Download or read book The Perverse Art of Reading written by Kris Pint and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy’. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling. The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and philosophical intertexts of Barthes’ ‘active semiology’ (Lacan, Kristeva, Winnicott, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault), while the second part discusses his growing attention for the intimate, bodily involvement in the act of reading. Subsequently, this study shows how Barthes’ phantasmatic reading strategy radically reviews the notions of space, detail and the untimely in fiction, as well as the figure of the author and his own role as a teacher. It becomes clear that the interest of Barthes’ lecture courses goes well beyond semiology and literary criticism, searching the answer to the ethical question par excellence: how to become what one is, how to live a good life.
Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Download or read book Nabokov Perversely written by Eric Naiman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.
Download or read book Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse written by P. O'Connor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-12-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse contains analysis of sexual perversion and narrative creativity in fictions from the Latin American boom and post-boom. O'Connor's main argument is that orthodox criticism of Latin American literature has neglected the eccentric singularities of other fictive trends in the corpus (especially in the second half of the twentieth-century). At the same time, by examining these eccentric singularities in their relationship to mainstream trends in the Latin American corpus, O'Connor forces his readers to view these master narratives and major trends (such as modernismo or magical realism) from surprisingly new angles. Five of the authors discussed (Puig, Lezama, Lima, Cortazar and Sarduy) have an established place in the Latin American literary canon. A fifth one, Rosario Ferre, may have come close to achieving that status with her earlier fictions. Others (Felisberto Hernandez, Alicia Borinsky, Cristina Peri Rossi and Silvia Molloy) are less well known, but they are certainly highly significant authors for scholars and students of contemporary Latin American fiction.
Download or read book The Perverse Library written by Craig Douglas Dworkin and published by Information as Material. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Perverse Library includes Professor Craig Dworkin's bibliography (2,427 titles), a supplementary bibliography of absent and imagined books, and an accompanying essay arguing libraries are in fact defined not by what they contain, but by what books they exclude or fail to include. The essay also investigates the histories of libraries, makes a theoretical argument about the relation of canons to architectural space, and explores the psychology of collecting – including the pathology of bibliomania: 'He had but one idea, one love, one passion: books. And this love, this passion burned within him, consuming his days, devouring his existence.' Although they present themselves as figures of rational organization, library catalogues and classification systems can only hope to distract from the aberrant chaos they cannot exorcise. Published to accompany the exhibition The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, 4 September – 31 October 2010, curated by Simon Morris.
Download or read book Perverse Romanticism written by Richard C. Sha and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.
Download or read book Birds Art Life written by Kyo Maclear and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this ... meditation on creativity and life"--
Download or read book Perversity written by Francis Carco and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A mystery story involving a pimp, a prostitute and her sexually immature brother set in the Paris slums and underworld."--Google.
Download or read book Pretty written by Rosalind Galt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film culture often rejects visually rich images, valuing simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as more provocative, political, and truly cinematic. Although cinema challenges traditional ideas of art, this opposition to the decorative continues a long-standing aesthetic antipathy to feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal and colonial perspective along with the preference for fine over decorative art, filmmakers, critics, and theorists tend to denigrate cinema's colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions. Condemning this exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scène, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements—styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art house cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from handmade experimental films to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge! and Amelie, pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, using visual exuberance to communicate distinct sexual and political identities. Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, a singular representation of cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art and film theory and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, woven with the threads of political agency.
Download or read book The Age of Perversion written by Danielle Knafo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.
Download or read book The Pleasure of the Text written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1975 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard
Download or read book The Rose Garden written by Kristjana Gunnars and published by Red Deer, Alta. : Red Deer College Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.
Download or read book Permanent Crisis written by Paul Reitter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show, this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. ,
Download or read book The Puppet and the Dwarf written by Slavoj Zizek and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our most daring intellectuals offers a Lacanian interpretation of religion, finding that early Christianity was the first revolutionary collective. Slavoj Žižek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet and the Dwarf he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality—New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism—and then tries to redeem the "materialist" kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a "postsecular" age, this book—with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy—is certain to stir controversy.
Download or read book Perverse Titillation written by Danny Shipka and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exploitation film industry of Italy, Spain and France during the height of its popularity from 1960 to 1980 is the focus of this entertaining history. With subject matter running the gamut from Italian zombies to Spanish werewolves to French lesbian vampires, the shocking and profoundly entertaining motion pictures of the "Eurocult" genre are discussed from the standpoint of the films and the filmmakers, including such internationally celebrated auteurs as Mario Bava, Jess Franco, Jean Rollin and Paul Naschy. The Eurocult phenomenon is also examined in relation to the influences that European culture and environment have had on the world of exploitation cinema. The author's insight and expertise contribute to a greater understanding of what made these films special--and why they have remained so popular to later generations.
Download or read book A Bibliography for the Study of French Literature and Culture Since 1885 written by Sheri Dion and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading the Remove of Literature written by Nick Thurston and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. READING THE REMOVE OF LITERATURE is a reading of Maurice Blanchot's seminal book The Space of Literature, performed on the page as an annotative writing that encircles the should-be space of print. Through the progressive appropriation and then erasure of Blanchot's text, and through a processual transposition of hand-writing into formal typography, Thurston addresses the very question of the possibility of literature that obsessed Blanchot. The meaning of the candid reflections and meditations which form the incisive marginalia is founded in a tension with the suggestions of the absent text. Floating alone these annotations may have little worth or make little sense, but between these covers they do not deny the history of their derivation: They are constantly anchored by that which is missing, in a creative erring, in a process of over-coming, which in this book asserts an equality of presence between the read and the written; the reading and the writing.
