Download or read book Herbarium verbarium written by Claudette Sartiliot and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As poetic symbols or scientific models, flowers have often been invoked to explain nature's harmonizing of expression, attraction, and reproduction. Words can lie, but flowers seem to speak plainly nature's own language. Flowers thrive as both botanical and literary phenomena in the works of Goethe, Rousseau, and Ruskin and serve as essential points of reference for Rilke, Proust, Genet, Ponge, Cixous, Derrida, and many others. This book explores the links between the flowers of nature and the flowers of metaphor. No longer rooted in a system of symbols, as they have been in many times and cultures, the flowers of modern literature are ambiguous and changeable. As examples of nature's finery and plenitude they justify not only finery and plentitude, but also questions and contradictions. They are flagrantly colorful or delicate and secretive. Yet throughout the Western traditional flowers have most frequently been considered feminine by male and female writers alike. It is this attachment that Sartiliot pursues to the end, questioning the place of flowers in Cixous's writings and in contemporary feminism.

Download or read book Flowers and Towers written by Nira Tessler and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the meaning and symbolism of the flower motif in the art of women artists, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It begins with a discussion of the symbolic significance of the flower in canonical texts such as the Song of Songs, in which the female lover is likened to a “lily among the thorns,” and to an “enclosed garden.” These allegorical images permeated into Christian iconography, attaining various expressions in the plastic arts from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries. The heart of the book is a discussion of the meaning of the change in representations of the flower, and at the same time the appearance of amazing images of “masculine” skyscrapers, in the works of avant-garde American women artists during the 1920s and 30s, in three hubs of Modernist art: New York, California, and Mexico. Tessler explains how modernist artists of various fields of art – such as Glaspell, Stettheimer, O’Keeffe, Pelton, Cunningham, Mather, Modotti and Kahlo – were aware of the religious symbolism of the flower in Judaism and Christianity, and turned it into an emblem of the new modern woman with her own views of the world. Flowers and Towers concludes by presenting the works of contemporary feminist American artists such as Chicago and Schapiro, who pay tribute to those same Modernist artists by creating a new and daring image of the flower and using “feminine” materials and techniques that link them, as it were, to their spiritual mothers.

Download or read book The Culture of Cursiler a written by Noël Valis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-16 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilería refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería, Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture. Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity. The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.

Download or read book Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism written by Bernhard Kuhn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of a rapidly fissuring disciplinary landscape where poetry and science are increasingly viewed as irreconcilable and unrelated, Bernhard Kuhn's study uncovers a previously ignored, fundamental connection between autobiography and the natural sciences. Examining the autobiographies and scientific writings of Rousseau, Goethe, and Thoreau as representative of their ages, Kuhn challenges the now entrenched thesis of the "two cultures." Rather, these three writers are exemplary in that their autobiographical and scientific writings may be read not as separate or even antithetical but as mutually constitutive projects that challenge the newly emerging boundaries between scientific and humanistic thought during the Romantic period. Reading each writer's life stories and nature works side by side-as they were written-Kuhn reveals the scientific character of autobiographical writing while demonstrating the autobiographical nature of natural science. He considers all three writers in the context of scientific developments in their own times as well as ours, showing how each one marks a distinctive stage in the growing estrangement of the arts and sciences, from the self-assured epistemic unity of Rousseau's time, to the splintering of disciplines into competing ways of knowing under the pressures of specialization and professionalization during the late Romantic age of Thoreau. His book thus traces an unfolding drama, in which these writers and their contemporaries, each situated in an intellectual landscape more fragmented than the last, seek to keep together what modern culture is determined to break apart.

Download or read book Budapest Diary written by Susan Rubin Suleiman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1993, after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for a six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest.

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 Organic Memory written by Laura Otis and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the past live in us? Do we inherit our ancestors' memories as we do their physical characteristics? In the nineteenth century, mainstream science embraced a long-standing superstition: the belief that memory could be inherited. Scientists reasoned that, just as bodies were reproduced from generation to generation, so were thoughts, memories, and cultural achievements. Heredity and identity were no mere family matter, but the basis of nations. The glories and sins of the past were not gone: they remained in the tissues of living people, who could be honored or blamed accordingly. Organic Memory surveys the literary and scientific history of an idea that will not go away. Focusing on the years between 1870 and 1918, Otis explores both the origins and the consequences of the idea that memories can be inherited. The organic memory theory contributed to the genocidal programs of the Third Reich, and it erupts in pop-psychology, racist propaganda, and ethnic cleansing. To track the spread, intensity, and endurance of this especially powerful idea, Otis singles out major authors whose work reinforced or ridiculed belief in organic memory. They include writers who were internationally influential yet who simultaneously represented their national traditions: Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Unamuno, P�o Baroja, Emilia Pardo Baz¾n, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The debates over the human genome project and the explosions of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, in Azerbaijan, Somalia, and elsewhere demonstrate how seriously organic memory continues to affect modern medicine and politics.

Download or read book In the Hollow of the Wave written by Bonnie Kime Scott and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, In the Hollow of the Wave looks at how Woolf treated "nature" as a deliberate discourse that shaped her way of thinking about the self and the environment and her strategies for challenging the imbalances of power in her own culture—all of which remain valuable in the framing of our discourse about nature today. Bonnie Kime Scott explores Woolf’s uses of nature, including her satire of scientific professionals and amateurs, her parodies of the imperial conquest of land, her representations of flora and fauna, her application of post-impressionist and modernist modes, her merging of characters with the environment, and her ventures across the species barrier. In shedding light on this discourse of Woolf and the natural world, Scott brings to our attention a critical, neglected, and contested aspect of modernism itself. She relies on feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial theory in the process, drawing also on the relatively recent field of animal studies. By focusing on multiple registers of Woolf’s uses of nature, the author paves the way for more extended research in modernist practices, natural history, garden and landscape studies, and lesbian/queer studies.

Download or read book Vladimir Jank l vitch and the Question of Forgiveness written by Alan Udoff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays focus on the work of Vladimir Jank l vitch as a moral philosopher, particularly that aspect of his work dealing with the question of forgiveness. They treat topics such as the place of moral philosophy in relation to his work as a whole, his relationship to contemporary French thought, and the backgrounds of classical Judaic tradition and world literature. The centerpiece of this tableau is Jank l vitch's book Le Pardon (Forgiveness). Chief among the distinguishing characteristics is its rigorous defense of what might be termed a forgiveness free of the entanglements that taint the common understanding of forgiveness--what Jank l vitch refers to as pseudo-forgiveness. The advocacy of forgiveness in the name of political or social expediency, as well as the psychological benefit for the victim, are similarly repudiated. In their place, Jank l vitch substitutes a radical forgiveness that is "initial, sudden, spontaneous"--not able to erase the past, but able to create a new future and, thereby, a new relationship to the past. He does not permit even this future, however, to serve as forgiveness's justification. For him, beyond all justifications, beyond justice itself, forgiveness is a gift akin to love.

Download or read book Pasquills Fastner written by Derek Pasquill and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A juxtaposition of diverse materials framing questions of theory, Islamicism, and Christianity

Download or read book Tiresian Poetics written by Ed Madden and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed andembodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has come to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualities." "This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian andmodernist writers reimagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or perfonnative power in figures of sexual difference - most often a feminized, often homosexual malebody, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Germany s Colonial Pasts written by Eric Ames and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany’s Colonial Pasts is a wide-ranging study of German colonialism and its legacies. Inspired by Susanne Zantop’s landmark book Colonial Fantasies, and extending her analyses there, this volume offers new research by scholars from Europe, Africa, and the United States. It also commemorates Zantop’s distinguished life and career (1945–2001). Some essays in this volume focus on Germany’s formal colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific between 1884 and 1914, while others present material from earlier or later periods such as German emigration before 1884 and colonial discourse in German-ruled Polish lands. Several essays examine Germany’s postcolonial era, a complex period that includes the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany with its renewed colonial obsessions, and the post-1945 era. Particular areas of emphasis include the relationship of anti-Semitism to colonial racism; respectability, sexuality, and cultural hierarchies in the formal empire; Nazi representations of colonialism; and contemporary perceptions of race. The volume’s disciplinary reach extends to musicology, religious studies, film, and tourism studies as well as literary analysis and history. These essays demonstrate why modern Germany must confront its colonial and postcolonial pasts, and how those pasts continue to shape the German cultural imagination.

Download or read book T S Eliot and the Mother written by Matthew Geary and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women. In a context of mother–son ambivalence (simultaneous feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother–child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional, repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/ mother–child relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ‘Marina’ (1930), ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) and The Family Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot’s life and writings and brings her individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore. Significantly, it establishes Charlotte’s death in 1929 as a decisive juncture, marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this proposition is Geary’s new formulation for recognising and examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S. Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother–son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than previously acknowledged.

Download or read book The Orphaned Imagination written by Guinn Batten and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the English Romantic poets generally portray them either as transcending the workings of capitalism or as working in complicity with an entrepreneurial economy. In The Orphaned Imagination, Guinn Batten challenges standard accounts of Romantic poetry and argues that Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge--each of whom suffered the loss of a father or father-figure at an early age--possessed an orphan's special insight into the dynamics and aesthetics of commodity culture and its symptomatic melancholia. Building on the theoretical insights of Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Batten interweaves the discourses of psychoanalysis, economics, biography, sexuality, melancholy, value, and exchange to question accepted ideas of how Romantic poetry works. She asserts that poetic labor is in fact paradigmatic of the kinds of production--and the kinds of desire--that capitalist culture renders invisible. If symbolic exchange, in cash or in words, requires the surrender of a beloved object, if healthy mourning requires an orphan to "work through" emotional loss through the consolation of art or a love for the living, then the rebellious Romantic poet, Batten contends, possessed unique insight into the alternative authority of a poetic language that renounced a culture of denial. Batten urges that scholars move beyond critical approaches condemning allegedly regressive forms of pleasure, recognizing that they, too, are haunted by melancholic attachments to dead poets as they conduct their work. The Orphaned Imagination will interest anyone concerned with the claims of the English Romantic poets to a distinctive, valuable form of knowledge and those who may wonder about the power of contemporary theory to illuminate a traditional field.

Download or read book The Event of the Thing written by Michael Marder and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Event of the Thing is the most complete examination to date of Derrida's understanding of thinghood and its crucial role in psychoanalysis, ethics, literary theory, aesthetics, and Marxism.

Download or read book Self Generation written by Helmut Müller-Sievers and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book begins by describing how and why epigenesis came to replace the reigning model of biological origination, preformation - the theory that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world. Contemporary with these developments, Kant used the figures of epigenesis and self-formation to illustrate his concepts of the origin of the categories, the possible success of practical reason, and the validity of aesthetic and teleological judgments. The author shows how Kant's figurative use of self-generation was turned into an indispensable determination by Fichte and his successors: philosophical knowledge can claim absolute certainty only if it can prove that it generates itself in logically accountable procedures.

Download or read book Desiring Voices written by Mary B. Moore and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moore (English, Marshall U.) analyzes and contextualizes the Petrarchan love sonnet sequences of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Close readings of the poems are accompanied by theory and criticism regarding constructs of women, historical events, and biographical material, illuminating the poets, Petrarchism as a convention, ideas about women, and the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects and objects. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR