Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Author: American Comparative Literature Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645858X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

Author: Jing Tsu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735214743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Author: Roosevelt Montas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

Author: American Comparative Literature Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Author: Heta Pyrhönen
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787351955
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading? Alongside these questions, the contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading.They consider, for example, how paying attention to readers’ emotional reactions as an indispensable component of reading affects our conception of the reading process. Other chapters consider how reading can be explored through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel and the healing power of books.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : International cooperation
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Author: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557532909
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Articles in this volume focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the field of comparative cultural studies. Contributors are Kwaku Asante-Darko on African postcolonial literature; Hendrik Birus on Goethe's concept of world literature; Amiya Dev on comparative literature in India; Marian Galik on interliterariness; Ernst Grabovszki on globalization, new media, and world literature; Jan Walsh Hokenson on the culture of the context; Marko Juvan on literariness; Karl S.Y. Kao on metaphor; Kristof Jacek Kozak on comparative literature in Slovenia; Manuela Mourao on comparative literature in the USA; Jola Skulj on cultural identity; Slobodan Sucur on period styles and theory; Peter Swirski on popular and highbrow literature; Antony Tatlow on textual anthropology; William H. Thornton on East/West power politics in cultural studies; Steven Totosy on comparative cultural studies; and Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong on comparative literature in China. The papers are followed by an index and a bibliography of scholarship in comparative literature and cultural studies compiled by Steven Totosy, Steven Aoun, and Wendy C. Nielsen.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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