Download or read book A Theory of Literary Production written by Pierre Macherey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey‘s first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to

Download or read book Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production written by Warren Montag and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey’s remarkable—and still provocative—early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume’s contributors interrogate Macherey’s work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature’s resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; “Reading Althusser,” in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser’s thought. Recent translations of Macherey’s work into English have introduced new readers to the critic’s enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.

Download or read book Constraining Chance written by Alison James and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines the representation and staging of chance in literature through the study of a specific case - the work of the 20th-century French writer Georges Perec (1936-82).

Download or read book Hegel Or Spinoza written by Pierre Macherey and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language translation of a classic work of French philosophy

Download or read book Literature and Human Equality written by Stewart Justman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-14 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stewart Justman presents Western literature from Shakespeare, Dickens, and others, to show how they changed the appearance of literature with new ways of constructing a tale.

Download or read book Opposing Poetries Readings written by Hank Lazer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains to structural engineers some of the basic equations for analyzing and designing buildings that were devised at the end of the 19th century but were so unmanageably complex to solve that they were displaced by approximation techniques until the recent advent of electronic computer. Heyman (engineering, U. of Cambridge) warns that some of the equations turn out not to fit reality as close as future occupants of buildings might prefer, and explains how to use them and in what context. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Eugene Jolas written by Eugène Jolas and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dividing his youth between the United States and the bilingual Alsace-Lorraine, Eugene Jolas (1894-1952) flourished in three languages. As an editor and poet, he came to know the major writers and artists of his time and enjoyed a pivotal position between the Anglo-American and Continental avant-garde. His editorship of transition, the leading avant-garde journal of Paris in the twenties and early thirties, provided a major impetus to writers from James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake was serialized in transition) to Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett, with first translations of André Breton, and Franz Kafka, among others. Jolas's critical work, collected in this volume, includes introductions to anthologies, manifestoes like the famous Vertical, essays, some published here for the first time, on writers as various as Novalis, Trakl, the major Surrealists, Heidegger, and other philosophers. An acute observer of the literary scene as well as of the roiling politics of the time, Jolas emerges here in his role at the very center of avant-garde activity between the wars. Accordingly, this book is of signal importance to anyone with an interest in modernism, avant-garde, multilingualism, and the culture of Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Postmodern Pooh written by Frederick Crews and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: North Point Press, 2001.

Download or read book Womb Fantasies written by Caroline Rupprecht and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Womb Fantasies examines the womb, an invisible and mysterious space invested with allegorical significance, as a metaphorical space in postwar cinematic and literary texts grappling with the trauma of post-holocaust, postmodern existence. In addition, it examines the representation of visible spaces in the texts in terms of their attribution with womb-like qualities. The framing of the study historically within the postwar era begins with a discussion of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair in the context of the Cold War’s need for safety in light of the threat of nuclear destruction, and ranges over films such as Marguerite Duras’ and Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour and Duras’ novel The Vice-Consul, exploring the ways that such cultural texts fantasize the womb as a response to trauma, defined as the compulsive need to return to the site of loss, a place envisioned as both a secure space and a prison. The womb fantasy is linked to the desire to recreate an identity that is new and original but ahistorical.

Download or read book Dear Friend written by Eric Torgersen and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2000-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his "Requiem for a Friend" in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the German painter who had had a profound effect on him, both personally and artistically, and who had died a year earlier. Modersohn-Becker, despite being one of the great modern painters, is today remembered primarily as she is portrayed in that poem. In Dear Friend, Eric Torgersen looks at the relationship of these two great artists whose vexed seven-year friendship was extraordinarily productive for both, and offers an introduction to the life and work of Modersohn-Becker, a gifted and determined woman whose work stands comparison with that of any painter of her day." "Included in the book are sixteen illustrations as well as new translations by Torgersen of Rilke's "Requiem for a Friend" and of the love poems Rilke wrote for Becker shortly after they met. Torgersen discusses Modersohn-Becker's vital paintings, including her unfinished portrait of Rilke. He quotes extensively from the letters and journals of both figures, translating many of Rilke's into English for the first time. Finally, Torgersen addresses the unanswered question of whether the two were ever lovers, and offers new insights into Rilke's writing of "Requiem for a Friend.""--Jacket.

Download or read book The Sublime Artist s Studio written by Gavriel Shapiro and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relation of the visual arts to Vladimir Nabokov's work is the subject of this in-depth and detailed study of one of the most significant facets of this modern master's oeuvre.

Download or read book Being and God written by Lorenz B. Puntel and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main thesis of this book is that it is philosophically reasonable, intelligible, and appropriate to raise questions about God, and to provide answers to those questions that are rational only within the framework of a conception of reality or being as a whole.

Download or read book The Man in the Moone written by Francis Godwin and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2009-08-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. The novel, which tells the story of Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard who flies to the moon by geese power and encounters an advanced lunar civilization, had an enormous impact on the European imagination for centuries after its initial publication. With its discussion of advanced ideas about astronomy and cosmology, the novel is an important example of both popular fiction and scientific speculation. This Broadview Edition includes a critical introduction that places the text in its scientific and historical contexts. The rich selection of appendices includes related writings by Godwin and his predecessors and contemporaries on magnetism, human flight, voyages to real and unreal lands, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

Download or read book The Object of the Atlantic written by Rachel Price and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Object of the Atlantic is a wide-ranging study of the transition from a concern with sovereignty to a concern with things in Iberian Atlantic literature and art produced between 1868 and 1968. Rachel Price uncovers the surprising ways that concrete aesthetics from Cuba, Brazil, and Spain drew not only on global forms of constructivism but also on a history of empire, slavery, and media technologies from the Atlantic world. Analyzing Jose Marti’s notebooks, Joaquim de Sousandrade’s poetry, Ramiro de Maeztu’s essays on things and on slavery, 1920s Cuban literature on economic restructuring, Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the “non-object,” and neoconcrete art, Price shows that the turn to objects—and from these to new media networks—was rooted in the very philosophies of history that helped form the Atlantic world itself.

Download or read book The Universal Jew written by Mikhal Dekel and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

Download or read book Techne Theory written by Henry Staten and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only since the Romantic period has art been understood in terms of an ineffable aesthetic quality of things like poems, paintings, and sculptures, and the art-maker as endowed with an inexplicable power of creation. From the Greeks to the 18th century, art was conceived as techne--the skill and know-how by which things and states of affairs are ordered. Techne Theory shows how to use this concept to cut through the Romantic notion of art as a kind of magic by returning to the original sense of art as techne, the standpoint of the person who actually knows how to make a work of art. Understood as techne, art-making, like all other cultural accomplishments, is a form of work performed by an artisan who has inherited the know-how of previous generations of artisans. Along the way, Techne Theory cuts through the humanist-structuralist impasse over the question of artistic agency and explains what 'form' really means.

Download or read book The Object of Literature written by Pierre Macherey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1995 book by Pierre Macherey was his first dealing with literature and theory since his seminal A Theory of Literary Production. Continuing the project of Althusserian theory, Macherey engages in a series of close exegeses of classical texts in French literature and philosophy, from the late eighteenth century down to the 1970s, that explore the historically variable but thematically similar ways in which literary texts represent philosophical ideas. Rejecting the simple notion that literature deploys philosophical topoi in an unmediated manner, Macherey shows the conceptual sophistication - and broad intellectual influence - that literary art has displayed in the modern period. At once a theoretical meditation of great originality and a historical work of scrupulous scholarship, The Object of Literature will entrench Pierre Macherey's already considerable reputation as one of the most significant contemporary theoreticians of literature.