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Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida
by Juliet Fleming"Cultural Graphology" could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida's speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history. Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida's early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida's thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as "error," "letter," "surface," and "cut," Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.
Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive: Objects, Institutions, and Practices between the Analogue and the Digital (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Tim SommerModern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and archive professionals, the book explores the objects, practices, and institutions that have been at the heart of the modern archival landscape since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Covering a wide range of questions, the volume reconstructs how literary manuscripts turned into secular relics and analyzes the impact that the rise of the archive has had on the scholarly study and public perception of literature as cultural heritage. Individual chapters range from historical accounts of the Romantic origins of manuscript worship to critical discussions of the archiving of contemporary writers’ born-digital material.
Cultural Hermeneutics: Essays after Unamuno and Ricoeur
by Mario ValdesIn Cultural Hermeneutics, Mario J. Valdés offers a synthesis of the hermeneutic philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Ricoeur, a dialectical method that has formed the basis for many of Valdés' own studies in comparative literature. As Valdés explains in these insightful essays, what Unamuno and Ricoeur shared in their hermeneutic studies was a theory of interpretation in which the meaning of a work of art comes into existence through the dialectical relationship between its creator and its readers, listeners, or viewers. Contextualizing this hermeneutic concept as it appears in the works of both philosophers, Cultural Hermeneutics presents the basis for a profound understanding of the arts.
Cultural History in France: Local Debates, Global Perspectives (Studies for the International Society for Cultural History)
by Evelyne Cohen Anaïs Fléchet Pascale Gœtschel Laurent Martin Pascal Ory Andrew Hill Rosine FefermanThis volume, which gathers contributions presented at the annual conferences of l'Association pour le développement de l'histoire culturelle (ADHC), questions the subjects and boundaries of cultural history in France – with regard to neighboring approaches such as cultural studies, media studies, and gender studies – to elaborate a "social history of representations." Historians, philosophers and sociologists address a large variety of topics and methodological proposals. Definitions, objects and actors, memories and cultural transfers: this book depicts the major questions that underlie the historical debate at the beginning of the 21st century.
A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought
by Stephen KernThis pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.
A Cultural History of Climate Change (Routledge Environmental Humanities)
by Tom Bristow Thomas H. FordCharting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge, action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time. To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning-points and experiments in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity. This ground-breaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory, cultural theory, as well as all general readers interested in climate change.
A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals
by Katherine EllisonDuring and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public. While there are many surveys of cryptography, none pay any attention to the volume of manuals that appeared during the seventeenth century, or provide any cultural context for the appearance, design, or significance of the genre during the period. On the contrary, when the period’s cryptography writings are mentioned, they are dismissed as esoteric, impractical, and useless. Yet, as this book demonstrates, seventeenth-century cryptography manuals show us one clear beginning of the capitalization of information. In their pages, intelligence—as private message and as mental ability—becomes a central commodity in the emergence of England’s capitalist media state. Publications boasting the disclosure of secrets had long been popular, particularly for English readers with interests in the occult, but it was during these particular decades of the seventeenth century that cryptography emerged as a permanent bureaucratic function for the English government, a fashionable activity for the stylish English reader, and a respected discipline worthy of its own genre. These manuals established cryptography as a primer for intelligence, a craft able to identify and test particular mental abilities deemed "smart" and useful for England’s financial future. Through close readings of five specific primary texts that have been ignored not only in cryptography scholarship but also in early modern literary, scientific, and historical studies, this book allows us to see one origin of disciplinary division in the popular imagination and in the university, when particular broad fields—the sciences, the mechanical arts, and the liberal arts—came to be viewed as more or less profitable.
A Cultural History of the Chinese Character “Ta: Invention and Adoption of a New Feminine Pronoun (China Perspectives)
by Huang XingtaoThis book offers a thorough examination of the history of a Chinese female pronoun – the Chinese character "Ta (她, She)" and demonstrates how the invention and identification of this new word is inextricably intertwined with matters of sociocultural politics. The Chinese character Ta for the third-person feminine singular pronoun was introduced in the late 1910s when the voices of women’s liberation rang out in China. The invention and dissemination of this word not only reflected an ideological gendering of the Chinese script but also provoked heated academic and popular debate well into the 1930s. Thus, the history of Ta provides a prism through which to explore modern Chinese history. The author provides an ambitious and informed examination of how Ta was invented and promoted in relation to the gender equality movement, the politics of neologism, and other domestic elements and international catalysts. This book is the first major work to survey Ta’s creation. It draws on diverse sources, including interviews with eight historians who experienced the popularisation of Ta as youths in the 1930s and 40s. This book will be an essential read for students and scholars of East Asian Studies, Chinese Cultural History, and those who are interested in the history of China.
A Cultural History of the English Language (The English Language Series)
by Gerry KnowlesThis book presents a new interpretation of the history of English. Access to large corpuses of English has allowed scholars to assess the minutiae of linguistic change with much greater precision than before, often pinpointing the beginnings of linguistic innovations in place and time. The author uses the findings from this research to relate major historical events to change in the language, in particular to areas of linguistic inquiry that have been of particular importance in recent years, such as discourse analysis, stylistics and work on pidgins and creoles. The book does not attempt to chronicle changes in syntax or pronunciation and spelling, but is designed to complement a corpus-based study of formal changes. The story of English is brought up to the late 1990s to include, amongst other things, discussions of Estuary English and the implications of the information superhighway.
A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829
by Claire ConnollyClaire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian scholarship, poetry, song, plays and memoirs, produced a series of notable fictions; marked most of all by their ability to fashion from these resources a new vocabulary of cultural identity. This book extends and enriches the current understanding of Irish Romanticism, blending sympathetic textual analysis of the fiction with careful historical contextualization.
A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present
by Kocku von StuckradThe soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture—from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements.This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century.Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements—ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today.
A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan
by Rebekah ClementsThe translation of texts has played a formative role in Japan's history of cultural exchange as well as the development of literature, and indigenous legal and religious systems. This is the first book of its kind, however, to offer a comprehensive survey of the role of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868. By examining a wide range of translations into Japanese from Chinese, Dutch and other European texts, as well as the translation of classical Japanese into the vernacular, Rebekah Clements reveals the circles of intellectual and political exchange that existed in early modern Japan, arguing that, contrary to popular belief, Japan's 'translation' culture did not begin in the Meiji period. Examining the 'crisis translation' of military texts in response to international threats to security in the nineteenth century, Clements also offers fresh insights into the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868.
A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (New World Studies)
by John Patrick LearyA Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba détente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment." John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography, journalism, popular song, travel narratives, and development theory. For the United States, Latin America has figured variously as good neighbor and insurgent threat, as its possible future and a remnant of its past. By illuminating the conventional ways in which Americans have imagined their place in the hemisphere, the author shows how the popular image of the United States as a modern, exceptional nation has been produced by a century of encounters that travelers, writers, radicals, filmmakers, and others have had with Latin America. Drawing on authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, Leary argues that Latin America has figured in U.S. culture not just as an exotic "other" but as the familiar reflection of the United States' own regional, racial, class, and political inequalities.
The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Michael C. FrankThis study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie
by Fawzia Afzal-KhanCultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel focuses on the novels of R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie and explores the tension in these novels between ideology and the generic fictive strategies that shape ideology or are shaped by it. Fawzia Afzal-Khan raises the important question of how much the usage of certain ideological strategies actually helps the ex-colonized writer deal effectively with postcolonial and postindependence trauma and whether or not the choice of a particular genre or mode employed by a writer presupposes the extent to which that writer will be successful in challenging the ideological strategies of "containment" perpetuated by most Western "orientalist" texts and writers. She argues that the formal or generic choices of the four writers studied here reveal that they are using genre as an ideological "strategy of liberation" to help free their peoples and cultures from the hegemonic strategies of "containment" imposed upon them. She concludes that the works studied here constitute an ideological rebuttal of Western writers' denigrating "containment" of non-Western cultures. She also notes that self-criticism, as implied in Rushdie's works, is not be confused with self-hatred, a theme found in Naipaul's work.
Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (Biosemiotics #15)
by Paul CobleyThis is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an 'epistemological break' with 'modern' modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the 'culture/nature' division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.
Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age
by Elizabeth OylerCultural Imprints draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868. The range of methodologies and materials discussed in Cultural Imprints challenges a uniform notion of warrior activity and sensibilities, breaking down an ahistorical, monolithic image of the samurai that developed late in the samurai age and that persists today. Highlighting the memory of warfare and its centrality in the cultural realm, Cultural Imprints demonstrates the warrior's far-reaching, enduring, and varied cultural influence across centuries of Japanese history.Contributors: Monica Bethe, William Fleming, Andrew Goble, Thomas Hare, Luke Roberts, Marimi Tateno, Alison Tokita, Elizabeth Oyler, Katherine Saltzman-Li
The Cultural Industries
by David Hesmondhalgh'The first edition of The Cultural Industries moved us irrevocably past the tired debates between political economy and cultural studies approaches. This second edition takes on new and vital targets, for example claims that the Internet is replacing television in everyday media consumption. . . . In the process, Hesmondhalgh provides us with an essential toolkit for making critical sense of the digital media age, and our places within it' - Nick Couldry, Goldsmiths College, University Of London 'This book sets a valuable standard for communication studies. Hesmondhalgh integrates cultural research with political economy, organizational sociology with public communication policy studies, global with comparative analysis, and intellectual property law with technology changes. I've successfully taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the USA and France using the first edition, and this one is better still' - John D. H. Downing, Global Media Research Centre, Southern Illinois University Praise for the first edition: 'This lucid, careful and sophisticated book orders the entire field, for the US as well as Europe, and at one stroke becomes the state of the art, the standard' - Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, USA This book is a powerful antidote to journalistic hype about change in the cultural industries. Significantly expanding, updating and revising an acclaimed first edition published in 2002, it · analyses how, why and in what ways cultural production has changed since the 1980s · guides the reader through existing approaches · scrutinises facts and debates about the role of culture and creativity in modern societies · provides new material on copyright, cultural policy, celebrity power, the digital distribution of music and many other issues Like its predecessor, this exciting new edition of The Cultural Industries places transformation in the cultural industries in long-term political, economic and cultural context. In doing so, Hesmondhalgh offers a distinctive critical approach to cultural production, drawing on political economy perspectives, but also on cultural studies, sociology and social theory.
Cultural Institutions of the Novel
by Deidre Lynch William B. WarnerThe story of the development of the novel--its origin, rise, and increasing popularity as a narrative form in an ever-expanding range of geographic and cultural sites--is familiar and, according to the contributors to this volume, severely limited. In a far-reaching blend of comparative literature and transnational cultural studies, this collection shifts the study of the novel away from a consideration of what makes a particular narrative a novel to a consideration of how novels function and what cultural work they perform--from what novels are, to what they do.The essays in Cultural Institutions of the Novel find new ways to analyze how a genre notorious for its aesthetic unruliness has become institutionalized--defined, legitimated, and equipped with a canon. With a particular focus on the status of novels as commodities, their mediation of national cultures, and their role in transnational exchange, these pieces range from the seventeenth century to the present and examine the forms and histories of the novel in England, Nigeria, Japan, France, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Works by Jane Austen, Natsume Sôseki, Gabriel García Márquez, Buchi Emecheta, and Toni Morrison are among those explored as Cultural Institutions of the Novel investigates how theories of "the" novel and disputes about which narratives count as novels shape social struggles and are implicated in contests over cultural identity and authority.Contributors. Susan Z. Andrade, Lauren Berlant, Homer Brown, Michelle Burnham, James A. Fujii, Nancy Glazener, Dane Johnson, Lisa Lowe, Deidre Lynch, Jann Matlock, Dorothea von Mücke, Bridget Orr, Clifford Siskin, Katie Trumpener, William B. Warner
Cultural Intelligence: Master the One Skill You Can't Do Without in Today's Global Economy
by David A. LivermoreAs an award-winning author and global business leader, David Livermore applies his social science and cultural intelligence (CQ) expertise to teach others how to thrive in increasingly multicultural workplaces and a globalized world. Now, in this essential book, he shows you how to leverage the benefits of cultural intelligence for themselves--including improved decision-making, negotiation, networking, and leadership skills--to gain a crucial advantage in the crowded job market. <P><P> In The Cultural Intelligence Difference, you’ll explore: customized strategies for improving interactions with people from diverse cultures, new findings on the bottom-line benefits of cultural intelligence, and many examples of major organizations that use CQ to achieve success. Most people know that some basic cultural sensitivity is important. But few have developed the deep cultural intelligence needed to truly bridge the cultural gaps that exist in every workplace. <P><P> The Cultural Intelligence Difference delivers a powerful tool for navigating today's work world with finesse--and success.
Cultural Intelligence: Living and Working Globally
by David C. Thomas Kerr InksonGlobalization means that managers need to be prepared to do business with people from a wide range of cultures. But it's just not possible to learn the particular customs and traits of every culture you might regularly come into contact with.
Cultural Intermarriage in Southern Appalachia: Cherokee Elements in Four Selected Novels by Lee Smith (Indigenous Peoples and Politics)
by Katerina PrajznerovaFirst Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Cultural Knowledge and Values in English Language Teaching Materials: (Multimodal) Representations and Stakeholders
by Tao Xiong Dezheng Feng Guangwei HuThis book provides a contextualized and balanced look into the timely topic of values in English Language Teaching (ELT) materials with a primary focus on the Chinese context. It features three distinct conceptual and methodological perspectives, namely, perceptions of stakeholders such as material writers, teachers and students, multimodal construction of values, and textual representation of values. It is a valuable resource for those interested in the social, cultural, moral, and ideological dimensions of English education in general, and in the textual and multimodal construction of values in language teaching materials in particular.
Cultural Labour and Contemporary World Literatures in Portuguese (New Comparisons in World Literature)
by Carlos Garrido CastellanoThis book examines the evolution of contemporary narrative in Portuguese from the point of view of cultural labour. The main objective of this volume is to analyse the panorama of contemporary literary fiction in Portuguese under the prism of the economization of cultural creativity and the expansion of neoliberal understanding of creative subjectivity and self-realization. Assuming that neoliberalism still constitutes a haunting presence that becomes present in ways that are far from universal and homogeneous and that are shaped by coloniality, this book expands the debates on cultural labour and literary materialisms beyond European and North American contexts. Dealing with contemporary literary production from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Macau, Canada and Goa, the volume also tries to reimagine issues of cultural labour and the expansion of artistic modes of self-definition from the point of view of contemporary literary production in Portuguese.
Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)
by Akiko Tsuchiya Aurélie VialetteThis groundbreaking volume explores how culture produced in Spain, from the nineteenth century to the present, both reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained by colonialism and slavery. Akiko Tsuchiya and Aurélie Vialette bring together an outstanding group of scholars, artists, cultural producers, and activists in a range of fields—from history to literary studies, anthropology to journalism, and flamenco to film. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies, contributors address the legacies of slavery in the archive; in cultural memory sites; and in literature, music, and visual arts. How, they ask, do different cultural forms and institutions represent and reckon with this past and push for justice in the face of persistent racial discrimination? In its focus on collective memory and the cultural afterlives of slavery and antislavery, Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain will appeal not only to Iberian and Latin American specialists but also readers across Afro-Hispanic, postcolonial, transatlantic, and critical race studies.