Download or read book Nabokov Rushdie and the Transnational Imagination written by R. Trousdale and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.
Download or read book Time Literature and Cartography After the Spatial Turn written by Adam Barrows and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature. Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces. Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.
Download or read book Salman Rushdie written by Robert Eaglestone and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most significant living novelist in English. His second novel, Midnight's Children, is regularly cited as the 'Booker of Bookers' and its impact is still being felt throughout in world literature. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to the 'Rushdie Affair' certainly the most significant literary-political event since the Second World War. Rushdie has continued to produce challenging fiction, controversial, thought-provoking non-fiction and has a presence on the world stage as a public intellectual. This collection brings together leading scholars to provide an up-to-date critical guide to Rushdie's writing from his earliest works up to the most recent, including his 2012 memoir of his time in hiding, Joseph Anton. Contributors offer new perspectives on key issues, including: Rushdie as a postcolonial writer; Rushdie as a postmodernist; his use and reuse of the canon; the 'Rushdie Affair'; his responses to 9/11 and to the 'War on Terror'; and issues of more complex philosophical weight arising from his fiction.
Download or read book Nabokov s Canon written by Marijeta Bozovic and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic's insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov's ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain. Nabokov's scholarly work, translations, and lectures on literature bear resemblance to New Critical canon reformations; however, Nabokov's canon is pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice. The new angles and theoretical framework offered by Nabokov's Canon help us to understand why Nabokov's provocative monuments remain powerful source texts for several generations of diverse international writers, as well as richly productive material for visual, cinematic, musical, and other artistic adaptations.
Download or read book Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy written by Vijay Mishra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is the first book to draw extensively from material in the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University to uncover the makings of the British-Indian writer's modernist poetics. Simultaneously connecting Rushdie with radical non-Western humanism and an essentially English-European sensibility, and therefore questions about world literature, this book argues that a true understanding of the writer lies in uncovering his 'genesis of secrecy' through a close reading of his archive. Topics and materials explored include unpublished novels, plays and screenplays; the earlier versions and drafts of Midnight's Children and its adaptations; understanding Islam and The Satanic Verses; the influence of cinema; and Rushdie's turn to earlier archives as the secret codes of modernism. Through careful examination of Rushdie's archive, Vijay Mishra demonstrates how Rushdie combines a radically new form of English with a familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. Together, these present a contradictory orientalism that defines Rushdie's own humanism within the parameters of world literature.
Download or read book Nabokov History and the Texture of Time written by Will Norman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.
Download or read book Space Place and Hybridity in the National Imagination written by Christine Vandamme and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores space, place and hybridity in today’s multicultural societies with a strong emphasis on the role of art and spatial representations, in order to map out the complexity of modern nations and celebrate the creative powers of their highly dynamic communities and cultures. It considers how the very idea of the nation has evolved since the emergence and development of the idea of the nation-state at the end of the eighteenth century, and how art can reinvigorate representations of nation-states worldwide without relegating their minorities to the margin. Instead of merely focusing on the role of place and land in national representations, the book adopts a wider and more critical approach to space in the arts by investigating the notions of both hybridity and Bhabha’s “Third Space” in the fields of aesthetics, film studies and literature, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial literature.
Download or read book Fictions of the War on Terror written by D. O'Gorman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that there are a number of contemporary novels that challenge the reductive 'us and them' binaries that have been prevalent not only in politics and the global media since 9/11, but also in many works within the emerging genre of '9/11 fiction' itself.
Download or read book Annotating Salman Rushdie written by Vijay Mishra and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one read a foundational postcolonial writer in English with declared Indian subcontinent roots? This book looks at ways of reading, and uncovering and recovering meanings, in postcolonial writing in English through the works of Salman Rushdie. It uses textual criticism and applied literary theory to resurrect the underlying literary architecture of one of the world’s most controversial, celebrated and enigmatic authors. It sheds light upon key aspects of Rushdie’s craft and the literary influences that contribute to his celebrated hybridity. It analyses how Rushdie uses his exceptional mastery of European, Anglo-American, Indian, Arabic and Persian literary and cultural forms to cultivate a fresh register of English that expands Western literary traditions. It also investigates an archival modernism that characterizes the writings of Rushdie. Drawing on the hitherto unexplored Rushdie Emory Archive, this book will be essential reading for students of literature, especially South Asian writing, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, linguistics and history.
Download or read book Contagious Imagination written by Jane Tolmie and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Frederick Luis Aldama, Melissa Burgess, Susan Kirtley, Rachel Luria, Ursula Murray Husted, Mark O’Connor, Allan Pero, Davida Pines, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Jane Tolmie, Rachel Trousdale, Elaine Claire Villacorta, and Glenn Willmott Lynda Barry (b. 1956) is best known for her distinctive style and unique voice, first popularized in her underground weekly comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Since then, she has published prolifically, including numerous comics, illustrated novels, and nonfiction books exploring the creative process. Barry’s work is genre- and form-bending, often using collage to create what she calls “word with drawing” vignettes. Her art, imaginative and self-reflective, allows her to discuss gender, race, relationships, memory, and her personal, everyday lived experience. It is through this experience that Barry examines the creative process and offers to readers ways to record and examine their own lives. The essays in Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, edited by Jane Tolmie, study the pedagogy of Barry’s work and its application academically and practically. Examining Barry’s career and work from the point of view of research-creation, Contagious Imagination applies Barry’s unique mixture of teaching, art, learning, and creativity to the very form of the volume, exploring Barry’s imaginative praxis and offering readers their own. With a foreword by Frederick Luis Aldama and an afterword by Glenn Willmott, this volume explores the impact of Barry’s work in and out of the classroom. Divided into four sections—Teaching and Learning, which focuses on critical pedagogy; Comics and Autobiography, which targets various practices of rememorying; Cruddy, a self-explanatory category that offers two extraordinary critical interventions into Barry criticism around a challenging text; and Research-Creation, which offers two creative, synthetic artistic pieces that embody and enact Barry’s own mixed academic and creative investments—this book offers numerous inroads into Barry’s idiosyncratic imagination and what it can teach us about ourselves.
Download or read book Nabokov and Indeterminacy written by Priscilla Meyer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Nabokov and Indeterminacy, Priscilla Meyer shows how Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illuminates his later work. Meyer first focuses on Sebastian Knight, exploring how Nabokov associates his characters with systems of subtextual references to Russian, British, and American literary and philosophical works. She then turns to Lolita and Pale Fire, applying these insights to show that these later novels clearly differentiate the characters through subtextual references, and that Sebastian Knight’s construction models that of Pale Fire. Meyer argues that the dialogue Nabokov constructs among subtexts explores his central concern: the continued existence of the spirit beyond bodily death. She suggests that because Nabokov’s art was a quest for an unattainable knowledge of the otherworldly, knowledge which can never be conclusive, Nabokov’s novels are never closed in plot, theme, or resolution—they take as their hidden theme the unfinalizability that Bakhtin says characterizes all novels. The conclusions of Nabokov's novels demand a rereading, and each rereading yields a different novel. The reader can never get back to the same beginning, never attain a conclusion, and instead becomes an adept of Nabokov’s quest. Meyer emphasizes that, unlike much postmodern fiction, the contradictions created by Nabokov’s multiple paths do not imply that existence is constructed arbitrarily of pre-existing fragments, but rather that these fragments lead to an ever-deepening approach to the unknowable.
Download or read book Russian Montparnasse written by Maria Rubins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reassesses the role of Russian Montparnasse writers in the articulation of transnational modernism generated by exile. Examining their production from a comparative perspective, it demonstrates that their response to urban modernity transcended the Russian master narrative and resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe.
Download or read book Troubling Late Modernism written by Doug Battersby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist writers developed new techniques for depicting characters' thoughts, feelings, and desires that revolutionized the novel form--a revolution novelists and critics are still reckoning with today. Troubling Late Modernism tracks how those techniques have been perversely reinvented by some of the most influential and innovative writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride reveal how these writers at once exploit and extend modernist forms of narration to cultivate disquieting affective attachments to protagonists compelled by violent or exploitative sexual desires. By interrogating the expressive power and ethical liabilities of modes of writing that give us intimate access to characters' inner lives, late modernism poses fundamental philosophical questions about emotion and its inseparability from knowledge and ethical deliberation. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterized late modernism's formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Charting late modernism's characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty with emotional and ethical provocation demands an approach attuned to the experience of reading these disturbingly erotic narratives. In dialogue with recent debates about critical method, Troubling Late Modernism presents a new way of closely reading prose fiction that brings together the lessons of formalism and affect theory.
Download or read book Romanian Literature as World Literature written by Mircea Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This “intersectional” revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or “Romanian literature in the plural.” Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.
Download or read book Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present written by Margaret Greaves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry and astronomy often travel together in the political sphere, from Milton's meeting with Galileo under house arrest to NASA's practice of launching poems into space. Anchored in the post-war period but drawing on a long history of poetry and science, Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present charts the surprising connection between poetry and extra-terrestrial space. In an era defined by the vast scales of globalization, environmental disaster, and space travel, poets bring the small scales of lyric intimacy to bear on cosmic immensity. While outer space might seem the domain of more popular genres, lyric poetry has ancient and enduring associations with cosmic inquiry that have made it central to post-war space culture. As the Cold War played out in space, American institutions and media - from NASA to Star Trek - enlisted poetry to present space exploration as a peaceful mission on behalf of humankind. Meanwhile, poets from across the globe have turned to the cosmos to contest American imperialism, challenging conventional ideas about lyric poetry in the process. Poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tracy K. Smith invoke the extra-terrestrial to interrogate national histories alongside their craft. Dazzled by the aesthetics of astronomy but wary of its imperial uses, poets employ astronomical figures and methods to imagine how we might care for both ourselves and others on a shared planet.
Download or read book Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English written by Peter I. Barta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term ‘bicultural’. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by ‘local’ people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose ‘native’ language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume's chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of comparative literature and cinema.
Download or read book H G Wells and All Things Russian written by Galya Diment and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.
