Download or read book Unwrapping Balzac written by Samuel Weber and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.
Download or read book Balzac written by Michael Tilby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This canon of French literature, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is also a major European figure in the development of realism. His work is dominated by an inter-related sequence of novels and short stories, La Comedie Humanine, which charts the idiosyncrasies of French society from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1840's. Among the most famous of these are Le Pierre Goriot and La Cousine Bette. Iin this study, Dr Tilby concentrates on the main approaches in practice and discusses some of the earliest responses to Balzac's work. His introduction and headnotes set Balzac's work in context. This book will be of interest to students of French language and literature and also to those studying French in combined studies or humanities courses.
Download or read book Balzac s Shorter Fictions written by Tim Farrant and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-02-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, besides scores of other tales and articles. Short forms appear early in Balzac's output, and shape his work throughout his career. Balzac's Shorter Fictions looks at the whole of this corpus, at the nature of short fiction, and at how Balzac's novels developed from his stories - at the links between literary genesis and genre. It explores the roles of short fiction in Balzac's creation, its part in producing effects of virtuality and perspective, and reflects ultimately on the relationship between brevity and length in La Comédie humaine. This, the first complete English-language study of Balzac's work for over forty years, synthesizes recent research on Balzac's practice within the context of modern thought on the author. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.
Download or read book Honore de Balzac written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents critical essays on the works of French author Honore de Balzac.
Download or read book Orientation in European Romanticism written by Paul Hamilton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.
Download or read book The Price of Literature written by Patrick M. Bray and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Price of Literature examines the presence of theory in the nineteenth-century French novel, something Proust likened to leaving a price tag on a gift. Emerging after the French Revolution, what we now call literature was conceived as an art liberated from representational constraints. Patrick M. Bray shows how literature’s freedom to represent anything at all has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself—unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation, or “the novel’s theoretical turn.” Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature’s ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship—one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
Download or read book Echoes of a Queer Messianic written by Richard O. Block and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsiders mostly German narratives from around 1800 to recover echoes of a queer messianic that still resonate today. Queer theory has focused heavily on North American and contemporary contexts, but in this book Richard O. Block helps to expand that reach. Deftly combining the two main currents of recent queer theory, the asocial and the reparative, he reconsiders mostly German narratives from around 1800, while relating his findings to recent texts such as A Lovers Discourse and Brokeback Mountain. He offers novel readings of well-known texts by Shelley, Kleist, and Goethe, arguing that this early writing serves as a creative font for much of the subsequent work in sexology. These texts also provide echoes of a kind of love overlooked or suppressed in favor of a politics of appeasement or one intended to make queers model citizens. This book charts the unexplored possibilities for queer love in an attempt to map a future for gay politics in the age of homonormativity. Compelling and highly original, this book offers a major intervention into queer theory, while at the same time performing stunning feats of literary and film criticism. This is a work of first-rate intelligence, style, and critical and theoretical precision. John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge
Download or read book Public Space and Democracy written by Marcel Hénaff and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from classical Greece to the present, Public Space and Democracy provides both historical accounts and a comparative analytical framework for understanding public space both as a place and as a product of various media, from speech to the Internet. These essays make a powerful case for thinking of modern technological developments not as the end of public space, but as an opportunity for reframing the idea of the public and of the public space as the locus of power.
Download or read book Narrating Nationalisms written by Jinqi Ling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rereads five major works by John Okada, Louis Chu, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston in order to reconceptualize the relationship between the past and present of post-WWII Asian American literary history. Drawing on work in cultural studies, postmodern and poststructuralist theory, social history, and neo-pragmatism, Ling offers fresh perspectives on the cultural politics and formal strategies of texts too often seen in recent criticism as devoid of complexities and fraught with totalizing implications. In challenging uncritical adoption of posthumanist views of history, agency, and identity in Asian American cultural criticism, this pioneering book opens an approach to Asian American literary texts that simultaneously registers their rich specificity and relatedness to works before and after.
Download or read book Deconstruction A Reader written by Martin McQuillan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers 'do' 'it', literary critics 'do' 'it', even architects, poets, painters 'do' 'it'. It can involve the concepts of capital, politics, and justice. So what, after all, is deconstruction? Deconstruction: A Reader makes an answer to this question available in the only way possible - by offering a selection of breathtaking range and depth of essential texts. With more than sixty selections by fifty contributors, including nine pieces by Jacques Derrida, this is the ultimate anthology of deconstructive reading, demonstrating that deconstruction is vivid, surprising, varied, and true to the text.
Download or read book The Narrative Shape of Truth written by Ilya Kliger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its champions—and its detractors—have often understood the novel as the genre par excellence of truthlessness. The Narrative Shape of Truth counters this widely accepted view. It argues instead that the novel has found new, historically specific configurations of truth and narrative. The nineteenth-century novel, in particular, can be understood as responding to the emerging tendency to view truth as inseparable from, rather than opposed to, time. Ilya Kliger offers a nonreductive way of reading the histories of philosophy and the novel side by side. He identifies the crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a new structural affiliation between truth and time emerged. This book examines novels by four authors—Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—as well as the writings of leading European intellectuals and philosophers. Kliger argues that the “realist” novel can be conceived as prompting us (and giving us the means) to think of truth differently, as immanent in a temporal shape rather than transcendent in a principle, a fact, or a higher order.
Download or read book Theatre in French Canada written by Leonard E. Doucette and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1984-12-15 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is only recently that historians of the theatre in French Canada have turned their attention to playwrights active before the twentieth century. Their practice had been to trace the roots of theatre to mid-1930s, to the appearance of Father Emile Legault and his troupe, the Compagnons de Saint-Laurent, dismissing what had gone before. In this innovative history, Leonard Doucette sets out deal for the first time with all plays that have survived to 1867 and to link them with the evolution of politics, institutions, and culture in French Canada. The study of theatre has often been handicapped also by the outdated practice of defining the literary-cultural history of a nation by identifying the masterpieces produced in specific periods and then defining other works in terms of what they are not. The surprisingly rich and varied history of theatrical forms in French Canada has just begun to receive the attention it deserves from scholars. Some of the texts and authors referred to in this history are identified for the first time: the materials cited and conclusions drawn are based upon original research in major Canadian libraries as well as the works of published critics and historians. The result is an excellent introduction to the various forms theatre has taken and the problems it has encountered in French Canada.
Download or read book Jos Bergam n written by Nigel Dennis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer, critic, and cultural activist José Bergamín (1895-1983) was unjustly relegated to the sidelines of contemporary Spanish intellectual life for reasons that have more to do with his political dissidence and long periods of exile than with the interest and importance of his written work. This book represents the first attempt to come to terms with that work. Professor Dennis's study focuses on the period 1920-1936, the so-called silver age of Spanish literature, during which Bergamín rose to prominence alongside a group of superlatively gifted writers and friends, among them Frederico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas. It sets out to explain the nature of the relationship Bergamín had as a critic and prose writer with the major poets of the 1920s and 1930s, and at the same time systematically examines the singularity of his own work as an aphorist, essayist, and dramatist. Professor Dennis also devotes attention to explaining the sense of Bergamín's initiative in founding the important journal Cruz y Raya (1933-1936) and the role this publication played, both culturally and politically, during the troubled years of the Second Republic. This book not only fills a notable gap in our understanding of pre--Civil War literary and intellectual life in Spain, but also lays the foundation for all future research into the work of this fascinating and enigmatic writer.
Download or read book Just Gaming written by Jean François Lyotard and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Poetry of Francisco de la Torre written by John Gethin Hughes and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1982-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francisco de la Torre has long been praised as an outstanding poet in the mould of Garcilaso de la Vega and his simplicity of style and soft, gentle, Arcadian environment of his poetry have been emphasized. In this volume Professor Hughes attempts to define more accurately the position of Francisco de la Torre's verse in the evolution of Spanish poetry in the sixteenth century, revealing that Torre's vision of the pastoral world and his poetic language show him to be a transitional poet of considerable quality and substance and not merely an imitator of Garcilaso. Hughes demonstrates that while some of Torre's poetry follows a general pastoral pattern, his descriptions are characterized by a sense of movement through a shifting perspective and that even in poems with a traditional pastoral setting, the descriptions sometimes negate the pastoral qualities. The author also shows that Torre, rather than looking back towards Garcilaso and his contemporaries, is already anticipating – especially in his stylistic technique and in his view of nature – the attitude of the seventeenth century.
Download or read book Paperwork written by Kevin McLaughlin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution—an age of mass-produced "Bank-paper" and "Book-paper." Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance—paper—that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls "the decline of the aura." The critical perspective elaborated by Benjamin serves as the point of departure for the readings of paper proposed in Paperwork. Kevin McLaughlin argues for a literary-critical approach to the impact of the mass media on literature through a series of detailed interpretations of paper in fiction by Poe, Stevenson, Melville, Dickens, and Hardy. In this fiction, he argues, paper dramatizes the "withdrawal," as Benjamin puts it, of the "here and now" of the traditional work of art into the dispersing or distracting movement of the mass media. Paperwork seeks to challenge traditional concepts of medium and message that continue to inform studies of print culture and the mass media especially in the wake of industrialized production in the early nineteenth century. It breaks new ground in the exploration of the difference between mass culture and literature and will appeal to cultural historians and literary critics alike.
Download or read book SHAKESPEARES HAMLET IN AN ERA OF TEXTUAL EXHAUSTION written by Sonya Freeman Loftis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture’s oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare’s play, Post-Hamlet examines Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a central symbol of our era’s "textual exhaustion," an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text—printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.
