Download or read book Literature Disaster and the Enigma of Power written by Eyal Peretz and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indeed, one might speak of a catastrophic turn in the realm of thinking and in the concepts and the problems that various theoretical discourses must face.".
Download or read book Chasing the White Whale written by David Dowling and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-11-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There have been a lot of crazy books about Melville and Moby-Dickiut this isn't one of them. Dowling's overarching analogy, between Ishmael's and Melville's obsessions and the annual marathon group-reading of Moby-Dick in New Bedford, makes perfect sense and generates illuminating analyses of the novel and its cultural contexts. It also lets him open his book up into a passionate exploration of how great literature can still play a vital role in people's lives today"-Damion Searls, editor, Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861 and Melville's; or The Whale --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Roman Disasters written by Jerry Toner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman Disasters looks at how the Romans coped with, thought about, and used disasters for their own ends. Rome has been famous throughout history for its great triumphs. Yet Rome also suffered colossal disasters. From the battle of Cannae, where fifty thousand men fell in a single day, to the destruction of Pompeii, to the first appearance of the bubonic plague, the Romans experienced large scale calamities.Earthquakes, fires, floods and famines also regularly afflicted them. This insightful book is the first to treat such disasters as a conceptual unity. It shows that vulnerability to disasters was affected by politics, social status, ideology and economics. Above all, it illustrates how the resilience of their political and cultural system allowed the Romans to survive the impact of these life-threatening events. The book also explores the important role disaster narratives played in Christian thought and rhetoric. Engaging and accessible, Roman Disasters will be enjoyed by students and general readers alike.
Download or read book Loneliness as a Way of Life written by Thomas Dumm and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.
Download or read book All the Devils Are Here written by David Greven and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2024-04-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English literary influence on classic American novelists’ depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All the Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne’s exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville’s evocation of “the step-mother world” of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors’ treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.
Download or read book Critical Companion to Herman Melville written by Carl Edmund Rollyson and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Companion to Herman Melville examines the life and work of a writer who spent much of his career in obscurity.
Download or read book Contingent Figure written by Michael D. Snediker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.
Download or read book Melville s Bibles written by Ilana Pardes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a splendid book, showing Ilana Pardes as a scholar-critic at the height of her powers. Distinguished and full of originality, Melville's Bibles brings into play a richly nuanced and minutely informed sense of the multiple roles of the Bible in antebellum American culture. This work is an important new understanding of the nature of Melville's major novel."—Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley "With a command of Biblical scholarship and a keen textual sensitivity, Pardes deftly analyzes the ways in which Melville incorporates Biblical language, genre, plot, character, and debate in Moby-Dick. Few critics have captured Melville's Biblical apprehensions and pretensions as well as Pardes or with her intellectual range and sympathy."—Samuel Otter, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley
Download or read book Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy written by Nicholas Monk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers a fresh approach to the work of Cormac McCarthy, one of the most important contemporary American authors. Essays focus on his work across the genres and/or in constellation with other writers and artists, presenting not only a different "angle" on the work, but setting him within a broader literary and artistic context. Such an approach offers a view of McCarthy that is strikingly different to previous collections that have dealt with the work in an almost exclusively "single author" and/or "single genre" mode. McCarthy’s novels are increasingly regarded as amongst the most rich, the most complex, and the most insightful of all recent literary responses to prevailing conditions in both the USA and beyond, and this collection recognizes the intertextual and interdisciplinary nature of his work. Contributors draw back the curtain on some of McCarthy’s literary ancestors, revealing and analyzing some of the fiction’s key contemporary intertexts, and showing a complex and previously underestimated hinterland of influence. In addition, they look beyond the novel both to other genres in McCarthy’s oeuvre, and to the way these genres have influenced McCarthy’s writing.
Download or read book The Fiction of America written by Susanne Hamscha and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fiction of America juxtaposes classic literature of the American Renaissance with twentieth-century popular culture--pairing, for instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Finding Nemo, Walt Whitman with Spiderman, and Hester Prynne with Madonna--to investigate how the "Americanness" of American culture constitutes itself in the interplay of the cultural imaginary and performance. Conceptualizing "America" as a transhistorical practice, Susanne Hamscha reveals disruptive, spectral moments in the narrative of "America," which confront American culture with its inherent inconsistencies.
Download or read book Blood written by Gil Anidjar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Epic written by Sneharika Roy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the ‘postcolonial epic’, ushered in by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’, where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life written by Ido Geiger and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well known that Hegel conceives of history as the gradual process of rational thought and of forms of political life. But he is usually thought to place himself at the end of this process. This book argues that an essential part of Hegel's historical-political thinking has escaped the notice of its interpreters.
Download or read book On Media Memory written by M. Neiger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Media Memory and brings Media and Mediation to the forefront of Collective Memory research. The essays explore a diversity of media technologies (television, radio, film and new media), genres (news, fiction, documentaries) and contexts (US, UK, Spain, Nigeria, Germany and the Middle East).
Download or read book J M Coetzee and Ethics written by Anton Leist and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-11 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection takes stock of J.M. Coetzee's impact from a number of interesting angles, Including animals, sexuality, race, and reason. The time is truly ripe for such a volume. Philosophers Who are interested Coetzee's work will find these essays useful for their own research, and readers of Coetzee who share an interest in philosophy will be able to further explore those interests."-Matthew Calarco, California State University at Fullerton, and author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Quiet Testimony written by Shari Goldberg and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-09-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James—open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude’s claim on the clamoring world. The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville’s characters could read the weather, and James’s could spend an evening with dead companions. By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.
Download or read book A Political Companion to Herman Melville written by Jason Frank and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing "strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition." This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work -- from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.
