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Literature in the Age of Lingua Franca English: The Zero Style
by Justin QuinnThe English language is now a lingua franca spoken by about two billion people. This insightful study considers how a "bridge language" affects world literature by analyzing what it is, how it works, what are its themes, what it means for canons, and how it is mediated.Cultural criticism often employs perspectives of race, citizenship, and colonialism, as well as considerations of scale (archipelagic, planetary), form (analogies between the literary and the social), and technologies (as they inflect artifacts). These approaches help rethink the new dynamics of anglophone literature, but they have often overlooked one of the basic elements of literature – the language itself. Literatures in English vernaculars have flourished, and Justin Quinn shows that writers are also creating a new idiom in English that is not fixed to a particular locale or community. While sentences may become simpler, the vocabulary range narrower, and rich cultural references lost, Quinn reveals how much this new form of writing gains. He explores the work of a wide range of authors, including Daisy Hildyard, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bryan Washington, Yiyun Li, and Terrance Hayes.Literature in the Age of Lingua Franca English: The Zero Style is an innovative and illuminating resource for students and scholars of global anglophone literature, comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Literature in the Ashes of History
by Cathy CaruthWhat does it mean for history to disappear?Outstanding Academic Title, ChoiceCathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own remembrance. At the heart of each chapter is the enigma of a history that, in its very unfolding, seems to be slipping away before our grasp. What does it mean for history to disappear? And what does it mean to speak of a history that disappears? These questions, Caruth suggests, lie at the center of the psychoanalytic texts that frame this book, as well as the haunting stories and theoretical arguments that resonate with each other in profound and surprising ways. In the writings of Honoré de Balzac, Hannah Arendt, Ariel Dorfman, Wilhelm Jensen, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida, we encounter, across different stakes and different languages, a variety of narratives that bear witness not simply to the past but also to the pasts we have not known and that repeatedly return us to a future that remains beyond imagination.These stories of trauma cannot be limited to the catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers in a time that comes to us from the other side of the disaster.
Literature in the Digital Age
by Adam HammondLiterature in a Digital Age: An Introduction guides readers through the most salient theoretical, interpretive, and creative possibilities opened up by the shift to digital literary forms such as e-books, digital archives, and electronic literature. While Digital Humanities (DH) has been hailed as the 'next big thing' in literary studies, many students and scholars remain perplexed as to what a DH approach to literature entails, and skeptical observers continue to see literature and the digital world as fundamentally incompatible. In its argument that digital and traditional scholarship should be placed in dialogue with each other, this book contextualizes the advent of the digital in literary theory, explores the new questions readers can ask of texts when they become digitized, and investigates the challenges that fresh forms of born-digital fiction pose to existing models of literary analysis.
Literature in the First Media Age
by David TrotterThe period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature, David Trotter argues, stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to portray communication by telephone, television, radio, and sound cinema--and to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they filled up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, Trotter observes, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars. In defining what they achieved, this book creates a new literary canon of works distinguished formally and thematically by their alertness to the implications of new media and new materials.
Literature in the Public Service
by Ceri SullivanHistorians and sociologists have been consistently - albeit gloomily - enthralled by Max Weber's model of the inevitable rise of the neurocrat. However, literary critics positively boast that writers, like academics, cannot 'do admin'. While Weber's thesis about the rise of the entrepreneur all fire, individuality, thrust is in tune with what we think literature is about, his thesis about the rise of the bureaucrat is not. Yet 'creative bureaucracy' is not only a euphemism for bending the rules. Literature in the Public Service shows how the public service makes its workers original, taking them beyond an individuated point of view to imagine the perfect public system. Creativity theorists too have swapped the model of solitary inspiration for a managed creative environment. John Milton, Anthony Trollope, and David Hare are examples of how authors work in and write about the public service, during its crisis moments. "
Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850
by John O'BrienLong before Citizens United and modern debates over corporations as people, such organizations already stood between the public and private as both vehicles for commerce and imaginative constructs based on groups of individuals. In this book, John O’Brien explores how this relationship played out in economics and literature, two fields that gained prominence in the same era. Examining British and American essays, poems, novels, and stories from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, O’Brien pursues the idea of incorporation as a trope discernible in a wide range of texts. Key authors include John Locke, Eliza Haywood, Harriet Martineau, and Edgar Allan Poe, and each chapter is oriented around a type of corporation reflected in their works, such as insurance companies or banks. In exploring issues such as whether sentimental interest is the same as economic interest, these works bear witness to capitalism’s effect on history and human labor, desire, and memory. This period’s imaginative writing, O’Brien argues, is where the unconscious of that process left its mark. By revealing the intricate ties between literary models and economic concepts, Literature Incorporated shows us how the business corporation has shaped our understanding of our social world and ourselves.
Literature, Interpretation and Ethics
by Colin DavisLiterature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us.The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance.Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.
Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde: Intersection in Egypt (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)
by Elisabeth KendallThe author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.
Literature, Language and Computing: Russian Contribution
by Polina Eismont Maria Khokhlova Mikhail Koryshev Elena RiekhakaynenThis book brings together selected revised papers representing a multidisciplinary approach to language and literature. The collection presents studies performed using the methods of computational linguistics in accordance with the traditions of Russian linguistic and literary studies, primarily in line with the Leningrad (Petersburg) philological school. The book comprises the papers allocated into 2 sections discussing the study of corpora in language, translation, and literary studies and the use of computing in language teaching and translation and in emotional text processing. A unique feature of the presented collection is that the papers, compiled in one volume, allow readers to get an understanding of a wide range of research conducted in Saint Petersburg State University and other Russian leading scientific institutions. Both the classical tradition of Saint Petersburg philology and the results obtained with the help of new computer technologies as a sample of the symbiosis of technologies and traditions, which bring research to a qualitatively new level, arouse interest.
Literature, Language, and the Classroom: Essays for Promodini Varma
by Sonali Jain; Anubhav PradhanThis book is a Festschrift dedicated to Promodini Varma, a meticulous scholar, teacher, and administrator of extraordinary rigour, grit, and perception. It presents reflections on researching and teaching English literatures and languages in India. It concerns itself broadly with literary modernism and English language teaching and classroom pedagogy, some of the core concerns of the literary fraternity today. The volume examines how the literary and cultural manifestations of modernity have pervasively informed not just much of our disciplinary framework but many of the key issues—decolonisation, globalisation, development—our society grapples with. With essays on William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling, the volume presents fresh insights on familiar canonical ground. It discusses ELT and classroom pedagogy and provides grounded appraisals of teaching and translating for multilingual classroom audiences given the demands of employability and the hierarchical dynamics of educational institutions. An interview on feminist pedagogy and theatre and an essay on urban nostalgia and redevelopment act as pertinent outliers, reflecting the ongoing transition to more multi-sited and interdisciplinary research and praxis. An engaging read on some of the most pressing concerns in the field, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, English language studies, and education.
Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680–1820
by Robin ValenzaThe current divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialized, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed new account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.
Literature, Life, and Modernity (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)
by Richard EldridgeRichard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life. Beyond simple entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives as subjects in relation to complex economies and technological systems. By imagining themselves in the role of the protagonist or the authorial persona, readers become immersed in structures of sustained attention, under which concrete possibilities of meaningful life, along with difficulties that block their realization, are tracked and clarified. Literary form, Eldridge argues, generates structures of care, reflection, and investment within readers, shaping-if not stabilizing-their interactions with everyday objects and events. Through the experience of literary forms of attention, readers may come to think and live more actively, more fully engaging with modern life, rather than passively suffering it. Eldridge considers the thought of Descartes, Kant, Adorno, Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, and Charles Taylor in his discussion of Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Stoppard, and Sebald, advancing a philosophy of literature that addresses our desire to read and the meaning and satisfaction that literary attention brings to our fragmented modern lives.
Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings
by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel Nicholas O. PaganThis edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the ‘crossings’ between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues —including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies.
Literature Minnesota The American Experience
by Prentice HallPrentice Hall Literature - the American Experience (Minnesota Edition)
The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II
by Nil SantiáñezThis book explores for the first time the literature of absolute war in connection to World War II. From a transnational and comparative standpoint, it addresses a set of theoretical, historical, and literary questions, shedding new light on the nature of absolute war, the literature on the world war of 1939–45, and modern war writing in general. It determines the main features of the language of absolute war, and how it gravitates around fundamental semantic clusters, such as the horror, terror, and the specter. The Literature of Absolute War studies the variegated responses given by literary authors to the extreme and seemingly unsolvable challenges posed by absolute war to epistemology, ethics, and language. It also delves into the different poetics that articulate the writing on absolute war, placing special emphasis on four literary practices: traditional realism, traumatic realism, the fantastic, and catastrophic modernism.
The literature of Al-andalus
by María Rosa Menocal Raymond P. Scheindlin Michael SellsThe Literature of Al-Andalus is an exploration of the culture of Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal, during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and in the centuries following the Christian conquest when Arabic continued to be widely used. The volume embraces many other related spheres of Arabic culture including philosophy, art, architecture and music. It also extends the subject to other literatures - especially Hebrew and Romance literatures - that burgeoned alongside Arabic and created the distinctive hybrid culture of medieval Iberia. Edited by an Arabist, an Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters compiled by a team of the world's leading experts of Islamic Iberia, Sicily and related cultures, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work which offers a interesting approach to the field.
Literature of an Independent England
by Claire Westall Michael GardinerSome of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British union, the place of English Literature within the union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation.
The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry
by William Kelley Simpson Robert K. Ritner Vincent A. Tobin Jr. Edward WenteThe latest edition of this highly praised anthology of ancient Egyptian literature offers fresh translations of all the texts as well as some twenty-five new entries, including writings from the late literature of the Demotic period at the end of classical Egyptian history. Praise for the earlier editions: “An elegant, easily readable, and most serviceable volume.”—K. A. Kitchen, Journal of Near Eastern Studies “A reliable rendering of the Egyptian text that can be useful to students of Egyptology and provide the layman with delightful reading material.”—Mordechai Gilula, Cultura
The Literature of Brunei: History, Culture, and Challenges (Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series)
by Ooi Keat Gin Kathrina Mohd DaudThis book presents an overview of the literature of Brunei, surveying literary traditions, innovations, and new approaches as well as historical and contemporary issues and challenges.This book highlights the unique characteristics of Bruneian literature, including its approach to bilingualism - Brunei Malay and English - its historical intertwining with monarchs and myths, and how its emerging developments can be charted in the twenty-first century.Gathering together the work of both established and emerging scholars of Bruneian literature and history, this book brings detailed scholarship to an English-speaking audience, some of which was originally written in the Malay language, and highlights a Bruneian perspective. In drawing out the peculiar traditions, innovations, and challenges of Bruneian literature, this collection of essays is not only original in concept but also a pioneering endeavour.The Literature of Brunei will be of interest to researchers in World and Asian Literature, in particular Southeast Asian literature.
The Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Provincial Novel (Routledge Library Editions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel #24)
by John LucasFirst published in 1977, this book studies three important nineteenth-century novelists: Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and Thomas Hardy. They are all provincial novelists who wrote about social change and the attendant problems and pressures this brought with it. Unlike previous critics, who have tended to concentrate on her ‘social-problem’ novels, here the author treats Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers and Cousin Phillis as central texts. However a chapter also examines Gaskell and Engels perception of social change in Manchester. This book also seeks to correct Hale White’s neglect, anointing Revolution in Tanner’s Lane and Clara Hopgood major works. The survey of women in Hardy’s novels represents an illuminating new angle and leads on to a discussion of love and marriage in later Victorian fiction.
The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
by Kam Louie Bonnie S. McdougallIn this general history of modern Chinese literature, McDougall (Chinese literature, Edinburgh U.) describes the fiction, drama, and poetry, and the historical and cultural developments, in three key periods: first, 1900-37, when Western influences led to new concepts of literature; second, 1938-65, when the Japanese invasion and the rise of the Communists marked a return to Chinese traditions followed by political restraint of literary production; and third, 1966-89, when underground literature set the stage for an era of experimentation. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The Literature of Controversy: Polemical Strategy from Milton to Junius (Routledge Revivals)
by Thomas N. CornsFirst published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.
The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation: Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era (Studies in American Popular History and Culture)
by Linda Joyce BrownThis work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants in order to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities, particularly that of whiteness, were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Literature of Language Arts: Second Course (California Edition)
by Holt Rinehart WinstonThis is a book with a big idea--that you are going to learn a lot about your language. This book came together because of the efforts of lots of people--writers, editors, artists, teachers, and even students like you. The chapters in Part 1 begin with an essay that explains the key standards you'll be mastering in the chapter. Then you'll read several literary selections. Following almost every literary selection, you will find some interesting readings, called informational texts. These might be newspaper or magazine articles, Web pages, instructional manuals, interviews, signs, maps, or other documents. All of these informational texts relate to the piece of literature. For example, after the story "In Trouble," about Gary Paulsen's experiences with sled dogs, you'll find an informational article about some of the breeds of dogs used to pull sleds. Along the way you'll find a lot of help in acquiring new words.
The Literature of Melancholia
by Martin Middeke Christina WaldThis collection analyzes philosophical, psycho-analytic and aesthetic contexts of the discourse of melancholia in British and postcolonial literature and culture and seeks to trace the multi-faceted phenomenon of melancholia from the early modern period to the present. Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.