Download or read book On the Horizon of World Literature written by Emily Sun and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Download or read book Literature Life and Modernity written by Richard Eldridge and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simple entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects in relation to complex economies and technological systems. By imagining themselves in the role of the protagonist or the authorial persona, readers become immersed in structures of sustained attention, under which concrete possibilities of meaningful life, along with difficulties that block their realization, are tracked and clarified. Literary form, Eldridge argues, generates structures of care, reflection, and investment within readers, shaping if not stabilizing their interactions with everyday objects and events. Through the experience of literary forms of attention, readers may come to think and live more actively, more fully engaging with modern life, rather than passively suffering it. Eldridge considers the thought of Descartes, Kant, Adorno, Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor in his discussion of Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Stoppard, and Sebald, advancing a philosophy of literature that addresses our desire to read and the meaning and satisfaction that literary attention brings to our fragmented modern lives.

Download or read book Literary Imagination Ancient and Modern written by Todd Breyfogle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translations of the Greek tragedies and Herodotus's History, as well as his edition of Hobbes's Thucydides, David Grene has also had a major impact as a teacher and interpreter of texts both ancient and modern. In this book, distinguished colleagues and former students explore the imaginative force of literature and history in articulating and illuminating the human condition. Ranging as widely as Grene's own interests in Greek and Roman antiquity, in drama, poetry, and the novel, in the art of translation, and in English history, these essays include discussions of the Odyssey and Ulysses, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, Mallarmé's English and T. S. Eliot's religion, and the mutually antipathetic minds of Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. The introduction by Todd Breyfogle sketches for the first time the contours of Grene's own thought. Classicists, political theorists, intellectual historians, philosophers, and students of literature will all find much of value in the individual essays here and in the juxtaposition of their themes. Contributors: Saul Bellow, Seth Benardete, Todd Breyfogle, Amirthanayagam P. David, Wendy Doniger, Mary Douglas, Joseph N. Frank, Victor Gourevitch, Nicholas Grene, W. R. Johnson, Brendan Kennelly, Edwin McClellan, Françoise Meltzer, Stephanie Nelson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Ostwald, Robert B. Pippin, James Redfield, Sandra F. Siegel, Norma Thompson, and David Tracy

Download or read book Mediating Modernity written by Stefanie Harris and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An interdisciplinary examination of the responses of literary authors in Germany, from 1895-1930, to the emerging media of image and sound recording"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Modern Minority written by Yoon Sun Lee and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with everyday life.

Download or read book Islam Modernity Violence and Everyday Life written by A. Ahmad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a better insight into the comparison of Western and Islamic cultures, with studies that address the issues of Islam and modernity, violence in Islamic law and history, and respect for individuals' privacy in Islamic cultures.

Download or read book Multispecies Modernity written by Sundhya Walther and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature considers relationships between animals and humans in the iconic spaces of postcolonial India: the wild, the body, the home, and the city. Navigating fiction, journalism, life writing, film, and visual art, this book argues that a uniquely Indian way of being modern is born in these spaces of disorderly multispecies living. The zones of proximity traversed in Multispecies Modernity link animal-human relations to a politics of postcolonial identity by transgressing the logics of modernity imposed on the postcolonial nation. Disorderly multispecies living is a resistance to the hygiene of modernity and a powerful alliance between human and nonhuman subalterns. In bringing an animal studies perspective to postcolonial writing and art, this book proposes an ethics of representation and an ethics of reading that have wider implications for the study of relationships between human and nonhuman animals in literature and in life.

Download or read book Modern Literature and the Tragic written by K. M. Newton and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy', Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian' commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the second world war with the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.

Download or read book The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature written by Allan Kilner-Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probing the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several key strands of occult practice which emerged in Europe from roughly 1894 to 1944, this book sets the work of leading modernist writers alongside lesser known female writers and writers in languages other than English to more fully portray the aesthetic and philosophical connections between modernism and the occult. Although the early decades of the twentieth century-the era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and war-are often described as a period of newness and innovation, many writers of the time found inspiration and visionary brilliance by turning to the mysterious occult past. This book's principle intervention is to reimagine the contours and boundaries of literary modernism by welcoming into the conversation a number of significant female writers and writers in languages other than English who are often still relegated to the fringes of modernist studies. Well-remembered poets and novelists such as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley were tied to occult beliefs, and this book sets these leading figures alongside less well-remembered but equally splendid modernists including Paul Brunton, Mary Butts, Alexandra David-Neel, Florence Farr, Dion Fortune, Hermann Hesse, and Rudolf Steiner. From the little magazines where occultism and Fabianism were comfortable companions, to consulting rooms of psychoanalysts where archetypes were revealed to be both mystical and mundane, to the forbidden mountain trails that led to formidable spiritual teachers, the conditions of modernism were invariably those conditions which inspired a return to the occult traditions that many thinkers believed had long evaporated. Indeed, in many ways these traditions were the making of the modern world. By uncovering hidden hopes and anxieties that faced a newly modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how literary modernists understood occultism as a universal form of cultural expression which has inspired creative exuberance since the dawn of civilisation.

Download or read book The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature written by Victoria Bladen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature explores the vital motif of the tree of life and what it meant to early modern writers who drew from its long histories in biblical, classical and folkloric contexts, giving rise to a language of trees, an arboreal aesthetics. An ancient symbol of immortality, the tree of life was appropriated by Christian ideology and iconography to express ideas about Christ; however, the concept also migrated beyond religious doctrine. Ideas circulating around the tree of life enabled writers to imagine and articulate ideas of death and rebirth, loss and regeneration, the condition of the political state and personal states of the soul through arboreal metaphors and imagery. The motif could be used to sacralise landscapes, such as the garden, orchard or country estate, blurring the lines between contemporary green spaces and the spiritual and poetic imaginary. Located within the field of environmental humanities, and intersecting with ecocriticism and critical plant studies, this volume outlines a comprehensive history of the tree of life and offers interdisciplinary readings of focus texts by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell and Ralph Austen. It includes consideration of related ideas and motifs, such as the tree of Jesse and the Green Man, illuminating the rich histories and meanings that emerge when an understanding of the tree of life and arboreal aesthetics are brought to the analysis of early modern literary texts and their representations of green spaces, both physical and metaphysical.

Download or read book Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics written by Sheldon H. Lu and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy written by Aidan Tynan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Download or read book Wasted Lives written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

Download or read book Modernity and Bourgeois Life written by Jerrold Seigel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be modern? In the nineteenth century a consensus emerged that Western Europe was giving birth to a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values played a key role. Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity.

Download or read book Culture and Modern Life written by David Ricky Matsumoto and published by Cengage Learning. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matsumoto's book is designed to help students appreciate how cultural factors moderate psychological processes and how the viewpoint of one's own culture can distort one's interpretation of the behavior of people from other cultures. At the same time, the book stresses thata behavioral phenomena are characterized by both cross-cultural similarities and differences. Students will thoroughly examine the cultural similarities and differences in psychology, communicaation, work, health, and more. Culture and Modern Life parallels Weiten and Lloyd's PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO MODERN LIFE and is available to students in a discount bundle.

Download or read book Modernity and Self Identity written by Anthony Giddens and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

Download or read book World Literature and Hedayat s Poetics of Modernity written by Omid Azadibougar and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces the canonical figure Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951) and draws a comprehensive image of a major intellectual force in the context of both modern Persian Literature and World Literature. A prolific writer known for his magnum opus, The Blind Owl (1936), Hedayat established the use of common language for literary purposes, opened new horizons on imaginative literature and explored a variety of genres in his creative career. This book looks beyond the reductive critical tendencies that read a rich and diverse literary profile in light of Hedayat’s suicide, arguing instead that his literary imagination was not solely the result of genius but rather enriched by a vast network of the world’s literary traditions. This study reflects on Hedayat’s attempts at various genres of artistic creation, including painting, fiction writing, satire and scholarly research, as well as his persistent struggles for artistic authenticity, which transcended solidly established literary and artistic norms. Providing a critical reading of Hedayat’s work to untangle aspects of his writing – including reflections on science, religion, nationalism and coloniality – alongside his pioneering work on folk culture, and how humor informs his writings, this text offers a critical review of the status of Persian literature in the contemporary landscape of the world’s literary studies.