Persistent Forms

Persistent Forms

Author: Ilya Kliger

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2015-12-14

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0823264866

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Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.


The "Odyssey" Re-formed

The

Author: Frederick Ahl

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1501720457

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Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman believe that contemporary readers who do not know ancient Greek can gain a sophisticated grasp of the Odyssey if they are aware of some of the issues that intrigue and puzzle the experts. They offer a challenging new reading of the epic that is directed to the general student of literature as well as to the classicist.Ahl and Roisman suggest that, while translators have served the Odyssey and its English-speaking readers remarkably well, the nonspecialist wishing to do a more detailed, critical reading of the epic faces a dilemma. The enormous scholarly literature makes few concessions to the nonspecialist, and those studies designed for general readers tend to offer variations on the overly simple, idealized readings of the epic common in high school and college survey courses.The Odyssey Re-Formed offers a lively and detailed reading of the Odyssey, episode by episode, with particular attention paid to the manipulative power of its language and Homer's skill in using that power. The authors explore how myth is shaped for specific, rhetorical reasons and suggest ways in which the epic uses its audience's awareness of the varied pool of mythic traditions to give the Odyssey remarkable and subtle resonances that have profound poetic power.


Petersburg Fin de Siècle

Petersburg Fin de Siècle

Author: Mark D. Steinberg

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-11-29

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 0300165706

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The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described and interpreted the troubled years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.Mark Steinberg, distinguished historian of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examines the work of writers of all kinds, from anonymous journalists to well-known public intellectuals, from secular liberals to religious conservatives. Though diverse in their perspectives, these urban writers were remarkably consistent in the worries they expressed. They grappled with the impact of technological and material progress on the one hand, and with an ever-deepening anxiety and pessimism on the other. Steinberg reveals a new, darker perspective on the history of St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution and presents a fresh view of Russia's experience of modernity.


The Atheist's Creed

The Atheist's Creed

Author: Michael Palmer

Publisher: Lutterworth Press

Published: 2010-10-29

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0718896912

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In The Atheist's Creed a prominent and widely-read contemporary philosopher, Dr Michael Palmer, presents the most comprehensive anthology of the major philosophical arguments for atheism now before the public. While the so-called 'new atheism' of RichardDawkins and others has attracted considerable publicity, it is these philosophical arguments that have down the ages provided the principal landmarks in the unfolding and increasingly widespread belief that no God exists. Using a combination of extracts,detailed introductions, biographies and extensive bibliographies, the author guides the reader through the history of atheism, from the time of the early Greeks down to the present day. In this analysis particular attention is given to the writings of Hume, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. The Atheist's Creed requires no specialist knowledge of philosophy. Each chapter is structured around a single theme and the various authors coordinated to allow the full force of the particular atheistic argument to emerge.The result is a compelling and powerful assessment of the case for atheism, which will be essential and fascinating reading for student and non-student alike and for all those concerned with the fundamental question: whether or not there is a God.