Download or read book Debi Cornwall Necessary Fictions written by and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.

Download or read book Nervous Fictions written by Jess Keiser and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous system comprising sympathetic spectators. Nervous Fictions is the first account of the Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the "active fancies" it generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton, Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists (Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser shows how attempts to understand the brain’s relationship to the mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred literary invention.

Download or read book Land Fictions written by D. Asher Ghertner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

Download or read book Futures and Fictions written by Simon O'Sullivan and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Futures and Fictions is a book of essays and conversations that explore possibilities for a different ‘political imaginary’ or, more simply, the imagining and imaging of alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against the impasses of our neoliberal present. In particular, the book contributes to prescient discussions around decolonization, post-capitalism and new kinds of social movements – exploring the intersections of these with contemporary art practice and visual culture. Contributions range from work on science, sonic and financial fictions and alternative space-time plots to myths and images generated by marginalized and ‘minor’ communities, queer-feminist strategies of fictioning, and the production of new Afro- and other futurisms. Contributors to thsi volume include Ursula K. Le Guin, Theo Reeves-Evisson, Bridget Crone, Kodwo Eshun, Louis Moreno, Laboria Cuboniks, Luciana Parisi, Stefan Helmreich, Mark Fisher, Judy Thorne, Annett Busch, Harold Offeh, Robin Mackay, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Kemang Wa Lehulere, and Oreet Ashery.

Download or read book Stranger Fictions written by Rebecca C. Johnson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, Stranger Fictions offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. Rebecca C. Johnson rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translation practices—including "bad" translation, mistranslation, and pseudotranslation—Johnson argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. Examining nearly a century of translations published in Beirut, Cairo, Malta, Paris, London, and New York, from Qiat Rūbinun Kurūzī (The story of Robinson Crusoe) in 1835 to pastiched crime stories in early twentieth-century Egyptian magazines, Johnson shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. Stranger Fictions affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Download or read book Licentious Fictions written by Daniel Poch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.

Download or read book Legal Fictions written by Lon Luvois Fuller and published by Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gospel Fictions written by Randel Helms and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-12-02 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the four canonical Gospels actual historical accounts or are they imaginative literature produced by influential literary artists to serve a theological vision? In this study of the Gospels based upon a demonstrable literary theory, Randel Helms presents the work of the four evangelists as the "supreme fictions" of our culture, self-conscious works of art deliberately composed as the culmination of a long literary and oral tradition.Helms analyzes the best-known and the most powerful of these fictions: the stories of Christ's birth, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion, death and resurrection. In Helms' exegesis of the Gospel miracle stories, he traces the greatest of these - the resurrection of Lazarus four days after his death - to the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by the god Horus.Helms maintains that the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about the writers' attitudes concerning Jesus. Helms examines each of the narratives - the language, the sources, the similarities and differences - and shows that their purpose was not so much to describe the past as to affect the present.This scholarly yet readable work demonstrates how the Gospels surpassed the expectations of their authors, influencing countless generations by creating a life-enhancing understanding of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.

Download or read book Anthropocene Fictions written by Adam Trexler and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Download or read book Science Fictions written by Stuart Ritchie and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fictions of America written by Ulrich Baer and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented compendium of milestones in the history of American literature. Presents all of the "first" literary works that broke barriers and inaugurated new traditions; with concise introductions.

Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Jennifer R. Mercieca and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extended analysis of how Americans imagined themselves as citizens between 1764 and 1845 Founding Fictions develops the concept of a “political fiction,” or a narrative that people tell about their own political theories, and analyzes how republican and democratic fictions positioned American citizens as either romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. By re-telling the stories that Americans have told themselves about citizenship, Mercieca highlights an important contradiction in American political theory and practice: that national stability and active citizen participation are perceived as fundamentally at odds.

Download or read book Pirating Fictions written by Monica F. Cohen and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of literary appropriation. The golden age of piracy captured the nineteenth-century imagination, animating such best-selling novels as Treasure Island and inspiring theatrical hits from The Pirates of Penzance to Peter Pan. But the prevalence of unauthorized reprinting and dramatic adaptation meant that authors lost immense profits from the most lucrative markets. Infuriated, novelists and playwrights denounced such literary piracy in essays, speeches, and testimonies. Their fiction, however, tells a different story. Using landmarks in copyright history as a backdrop, Pirating Fictions argues that popular nineteenth-century pirate fiction mischievously resists the creation of intellectual property in copyright legislation and law. Drawing on classic pirate stories by such writers as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie, this wide-ranging account demonstrates, in raucous tales and telling asides, how literary appropriation was celebrated at the very moment when the forces of possessive individualism began to enshrine the language of personal ownership in Anglo-American views of creative work.

Download or read book Useful Fictions written by Michael Austin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion observed inThe White Album. Why is this? Michael Austin asks, inUseful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species' need for stories? Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cognitive psychology, game theory, and evolutionary aesthetics, Austin develops the concept of a "useful fiction," a simple narrative that serves an adaptive function unrelated to its factual accuracy. In his work we see how these useful fictions play a key role in neutralizing the overwhelming anxiety that humans can experience as their minds gather and process information. Rudimentary narratives constructed for this purpose, Austin suggests, provided a cognitive scaffold that might have become the basis for our well-documented love of fictional stories. Written in clear, jargon-free prose and employing abundant literary examplesfrom the Bible toOne Thousand and One Arabian NightsandDon QuixotetoNo ExitAustin's work offers a new way of understanding the relationship between fiction and evolutionary processesand, perhaps, the very origins of literature.

Download or read book Collected Fictions written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download or read book Author Fictions written by Ingo Berensmeyer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictional novelists and other author characters have been a staple of novels and stories from the early nineteenth century onwards. What is it that attracts authors to representing their own kind in fiction? Author Fictions addresses this question from a theoretical and historical perspective. Narrative representations of literary authorship not only reflect the aesthetic convictions and social conditions of their actual authors or their time; they also take an active part in negotiating and shaping these conditions. The book unfolds the history of such ‘author fictions’ in European and North American texts since the early nineteenth century as a literary history of literary authorship, ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction. It combines rhetorical and sociological approaches to answer the question how literature makes authors. Identifying ‘author fictions’ as narratives that address the fragile material conditions of literary creation in the actual and symbolic economies of production, Ingo Berensmeyer explores how these texts elaborate and manipulate concepts and models of authorship. This book will be relevant to English, American and comparative literary studies and to anyone interested in the topic of literary authorship.

Download or read book Economic Science Fictions written by William Davies and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative new anthology exploring how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics. From the libertarian economics of Ayn Rand to Aldous Huxley's consumerist dystopias, economics and science fiction have often orbited each other. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies has deliberately merged the two worlds, asking how we might harness the power of the utopian imagination to revitalize economic thinking. Rooted in the sense that our current economic reality is no longer credible or viable, this collection treats our economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating different economic futures. It asks how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics and provides surprising new syntheses, merging social science with fiction, design with politics, scholarship with experimental forms. With an opening chapter from Ha-Joon Chang as well as theory, short stories, and reflections on design, this book from Goldsmiths Press challenges and changes the notion that economics and science fiction are worlds apart. The result is a wealth of fresh and unusual perspectives for anyone who believes the economy is too important to be left solely to economists. Contributors AUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady and James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems