The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

Author: Peter Stallybrass

Publisher:

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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"Applying the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin and recent French critical theorists to the concept of hierarchies in Western society, Stallybrass and White explore the symbolic polarities of the exalted and the base. The authors compare high and low discourse in a variety of domains, and discover that, in every case, the polarities structure and depend upon each other and, in certain instances, interpenetrate to produce political change. In this wide-ranging book, the authors, drawing largely on Bakhtin's notion of the carnival, map out hierarchies in literary and cultural history. Looking closely at a variety of texts from the 17th to the 20th century, they find that high-low oppositions occur in four symbolic domains--psychic forms, the human body, geographic space, and social order--and are fundamental to the mechanisms of ordering in European culture. Transgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of these domains, the authors assert, is likely to have major consequences in the other three. Unconfined by conventional disciplinary boundaries, this investigation of the interplay between limits and transgressions within hierarchies will fascinate students of literary theory and English literature as well as those of intellectual and cultural history, psychology, and anthropology." -- Back cover

José Carlos Mariátegui’s Unfinished Revolution
José Carlos Mariátegui’s Unfinished Revolution

Author: Melisa Moore

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1611484634

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The years 1909–1930, the eleven-year presidency of the businessman-turned-politician Augusto B. Leguía, mark a formative period of Peruvian modernity, witnessing the continuity of a process of reconstruction and the founding of an intellectual and cultural tradition after a humbling defeat during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). But these years were also fraught with conflict generated by long-standing divisions and new rivalries. A postwar generation of intellectuals and artists, led by José Carlos Mariátegui and galvanized by left-wing thinking and an avant-garde aesthetic, sought representation in the fields of politics and the arts, and participation in the process of reconstruction initiated by a Positivist oligarchy. New political and artistic conceptions raised their awareness of the fractured sense of nationhood in Peru and the need for a new project of nation-formation centered on a common political and cultural consciousness. They also gave rise to divergent political and artistic practices and projects. Amongst these, Mariátegui’s Indigenist-Marxist politics and Modernist-inspired poetics were pivotal in revitalizing, conciliating and channeling those of his cohorts and challengers. Comprising six full-length chapters, a comprehensive Introduction and Conclusion, this monograph is extensive in scale and scope. It provides fresh readings of key writings of Mariátegui, one of Latin America’s most important and revolutionary political, cultural and aesthetic theorists, through the lens of his poetics, emphasizing the value of this approach for a fuller understanding of his work’s political meaning and impact. It does so through detailed analysis of the poetic, expressive language employed in seminal political essays, aimed at forging a new Marxist position in 1920s Peru. Furthermore, it offers powerful and original critiques of understudied intellectuals of this time, especially aprista-Futurist, Socialist and Indigenist female writers and artists, such as Magda Portal and Ángela Ramos, whose work he championed. These readings are fully contextualized in terms of detailed critical study of complex sociopolitical conditions and positions, and bio-bibliographical, intellectual backgrounds of Mariátegui and his contemporaries. The monograph examines and underscores the fundamental importance of Mariátegui’s, and their, politico-poetic practices and projects for forging a national-cum-cosmopolitan, shared, yet also heterogeneous, political culture and cultural tradition in 1920s Peru.

Dante and the Sense of Transgression
Dante and the Sense of Transgression

Author: William Franke

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-12-20

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1441160426

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William Franke reads Dante's poetic language in the Paradiso in the light of contemporary critical theory by such thinkers as Derrida, Blanchot and Bataille.

Rabelais and His World
Rabelais and His World

Author: Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780253203410

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This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

Bodies Out of Bounds
Bodies Out of Bounds

Author: Jana Evans Braziel

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-09-13

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780520225855

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"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Subversive Intent
Subversive Intent

Author: Susan Rubin Suleiman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780674853843

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With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists of this century. Focusing also on women's avant-garde artistic practices, Suleiman demonstrates how to read difficult modern works in a way that reveals their political as well as their aesthetic impact. Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by André Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avantgarde artists and theorists--including Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody. Central to Suleiman's revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman's laughing mother embodies the need for a link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.

The Bridge of Dreams
The Bridge of Dreams

Author: Haruo Shirane

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780804717199

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The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.

Literature and "Interregnum"
Literature and

Author: Patrick Dove

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1438461569

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Literature and "Interregnum" examines the unraveling of the political forms of modernity through readings of end-of-millennium literary texts by César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, Sergio Chejfec, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño. The opening of national spaces to the global capitalist system in the 1980s culminates in the suspension of key principles of modernity, most notably that of political sovereignty. While the neoliberal model subjugates modern forms of social organization and political decision making to an economic rationale, the market is unable to provide a new ordering principle that could fill the empty place formerly occupied by the national figure of the sovereign. The result is a situation that resembles what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci termed "interregnum," an in-between time in which "the old [order] is dying and the new cannot be born." The recoding of history as literary form provides occasions for reconsidering modern conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, mood, temporality, thought, politics, ethical experience, as well as of literature itself as social institution. In his analysis, Patrick Dove seeks to create dialogues between literature and theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, and sociology of globalization. The author highlights the connections between mass media, technology, politics, and economics.

Neo-Victorian Cities
Neo-Victorian Cities

Author:

Publisher: Hotei Publishing

Published: 2015-02-04

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9004292330

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This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction
Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction

Author: Thomas J. Ferraro

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0192608118

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Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is a critical study of classic American novels. Ferraro returns to Hawthorne's closet of secreted sin to reveal The Scarlet Letter as a deviously psychological turn on the ancient Meditererranean Catholic folk tales of female wanderlust, cuckolding priests, and demonic revenge. This lights the way to explore what Ferraro calls "the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism" in seven modern American masterworks, including Chopin's The Awakening, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's The Professor's House, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction explores stories of forbidden passion and sacrificial violence, with ultra-radiant women (and sometimes men) at their focus. It examines how these novels speak to readers across religious and social spectrums, generating an inclusive mode of address and near-universal relevance. Ferraro breaks the codes of contemporary criticism in his thematic focus and critical style, going beyond Protestantism and even Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy itself. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction encourages the attentive reader to think about the American imagination, the myriad arts of writing about the passion plays of love, and even our canonical structures for reading and thinking about literature in new ways.