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Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment
by James NoggleUnfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility.Each of the four sections of Unfelt—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought.Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, Noggle charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, the virtual.
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
by Vivian GornickA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her lifeI sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”
The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin
by Douglas AndersonBenjamin Franklin wrote his posthumously published memoir—a model of the genre—in several pieces and in different temporal and physical places. Douglas Anderson’s study of this work reveals the famed inventor as a literary adept whose approach to autobiographical narrative was as innovative and radical as the inventions and political thought for which he is renowned.Franklin never completed his autobiography, choosing instead to immerse his reader in the formal and textual atmosphere of a deliberately "unfinished" life. Taking this decision on Franklin’s part as a starting point, Anderson treats the memoir as a subtle and rewarding reading lesson, independent of the famous life that it dramatizes but closely linked to the work of predecessors and successors like John Bunyan and Alexis de Tocqueville, whose books help illuminate Franklin’s complex imagination. Anderson shows that Franklin’s incomplete story exploits the disorderly and disruptive state of a lived life, as opposed to striving for the meticulous finish of standard memoirs, biographies, and histories. In presenting Franklin’s autobiography as an exemplary formal experiment in an era that its author once called the Age of Experiments, The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin veers away from the familiar practices of traditional biographers, viewing history through the lens of literary imagination rather than the other way around. Anderson’s carefully considered work makes a persuasive case for revisiting this celebrated book with a keener appreciation for the subtlety and beauty of Franklin’s performance.
Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century
by Rowena Kennedy-EpsteinIn Unfinished Spirit, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein brings to light the extraordinary archive of Muriel Rukeyser's (1913–1980) unpublished and incomplete literary works, revealing the ways in which misogyny influences the kinds of texts we read and value. Despite her status today as an influential poet, much of Rukeyser's critical and feminist writing remained unfinished, suppressed by the sexism of editors, political censure, the withdrawal of funding and publishing contracts, as well the conditions of single motherhood and economic precarity.From Savage Coast, her novel of the Spanish Civil War (which Kennedy-Epstein recovered, edited, and published to great acclaim in 2013) to her photo-text collaboration with Berenice Abbott, essays on women writers, radio scripts, and biographies, Unfinished Spirit traces the creation, reception, and rejection of Rukeyser's most ambitious texts—works that continued the radical, avant-garde project of modernism and challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture. Bound together by Rukeyser's radical vision of artistic creation and political engagement, these incomplete texts open a space to theorize the politics of the unfinished for understanding women's artistic production, reasserting the importance of the archive as a primary site of feminist criticism.
Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater
by Katherine Schaap WilliamsUnfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.
The Unfolding of The Seasons: A Study of James Thomson's Poem (Routledge Revivals)
by Ralph CohenFirst published in 1970, The Unfolding of The Seasons provides an interpretation and evaluation of James Thomson’s poem The Seasons. Professor Cohen urges its reconsideration as a major Augustan poem, arguing that Thomson’s unity, diction and thought combine with a conception of man, nature and God which is poetically tenable and distinctive. The case for The Seasons as an important work of art depends upon its effectiveness as a moving vision of human experience, and Professor Cohen believes that many critics have not felt this effectiveness because they have misconceived Thomson’s vision and misunderstood his idiom. His study aims to persuade them to return to the poem and to examine it within the context of an Augustan tradition. Professor Cohen shows that Thomson’s great achievement is to have fashioned a conception which, by bringing nature to the forefront of his poem, became a new poetic way of defining human experience. Thomson was not the first nature poet in English, but he was the first to provide an effective idiom in which science, orthodox religion, natural description, and classical allusions blended to describe the glory, baseness and uncertainty of man’s earthly environment, holding forth the hope of heavenly love and wisdom. This study shows that Thomson found a personal idiom by means of which he created an artistic vision. It will appeal to those with an interest in English literature and in philosophy.
The Unfolding of Words
by Judith Rice HendersonLeading sixteenth-century scholars such as Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus used print technology to engage in dialogue and debate with authoritative contemporary texts. By what Juan Luis Vives termed 'the unfolding of words,' these humanists gave old works new meanings in brief notes and extensive commentaries, full paraphrases, or translations. This critique challenged the Middle Ages' deference to authors and authorship and resulted in some of the most original thought - and most violent controversy - of the Renaissance and Reformation. The Unfolding of Words brings together international scholarship to explore crucial changes in writers' interactions with religious and classical texts. This collection focuses particularly on commentaries by Erasmus, contextualizing his Annotations and Paraphrases on the New Testament against broader currents and works by such contemporaries as François Rabelais and Jodocus Badius. The Unfolding of Words tracks humanist explorations of the possibilities of the page that led to the modern dictionary, encyclopedia, and scholarly edition.
Unfolding the Mind: The Unconscious in American Romanticism and Literary Theory (Routledge Library Editions: Literary Theory #25)
by Jeffrey SteeleAmerican writers in the 1830’s and 1840’s felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the unconscious constitutes to the theme of this study, which was first published in 1987. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.
Unfolding the Mind: The Unconscious in American Romanticism and Literary Theory (Routledge Library Editions: Literary Theory)
by Jeffrey SteeleAmerican writers in the 1830s and 1840s felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the unconscious constitutes to the theme of this study, which was first published in 1987. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.
Unforced Flourishing
by Thomas SalumetsAre we ill-suited for this world? Among Europe's major contemporary poets, Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we flourish. But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness? In Unforced Flourishing, Thomas Salumets seeks access to Kaplinski's life and work and finds a path to the signature of his thinking. He uncovers a man who craves human closeness that few, if any, can provide, a writer drawn towards wordless communication in a world of words, signs, and symbols, who yearns for the sacred in secular times, and who detects more richness in nature than in the human imagination. Salumets describes Kaplinski as an intellectual attracted to a contrarian sense of self, art, and culture, who searches for his homeland's mystical connections at a time when Estonia firmly aligns with values and modes of thought vastly different from his own. What emerges is a mentality firmly rooted in the belief that the greatest risk to human fulfillment results from human beings themselves. The first major study in English of one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures, Unforced Flourishing details Kaplinski's embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world.
Unforced Flourishing: Understanding Jaan Kaplinski
by Thomas SalumetsAre we ill-suited for this world? Among Europe's major contemporary poets, Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we flourish. But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness? In Unforced Flourishing, Thomas Salumets seeks access to Kaplinski's life and work and finds a path to the signature of his thinking. He uncovers a man who craves human closeness that few, if any, can provide, a writer drawn towards wordless communication in a world of words, signs, and symbols, who yearns for the sacred in secular times, and who detects more richness in nature than in the human imagination. Salumets describes Kaplinski as an intellectual attracted to a contrarian sense of self, art, and culture, who searches for his homeland's mystical connections at a time when Estonia firmly aligns with values and modes of thought vastly different from his own. What emerges is a mentality firmly rooted in the belief that the greatest risk to human fulfillment results from human beings themselves. The first major study in English of one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures, Unforced Flourishing details Kaplinski’s embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world.
The Unforgivable: And Other Writings
by Cristina CampoThrilling, stylish essays about everything from flying carpets and Doctor Zhivago to God and Shakespeare, by a rediscovered Italian writer.Christina Campo published only two short collections of essays in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). The Unforgivable and Other Writings brings together both volumes, along with a selection of essays on literature and an autobiographical short story, offering readers of English the first full-length portrait of a writer who has long been admired in Italy and abroad.Campo's subjects range from the canonical to the esoteric. She writes stylishly about Shakespeare and Doctor Zhivago, as well as flying carpets, sprezzatura, and the theophagic origins of the Latin liturgy. Her passion for Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot makes her a modernist, but like these American counterparts she is a modernist preoccupied by the deep past and by her desire to escape from personality through sustained attention to form. For Campo, writing was a spiritual discipline, and her sentences are at once wonderfully and wildly alive and serenely self-effacing. "I have written little," she once said, "and would like to have written less."
Unfuck Your Writing: Write Better, Reach Readers, & Share Your Inner World
by Joe Biel Faith G. Harper, PhD, LPC-S, ACS, ACNWant to be a writer, but the words won't come? Do you have a lot to say but don't know how to write it so people will read it? Do you struggle with anxiety, procrastination, or feeling like an imposter around your writing? Microcosm's two most prolific authors teach you their tricks of the trade in this no-nonsense, practical guide to the craft of writing longform work. Learn skills like setting and sticking to goals, communicating effectively with your writing, having fun while writing, working with an editor, and creating reader-oriented work. This is not a book about crafting beautiful sentences with perfect grammar; instead Harper and Biel will teach you to write so that your words have the greatest possible impact on the world.
Unhappy Beginnings: Narratives of Precarity, Failure, and Resistance in North American Texts (Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture)
by Isabel González-Díaz Fabián Orán-LlarenaThis book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.
Unheard Voices: An Anthology of Stories and Poems to Commemorate the Bicentenary Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade
by Malorie BlackmanIn March 1807, the British Parliament passed an Act making the trading and transportation of slaves illegal. It was many years before slavery, as it was known then, was abolished, and slavery still continues today in different ways, but it was a big step forward towards the empancipation of a people. Malorie Blackman has drawn together some of the finest of today's writers and poets to contribute to this important anthology. Their short stories and poems sit alongside first-hand accounts of slavery from freed slaves, making a fascinating and absorbing collection that remembers and commemorates one of the most brutal and long-lasting inflictions of misery that human beings have inflicted upon other human beings.
Unheard Voices: Finding language and belonging in the Deaf and hearing worlds
by Dawn MauldonIn this poignant and powerful memoir, the author tells the story of their childhood growing up with Deaf parents. Through intimate and evocative prose, Dawn explores the challenges and joys of living in a world that is often hostile and unwelcoming to those who are different.From the isolation and challenges that come with being a child of Deaf parents, to the strength and resilience that comes with love and belonging, the author shares their unique and deeply personal perspective on what it means to see and communicate in a richly silent world.This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Deaf experience, and the power of love and belonging to overcome adversity. Beautifully written and deeply moving, Unheard Voices is an exploration of what it means to be a part of a diverse and vibrant culture.
An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript
by Sharonah Esther FredrickThis groundbreaking work in literature, cultural studies, and history compares the two greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru&’s lower Andean regions.
Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z (Postwestern Horizons)
by Stephen TatumIn Unhomely Wests Stephen Tatum presents twenty-six essays exploring selected literary, visual art, cinematic, and musical representations of homelessness as a theme, a trope, an affliction, a threat, and a condition of alienation in the late modern and postmodern American West. Arranged in alphabetical order, from &“Alphabet/Abecedario&” to &“Zombieland,&” Tatum&’s essays aim to discover how his eclectic selection of texts both produce uncanny literary effects and bear witness to the entangled capitalist, geopolitical, and ecological crises that shape our external world and our &“unhomely&” textual worlds. In keeping with the etymological and conceptual linkage between the unhomely and the uncanny, Tatum&’s critical meditations focus on both uncanny textual architectures and architecturally unhomely junkspaces of abandonment and ruin, of corporeal displacement, and of cognitive or affective disorientation. And since an emergent unhomely structure of feeling exposes how our lived present is saturated with history&’s apparitional revenants, this collection of essays—comprising a new lexicon of unhomely Wests—conveys a hauntology underwritten by spectrality as a theme, a trope, an image. Committed to revising the conventional academic text, Unhomely Wests exemplifies Roland Barthes&’s directive that we consider the alphabetic order as a call to &“Cut! Resume the story in another way!&”
Unhuman Culture
by Daniel CottomIt is widely acknowledged that the unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of "the Other" in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and postcolonial studies, and shows up in the "antihumanism" associated with figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. One might trace its genealogy, as Freud did, to the Copernican, Darwinian, and psychoanalytic revolutions that displaced humanity from the center of the universe. Or as Karl Marx and others suggested, one might lose human identity in the face of economic, technological, political, and ideological forces and structures.With dazzling breadth, wit, and intelligence, Unhuman Culture ranges over literature, art, and theory, ancient to postmodern, to explore the ways in which contemporary culture defines humanity in terms of all that it is not. Daniel Cottom is equally at home reading medieval saints' lives and the fiction of Angela Carter, plumbing the implications of Napoleon's self-coronation and the attacks of 9/11, considering the paintings of Pieter Bruegel and the plastic-surgery-as-performance of the body artist Orlan.For Cottom, the unhuman does not necessarily signify the inhuman, in the sense of conspicuous or extraordinary cruelty. It embraces, too, the superhuman, the supernatural, the demonic, and the subhuman; the supposedly disjunctive animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the realms of artifice, technology, and fantasy. It plays a role in theoretical discussions of the sublime, personal memoirs of the Holocaust, aesthetic reflections on technology, economic discourses on globalization, and popular accounts of terrorism. Whereas it once may have seemed that the concept of culture always, by definition, pertained to humanity, it now may seem impossible to avoid the realization that we must look at things differently. It is not only art, in the narrow sense of the word, that we must recognize as unhuman. For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman culture.
A Unification of Morphology and Syntax: Investigations into Romance and Albanian Dialects (Routledge Leading Linguists)
by M. Rita Manzini Leonardo M. SavoiaThis highly original and innovative analysis focuses on the morphosyntax of dialects comprising Italy, Corsica and the Italian and Romansch-speaking areas of Switzerland. The empirical base used in the book includes a wealth of previously unknown or understudied data from a variety of Romansch dialects, whilst the theoretical framework is extremely sophisticated and up-to-date. Linguists of all genres will be fascinated by Manzini and Savoia’s radical conclusion: they claim that their work suggests a unification of morphology and syntax.
Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds and Video Games
by James Paul GeeDiscourse Analysis is becoming increasingly "multimodal", concerned primarily with the interplay of language, image and sound. Video Games allow humans to create, live in and have conversations with new multimodal worlds. In this ground-breaking new textbook, best-selling author and experienced gamer, James Paul Gee, sets out a new theory and method of discourse analysis which applies to language, the real world, science and video games. Rather than analysing the language of video games, this book uses discourse analysis to study games as communicational forms. Gee argues that language, science, games and everyday life are deeply related and each is a series of conversations. Discourse analysis should not be just about language, but about human interactions with the world, with games, and with each other, interactions that make meaning and sustain lives amid risk and complexity. Written in a highly accessible style and drawing on a wide range of video games from World of Warcraft and Chibi-Robo to Tetris, this engaging textbook is essential reading for students in discourse analysis, new media and digital culture.
Unified Fields
by Janine RogersLiterary form presents an important opportunity for understanding the relationship between literature and science. Through a series of close readings of poetry and prose, Unified Fields demonstrates that formal structures in literature can relate to scientific concepts through their essential interpretive functions. Janine Rogers engages with a wide range of writing from Canadian, British, and American authors, including the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robyn Sarah as well as prose by Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Stephen Hawking. She employs an interdisciplinary approach combining formalist, historical, and theoretical literary practice, informed by interpretive frameworks developed in the philosophy of science. Although dedicated to contemporary texts, Rogers's analysis is frequently rooted in historical contexts of form, including Euclidean geometry and medieval romance, developed when the distinction between literature and science was not so drastic. These historical connections demonstrate that continuities of form resonate in both contemporary literature and science. Through critical analysis and engaging prose, Unified Fields bridges an important disciplinary gap by revealing how literary practice informs scientific understanding.
Unified Fields: Science and Literary Form
by Janine RogersLiterary form presents an important opportunity for understanding the relationship between literature and science. Through a series of close readings of poetry and prose, Unified Fields demonstrates that formal structures in literature can relate to scientific concepts through their essential interpretive functions. Janine Rogers engages with a wide range of writing from Canadian, British, and American authors, including the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robyn Sarah as well as prose by Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Stephen Hawking. She employs an interdisciplinary approach combining formalist, historical, and theoretical literary practice, informed by interpretive frameworks developed in the philosophy of science. Although dedicated to contemporary texts, Rogers's analysis is frequently rooted in historical contexts of form, including Euclidean geometry and medieval romance, developed when the distinction between literature and science was not so drastic. These historical connections demonstrate that continuities of form resonate in both contemporary literature and science. Through critical analysis and engaging prose, Unified Fields bridges an important disciplinary gap by revealing how literary practice informs scientific understanding.
Uniformity and Variability in the Indian English Accent (Elements in World Englishes)
by Caroline R. WiltshireThe sounds of Indian English are distinct and recognizable to outsiders, while insiders perceive variations in how English has developed in this large diverse population. What characteristics mark the unity? Which are clues to a speaker's origins or identity? This Element synthesizes research over the past fifty years and adds to it, focusing on selected features of consonants, vowels, and suprasegmentals (stress, intonation, rhythm) to understand the characteristics of Indian English accents and sources of its uniformity and variability. These accent features, perceptible by humans and discoverable by computational approaches, may be used in expressing identity, both local and pan-Indian.
The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
by Brad S. GregoryIn a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.