a cultural event, a matrix of decisions, an intricate cultural practice that may focus on religious traditions, modern “underground” literary movements, poetic invention, or the irreducible complexity of cultural politics. Drawing from classical Roman and Indian to modern European traditions, the volume makes clear that to study a text is to study a culture. It also demonstrates the essential importance of heightened textual awareness for contemporary cultural studies and critical theory—and, indeed, for any discipline that studies human culture.
In this fast moving study, Chris Jenks presents a broad overview of the history of ideas, the major theorists and the significant moments in the formation of the idea of transgression.
