In accordance with the notion that “identity” is absolutely central to ontological and discursive practices, this volume explores a multiplicity of “ways of being”, including the adoption of an ethnic position, the enactment of gender, the conception of childhood and artistic visions of urban life in addition to other pivotal modes of existence. Beyond discourses of identity featured in the first section of this work, “ways of performing” identity in literature are brought to light in the second half through studies into, for instance, the roles of enunciator and reader, the depiction of villainy and the portrayal of rebellious victimhood. Integrating research from Great Britain, Bulgaria, Iraq, Japan, Romania, Spain and Ukraine, this collection of fifteen chapters offers innovative and inspiring insights from a comparative stance into the complex dynamics and parameters which govern the construction of “identity” in cultural and literary space.
When Canadian authors win prestigious literary prizes, from the Governor General's Literary Award to the Man Booker Prize, they are celebrated not only for their achievements, but also for contributing to this country's cultural capital. Discussions about culture, national identity, and citizenship are particularly complicated when the honorees are immigrants, like Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, or Rohinton Mistry. Then there is the case of Yann Martel, who is identified both as Canadian and as rootlessly cosmopolitan. How have these writers' identities been recalibrated in order to claim them as 'representative' Canadians? Prizing Literature is the first extended study of contemporary award winning Canadian literature and the ways in which we celebrate its authors. Gillian Roberts uses theories of hospitality to examine how prize-winning authors are variously received and honoured depending on their citizenship and the extent to which they represent 'Canadianness.' Prizing Literature sheds light on popular and media understandings of what it means to be part of a multicultural nation.
This book proposes a novel creative research practice in geography based on comics. It presents a transdisciplinary approach that uses a set of qualitative visual methods and extends from within the geohumanities across literary spatial studies, comics, urban studies, mobility studies, and beyond. Written by a geographer-cartoonist, the book focuses on ‘narrative geographies’ and embraces a geocritical and relational approach to examine comic book geographies in pursuit of a growing interest in creative, art-based experimental methods in the geohumanities. It explores comics-based research through interconnections between art and geography and through theoretical and methodological contributions from scholars working in the fields of the social sciences, humanities, literary geographies, mobilities, comics, literary studies, and urban studies, as well as from visual artists, comics authors, and art practitioners. Comics are valuable objects of geographical interest because of their spatial grammar. They are also a language particularly suited to geographical analysis, and the ‘geoGraphic novel’ offers a practice of research that has the power to assemble and disassemble new spatial meanings. The book thus explores how the ‘geoGraphic novel’ as a verbo-visual genre allows the study of geographical issues, composes geocentred stories, engages wider and non-specialist audiences, promotes geo-artistic collaboration, and works as a narrative intervention in urban contexts. Through a practice-based approach and the internal perspective of a geographer-cartoonist, the book provides examples of how geoGraphic fieldwork is conducted and offers analysis of the processes of ideation, composition, and dissemination of geoGraphic narratives.
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.
Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, their coding, conceptualization and the relationship between the two, have been intriguing people for millennia. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The book explores the issues of space, time and their interrelation from two different perspectives: the linguistic and the literary. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics, i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. The topics under consideration include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized in neutral, postural and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), prepositional semantics (Ch.3), aspectuality (in Tamil, Ch. 4). All articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when possible between space and time. Given that all seem to propose at least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications because a literary text testifies of a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. A particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through the whole century. Departing from the late nineteenth century England’s and Croatia’s fictive spaces (Ch. 5), the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties (Ch. 6), via the post-WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality (Ch 7), to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time (Ch 8). The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. The main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies to the issues under exam; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes our views of space-time/reality. All this also suggests that science and literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-temporal) reality and culture. The only hope to objectively envisage any if not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.
There has been a proliferation of literary festivals in recent decades, with more than 450 held annually in the UK and Australia alone. These festivals operate as tastemakers shaping cultural consumption; as educational and policy projects; as instantiations, representations, and celebrations of literary communities; and as cultural products in their own right. As such they strongly influence how literary culture is produced, circulates and is experienced by readers in the twenty-first century. This book explores how audiences engage with literary festivals, and analyses these festivals’ relationship to local and digital literary communities, to the creative industries focus of contemporary cultural policy, and to the broader literary field. The relationship between literary festivals and these configuring forces is illustrated with in-depth case studies of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Port Eliot Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and the Clunes Booktown Festival. Building on interviews with audiences and staff, contextualised by a large-scale online survey of literary festival audiences from around the world, this book investigates these festivals’ social, cultural, commercial, and political operation. In doing so, this book critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the complex and contested terrain of contemporary book culture.
Cultural geography and the social sciences have seen a rise in the use of creative methods with which to understand and represent everyday life and place. Conversely, many artists are producing work that centres on ideas of place and space and utilising empirical research methods that have a resonance with geographers. This book contributes to the body of literature emerging from such creative approaches to place. Drawing together theory and practice from cultural geography, anthropology and graphic design, this book proposes an interdisciplinary geo/graphic process for interrogating and re/presenting everyday life and place. A diverse set of research projects highlights participatory and autoethnographic approaches to the research. The sites of the projects are varied, encompassing the commercial space of grocery shops, cafés and restaurants, the private, domestic space of the home, and a Scottish World Heritage site. The theoretical context of each project highlights the transferability of the geo/graphic process, with place being variously framed within discussions of food, multi-culturalism and belonging; home, collecting and meaningful possessions; and, materiality, memory and affect. Themes in the book will appeal to researchers working in the creative methods field. This book will also be essential supplementary reading for postgraduate students studying Cultural Geography, Experimental Geographies, Visual Anthropology, Art and Design.
First published in 1990, this collection of essays in literary criticism, feminist theory and race relations was named one of the top twenty-five books of 1988 by the Voice Literary Supplement. The title covers such subjects as black literature; the reconstruction of culture, changing arts, letters and sciences to include the topics of women and gender; and, the nature of family and the changing roles of women within society. As such, Catharine Stimpson employs a transdisciplinary approach, to encourage greater understanding of the differences among women, and thus socially-constructed differences in general. Where the Meanings Are tells of some of the arguments within feminism during the re-designing and designing of cultural spaces, as post-modernism began to change the boundaries of race, class, and gender. It will therefore be of great value to students and general readers with an interest in the relationship between gender and culture, sex and gender difference, feminist theory and literature.
