Download or read book On Lightness in World Literature written by B. Scott and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the apparent ubiquity of light literature, and despite the greater cultural prestige it has been afforded in recent decades, very little has been written on the adjective that actually defines this category. What, precisely, does it signify, and what are some of the key strategies by which the effect of lightness is achieved within literary discourse? In this original and engaging study, Bede Scott explores the aesthetic quality of lightness as demonstrated by a diverse range of narratives – spanning four different centuries and five different countries. In each case, he focuses on a specific 'type' of lightness, whether it be the refined triviality of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, the ludic tendencies of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis' Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, or the 'exhilarating and primitive vitality' of Voltaire's Candide. By bringing together such disparate sources, Scott makes a strong case for the universality of this particular aesthetic value, while also subjecting its underlying structural features to close critical scrutiny.
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 World Light written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificently humane novel from the acclaimed Icelandic Nobel Prize winner: as an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness. As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this extraordinary novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf’s ambition drives him onward—and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women—World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.
Download or read book Metamorphoses written by Ovid and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available for the first time in an annotated edition, Rolfe Humphriess legendary translation captures the spirit of Ovid's swift and conversational language, bringing the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet to modern readers. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as youve never read them before--sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious.
Download or read book Distant Light written by Antonio Moresco and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle of the forest. But who really is this child? The answer at the secret heart of this novel is both uncanny and profoundly touching. Antonio Moresco's "Little Prince" is a moving meditation on life and the universe we inhabit. Moresco reflects on the solitude and pain of existence, but also on what we share with all around us, living and dead.
Download or read book Matches written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes any number of forms. Epigrams. Aphorisms. Fragments. Sayings. Dicta. Sententiae. Facetiae. Pearls of wisdom. Fractions of truth. Maxims. Definitions. Jottings. Miscellaneous musings. Meditations. Ricordi. Pensées. Ephemera. Miniatures. Sketches. Vignettes. Denkbilder. Capriccios. Tiny 'fires without flames' ... In returning to these genres, Matches goes back to the drawing board of modern critique. It sets out to rekindle short-form literary-philosophical reflection, with roots in the Antiquity of Heraclitus and Hippocrates, apogee in the French moralistes (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Chamfort ...), and late splendour in German letters (Nietzsche, Kraus, Jünger ...). Moving from art and aesthetics to philosophies past and present, through natural and technological landscapes, beneath the constellations of politics, history and ethics, along the byways of contemporary literary culture--the slow reader with a little spare time will not fail to be struck. Here are pages to peruse and mistrust, texts to think with, a book to put down and ponder, to ponder and put down. A tome to keep handy, handle often, and strike repeatedly against the rough patches of the mind.
Download or read book Against World Literature written by Emily Apter and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Download or read book Slowness written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." — Mirabella Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
Download or read book Flash and Gleam written by Sue Fliess and published by Millbrook Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The soft glow of a candle, the blink of a firefly, a burst of fireworks—light is everywhere in our world! Rhyming text and luminous illustrations follow four children as they experience many different forms of light. "[M]ultiple STEAM applications, from poetry and creative writing to introductions to energy and light to how the sun affects human life, and doubles as a great read-aloud or a starry bedtime story."—starred, Booklist
Download or read book Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Si cle written by Stefano Evangelista and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers' attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism--or world citizenship--informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.
Download or read book Difficult Light written by Tomas Gonzalez and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grappling with his son's death, the painter David explores his grief through art and writing, etching out the rippled landscape of his loss. Over twenty years after his son's death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter's eyes. From one of Colombia's greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.
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.
Download or read book The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature written by John Sturrock and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: opinion, the Guide offers a discriminating - and sometimes controversial - view of a broad range of contemporary literatures.
Download or read book The Other World s Books Depend on the Bean Counter Vol 1 light novel written by Yatsuki Wakatsu and published by Yen Press LLC. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A HANDSOME COMMANDER IS THE CURE! One day, twenty-nine-year-old accountant Seiichirou Kondou is accidentally transported to another world. As compensation, the Romany Kingdom promises to take care of all his living expenses, but the workaholic Seiichirou still asks for a job. Once he’s placed in the Royal Accounting Department, he starts whipping his lackadaisical colleagues into shape. But when he gets in over his head and nearly dies from overwork, the handsome Commander Aresh steps in to save him, and the two develop a unique physical relationship...as a form of medical treatment?!
Download or read book The Other World s Books Depend on the Bean Counter Vol 2 light novel written by Yatsuki Wakatsu and published by Yen Press LLC. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His heart and life are on the line! Seiichirou Kondou used to be a regular Japanese salaryman, but now he’s an accountant in another world! He is still a workaholic, but the handsome and doting Commander Aresh refuses to let him continue his unhealthy lifestyle. The young commander oversees everything from his diet to his working hours. Thanks to their special physical relationship, he also looks after Seiichirou in bed, tenderly wrapping him in protective magic and painstakingly filling the man’s body with magical energy. But make no mistake—this is not a honeymoon! Before Seiichirou can address Aresh’s deepening feelings, his caretaker leaves on a dangerous mission. And Seiichirou has his own harrowing assignment that involves an audit of the church—even if the profound levels of magic there make it a brush with death!
Download or read book World Literature Non Synchronism and the Politics of Time written by Filippo Menozzi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-06 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.
Download or read book Beyond Bola o written by Héctor Hoyos and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. Challenging the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, he identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. Hoyos shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modeling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual "Nazi" histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives, and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.
