Download or read book Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry written by Bryan Walpert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist arguments (inherited from Eliot and Pound, arguments influenced in part by relativity and quantum theory), and postmodernist arguments (arguments informed by post-structuralist theory, e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, with affinities to arguments for the limitations of science in the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science). Some of these poems reveal the discursive ideologies of scientific language—reveal, in other words, the performativity of scientific language. In doing so, these poems themselves can also be read as performative acts and, therefore, as forms of intervention rather than representation. Reading Retallack alongside science studies scholar Karen Barad, the book concludes by proposing that viewing knowledge as a form of intervention, rather than representation, offers a bridge between contemporary poetry and science.

Download or read book Humor Empathy and Community in Twentieth Century American Poetry written by Rachel Trousdale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies—whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Download or read book Trauma in Contemporary Literature written by Marita Nadal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma in Contemporary Literature analyzes contemporary narrative texts in English in the light of trauma theory, including essays by scholars of different countries who approach trauma from a variety of perspectives. The book analyzes and applies the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in trauma theory, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, absence vs. loss, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, nachträglichkeit, transgenerational trauma, the process of acting out and working through, introjection and incorporation, mourning and melancholia, the phantom and the crypt, postmemory and multidirectional memory, shame and the affects, and the power of resilience to overcome trauma. Significantly, the essays not only focus on the phenomenon of trauma and its diverse manifestations but, above all, consider the elements that challenge the aporias of trauma, the traps of stasis and repetition, in order to reach beyond the confines of the traumatic condition and explore the possibilities of survival, healing and recovery.

Download or read book Contemporary Trauma Narratives written by Jean-Michel Ganteau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

Download or read book Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture written by Monica Germana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world’s globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex – and, frequently, paradoxical – paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

Download or read book Class and the Making of American Literature written by Andrew Lawson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

Download or read book American Studies Ecocriticism and Citizenship written by Joni Adamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reclaims public intellectuals and scholars important to the foundational work in American Studies that contributed to emerging conceptions of an "ecological citizenship" advocating something other than nationalism or an "exclusionary ethics of place." Co-editors Adamson and Ruffin recover underrecognized field genealogies in American Studies (i.e. the work of early scholars whose scope was transnational and whose activism focused on race, class and gender) and ecocriticism (i.e. the work of movement leaders, activists and scholars concerned with environmental justice whose work predates the 1990s advent of the field). They stress the necessity of a confluence of intellectual traditions, or "interdisciplinarities," in meeting the challenges presented by the "anthropocene," a new era in which human beings have the power to radically endanger the planet or support new approaches to transnational, national and ecological citizenship. Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common—namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground—and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups—ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional—that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision. Read together, the essays included in American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship create a "methodological commons" where environmental justice case studies and interviews with activists and artists living in places as diverse as the U.S., Canada, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Taiwan and the Navajo Nation, can be considered alongside literary and social science analysis that contributes significantly to current debates catalyzed by nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, hurricanes, and climate change, but also by hopes for a common future that will ensure the rights of all beings--human and nonhuman-- to exist, maintain, and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes

Download or read book Poetry and Mindfulness written by Bryan Walpert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the Humanities are under threat, this book offers a defense of poetry within the context of growing interest in mindfulness in business, health care, and education. The book argues that the benefits and insights mindfulness provides are also cultivated by the study of poetry. These benefits include a focus on the present, the ability to see through scripts and habits, a rethinking of subjectivity, and the development of ecological or systems thinking. Bryan Walpert employs close readings of traditional and experimental poetry and draws on scientific studies of the effects of mindfulness or reading literature on the brain. It argues the skills that poetry, like mindfulness, cultivates are useful beyond the page or classroom and ultimately are necessary to engage with such global issues as the environmental crisis.

Download or read book Feminist Theory Across Disciplines written by Shira Wolosky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defying traditional definitions of public and private as gendered terms, and broadening discussion of women’s writing in relation to feminist work done in other fields, this study addresses American women’s poetry from the seventeenth to late-twentieth century. Engaging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, history, political theory, religious culture, cultural studies, and poetics, this study provides entry into some of the founding feminist discussions across disciplines, moving beyond current scholarship to pursue an interpretation of feminism’s defining interests and assumptions in the context of women’s writing. The author emphasizes and explores how women’s writing expresses their active participation in community and civic life, emerging from and shaping a woman’s selfhood as constituted through relationships, not only on the personal level, but as forming community commitments. This distinctive formation of the self finds expression in women’s voices and other poetic forms of expression, with the aesthetic power of poetry itself bringing different arenas of human experience to bear on each other in mutual interrogation and reflection. Women poets have addressed the public world, directly or through a variety of poetic structures and figures, and in doing so they have defined and expressed specific forms of selfhood engaged in and committed to communal life.

Download or read book Modern Orthodoxies written by Lisa Mulman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study introduces a genuine, provocative religious vocabulary into the discourse on Modernist art and literature. Mulman looks at key texts and figures of the Modern period, including Henry Roth, Amedeo Modigliani, James Joyce, and Art Spiegelman, revealing a significant engagement with the rituals of Jewish observance and the structure of Talmudic interpretation. While critics often view the formal experimentation of High Modernism as a radical departure from conventional beliefs, this book shows that these aspects of Modernist art are deeply entwined with, and indebted to, the very traditions that they claim to be writing against. As such, the book offers a unique and truly multidisciplinary approach to Modernist studies and a cogent analysis of the ways in which spirituality informs artistic production.

Download or read book Shipwreck in Art and Literature written by Carl Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

Download or read book Stanley Cavell Literature and Film written by Andrew Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature, highlighting how literature and philosophy are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Download or read book Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture written by Basuli Deb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

Download or read book Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South Asian Literature written by Christin Hoene and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

Download or read book Literature and the Glocal City written by Ana María Fraile-Marcos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection’s most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of ‘glocality’, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.

Download or read book Cognition Literature and History written by Mark J. Bruhn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.