The journeys of life, of love, of loss, and of its...”trials and tribulations”...as so encountered by each, whether chosen or have had thrust upon us, may dictate actions in reactions perhaps reconciliatory of approval within an appeased approach given of a rationalizing in the moment, of a mind somewhat awry, framing its way towards the realization of the inevitable. However, be not so blinded by those notions as they spring forth, for the inevitable is a reality of fact all must face. Such are the written words of...”The Tellings” and “The Untellings”... ...YOU ARE NOT ALONE...
From the author of the Oprah Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is an emotionally powerful novel that "succeeds mightily...truly a wonderful story" (Boston Globe). Aria is no stranger to tragedy -- as a young girl, she and her older sister and mother survived a car crash that took the lives of their father and beloved baby sister. And although relations with her remaining family are strained, she's done her best to establish a solid, normal life for herself, living in Atlanta and teaching literacy to girls who have fallen on hard times. But now she has a secret that she's not yet ready to share with Dwayne, her devoted boyfriend, or Rochelle, her roommate and best friend: Aria is pregnant. Or so she thinks. The truth is about to make her question her every assumption and reevaluate the life she has worked so hard to build for herself...as it sends her reeling in a direction she had no idea she was destined to go. Praise for Tayari Jones "Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear." -- Michael Chabon "Tayari Jones has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation." -- Essence "One of America's finest writers." -- Nylon.com "Tayari Jones is a wonderful storyteller." -- Ploughshares
Contemporary theory across a wide range of disciplines denaturalizes the body and reveals it to be a social construction. Cultural practices which deform, adorn, mutilate, and obliterate the body illustrate that it is an important site for the inscription of culture. The authors draw on cross currents in feminist theory, literary criticism, anthropology, and history to analyze several such cultural practices as examples of the power of culture to encode its messages on the human form.
Home and exile have become key discussions in discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, identity, and multiculturalism. These discourses can be expected to flourish in the future as an increasing number of multicultural scholars struggle with various kinds of displacements and the meaning of home that is thereby instantiated anew as we experience living in between cultures. This book sits in the intersection between cultural studies and performance studies. It seeks to break theoretical and empirical ground by reframing understandings of home and exile. Popular notions of exile forwarded by transnational and postcolonial scholars position home as a place of return and longing. While we believe that there are many truths in this position, we performatively seek emergent forms of displacement that are demanding new frameworks with which to enact meanings of home and exile. As Third World immigrant scholars in Western academe, we believe our move is vital in order to explore the experiences of persons, such as ourselves, who fall outside the models of displacement that have long constituted émigré writings. We define this move as a performative one because we experiment with different genres and voices to question and reproblematize existing understandings of knowledge frames. The genres we embody include performative writing, dialogue, autoethnography, essay form, personal narrative, and so on. Our goal is to address theories, stories, and pedagogies that speak to our tribulations in negotiating such intellectual displacements. This book can be an ideal supplementary text for courses in cultural studies as every chapter speaks in performative, reflexive, and storied ways to our own struggles to find real and theoretical homes. It will therefore have relevance to many departments in the humanities, including Communication Studies, English, Cultural Studies, Education, Anthropology, Sociology, and Women's Studies. In fact, this book serves the heuristic function of inspiring new research questions and demonstrating how a wide range of theories and research methods can be employed to enact discourses of home and exile.
"Pitch and Revelation is the first book-length study of the poetry, prose, and dramatic literature of the African American poet Jay Wright (1934-). The authors premise their reading on joy as a foundational philosophical concept. In this, they follow Spinoza, who understood joy as that affect necessary for the construction of an intellectual love of God, leading into the infinite univocity of everything. Similarly, with Wright, joy leads to a visceral sense of what the authors call the great weave of the world. This weave is akin to the notion of entanglement made popular by physicists and contemporary scholars of Science Studies, such as Karen Barad, which speaks of the always ongoing, mutually constitutive connections of all matter and intellectual processes. By exhibiting and detailing the joy of reading Wright, Pitch and Revelation intends to help others chart their own paths into the intellectual, musical, and rhythmical territories of Wright's world so as to more fully experience joy in the world generally. Although the exhibitions of meaning making presented are instructive, they do not follow the "do as I do" or "do as I say" model of instructional texts. Instead,they invite the reader to "do along with us" as the authors make meaning from selections across Wright's erudite, dense, rhythmically fascinating, endlessly lyrical, highly structured, and seemingly hermetic body of work."--publisher's website.
The field of organizational storytelling research is productive, vibrant and diverse. Over three decades we have come to understand how organizations are not only full of stories but also how stories are actively making, sustaining and changing organizations. This edited collection contributes to this body of work by paying specific attention to stories that are neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted or deliberately left silent. Despite the fact that such stories are not voiced they have a role to play in organizational analysis. The chapters in this volume variously explore how certain realities become excluded or silenced. The stories that remain below the audible range in organizations offer researchers an access to study political practices which marginalise certain organisational realities whilst promoting others. This volume offers a further contribution by paying heed to silence and the processes of silencing. These silences influence the choice of issues on organisational agendas, the choice of audience(s) to which these discourses are addressed and the ways of addressing them. In exploring these relatively understudied terrains, Untold Stories in Organizations comprises an important contribution to the organizational storytelling space, opening paths for new trajectories in storytelling research.
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
Daniel, his mother and cat watch an inner-city riot from their apartment window. When their building catches alight they are evacuated to a church. Observations from child's point of view.
How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics. Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.
This compelling investigation of the later music of Franz Schubert explores the rich terrain of Schubert's impromptus and last piano sonatas. Drawing on the relationships between these pieces and Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, his earlier "Der Wanderer," the closely related "Unfinished" Symphony, and his story of exile and homecoming, "My Dream," Charles Fisk explains how Schubert's view of his own life may well have shaped his music in the years shortly before his death. Fisk's intimate portrayal of Schubert is based on evidence from the composer's own hand, both verbal (song texts and his written words) and musical (vocal and instrumental). Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that through his music Schubert sought to alleviate his apparent sense of exile and his anticipation of early death. Fisk supports this view through close analyses of the cyclic connections within and between the works he explores, finding in them complex musical narratives that attempt to come to terms with mortality, alienation, hope, and desire. Fisk's knowledge of Schubert's life and music, together with his astute and imaginative attention to musical detail, helps him achieve one of the most difficult goals in music criticism: to capture and verbalize the human content of instrumental music.
