Download or read book Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film written by Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The volume gathers 12 chapters penned by scholars from Japan, the USA, Canada, and Spain which look into the representation of vulnerability in human bodies and subjectivities. Not only is the array of genres covered in this volume significant— from narrative, drama, poetry, (auto)documentary, or film— in fiction and nonfiction, but also the varied cultural and linguistic coordinates of the literary and filmic texts scrutinized—from the USA, Canada, Spain, France, the Middle East, to Japan. Readers who decide to open the cover of this volume will benefit from becoming familiar with a relatively old topic— that of vulnerability— from a new perspective, so that they can consider the great potential of this critical concept anew.
Download or read book Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage written by Magda Dragu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue fills a gap in the current scholarship on literary collage, by addressing how different the interpretations of the concept are, depending on the author who uses the concept and the material and writers surveyed. The book studies writers who employed literary collage during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some whose works have been intensely analyzed from this perspective (William S. Burroughs and Walter Benjamin), but also some whose collage-writing style has recently been investigated by writers, being usually placed under the umbrella term of artist books (Stelio Maria Martini).
Download or read book Resistant Reproductions written by Fran Bigman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resistant Reproductions asks why narratives of pregnancy and abortion emerged in the early twentieth century and what kinds of stories these narratives conveyed. Is it only once pregnancy becomes plannable that it becomes a story worth telling? Abortion is often considered resistant and feminist, while pregnancy is considered domestic and conventional. How can readings of literary narratives challenge this reductive binary? Resistant Reproductions, the first book-length study of both pregnancy and abortion in British culture, addresses these questions by examining pregnancy narratives, including abortion narratives, in British fiction and film from 1907 to 1967. Fiction became a way for writers to explore what new possibilities of reproductive control would mean for the individual, yet there was also much anxiety about who would have control: individuals or the state. While exploring intimate personal experiences of pregnancy and abortion, Resistant Reproductions also asks how literary narratives used reproductive plots to address political issues of gender, class, and eugenics.
Download or read book Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis written by Janet M. Wilson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-21 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.
Download or read book Reading Digital Fiction written by Alice Bell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The book analyses and theorises five generations of digital fiction and their reading including hypertext fiction, hypermedia fiction, narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. It showcases medium- and platform-specific methods of qualitative reader response research across a variety of contexts and settings from screen-based and embodied interaction to gallery installation, and from reading group and individual interview to think-aloud methodologies. The book thus addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction reading by designing and reporting on new empirical studies focusing on hypertextuality, interactivity, immersion, as well as medium-specific forms of textual “you”, ontological ambiguity, reader orientation and empathy. In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands cognitive, transmedial, and empirical narratology and stylistics by placing the reader of these new narratives front and centre.
Download or read book The Clouds written by Stefano Gualeni and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a slow autumn afternoon, an atmospheric physicist working at the Malta Weather Station receives a surprising email from a colleague working in the United Kingdom: something troubling has apparently been detected during one of their research flights. The ensuing meteorological mystery is the starting point for the science fiction novella The Clouds. Alongside the novella, this book features three essays written by the same author that discuss in a more explicit and conventional way three philosophical ideas showcased in The Clouds: the expressive use of fictional games within fictional worlds; the possibility for existential meaning within simulated universes; and the unnatural narratological trope of "unhappening." With its unique format, this book is a fresh reflection on the mediatic form of philosophy and a compelling argument for the philosophical value of fiction.
Download or read book Adaptation and Beyond written by Eva C. Karpinski and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "world-building," which accurately captures the complexity and multidirectionality of contemporary scattered and ubiquitous practices of adaptation. The Editors argue that the process of moving stories or their elements across different media platforms and repurposing them for new uses results in the production of hybrid transtextualities. The book demonstrate how hybrid textualities augment narrative and literary forms as goals of their world-building, finding unexpected sites of cross-pollination, expansion, and appropriation in spoken-word and dance performance, (auto)biographical comics, advertising, Chinese Kun opera, and popular song lyrics. This yoking of hybridity and transmediality yields not only diversified and often commercialized aesthetic forms but also enables the emergence a unique cultural space in-between, a mezzaterra capable of addressing current political issues and mobilizing broader audiences
Download or read book E M Forster s Material Humanism written by Nour Dakkak and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-19 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through attending to the nonhuman, E. M. Forster’s Material Humanism: Queer Matters places Forster’s fiction in conversation with contemporary debates concerned with the intersection of neomaterialism, environmental humanities and queer ecology. The book revisits Forster’s liberal humanism from a materialist perspective by focusing on humans’ embodied activities in artificial and natural environments. By examining the everyday embodied experiences of characters, the book thus brings to the fore insignificant and sometimes overlooked aspects in Forster’s fiction. It also places importance on the texts’ treatment of queer intimacy as an embodied experience that can transcend sexual desire. The book acknowledges nonhuman agency as central to our understanding of queerness in Forster’s texts and studies the representation of formless matters such as dust as a way through which Forster’s ecological concerns arise by linking the fate of oppressed humans with oppressed nonhuman others.
Download or read book Bodies Boundaries and Vulnerabilities written by Lisa Folkmarson Käll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the interrelations between bodily boundaries and vulnerabilities. It calls attention to the vulnerability of bodies as an essential aspect of having boundaries and being bound to other bodies. The volume advances an understanding of embodiment as the central aspect of subjectivity, its identity formation and its relations to others and the world. The essence of embodiment is what connects us with others and in equal measure what distinguishes us from others. The collection also addresses the centrality of the body to political and cultural activity, targeting the role and constitution of norms in the regulation of bodies, and the construction of spaces that bodies inhabit, in constructing national and cultural identities. It raises questions of how bodies and boundaries materialize in co-constitutive relation to one another; how bodies are situated and come to embody various bodies and intersections between different categories of identity and systems of value, meaning and knowledge; how the regulation and policing of bodies and the boundaries between them come to constitute bodies as being weak, strong, vulnerable or resilient and as having more or less fixed or fluid boundaries. The chapters in the volume all demonstrate how individual human bodies are formed in relation to each other as they are regulated and distinguished from one another by larger collective bodies of nature, culture, science, nation and state, as well as by other human or non-human animal bodies.
Download or read book Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care written by Amelia DeFalco and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.
Download or read book Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture written by Alexandra Schultheis Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions—through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore draws on theories of vulnerability, precarity, and dispossession to argue for the necessity of recognizing the embodied and material contexts of human rights subjects. At the same time, she demonstrates how these theories run the risk of reproducing the structural imbalances that lie at the core of critiques of human rights. Pairing conventional human rights genres—legal instruments, human rights reports, reportage, and humanitarian campaigns—with literary and visual culture, Moore develops a transnational feminist reading praxis of five sites of rights and their violation over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address state-sponsored ethnocide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, the human rights campaigns, fiction, and film that have brought Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how literature and visual culture participate in that cultural imaginary. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability, Moore demonstrates the importance of situating human rights violations not only in the context of neo-liberal development policies but also in relation to the growth of security networks that serve the nation-state often at the expense of the security of specific subjects and populations. In place of conventional victims and agents, the intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, yet which run the risk of cooptation by security rhetoric.
Download or read book Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film written by Naomi Nkealah and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films. The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war. This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice.
Download or read book Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture written by Michaela Schrage-Früh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities written by Alan Bleakley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 875 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other. Composed of eight parts, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities looks at the medical humanities as: a network and system therapeutic provocation forms of resistance a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum concerned with performance and narrative mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture through public engagement. This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine’s capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.
Download or read book Infamous Bodies written by Samantha Pinto and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The countless retellings and reimaginings of the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta have transformed them into difficult cultural and black feminist icons. In Infamous Bodies, Samantha Pinto explores how histories of these black women and their ongoing fame generate new ways of imagining black feminist futures. Drawing on a variety of media, cultural, legal, and critical sources, Pinto shows how the narratives surrounding these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century celebrities shape key political concepts such as freedom, consent, contract, citizenship, and sovereignty. Whether analyzing Wheatley's fame in relation to conceptions of race and freedom, notions of consent in Hemings's relationship with Thomas Jefferson, or Baartman's ability to enter into legal contracts, Pinto reveals the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality in the formation of political rights. In so doing, she contends that feminist theories of black women's vulnerable embodiment can be the starting point for future progressive political projects.
Download or read book Notes Made While Falling written by Jenn Ashworth and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing. Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane—or might just allow us to keep on living. In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.
Download or read book Migrating Minds written by Didier Coste and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 2023 "René Wellek Prize for the Best Edited Essay Collection" by the American Comparative Literature Association, Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with 20 innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives. The volume satisfies the need for a stronger involvement of Comparative and World Literatures and Cultures, Translation, and Education Theories in this crucial debate, and also proposes an experimental way to explore in depth the necessity of a cosmopolitan method as well as the riches of cosmopolitan representations. The essays follow a logical progression from the situated philosophical and political foundations of the debate to interdisciplinary propositions for a pedagogy of cosmopolitanism through studies of modern and contemporary cosmopolitan cultural practices in literature and the arts and the concurrent analysis of prototypes of cosmopolitan identities. This trajectory allows readers to appreciate new historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and practical implications of cosmopolitanism that pertain to multiple genres and media, under different modes of production and reception. In the deterritorialized landscape of Migrating Minds, mental and sentimental mobility, rather than the legacy of place, is the key to an efficient, humanist response to deadening globalization.
