Author: Sidney I Dobrin
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809335638
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Search Strategies for Writing Studies -- or, Planning for a Future That / Sidney I. Dobrin and Kyle Jensen -- PART I / SPACE -- Abductive Historiography: This Is a (Feminist) Test / Jessica Enoch -- A Method for Getting Carried Away: Kentucky's Calling / Jenny Rice -- PART II / TIME -- The Writing Wager: Gambling, Risk, and the Future of Writing / Brooke Rollins -- Writing(,) Hypothetically / Kevin J. Porter -- PART III / ARCHIVE -- Archival Subjects and the Violence of Writing / Michael Bernard-Donals -- Writing, Textual Forgery, and the Discourse of Possibilities / Ron Fortune -- PART IV / NETWORKS -- Abduction, Writing, Digital Humanities / Collin Brooke -- Craft Technology: Social Networked Delivery / Jeff Rice -- PART V / INSCRIPTION -- Metaphors for the Future: How to Train the Riparian Subjects of "Writing" Studies / Jodie Nicotra -- Intoning Writing / Matthew Heard -- PART VI / LIFE -- Writing the Virus / John Muckelbauer -- Abducted by Nada: Ego Death, Open Source, and the Importance of Doing Nothing in the Infoquake / Richard M. Doyle -- Contributors -- Index -- Back Cover
Abducting Writing Studies
Author: Sidney I Dobrin
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809335638
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Search Strategies for Writing Studies -- or, Planning for a Future That / Sidney I. Dobrin and Kyle Jensen -- PART I / SPACE -- Abductive Historiography: This Is a (Feminist) Test / Jessica Enoch -- A Method for Getting Carried Away: Kentucky's Calling / Jenny Rice -- PART II / TIME -- The Writing Wager: Gambling, Risk, and the Future of Writing / Brooke Rollins -- Writing(,) Hypothetically / Kevin J. Porter -- PART III / ARCHIVE -- Archival Subjects and the Violence of Writing / Michael Bernard-Donals -- Writing, Textual Forgery, and the Discourse of Possibilities / Ron Fortune -- PART IV / NETWORKS -- Abduction, Writing, Digital Humanities / Collin Brooke -- Craft Technology: Social Networked Delivery / Jeff Rice -- PART V / INSCRIPTION -- Metaphors for the Future: How to Train the Riparian Subjects of "Writing" Studies / Jodie Nicotra -- Intoning Writing / Matthew Heard -- PART VI / LIFE -- Writing the Virus / John Muckelbauer -- Abducted by Nada: Ego Death, Open Source, and the Importance of Doing Nothing in the Infoquake / Richard M. Doyle -- Contributors -- Index -- Back Cover
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809335638
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Search Strategies for Writing Studies -- or, Planning for a Future That / Sidney I. Dobrin and Kyle Jensen -- PART I / SPACE -- Abductive Historiography: This Is a (Feminist) Test / Jessica Enoch -- A Method for Getting Carried Away: Kentucky's Calling / Jenny Rice -- PART II / TIME -- The Writing Wager: Gambling, Risk, and the Future of Writing / Brooke Rollins -- Writing(,) Hypothetically / Kevin J. Porter -- PART III / ARCHIVE -- Archival Subjects and the Violence of Writing / Michael Bernard-Donals -- Writing, Textual Forgery, and the Discourse of Possibilities / Ron Fortune -- PART IV / NETWORKS -- Abduction, Writing, Digital Humanities / Collin Brooke -- Craft Technology: Social Networked Delivery / Jeff Rice -- PART V / INSCRIPTION -- Metaphors for the Future: How to Train the Riparian Subjects of "Writing" Studies / Jodie Nicotra -- Intoning Writing / Matthew Heard -- PART VI / LIFE -- Writing the Virus / John Muckelbauer -- Abducted by Nada: Ego Death, Open Source, and the Importance of Doing Nothing in the Infoquake / Richard M. Doyle -- Contributors -- Index -- Back Cover
Rhetorical Delivery and Digital Technologies
Author: Sean Morey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317407083
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317407083
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This book theorizes digital logics and applications for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Digital writing technologies invite a re-evaluation about what delivery can offer to rhetorical studies and writing practices. Sean Morey argues that what delivery provides is access to the unspeakable, unconscious elements of rhetoric, not primarily through emotion or feeling as is usually offered by previous studies, but affect, a domain of sensation implicit in the (overlooked) original Greek term for delivery, hypokrisis. Moreover, the primary means for delivering affect is both the logic and technology of a network, construed as modern, digital networks, but also networks of associations between humans and nonhuman objects. Casting delivery in this light offers new rhetorical trajectories that promote its incorporation into digital networked-bodies. Given its provocative and broad reframing of delivery, this book provides original, robust ways to understand rhetorical delivery not only through a lens of digital writing technologies, but all historical means of enacting delivery, offering implications that will ultimately affect how scholars of rhetoric will come to view not only the other canons of rhetoric, but rhetoric as a whole.
Rhetorical Speculations
Author: Scott Sundvall
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607328313
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The future of writing studies is fundamentally tied to advancing technological development—writing cannot be done without a technology and different technologies mediate writing differently. In Rhetorical Speculations, contributors engage with emerging technologies of composition through “speculative modeling” as a strategy for anticipatory, futural thinking for rhetoric and writing studies. Rhetoric and writing studies often engages technological shifts reactively, after the production and reception of rhetoric and writing has changed. This collection allows rhetoric and writing scholars to explore modes of critical speculation into the transformative effect of emerging technologies, particularly as a means to speculate on future shifts in the intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional frameworks of the field. In doing so, the project repositions rhetoric and writing scholars as proprietors of our technological future to come rather than as secondary receivers, critics, and adjusters of the technological present. Major and emerging voices in the field offer a range of styles that include pragmatic, technical, and philosophical approaches to the issue of speculative rhetoric, exploring what new media/writing studies could be—theoretically, pedagogically, and institutionally—as future technologies begin to impinge on the work of writing. Rhetorical Speculations is at the cutting edge of the subject of futures thinking and will have broad appeal to scholars of rhetoric, literacy, futures studies, and material and popular culture. Contributors: Bahareh Brittany Alaei, Sarah J. Arroyo, Kristine L. Blair, Geoffrey V. Carter, Sid Dobrin, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Steve Holmes, Kyle Jensen, Halcyon Lawrence, Alexander Monea, Sean Morey, Alex Reid, Jeff Rice, Gregory L. Ulmer, Anna Worm
Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric
Author: Laurie Gries
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607326744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347
Book Description
While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research. Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand. As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric will be a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing. Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607326744
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347
Book Description
While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research. Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand. As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric will be a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing. Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey
Responding to the Sacred
Author: Michael Bernard-Donals
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271089733
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations of rhetoric. Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred. This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Michelle Ballif, Jean Bessette, Trey Conner, Richard Doyle, David Frank, Daniel M. Gross, Kevin Hamilton, Cynthia Haynes, Steven Mailloux, James R. Martel, Jodie Nicotra, Ned O’Gorman, and Brooke Rollins.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271089733
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations of rhetoric. Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred. This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Michelle Ballif, Jean Bessette, Trey Conner, Richard Doyle, David Frank, Daniel M. Gross, Kevin Hamilton, Cynthia Haynes, Steven Mailloux, James R. Martel, Jodie Nicotra, Ned O’Gorman, and Brooke Rollins.
Metabolizing Capital
Author: Christian J. Pulver
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607329689
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Metabolizing Capital outlines a critical ecological framework to guide the theorization of writing and rhetoric in the dynamic contexts of Web 3.0 and environmental crisis. The rise of the global cloud and the internet-of-things have ushered in a new stage of the internet that marks a transition from the celebrated user-generated content of Web 2.0 to the data-driven networks of Web 3.0. As social media networks have expanded, so has the amount of writing and communication we do online. This has created several valuable sub-layers of data and metadata about consumer-citizens that corporations and governments now routinely collect, store, and monetize. This frenzy to collect more data is contributing to several problematic social and environmental concerns as flows of information and capital dangerously accelerate how energy and matter move through ecosystems at every scale. This book explores the planetary consequences of Web 3.0 and the vital role that writing and data production play in accelerating capital circulation, from concerns raised by the growing energy demands of the information industries, to growing streams of electronic waste, to the growing socioeconomic tensions arising as a result of information monopolies. A posthuman, Marxist analysis of digital culture and writing, Metabolizing Capital contributes to and challenges current understandings of rhetorical agency and actor networks. Combining scholarship from writing studies, rhetoric, and composition with research in metabolic ecology, information theory, media studies, cognitive psychology, history, and new materialism, this book should be of interest to scholars in writing studies as well as others who study digital culture, ecological literacies, the history of writing and information, big data, and environmental concerns related to electronics and the information industries.
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607329689
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Metabolizing Capital outlines a critical ecological framework to guide the theorization of writing and rhetoric in the dynamic contexts of Web 3.0 and environmental crisis. The rise of the global cloud and the internet-of-things have ushered in a new stage of the internet that marks a transition from the celebrated user-generated content of Web 2.0 to the data-driven networks of Web 3.0. As social media networks have expanded, so has the amount of writing and communication we do online. This has created several valuable sub-layers of data and metadata about consumer-citizens that corporations and governments now routinely collect, store, and monetize. This frenzy to collect more data is contributing to several problematic social and environmental concerns as flows of information and capital dangerously accelerate how energy and matter move through ecosystems at every scale. This book explores the planetary consequences of Web 3.0 and the vital role that writing and data production play in accelerating capital circulation, from concerns raised by the growing energy demands of the information industries, to growing streams of electronic waste, to the growing socioeconomic tensions arising as a result of information monopolies. A posthuman, Marxist analysis of digital culture and writing, Metabolizing Capital contributes to and challenges current understandings of rhetorical agency and actor networks. Combining scholarship from writing studies, rhetoric, and composition with research in metabolic ecology, information theory, media studies, cognitive psychology, history, and new materialism, this book should be of interest to scholars in writing studies as well as others who study digital culture, ecological literacies, the history of writing and information, big data, and environmental concerns related to electronics and the information industries.
Abducted
Author: Susan A. Clancy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029577
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it? To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated "abductees"--old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis. Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. "Being abducted," writes Clancy, "may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium." This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029577
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it? To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated "abductees"--old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis. Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. "Being abducted," writes Clancy, "may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium." This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.
Entitled Opinions
Author: Caddie Alford
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361413
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
"An expansive and detailed reconsideration of what counts as an opinion in the age of social media"--
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361413
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
"An expansive and detailed reconsideration of what counts as an opinion in the age of social media"--
The Journey of Abduction
Author: Barbara Madrid
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1441578463
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 459
Book Description
Yolanda’s journey begins when she awakens in unknown territory; driven to the end of another country, the very edge of Mexico near the Caribbean waters of Espiritu Santo Bay. What happens there will change her life forever. Tormented by the Olmos family conflicts and her own Native American beliefs Yolanda must be careful not to reveal anything about herself lest they think her to be a witch. The most dangerous realization of all Yolanda finds herself falling in love with the man she hates the most, the man that holds her captive.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1441578463
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 459
Book Description
Yolanda’s journey begins when she awakens in unknown territory; driven to the end of another country, the very edge of Mexico near the Caribbean waters of Espiritu Santo Bay. What happens there will change her life forever. Tormented by the Olmos family conflicts and her own Native American beliefs Yolanda must be careful not to reveal anything about herself lest they think her to be a witch. The most dangerous realization of all Yolanda finds herself falling in love with the man she hates the most, the man that holds her captive.
Grafting Helen
Author: Matthew Gumpert
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029917123X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial anchor for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coveted once again. Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029917123X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial anchor for much of Western thought and literature. Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coveted once again. Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.