Download or read book Gombrowicz Polish Modernism and the Subversion of Form written by Michael Goddard and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form provides a new and comprehensive account of the writing and thought of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. While Gombrowicz is probably the key Polish modernist writer, with a stature in his native Poland equivalent to that of Joyce or Beckett in the English language, he remains little known in English. As well as providing a commentary on his novels, plays, and short stories, this book sets Gombrowicz's writing in the context of contemporary cultural theory. The author performs a detailed examination of Gombrowicz's major literary and theatrical work, showing how his conception of form is highly resonant with contemporary, postmodern theories of identity. This book is the essential companion to one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures whose work, banned by the Nazis and suppressed by Poland's Communist government, has only recently become well known in the West.
Download or read book Form and Instability written by Anita Starosta and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, and Post-Imperial Difference busies itself with the work of accounting for this discrepancy between ostensible historical change and the persistence of anachronistic ways of thinking, a discrepancy that remains unaddressed and eludes attention; and it goes on to propose that literature—not simply as an archive of representations or a source of cultural capital but as a critical perspective in its own right—offers a way to apprehend and to redress this problem.Historical situations such as the post-1989 transitions to capitalism and liberal democracy, as well as the “Eastern” enlargement of the E.U., not only entail empirical change; they also call for and provoke intense renegotiations of cultural values and analytical concepts. Through rhetoric, reading, and translation—terms central to this book—literature will be seen to expedite and redirect such re-arrangements. It will be shown to destabilize discursively fixed categories without imposing, in turn, its own fixity. Located at the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study has a twofold commitment: to Eastern Europe on the one hand and to literature on the other. It aims to intervene in the way we conceive of Eastern Europe by seeking to develop a more equitable way of thinking, one that avoids subordinating it to Eurocentric narratives of progress. At the same time, it marshals literature as both object and method of this rethinking, in order to extend existing conceptions of the usefulness and of the proper organization of literary studies. The three terms in the title of this book mark a passage—via literature—from “Eastern Europe” as an inadequate and obsolescent category to “post-imperial difference” as a more accurate, if provisional, account of the region. By way of original readings of particular texts, and by attending to literature as a critical
Download or read book Anti Portraits Poetics of the Face in Modern English Polish and Russian Literature 1835 1965 written by Kamila Pawlikowska and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-Portraits: Poetics of the Face in Modern English, Polish and Russian Literature (1835-1965) is a study of a-physiognomic descriptions of the face. It demonstrates that writers such as George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolay Gogol, Virginia Woolf and Witold Gombrowicz vigorously resisted the belief that facial features reflect character. While other studies tend to focus on descriptions which affirm physiognomy, this book examines portraits which question popular face-reading systems and contravene their common premise – the surface-depth principle. Such portraits reveal that physiognomic formula is a cultural construct, invented to abridge, organise and regulate legibility of the human face. Most importantly, strange and ‘unreadable’ fictional faces frequently expose the connection between physiognomic judgement and stereotyping, prejudice and racism.
Download or read book Strategic Occidentalism written by Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.
Download or read book Gombrowicz in Transnational Context written by Silvia Dapia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was born and lived in Poland for the first half of his life but spent twenty-four years as an émigré in Argentina before returning to Europe to live in West Berlin and finally Vence, France. His works have always been of interest to those studying Polish or Argentinean or Latin American literature, but in recent years the trend toward a transnational perspective in scholarship has brought his work to increasing prominence. Indeed, the complicated web of transnational contact zones where Polish, Argentinean, French and German cultures intersect to influence his work is now seen as the appropriate lens through which his creativity ought to be examined. This volume contributes to the transnational interpretation of Gombrowicz by bringing together a distinguished group of North American, Latin American, and European scholars to offer new analyses in three distinct themes of study that have not as yet been greatly explored — Translation, Affect and Politics. How does one translate not only Gombrowicz’s words into various languages, but the often cultural-laden meaning and the particular style and tone of his writing? What is it that passes between author and reader that causes an affect? How did Gombrowicz’s negotiation of the turbulent political worlds of Poland and Argentina shape his writing? The three divisions of this collection address these questions from multiple perspectives, thereby adding significantly to little known aspects of his work.
Download or read book Silence and Subject in Modern Literature written by U. Olsson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does interrogation silence its object and not make it speak? Silence vs speech is a central issue in classical and modern literary works. This book studies literary representations of the power relations in which we are forced to speak using a range of texts ranging from the modern crime novel, via classics, to avant-garde plays.
Download or read book Lost and Found Voices written by Luc Beaudoin and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One writer is stranded by the Second World War. Another flees multiple revolutions to live the rest of his life in Rio de Janeiro. Two others, public about their sexuality at home, choose self-exile. In Lost and Found Voices Luc Beaudoin offers a critical engagement with these four displaced authors: Witold Gombrowicz, Valerii Pereleshin, Abdellah Taïa, and Slava Mogutin. Not quite fitting into their respective diasporas and sharing an urge to express their queer desires, it is in their published works of literature, film, and photography that these writers locate their shifting identities and emergent queer voices. Their artistry is the basis from which Beaudoin traces their expressions of desire in language, culture, and community, offering a contextual queer reading that navigates their linguistic, cultural, artistic, and sexual self-translations and self-portrayals. Their choices are determinative: Gombrowicz masked his attraction to men in his works, keeping the truth hidden in an intimate diary; Pereleshin explored his lust in Brazilian Portuguese after being shunned by the Russian diaspora; Taïa writes in French to destabilize both the language and his status as an immigrant in France; Mogutin becomes a hardcore gay rebel in word and image to rattle assumptions about gay life. Bringing authors generally not familiar to an English-speaking readership into one volume, and including Beaudoin's own experience of living between languages, Lost and Found Voices provides provocative insights into what it means to be gay in both the past and the present.
Download or read book Transformative Fictions written by Daniel Just and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change engages with current debates in world literature over the past twenty years, addressing the nature of literary influence in centers and peripheries, the formation of transnational literary and pedagogical canons, and the role of translation and regionalism in how we relate to texts from around the globe. The author, Daniel Just, argues for a supranational but sub-global perspective of regions that emphasizes practical reasons for reading and focuses on the potential of literary texts to stimulate personal transformation in readers. One of the recurring dilemmas in these debates is the issue of delimitation of world literature. The trouble with the world as a frame of reference is that no single researcher is bound to have the in-depth knowledge and linguistic skills to discuss works from all countries. In response, this book revives literary theory and recasts it for the purposes of world literature, by making a case for the continuing relevance of literature in the age of new media. With the examples of fictional and nonfictional writings by Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal, Just shows that regional literatures offer differing methods of activating readers and thereby prompting personal change. This book would be of general interest to anyone who wants to explore personal change through literature but is particularly indispensable for literary professionals, researchers, and postgraduate and graduate students.
Download or read book Slapstick Modernism written by William Solomon and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.
Download or read book The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature written by Tomasz Bilczewski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature offers an introduction to Polish literature through thirty-three case studies, covering works from the Middle Ages up to the present day. Each chapter draws on a text or body of work, examining its historical context, as well as its international reception and position within world literature. The book presents a dual perspective on Polish literature, combining original readings of key texts with discussions of their two-way connections with other literatures across the globe. With a detailed introduction offering a narrative overview, the book is divided into six sections offering a chronological pathway through the material. Contributors from around the world examine the various cultural exchanges at play, with each chapter including: Definitions of key terms and brief overviews of historical and political events, literary eras, trends, movements, groups, and institutions for those new to the area Analysis and notes on translations, including their hidden dimensions and potential Textual focus on poetics, such as strategies of composition, style, and genre A range of historical, sociological, political, and economic contexts From medieval song through to the contemporary novel, this book offers an interpretive history of Polish literature, while also positioning its significance within world literature. The detailed introductions make it accessible to beginners in the area, while the original analysis and focused case studies will also be of interest to researchers.
Download or read book Estranging the Novel written by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author's comparative approach to studying literary form makes a forceful case for a more geographically and formally expansive vision of the novel"--
Download or read book Kundera and Modernity written by Liisa Steinby and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a large amount of scholarship about Milan Kundera's work exists, in Liisa Steinby's opinion his work has not been studied within the context of (European) modernity as a sociohistorical and a cultural concept. Of course, he is considered to be a modernist writer (some call him even a postmodernist), but what the broader concept of modernity intellectually, historically, socially, and culturally means for him and how this is expressed in his texts has not been thoroughly examined. Steinby's book fills this vacuum by analyzing Kundera's novels from the viewpoint of his understanding of the existential problems in the culture of modernity. In addition, his relation to those modernist novelists from the first half of the twentieth century who are most important for him is scrutinized in detail. Steinby's Kundera and Modernity is intended for students of modernism in literary and (comparative) cultural studies, as well as those interested in European and Central European studies.
Download or read book Asian Diaspora and East West Modernity written by Sheng-mei Ma and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity, Sheng-mei Ma analyzes Asian, Asian diaspora, and Orientalist discourse and probes into the conjoinedness of West and East and modernity's illusions. Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature, as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema, the internet, and the Korean Wave, Ma's analyses render fluid the two hemispheres of the globe, the twin states of being and nonbeing, and things of value and nonentity. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intution, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism.
Download or read book Why Internet Porn Matters written by Margret Grebowicz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."
Download or read book Text and Image in Modern European Culture written by Natasha Grigorian and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and image relations under the impact of modern technologies (avant-garde experiments, digital poetry). The discussion encompasses pivotal fin de siècle, modernist, and postmodernist works and movements in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. A selected bibliography of work published in the field is also included. The volume will appeal to scholars of comparative literature, art history, and visual studies, and it includes contributions appropriate for supplementary reading in senior undergraduate and graduate seminars.
Download or read book Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility written by Arianna Dagnino and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists' increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers-Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow-and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematic critical, and stylistic aspects. By studying the selected authors' corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. "The work is a significant contribution to scholorship, for it increases our theoretical awareness of today's literary developments, providing us with critical tools that enable us to approach literary texts with an innovative perspective."-Maurizio Ascari, Universita di Bologna.
Download or read book Women s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth Century China written by Li Guo and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women’s tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of “woman-oriented perspective” and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men’s equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women’s potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.
