Download or read book Bitter Carnival written by Michael André Bernstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1992-03-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.
Download or read book Mark at the Threshold written by Geoff R. Webb and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discussion concerning Markan characterisation (and Markan genre) can be helpfully informed by Bakhtinian categories. This book uses the twin foci of chronotope and carnival to examine specific characters in terms of different levels of dialogue. Various passages in Mark are examined, and thresholds are noted between interindividual character-zones, and between the hearing-reader and text-voices. Several generic contacts are shown to have shaped the text’s ‘genre-memory’ – in particular, the Graeco-Roman popular literature of the ancient world. The resultant picture is of an earthy, populist Gospel whose “voices” resonate with the “vulgar” classes, and whose spirituality is refreshingly relevant to everyday concerns.
Download or read book The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals written by Eyolf Østrem and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the History of the Arts and the History of Christianity in Western Culture. The present volume was planned on the basis of the first annual international conferences at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen: a collection of 15 essays with a wide range of topics both in terms of chronology and subject matter written. The book is a special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration.
Download or read book A Carnival of Snackery written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harmless laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.
Download or read book The Arena of Satire written by David H. J. Larmour and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first comprehensive reading of Juvenal’s satires in more than fifty years, David H. J. Larmour deftly revises and sharpens our understanding of the second-century Roman writer who stands as the archetype for all later practitioners of the satirist’s art. The enduring attraction of Juvenal’s satires is twofold: they not only introduce the character of the “angry satirist” but also offer vivid descriptions of everyday life in Rome at the height of the Empire. In Larmour’s interpretation, these two elements are inextricably linked. The Arena of Satire presents the satirist as flaneur traversing the streets of Rome in search of its authentic core—those distinctly Roman virtues that have disappeared amid the corruption of the age. What the vengeful, punishing satirist does to his victims, as Larmour shows, echoes what the Roman state did to outcasts and criminals in the arena of the Colosseum. The fact that the arena was the most prominent building in the city and is mentioned frequently by Juvenal makes it an ideal lens through which to examine the spectacular and punishing characteristics of Roman satire. And the fact that Juvenal undertakes his search for the uncorrupted, authentic Rome within the very buildings and landmarks that make up the actual, corrupt Rome of his day gives his sixteen satires their uniquely paradoxical and contradictory nature. Larmour’s exploration of “the arena of satire” guides us through Juvenal’s search for the true Rome, winding from one poem to the next. He combines close readings of passages from individual satires with discussions of Juvenal’s representation of Roman space and topography, the nature of the “arena” experience, and the network of connections among the satirist, the gladiator, and the editor—or producer—of Colosseum entertainments. The Arena of Satire also offers a new definition of “Juvenalian satire” as a particular form arising from the intersection of the body and the urban landscape—a form whose defining features survive in the works of several later satirists, from Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh to contemporary writers such as Russian novelist Victor Pelevin and Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh.
Download or read book The Darker World Within written by Molly Smith and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the Stuart preoccupation with the darker side of the psyche suggests that fascination with evil perhaps precipitated the radical sociopolitical and cultural changes of the midcentury and that recurring depictions of declining patriarchal authority in plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley made possible the cultural assault on monarchy and patriarchy of the period.
Download or read book Pay for Your Pleasures written by Cary Levine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on work by the three artists from the 1970s through the 1990s. Examines their participation in subcultural music scenes and discovers a common political strategy which lead them to create strange and unseemly imates that test the limites of art, gender roles, sex, acceptable behavior, poor taste, and the gag reflex.
Download or read book Filth written by William A. Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on 'filth' in literary & cultural materials from London, Paris & their colonial outposts in the 19th & early 20th centuries, the essays in this volume range over topics from the building of sewers to the fictional representation of labouring women as polluting.
Download or read book Violence and Nihilism written by Luís Aguiar de Sousa and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nihilism seems to be per definition linked to violence. Indeed, if the nihilist is a person who acknowledges no moral or religious authority, then what does stop him from committing any kind of crime? Dostoevsky precisely called attention to this danger: if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted, even anthropophagy. Nietzsche, too, emphasised, although in different terms, the consequences deriving from the death of God and the collapse of Judeo-Christian morality. This context shaped the way in which philosophers, writers and artists thought about violence, in its different manifestations, during the 20th century. The goal of this interdisciplinary volume is to explore the various modern and contemporary configurations of the link between violence and nihilism as understood by philosophers and artists (in both literature and film).
Download or read book Madmen and Other Survivors written by Jeremy Tambling and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun's Fiction puts the short stories written by this outstanding Chinese writer between 1918 and 1926 into a broad context of Modernism. The fiction of Lu Xun (1881–1936) deals with the China moving beyond the 1911 Revolution. He asks about the possibilities of survival, and what that means, even considering the possibility that madness might be a strategy by which that is possible. Such an idea calls identity into question, and Lu Xun is read here as a writer for whom that is a wholly problematic concept. The book makes use of critical and cultural theory to consider these short stories in the context of not only Chinese fiction, but in terms of the art of the short story, and in relation to literary modernism. It attempts to put Lu Xun into as wide a perspective as possible for contemporary reading. To make his work widely accessible, he is treated here in English translation.
Download or read book Grotesque Anatomies written by David Musgrave and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pope’s Dunciad among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the longer, more encylopedic form (Varro-Petronius-Boethius), and their subsequent fusion during the Renaissance. It also contains an account of the critical reception of the genre, with the term ‘Menippean satire’ first being used by Justus Lipsius in 1581. Finally, Menippean satire is described as a literary version of the grotesque, and a brief theory of the grotesque in the modern period as ‘radical heterogeneity’ is outlined. This is also the foundation of a new definition of Menippean satire, drawing on previous definitions by Frye, Bakhtin and Kirk, and revising them for the modern period. The following chapters examine iconic works as examples of Menippean satire and of the grotesque. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the nose in Menippean satire and comic literature generally, and reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in this context. It also gives an account of metaphor as a ‘grotesque transformation’. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the stomach in Menippean satire and symposiastic literature, and reads Peacock’s Gryll Grange in this context. The link between the stomach as a figure of thinking in comic literature is the basis for an account of symbolic structuring as ‘grotesque association’. Chapter 4 is a close reading of the scatological imagery of Pope’s Dunciad, and how scatology generally tends towards a cyclical metaphysics. It also relates changes in print technology and copyright laws to the reticular scatological structure of the Dunciad. Chapter 5 argues for Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Menippean satire, focusing on the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme as a missing premise, as an example of ‘under-mindedness’ and as an ironic aspect of the fragmentation typical of late Romantic Menippean satires. Chapter 6 examines Urquhart’s eccentric The Jewel as a satire on the referential function of language, reading it in the context of projections for a universal language from this period. The final chapter identifies some key works by Derrida and Barthes as Menippean satires, noting the resurgence of the form in some postmodern and deconstructive writing.
Download or read book The Return of Resentment written by Robert A. Schneider and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Return of Resentment charts the long history of resentment, from its emergence to its establishment as the word of the moment. The term "resentment," often casually paired with words like "hatred," "rage," or "fear," has dominated US news headlines since November 2016. Despite its increased use, this word seems to defy easy categorization. Does "resentment" describe many interlocking sentiments, or is it just another way of saying "anger"? Does it suggest an irrational grievance, as opposed to a legitimate callout of injustice? Does it imply political leanings, or it is nonpartisan by nature? In The Return of Resentment, Robert A. Schneider explores these questions and more, moving from eighteenth-century Britain to the aftermath of the French Revolution to social movements throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment by movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment's modernity and its ambiguity--how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition. Schneider anatomizes the many ways it has been found appropriate as a label for present-day movements, from the followers of Trump and the supporters of Brexit to radical Islamicists and proponents of identity politics. Addressing our contemporary political situation in a novel way, The Return of Resentment challenges us to think critically about the roles different emotions play in politics.
Download or read book Wrong s what I Do Best written by Barbara Ching and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk. With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Merle Haggard, George Jones, David Allan Coe, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, and the Outlaw Movement, this book is written in a jargon-free, engaging style that will interest both academic as well as general readers.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy written by Anthony J. Cascardi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast differences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. This Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests that literature and philosophy share while offering a lucid account of their differences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and offers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present.
Download or read book Irvine Welsh written by Robert Morace and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to the work of Irvine Welsh, placing his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores Welsh's biography, his impact on contemporary Scottish fiction and the cultural relevance of his work. Including a timeline of key dates, it also offers an overview of the critical reception his work has provoked
Download or read book Speaking Out written by Linde Zingaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many professionals in health, education, and community service roles are caught in a particular bind of identity—they live in a complex social borderland of credibility and professional authority while experiencing or having experienced the same discrimination, violence or trauma that they are committed to conquering. For some, the disclosure of their own stories of marginalization has become a tool for advocacy, for telling a larger truth; for others, self-disclosure is a more personal action, intended to assist isolated others in developing trust and connection. Linde Zingaro, a lifelong social service worker and activist, interviewed several colleagues who have chosen to speak out in this way, talking with them about their ethics and intentions, and collaborating to identify some of the risks of negative personal and professional consequences for the practitioner. She uses their voices—and her own—to illustrate some of the ways that these people have learned to safely and effectively use the transformative potential of storytelling as significant social action. This examination of speaking out as a meaningful social practice may help other workers, activists, and community researchers in their efforts to be heard in the interests of a more just society.
Download or read book Taking a Stand written by Jared N. Champion and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raúl Pérez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and—more recently—Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up comedian as public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli’s use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari’s merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford’s emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously.
