Download or read book Post45 Vs The World Literary Perspectives on the Global Contemporary written by William G. Welty and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the work done on the Post45 literary field carries an implicitly Americanist perspective. Even the name of the field suggests a certain literary history, with certain assumptions and blind spots about national spaces, identities, and histories. But what would Post45 look like when considered from outside of the United States? How do the current contours of the field exclude certain voices, either in the United States or elsewhere in the world? And how would such new perspectives shift the beginning and possible endpoint of that literary period? What new narratives of the contemporary emerge if we begin telling the story in a different year or from a different national or global perspective? This collection attempts to re-frame the discussions in Post45 by engaging with non-American writers, texts, and perspectives. Additionally, productive conversations emerge by attempting to think of canonical American writers like Mark Twain and Ishmael Reed from other national and global perspectives. The authors consider both the ways texts themselves as well as their reception histories approach and challenge our understandings of the contemporary. Ultimately, the collection interrogates prevailing narratives of history, culture, identity, and space within the Post45 field. In so doing, it re-considers the historical periodization of the field, which currently covers approximately 75 years of literary history. The resulting essays thus work towards a new intertwined narrative about what defines the contemporary and how national and global literatures fit into that moment of world history.
Download or read book Literature and the Global Contemporary written by Sarah Brouillette and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous ‘now’. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent ‘end of history’ with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline’s rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
Download or read book The Anthropocene Unconscious written by Mark Bould and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?
Download or read book Life in These United States written by Reader's Digest and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American spirit is alive and well in this collection of heartwarming, often hilarious anecdotes about life in big cities, small towns, and hidden hamlets from coast to coast. Selected from thousands of contributions submitted to Reader's Digest each year, these delightful glimpses of our national preoccupations, regional points of pride, and down-home wisdom capture the idiosyncracies, interests, and ideals of ordinary people. 200+ color illustrations.
Download or read book Globalization and Literary Studies written by Joel Evans and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a history of the way in which literature not only reflects, but actively shapes processes of globalization and our notions of global phenomena. It takes in a broad sweep of history, from antiquity, through to the era of imperialism and on to the present day. Whilst its primary focus is our own historical conjuncture, it looks at how earlier periods have shaped this by tracking key concepts that are imbricated with the concept of globalization, from translation, to empire, to pandemics and environmental collapse. Drawing on these older themes and concerns, it then traces the germ of the relation between global phenomena and literary studies into the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring key issues and frames of study such as contemporary slavery, the digital, world literature and the Anthropocene.
Download or read book The Postcolonial and the Global written by Revathi Krishnaswamy and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary work brings the humanities and social sciences into dialogue by examining issues such as globalized capital, discourses of antiterrorism, and identity politics. Essayists from the fields of postcolonial studies and globalization theory address the ethical and pragmatic ramifications of opposing interpretations of these issues and, for the first time, seek common ground. Contributors: Pal Ahluwalia, U of California, San Diego; Arjun Appadurai, New School U; Geoffrey Bowker, Santa Clara U; Timothy Brennan, U of Minnesota; Ruth Buchanan, U of British Columbia; Verity Burgmann, U of Melbourne; Pheng Cheah, U of California, Berkeley; Inderpal Grewal, U of California, Irvine; Ramon Grosfoguel, U of California, Berkeley; Barbara Harlow, U of Texas, Austin; Anouar Majid, U of New England; John McMurtry, U of Guelph; Walter D. Mignolo, Duke U; Sundhya Pahuja, U of Melbourne; R. Radhakrishnan, U of California, Irvine; Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State U; E. San Juan, Philippine Forum, New York; Saskia Sassen, U of Chicago; Ella Shohat, New York U; Leslie Sklair, London School of Economics; Robert Stam, New York U; Madina Tlostanova, Russian Peoples’ Friendship U; Harish Trivedi, U of Delhi. Revathi Krishnaswamy is associate professor of English at San Jose State University. John C. Hawley is professor and chair of English at Santa Clara University.
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 Global Anglophone Poetry written by Omaar Hena and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry's relevancy as a tool for social and political change continues to be overlooked in a global context. Looking to writers as diverse as Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and Daljit Nagra, Hena shows that poets throughout the world have reinvigorated older poetic traditions to address political realities and the sweeping pressures of modernity.
Download or read book The Embassy of Cambodia written by Zadie Smith and published by Penguin Books Limited. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare and brilliant story from Zadie Smith, taking us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions. 'It's scale is superficially small, but its range is lightly immense; in the first couple of pages, the world from Ghana to London to Cambodia enters. It is a fiction of consequences both global and heartrenchingly intimate. This voice is global, plural and local, with a delicate grip on historic consequences...... Works on an awesomely global scale, and the relations of slavery and mastership are traced in both personal and international scale.' Philip Hensher, The Guardian 'Reading it is a bit like having a starter in a restaurant that is so good you wish you had ordered a big portion as a main course, only to realise, as you finish it, that it was exactly the right amount.' 'A perfect stocking-filler of a book that shows that short-form fiction can be as vibrant and as healthy as any densely realised full-length novel.' Louise Doughty, The Observer 'Smith serves up a smasher.' Leyla Sanai, The Independent On Sunday
Download or read book Network Aesthetics written by Patrick Jagoda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “network” is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word’s ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network’s role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today’s world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.
Download or read book Ornamentalism written by Anne Anlin Cheng and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity. This book alters the foundational terms of racialized femininity by allowing us to conceptualize race and gender without being solely beholden to flesh or skin. Tracing a direct link between the making of Asiatic femininity and a technological history of synthetic personhood in the West from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Ornamentalism demonstrates how the construction of modern personhood in the multiple realms of law, culture, and art has been surprisingly indebted to this very marginal figure and places Asian femininity at the center of an entire epistemology of race. Drawing from and speaking to the multiple fields of feminism, critical race theory, visual culture, performance studies, legal studies, Modernism, Orientalism, Object Studies and New Materialism, Ornamentalism will leave reader with a greater understanding of what it is to exist as a "person-thing" within the contradictions of American culture.
Download or read book What Is World Literature written by David Damrosch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.
Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
Download or read book The World Republic of Letters written by Pascale Casanova and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.
Download or read book The Condition of Postmodernity written by David Harvey and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1992-04-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.
Download or read book Reading Capitalist Realism written by Leigh Claire La Berge and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power. Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness. Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”
Download or read book This Thing Called the World written by Debjani Ganguly and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In This Thing Called the World Debjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it. Ganguly contends that global literature coalesced into its current form in 1989, an event marked by the convergence of three major trends: the consolidation of the information age, the arrival of a perpetual state of global war, and the expanding focus on humanitarianism. Ganguly analyzes a trove of novels from authors including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Art Spiegelman, who address wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka, the Palestinian and Kashmiri crises, the Rwandan genocide, and post9/11 terrorism. These novels exist in a context in which suffering's presence in everyday life is mediated through digital images and where authors integrate visual forms into their storytelling. In showing how the evolution of the contemporary global novel is analogous to the European novel’s emergence in the eighteenth century, when society and the development of capitalism faced similar monumental ruptures, Ganguly provides both a theory of the contemporary moment and a reminder of the novel's power.
