Download or read book The Limits of Literary Historicism written by Allen Dunn and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism—its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments—this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative. Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that transcend mere formula, and suggest alternatives to historicism altogether. The volume begins with the editors’ extended introduction, “The Enigma of Critical Distance; or, Why Historicists Need Convictions,” and then is divided into three sections: “The Limits of Historicism,” “Engagements with History,” and “Alternatives to History.” Defying convention, The Limits of Literary Historicism shakes up established modes to move beyond the claustrophobic analyses of contemporary historicism and to ask larger questions that envision more fulfilling and more responsible possibilities in the practice of literary scholarship.

Download or read book The Limits of Critique written by Rita Felski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Download or read book Censorship and the Limits of the Literary written by Nicole Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive, even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after the opening of the USSR's spekstrahn, those enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and book banning in colonial countries also demonstrates censorship's formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines these and other developments across twelve countries, from the Enlightenment to the present day, offering case studies from the French revolution to Internet China. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final, failed version of national control?

Download or read book Censorship and the Limits of the Literary written by Nicole Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the defining relationship of literature to censorship across the globe"--

Download or read book Beyond the Story written by Christina Bieber Lake and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism argues that theology is crucial to understanding the power of contemporary American stories. By drawing on the theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Christian personalism, and contemporary phenomenology, Lake argues that literary fiction activates an irreducibly personal intersubjectivity between author, reader, and characters. Stories depend on a dignity-granting valuation of the particular lives of ordinary people, which is best described as an act of love that mirrors the love of the divine. Through original readings of the fiction of Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, and others, Lake enters into a dialogue with postsecular theory and cognitive literary studies to reveal the limits of sociobiology’s approach to culture. The result is a book that will remind readers how storytelling continually reaffirms the transcendent value of human beings in an inherently personal cosmos. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of theology and literary studies, as well as a broad audience of readers seeking to engage on a deeper level with contemporary literature.

Download or read book The Limits of Art written by Huntington Cairns and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1960 with total page 1473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Anti Literature written by Adam Joseph Shellhorse and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by "literature." Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Adam Joseph Shellhorse reveals literature's power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions. His analysis engages the work of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian concrete poets, Osman Lins, and David Vi–as, to develop a theory of anti-literature that posits the feminine, multimedial, and subaltern as central to the undoing of what is meant by "literature." By placing Brazilian and Argentine anti-literature at the crux of a new way of thinking about the field, Shellhorse challenges prevailing discussions about the historical projection and critical force of Latin American literature. Examining a diverse array of texts and media that include the visual arts, concrete poetry, film scripts, pop culture, neo-baroque narrative, and others that defy genre, Shellhorse delineates the subversive potential of anti-literary modes of writing while also engaging current debates in Latin American studies on subalternity, feminine writing, posthegemony, concretism, affect, marranismo, and the politics of aesthetics.

Download or read book Narrating Death written by Daniel K. Jernigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death.

Download or read book The Limits of Expression written by Patricia Kolaiti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new view of the interplay between language, literature and mind.

Download or read book At the Limits of Art written by Janet Downie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hieroi Logoi (or "Sacred Tales") of Aelius Aristides presents a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world-one that seems at once public and private, artful and naive. A prominent rhetor among the educated elite of second-century Asia Minor, Aristides produced a substantial body of polished discourses, declamations, and hymns. Within his oeuvre, however, the unparalleled Logoi stand out, and while scholars have embraced it as a rich source for Imperial-era religion, politics, and elite culture, the style of the text has presented a persistent stumbling block to literary analysis. Setting this dream-memoir of illness and divine healing in the context of Aristides' professional concerns as an orator, this book investigates the text's rhetorical aims and literary aspirations. At the Limits of Art argues that the Hieroi Logoi is an experimental work. Incorporating numerous dream accounts and narratives of divine cure in a multi-layered and open text, Aristides works at the limits of rhetorical convention to fashion an authorial voice that is transparent to the divine. Reading the Logoi in the context of contemporary oratorical practices, and in tandem with Aristides' polemical orations and prose hymns, the book uncovers the professional agendas motivating this unusual self-portrait. Aristides' sober view of oratory as a sacred pursuit was in tension with a widespread contemporary preference for spectacular public performance. In the Hieroi Logoi, he claims a place in the world of the Second Sophistic on his own terms, offering a vision of his professional inspiration in a style that pushes the limits of literary convention.

Download or read book The Womanist Idea written by Layli Maparyan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on the heels of The Womanist Reader, The Womanist Idea offers a comprehensive, systematic analysis of womanism, including a detailed discussion of the womanist worldview (cosmology, ontology, epistemology, logic, axiology, and methodology) and its implications for activism. From a womanist perspective, social and ecological change is necessarily undergirded by spirituality – as distinct from religion per se – which invokes a metaphysically informed approach to activism.

Download or read book Futile Pleasures written by Corey McEleney and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, 2018 MLA Prize for a First Book Against the defensive backdrop of countless apologetic justifications for the value of literature and the humanities, Futile Pleasures reframes the current conversation by returning to the literary culture of early modern England, a culture whose defensive posture toward literature rivals and shapes our own. During the Renaissance, poets justified the value of their work on the basis of the notion that the purpose of poetry is to please and instruct, that it must be both delightful and useful. At the same time, many of these writers faced the possibility that the pleasures of literature may be in conflict with the demand to be useful and valuable. Analyzing the rhetoric of pleasure and the pleasure of rhetoric in texts by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, McEleney explores the ambivalence these writers display toward literature’s potential for useless, frivolous vanity. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, this book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, Futile Pleasures both theorizes and performs the queer pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, McEleney argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Download or read book Literary Interest written by Steven Knapp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as a specifically literary discourse, distinguishable from other modes of thought and writing? Is there any way to defend the intuition that a work of literature says something that can't be said in any other way? Drawing on recent work in the philosophies of language and action, Steven Knapp presents a challenging new definition of "the literary" in a forceful analysis that will radically change the sometimes heated debate about formalism. Formalist theorists have maintained that the uniqueness of the literary lies in the special nature of literary language. Their critics argue that to draw sharp distinctions between literary and nonliterary language is to privilege one kind of text and to insulate cultural activity from social conflict and political change. In the course of a rigorous engagement with such literary theorists, old and new, Knapp develops a provocative defense of the notion of a uniquely literary mode of discourse--a defense that challenges proponents as well as critics of formalism. He extends and deepens current debates about the literary canon, the purpose of literary study, and the aims and implications of the recent critical return to history. His bold and surprising argument has significance for the ethical and political role of literary studies that no one interested in literary theory or the philosophy of art will be able to ignore. Literary Interest will engage theorists, literary critics in all fields, and philosophers addressing issues of aesthetics and language.

Download or read book The Art of Reading written by Damon Young and published by Scribe Publications. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful celebratory tribute to the powers of one of our most undervalued skills — an ideal gift for the avid reader. ‘What you are doing right now is, cosmically speaking, against the odds.’ As young children, we are taught to read, but soon go on to forget just how miraculous a process it is, this turning of scratches and dots into understanding, unease and inspiration. Perhaps we need to stop and remember, stop and learn again how to read better. Damon Young shows us how to do exactly this, walking alongside some of the greatest readers who light a path for us — Borges, Plato, Woolf. Young reads passionately, selectively, surprisingly — from superhero noir to speculative realism, from Heidegger to Heinlein — and shows his reader how cultivating their inner critic can expand their own lives as well as the lives of those on the pages of the books they love.

Download or read book The Lifespan of a Fact written by John D'Agata and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A BROADWAY PLAY STARRING DANIEL RADCLIFFE 'Provocative, maddening and compulsively readable' Maggie Nelson In 2003, American essayist John D'Agata wrote a piece for Harper's about Las Vegas's alarmingly high suicide rate, after a sixteen-year-old boy had thrown himself from the top of the Stratosphere Tower. The article he delivered, 'What Happens There', was rejected by the magazine for inaccuracies. But it was soon picked up by another, who assigned it a fact checker: their fresh-faced intern, and recent Harvard graduate, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay's eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D'Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This book includes an early draft of D'Agata's essay, along with D'Agata and Fingal's extensive discussion around the text. The Lifespan of a Fact is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between 'truth' and 'accuracy', and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. 'A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be' Lydia Davis

Download or read book Reading East Asian Writing written by Michel Hockx and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents contributions by thirteen scholars of Chinese and Japanese literature whose work is characterised by a strong interest in literary theory. They focus in particular on the various new theories that have emerged during the past two decades, uprooting traditional forms of understanding literary texts, their function, their readership and their interpretation. Often confined to discussion of a specific country or area, these theories have been criticised for their Western bias. This collection breaks through these barriers, providing an opportunity for scholars of two closely related yet often independently studied cultures to present and compare their views on specific theories of literature, to discuss the advantages and shortcomings of those theories, and to consider specific difficulties related to the East-West dimension.

Download or read book Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction written by Gerald Alva Miller Jr. and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.