Download or read book Against Literature written by John Beverley and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a way of thinking about literature that is 'outside' or 'against' literature? In Against Literature, John Beverley brilliantly responds to this question, arguing for a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony.
Download or read book Literature Against Criticism written by Martin Paul Eve and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Paul Eve’s engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it.
Download or read book Against World Literature written by Emily Apter and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Download or read book Literature Against Philosophy Plato to Derrida written by Mark Edmundson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.
Download or read book Literature Against Itself written by Gerald Graff and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first and still one of the best critiques of post-1960s cultural radicalism, analyzing why and how the defenders of literature have gone wrong. "A wonderfully trenchant and illuminating inquiry.--Virginia Quarterly Review.
Download or read book On Literature and Philosophy written by Naguib Mahfouz and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most important writers in contemporary Arabic literature. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1988 (the only Arab writer to win the prize thus far), his novels helped bring Arabic literature onto the international stage. Far fewer people know his nonfiction works, however—a gap that this book fills. Bringing together Mahfouz’s early nonfiction writings (most penned during the 1930s) which have not previously been available in English, this volume offers a rare glimpse into the early development of the renowned author. As these pieces show, Mahfouz was deeply interested in literature and philosophy, and his early writings engage with the origins of philosophy, its development and place in the history of thought, as well its meaning writ large. In his literary essays, he discusses a wide range of authors, from Anton Chekov to his own Arab contemporaries like Taha Hussein. He also ventures into a host of important contemporary issues, including science and modernity, the growing movement for women’s rights in the Arab world, and emerging ideologies like socialism—all of which outline the growing challenges to traditional modes of living that we saw all around him. Together, these essays offer a fascinating window not just into the mind of Mahfouz himself but the changing landscape of Egypt during that time, from the development of Islam to the struggles between tradition, modernity, and the influences of the West.
Download or read book The Hatred of Literature written by William Marx and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness. Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since. In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
Download or read book Writing Against God written by Joanne Halleran McMullen and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers approaching Flannery O'Connor's work without knowledge of her Catholicism may find little evidence of it in her fiction. Yet readers who come to O'Connor's work with a prior awareness of her faith (as evidenced, for example, in her essays and correspondence) believe that her Catholicism suffuses every sentence of her fictional canon. Writing against God explores the difficulty of reconciling O'Connor's private and public insistence on the importance of Catholicism in her work with the fiction her readers encounter on the printed page. O'Connor's linguistic choices often move her fiction out of her control, producing a message in conflict with the one she stated she intended. Through a detailed examination of O'Connor's language in her two novels and in short stories that span her career, McMullen exposes a pervasive spiritual environment often in opposition to the Roman Catholic tenets O'Connor professed. Blending a reader-response approach with linguistic analysis, Writing against God offers explanations for the mysteries surrounding and the mysteries within O'Connor's fiction.
Download or read book Pathetic Literature written by Eileen Myles and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic” “Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature, a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego in the early 2000s, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology, which includes a hearty 106 contributors, encompassing canonical global stars like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, literary libertines like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as extraordinary writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Wrenching and discomfiting prose by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poems by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, and butts up against fiction from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others, including Myles’s own opening salvo of their 1992 presidential campaign. The result is a completely anomalous and uplifting anthology that encourages a fresh political discourse on literature, as well as supplying an essential compendium of pained, awkward, queer, trans, gleeful, and ever-jarring ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.
Download or read book Reading Backwards written by Muireann Maguire and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts. "Anticipatory plagiarism” is a concept developed by the French Oulipo group, but it has never to my knowledge been explored with reference to Russian studies. The editors and contributors to the proposed volume – a blend of senior and beginning scholars, Russians and non-Russians – offer a set of essays on Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy which provocatively test the utility of AP as a critical tool, relating these canonical authors to more recent instances, some of them decidedly non-canonical. The senior scholars who are the editors and most of the contributors are truly distinguished. The volume is likely to receive serious attention and to be widely read. I recommend it with unqualified enthusiasm. William Mills Todd III, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, Harvard University As the founder of the notion of "plagiarism by anticipation", which was stolen from me in the sixties by fellow colleagues, I am delighted to learn that my modest contribution to literary theory will be used to better understand the interplay of interferences in Russian literature. Indeed, one would have to be naive to think that the great Russian authors would have invented everything. In fact, they were able to draw their ideas from their predecessors, but also from their successors, testifying to the open-mindedness that characterizes the Slavic soul. This book restores the truth. Pierre Bayard, Professor of Literature, University of Paris 8 This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature re-assesses three major nineteenth-century authors—Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—either in terms of previous writers and artists who plagiarized them (such as Raphael, Homer, or Hall Caine), or of their own depredations against later writers (from J.M. Coetzee to Liudmila Petrushevskaia). Far from suggesting that past authors literally stole from their descendants, these engaging essays, contributed by both early-career and senior scholars of Russian and comparative literature, encourage us to identify the contingent and familiar within classic texts. By moving beyond rigid notions of cultural heritage and literary canons, they demonstrate that inspiration is cyclical, influence can flow in multiple directions, and no idea is ever truly original. This book will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Russian Studies. The introductory discussion of the origins and context of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’, alongside varied applications of the concept, will also be of interest to those working in the wider fields of comparative literature, reception studies, and translation studies.
Download or read book Against World Literature written by Emily Apter and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Download or read book Literature Against Fundamentalism written by Tabish Khair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-18 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and its subject matter ('reality'). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing. Literature Against Fundamentalism argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language and language in reality, where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive. Tabish Khair defines this mode of engagement as essentially an agnostic one, resistant to simple dogma. Hence, literature can provide an antidote to fundamentalism. Khair argues that reading literature as literature--and not just as material for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses--is essential for humanity. In the process, he offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature as in 'a call to arms'.
Download or read book Language Truth and Literature written by Richard Gaskin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Gaskin offers an original defence of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of production and not subject to individual readers' responses. He shows that the appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation.
Download or read book Literature Journals in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in China 1931 1938 written by Sunny Han Han and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the development of Chinese literature journals and social ideologies from 1931 to 1938, combining first-hand historical materials, historical data and four important literature journals to study the competition and cooperation between various powers such as the Kuomintang, the CCP, the “Third Party”, and intellectuals. This book describes the most influential Chinese literature journals and their political background during that period, and explains the relations between disparate political and social powers, helping to decipher Chinese intellectuals’ cultural positions during this time. The author concludes with the provocative thesis that there was a progression in literature of the Nanjing Decade from an emphasis on class struggle to national salvation to a humanism that transcended these differences. ——Arif Dirlik, author of "Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity" The author looks into sources drawn from various camps and areas, identifies ideological and affective contestations, debates theoretical agendas, and ponders the consequences of literature as a unique manifestation of wartime engagements. Both historically informed and methodologically engaged, Han’s book is a most important source for anyone interested in the cultural and political dynamics of modern China in an extraordinary time. ——David Der-wei Wang, Professor of Harvard University
Download or read book Essays on literature Essays on nature Juvenilia College papers Scientific papers Sketches Stevenson s companion to the cook book Stevenson at play written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Literature and the Japanese War of Aggression against China written by Xiangyuan Wang and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Japanese literature, which played a prominent role in the aggressive war against China, is analysed as “Invasion Literature”. The book conducts an in-depth study and discussion focusing on the origin and development of invasion literature, the writers, their works and the important role they played in the war against China, and the influence that such writings have had on Japanese post-war literature. It examines in particular detail under-discussed and lesser-known texts, thus compensating for lack of other scholarly writings researching the history and representation of the Japanese invasion of China in Japanese literature. This book was first published in Chinese by the “Quality Engineering” Project of Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences “Nine Five” Planning. Upon publication, it was well-received by the public and led to various television and newspaper interviews for the author. It was republished by Kunlun Press in 2005, and again met with a great reception. The preface of this book was published in People’s Daily and several chapters were reprinted in six issues of Journal of Literature and Art. The book won first prize of the Sixth Excellent Achievements of Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences, and the Book Award of the Sixth Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It was also selected to be part of the first national “Three One Hundred” original publication project.
Download or read book Fighting the Last War written by Tamir Bar-On and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the political and security threats posed by the domestic radical right in Western countries have been consistently exaggerated since 1945. This has allowed governments to justify censoring and repressing their political opponents, including many who cannot be fairly described as being affiliated with the radical right.
