Download or read book Towards a New Literary Humanism written by A. Mousley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature cultivates 'deep selves' for whom books matter because they take over from religion fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. This volume embraces and questions this perspective, whilst also developing a 'new humanist' critical vocabulary which specifies, and therefore opens to debate, the human significance of literature.
Download or read book Literature and the Human written by Andy Mousley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does literature matter? What is its human value? Historical approaches to literature have for several decades prevailed over the idea that literary works can deepen our understanding of fundamental questions of existence. This book re-affirms literature's existential value by developing a new critical vocabulary for thinking about literature's human meaningfulness. It puts this vocabulary into practice through close reading of a wide range of texts, from The Second Wakefield Shepherds’ Play to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Individual chapters discuss: Literature’s engagement of the emotions Literature’s humanisation of history Literature’s treatment of universals and particulars The depth of reflection provoked by literary works Literature as a special kind of seeing and framing The question at the heart of the volume, of why literature matters, makes this book relevant to all students and professors of literature.
Download or read book Humanism Drama and Performance written by Hana Worthen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the appropriation of theatre and theatrical performance by ideologies of humanism, in terms that continue to echo across the related disciplines of literary, drama, theatre, and performance history and studies today. From Aristotle onward, theatre has been regulated by three strains of critical poiesis: the literary, segregating theatre and the practices of the spectacular from the humanizing work attributed to the book and to the internality of reading; the dramatic, approving the address of theatrical performance only to the extent that it instrumentalizes literary value; and the theatrical, assimilating performance to the conjunction of literary and liberal values. These values have been used to figure not only the work of theatre, but also the propriety of the audience as a figure for its socializing work, along a privileged dualism from the aestheticized ensemble—harmonizing actor, character, and spectator to the essentialized drama—to the politicized assembly, theatre understood as an agonistic gathering.
Download or read book What Is Fiction For written by Bernard Harrison and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-29 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Harrison’s marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work.” —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the human condition? Can mere words illuminate something that we call “reality”? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.
Download or read book The Humanist Re Turn Reclaiming the Self in Literature written by Michael Bryson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls "the anti-humanism" of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential struggles—not struggles of competition, but of connection, the struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity.
Download or read book The Reception of Aristotle s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond written by Bryan Brazeau and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.
Download or read book Language Truth and Literature written by Richard Gaskin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Gaskin offers an original defence of literary humanism, according to which works of imaginative literature have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of production and not subject to individual readers' responses. He shows that the appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity fully on a par with scientific investigation.
Download or read book Towards a New Humanism written by Susan Lori Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Posthumanist Shakespeares written by S. Herbrechter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorists critically investigate the relationship between early modern culture and contemporary political and technological changes concerning the idea of the 'human.' The volume covers the tragedies King Lear and Hamlet in particular, but also provides posthumanist readings of other Shakespearean plays.
Download or read book Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty First Century Narrative written by Sonia Baelo-Allué and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative brings together fifteen scholars from five different countries to explore the different ways in which the posthuman has been addressed in contemporary culture and more specifically in key narratives, written in the second decade of the 21st century, by Dave Eggers, William Gibson, John Shirley, Tom McCarthy, Jeff Vandermeer, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Cixin Liu and Helen Marshall. Some of these works engage in the premises and perils of transhumanism, while others explore the qualities of the (post)human in a variety of dystopian futures marked by the planetary influence of human action. From a critical posthumanist perspective that questions anthropocentrism, human exceptionalism and the centrality of the ‘human’ subject in the era of the Anthropocene, the scholars in this collection analyse the aesthetic choices these authors make to depict the posthuman and its aftereffects.
Download or read book The New Human in Literature written by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century literature changed understandings of what it meant to be human. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, in this historical overview, presents a record of literature's changing ideas of mankind, questioning the degree to which literature records and creates visions of the new human. Grounded in the theory of Niklas Luhmann and drawing on canonical works, Thomsen uses literary changes in the mind, body and society to define the new human. He begins with the modernist minds of Virginia Woolf, Williams Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Celine's, discusses the society-changing concepts envisioned by Chinua Achebe, Mo Yan and Orhan Pamuk. He concludes with science fiction, discussing Don DeLillo and Michel Houellebecq's ideas of revolutionizing man through biotechnology. This is a study about imagination, aesthetics and ethics that demonstrates literature's capacity to not only imagine the future but portray the conflicting desires between individual and various collectives better than any other media. A study that heightens reflections on human evolution and posthumanism.
Download or read book Renaissance Posthumanism written by Joseph Campana and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.
Download or read book Before Humanity written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?
Download or read book Humanism written by Tony Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault.
Download or read book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask i ek written by Russell Sbriglia and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Žižek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Žižek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Žižek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Žižekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Žižek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek affirms Žižek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Žižekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Žižek
Download or read book The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti Racist Literature written by Alexandra Hartmann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-05-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an intellectual history and theoretical exploration of black humanism since the civil rights era. Humanism is a human-centered approach to life that considers human beings to be responsible for the world and its course of history. Both the heavily theistic climate in the United States as well as the dominance of the Black Church are responsible for black humanism’s existence in virtual oblivion. For those who believe the world to be one without supernatural interventions, human action matters greatly and is the only possible mode for change. Humanists are thus committed to promoting the public good through human effort rather than through faith. Black humanism originates from the lived experiences of African Americans in a white hegemonic society. Viewed from this perspective, black humanist cultural expressions are a continuous push to imagine and make room for alternative life options in a racist society. Alexandra Hartmann counters religion’s hegemonic grasp and uncovers black humanism as a small yet significant tradition in recent African American culture and cultural politics by studying its impact on African American literature and the ensuing anti-racist potentials. The book demonstrates that black humanism regards subjectivity as embodied and is thus a worldview that is characterized by a fragile hope regarding the possibility of progress – racial and otherwise – in the country.
Download or read book Fictions of Infinity written by Martin Riedelsheimer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the connection of infinity and Levinasian ethics in 21st-century fiction. It tackles the paradox of how infinity can be (re-)presented in the finite space between the covers of a book and finds an answer that combines conceptual metaphor theory with concepts from classical narratology and beyond, such as mise en abyme, textual circularity, intertextuality or omniscient narration. It argues that texts with such structures may be conceptualised as infinite via Lakoff and Núñez’s Basic Metaphor of Infinity. The catachrestic transfer of infinity from structure to text means that the texts themselves are understood to be infinite. Taking its cue from the central role of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, the function of such ‘fictions of infinity’ turns out to be ethical: infinite textuality disrupts reading patterns and calls into question the reader’s spontaneity to interpret. This hypothesis is put to the test in detailed readings of four 21st-century novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and John Banville’s The Infinities. This book thus combines ethical criticism with structural aesthetics to uncover ethical potential in fiction.
