Download or read book Elemental Narratives written by Enrico Cesaretti and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent “material turn” in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and the expressive eloquence of “glocal” materials, such as sulfur, petroleum, marble, steel, and asbestos, that have helped make and, simultaneously, “un-make” today’s Italy, affecting its socio-environmental health in multiple ways. Embracing the idea of a decentralized agency that is shared among human and nonhuman entities, Cesaretti suggests that engaging with these entangled discursive and material texts is a sound and revealing ecocritical practice that promises to generate new knowledge and more participatory, affective responses to environmental issues, both in Italy and elsewhere. Ultimately, he argues that complementing quantitative, data-based information with insights from fiction and nonfiction, the arts, and other humanistic disciplines is both desirable and crucial if we want to modify perceptions and attitudes, increase our awareness and understanding, and, in turn, develop more sustainable worldviews in the era of the Anthropocene. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this book will appeal broadly to scholars and students working in the fields of environmental studies, comparative literatures, ecocriticism, environmental history, and Italian studies.

Download or read book Elemental Narratives written by Enrico Cesaretti and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent “material turn” in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and the expressive eloquence of “glocal” materials, such as sulfur, petroleum, marble, steel, and asbestos, that have helped make and, simultaneously, “un-make” today’s Italy, affecting its socio-environmental health in multiple ways. Embracing the idea of a decentralized agency that is shared among human and nonhuman entities, Cesaretti suggests that engaging with these entangled discursive and material texts is a sound and revealing ecocritical practice that promises to generate new knowledge and more participatory, affective responses to environmental issues, both in Italy and elsewhere. Ultimately, he argues that complementing quantitative, data-based information with insights from fiction and nonfiction, the arts, and other humanistic disciplines is both desirable and crucial if we want to modify perceptions and attitudes, increase our awareness and understanding, and, in turn, develop more sustainable worldviews in the era of the Anthropocene. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this book will appeal broadly to scholars and students working in the fields of environmental studies, comparative literatures, ecocriticism, environmental history, and Italian studies.

Download or read book Elemental Encounters in the Contemporary Irish Novel written by Claire McGrail Johnston and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The underlying premise of this book is that reading is touching. Words leap out of their beds and pierce flesh like a knife. Storytelling breathes within the dynamic of encounters with air, fire, earth and water, permeated by emotion, imagination and touch. These ideas are contextualized within ancient community rituals, social justice gatherings, pedagogical practices, and map-making. The four elements are retrieved from exile as imaginative, corporeal, and generative substances that operate within stories like medicine bundles. Reading becomes a Deleuzian ‘enterprise of health’, a challenging experience that grasps Paulo Freire’s generative themes, and is simultaneously thought-provoking and valuable. The capacious literary space capable of housing this sensual ferment is the novel. More verb than noun, the novel is an elemental bundle that engages with flesh in all its manifestations. This book spotlights Irish novels by John Banville and Mary Morrissy, exploring how they revitalise the elements with sensual, social, and tactile textures.

Download or read book The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks written by Raul Lejano and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-07-26 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory and case studies demonstrate the analytic potential of mutually constitutive “narrative networks” in environmental governance. For as long has humans have lived in communities, storytelling has bound people to each other and to their environments. In recent times, scholars have noted how social networks arise around issues of resource and ecological management. In this book, Raul Lejano, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram argue that stories, or narratives, play a key role in these networks—that environmental communities “narrate themselves into existence.” The authors propose the notion of the narrative-network, and introduce innovative tools to analyze the plots, characters, and events that inform environmental action. Their analysis sheds light on how environmental networks can emerge in unlikely contexts and sustain themselves against great odds. The authors present three case studies that demonstrate the power of narrative and narratology in the analysis of environmental networks: a conservation network in the Sonoran Desert, which achieved some success despite U.S.-Mexico border issues; a narrative that bridged differences between community and scientists in the Turtle Islands; and networks of researchers and farmers who collaborated to develop and sustain alternative agriculture practice in the face of government inaction. These cases demonstrate that by paying attention to language and storytelling, we can improve our understanding of environmental behavior and even change it in positive ways.

Download or read book Narrative and Belief written by Markus Altena Davidsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and certain other works of fantasy and science fiction have inspired some of their readers and viewers to believe that the superhuman powers of the story-worlds, such as Gandalf and the Force, exist also in the real world. We can say that such fictional narratives possess ‘religious affordance’, for they contain certain textual features that afford or make possible a religious, rather than just a fictional, use of the text. This book aims to identify those features of the text that make it possible for a fictional narrative to inspire belief in the supernatural beings of the story, or even to facilitate ritual interaction with these beings. The contributions analyse the religious affordance and actual use of a wide range of texts, spanning from Harry Potter and Star Wars, over The Lord of the Rings and late 19th-century Scandinavian fantasy, to the Christian Gospels. Although we focus on the religious affordance of fictional texts, we also spell out implications for the study of religious narratives in general, and for the narrativist study of religion. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Religion.

Download or read book An Anthropogenic Table of Elements written by Timothy Neale and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

Download or read book The Complete Literary Guide to the Bible written by Leland Ryken and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible is consideration of the Bible from a literary perspective, reflecting contemporary interest in the academic world of the Bible as literature. This collection of essays addresses both specific books of the Bible and general topics dealing with the Bible. The four main sections of the book are; The Bible as Literature, The Literature of the Old Testament, The Literature of the New Testament, and The Literary Influence of the Bible. The editors for A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible are Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman III. Contributors include: Fredrick Buechner, Novelist John Sailhamer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Wilson G. Baroody, Arizona State University William F. Gentrup, Arizona State University Kenneth R.R. Gros, Louis Indiana University Willard Van Antwerpen, Indiana University Nancy Tischler, The Pennsylvania State University Michael Hagan, North American Baptist Seminary Richard L. Pratt, Jr., Reformed Theological Seminary Douglas Green, Yale University Wilma McClarty, Southern College Jerry A. Gladson, First Christian Church, Garden Grove, California Raymond C. Van Leeouwen, Calvin Theological Seminary Richard Patterson, Liberty University James H. Sims, The University of Southern Mississippi Branson L. Woodard, Jr. Liberty University Amberys R. Whittle, Georgia Southern University John H. Augustine, Yale University Michael Travers, Grand Rapids Baptist College Marianne Meye Thompson, Fuller Theological Seminary John W. Sider, Westmont College Carey C. Newman, Palm Beach Atlantic College William G. Doty, The University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa Chaim Potak, Novelist Gene Warren Doty, University of Missouri-Rolla Sidney Greidanus, Calvin Theological Seminary XXXXXXX

Download or read book Storied Deserts written by Celina Osuna and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Download or read book A User s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are so many people attracted to narrative fiction? How do authors in this genre reframe experiences, people, and environments anchored to the real world without duplicating "real life"? In which ways does fiction differ from reality? What might fictional narrative and reality have in common—if anything? By analyzing novels such as Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist, along with selected Latino comic books and short fiction, this book explores the peculiarities of the production and reception of postcolonial and Latino borderland fiction. Frederick Luis Aldama uses tools from disciplines such as film studies and cognitive science that allow the reader to establish how a fictional narrative is built, how it functions, and how it defines the boundaries of concepts that appear susceptible to limitless interpretations. Aldama emphasizes how postcolonial and Latino borderland narrative fiction authors and artists use narrative devices to create their aesthetic blueprints in ways that loosely guide their readers' imagination and emotion. In A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction, he argues that the study of ethnic-identified narrative fiction must acknowledge its active engagement with world narrative fictional genres, storytelling modes, and techniques, as well as the way such fictions work to move their audiences.

Download or read book The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights written by Muhsin J. al-Musawi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi shows how deeply Islamic heritage and culture is embedded in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (known to many as the Arabian Nights) and how this integration invites readers to make an Islamic milieu. Conservative Islam dismisses The Thousand and One Nights as facile popular literature, and liberal views disregard the rich Islamic context of the text. Approaching the text with a fresh and unbiased eye, al-Musawi reads the tales against Islamic schools of thought and theology and recovers persuasive historical evidence to reveal the cultural and religious struggle over Islam that drives the book's narrative tension and binds its seemingly fragmented stories. Written by a number of authors over a stretch of centuries, The Thousand and One Nights depicts a burgeoning, urban Islamic culture in all its variety and complexity. As al-Musawi demonstrates, the tales document their own places and periods of production, reflecting the Islamic individual's growing exposure to a number of entertainments and temptations and their conflict with the obligations of faith. Aimed at a diverse audience, these stories follow a narrative arc that begins with corruption and ends with redemption, conforming to a paradigm that concurs with the sociological and religious concerns of Islam and the Islamic state. By emphasizing Islam in his analysis of these entertaining and instructional tales, al-Musawi not only illuminates the work's consistent equation between art and life, but he also sheds light on its underlying narrative power. His study offers a brilliant portrait of medieval Islam as well, especially its social, political, and economic institutions and its unique practices of storytelling.

Download or read book Toxic Matters written by Monica Seger and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Toxic Matters, Monica Seger considers two Italian environmental disasters: an isolated factory explosion in Seveso, just north of Milan, in 1976 and the ongoing daily toxic emissions from the Ilva steelworks in the Apulian city of Taranto. Both have exposed residents to high concentrations of the persistent organic pollutant known as dioxin. Although different in terms of geography and temporality, Seveso and Taranto are deeply united by this nearly imperceptible substance, and by the representational complexities it poses. They are also united by creative narrative expressions, in literary, cinematic, and other forms, that push back against dominant contexts and representations perpetuated by state and industrial actors. Seger traces a dialogue between Seveso and Taranto, exploring an interplay between bodies, soil, industrial emissions, and the wealth of dynamic particulate matter that passes in between. At the same time, she emphasizes the crucial function of narrative expression for making sense of this modern-day reality and for shifting existing power dynamics as exposed communities exercise their voices. While Toxic Matters, is grounded in Italian cases and texts, it looks outward to the pressing questions of toxicity, embodiment, and storytelling faced by communities worldwide.

Download or read book Wit s End written by James Combs and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the “Great Movies,” that fluid category of feature films deemed by various authorities—film societies, critics, academics, and movie enthusiasts—to be the enduring and memorable works of cinematic history. But what are they about? In Wit’s End, the author attempts to “make sense” of these films in order to understand their greatness in the context of their relation to other films and to the worlds they come from and recreate on screen. To that end, we employ the conceptual power of pragmatic social theory and the rich idea of aesthesis to explore and arrange these films as a means of understanding what they express about the universality of human life in our keen use of wit, organization of social wont, and direction of cultural way. It is hoped that such an inquiry will illuminate the glory of the great films and contribute to the advance of film studies.

Download or read book For the Story Teller written by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlock the art of storytelling with "For the Story Teller, Story Telling and Stories to Tell" by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey. This charming book provides tips and tricks for captivating your audience with engaging tales and a collection of delightful stories to get you started!

Download or read book Dreams of Exile written by Ian Bell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child," Robert Louis Stevenson once said in a statement that perfectly captures the magic of his own fiction. Immensely popular during is brief life--he died in 1894 at the age of forty-four--he has never lacked for readers since. In the century that followed his death, many biographies have been written, each with its own R.L.S.: the sickly, dreaming child; the Bohemian dandy outraging Victorian Edinburgh; the romantic wanderer leading his donkey through the wilds of the Cevennes; the frail genius doomed to die young. For some, he is the man of action avid for experience, filled with wanderlust; for others, the writer of stories beloved by children and familiar from innumerable film ad television dramas. Still others know him as the essayist whose skills matched William Hazlitt's and the novelist to whom even Henry James deffered. All of these are R.L.S., but none is the full Stevenson. Now, in this new and acclaimed biography, Ian Bell attempts to see Stevenson whole, to trace the line of descent form the son of Calvinist engineers to the man who ended his days as Tusitala among the Samoan islanders. Understanding that for Stevenson geography mattered, Bell sets out to discover the complete man through the places he lived and the people he lived among as well as through the books that poured from him during his all-too-short literary life. As such, Dreams of Exile is both literary biogrpahy and travel narrative. It follows Stevenson's development as an artist and as a man by following his often chaotic progress from continent to continent, in good health and in bad, in poverty and in wealth. Along the way, it reveals his often tortured relations with his family, his robust sexuality, and the mystery of his stormy marriage to a woman many years his senior. But perhaps Bell's most important contribution is to rescue R.L.S. from the many conflicting and often romanticized images that have continued to surround him, and in the process to make a telling case for Stevenson's genius as a writer.

Download or read book Wandering Women written by Laura Di Bianco and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlights the absence of, and their wish for, life-sustaining communities. Laura Di Bianco contends that women's urban filmmaking—while articulating a claim for belonging and asserting cinematic and social agency—brings into view landscapes of the Anthropocene, where urban decay and the erasure of nature intersect with human alienation. Though a minor cinema, it is also a powerful movement of resistance against the dominant male narratives about the world we inhabit. Based on interviews with directors, Wandering Women deepens the understanding of contemporary Italian cinema while enriching the field of feminist ecocritical literature.

Download or read book Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition written by Elizabeth Vander Lei and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, determined individuals have appropriated and reconstructed rhetorical and religious resources to create effective arguments. In the process, they have remade both themselves and their communities. This edited volume offers notable examples of these reconstructions, ranging from the formation of Christianity to questions about the relationship of religious and academic ways of knowing. The initial chapters explore historic challenges to Christian doctrines and gender roles. Contributors examine Mormon women's campaigns for the recognition of their sect, women's suffrage, and the statehood of Utah; the Seventh-day Adventist challenge to the mainstream designation of Sunday as the Sabbath; a female minister who confronted the gendered tenets of early Methodism and created her own sacred spaces; women who, across three centuries, fashioned an apostolic voice of humble authority rooted in spiritual conversion; and members of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who redefined notions of women's intellectual capacity and appropriate fields for work from the Civil War through World War II. Considering contemporary learning environments, other contributors explore resources that can help faculty and students of composition and rhetoric consider more fully the relations of religion and academic work. These contributors call upon the work of theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars to propose strategies for building trust through communication. The final chapters examine the writings of Apostle Paul and his use of Jewish forms of argumentation and provide an overarching discussion of how the Christian tradition has resisted rhetorical renovation, and in the process, missed opportunities to renovate spiritual belief.

Download or read book Twenty Years After Communism written by Michael H. Bernhard and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Remembering the past, especially as collectivity, is a political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration is an integral part of the establishment of new political regimes, new identities, and new principles of political legitimacy. This volume is about the explosion of the politics of memory triggered by the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe, particularly about the politics of its commemoration twenty years later. It offers seventeen in-depth case studies, an original theoretical framework, and a comparative study of memory regime types and their origins. Four different kinds of mnemonic actors are identified: mnemonic warriors, mnemonic pluralists, mnemonic abnegators, and mnemonic prospectives. Their combinations render three different types of memory regimes: fractured, pillarized, and unified. Disciplined comparative analysis shows how several different configurations of factors affect the emergence of mnemonic actors and different varieties of memory regimes. There are three groups of causal factors that influence the political form of the memory regime: the range of structural constraints the actors face (e.g., the type of regime transformation), cultural constraints linked to past political conflict (e.g., salient ethnic or religious cleavages), and cultural and strategic choices actors make (e.g. framing post-communist political identities)"--