Critical Insights: Literature in Times of Crisis PDF Download

Author: Robert C. Evans
Publisher: Salem Press
ISBN: 9781642657548
Category : Apocalypse in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Almost since its inception, literature has emphasized and explored crises of various sorts, including political upheavals, social turmoil, destructive warfare, familial and personal conflicts, and devastating external dangers, especially those involving disease, the environment, the economy, and natural disasters. This book explores a wide range of kinds of crises and the ways they have been written about in literature of various genres and time periods. It also emphasizes the artistry involved in the various works it examines.

Author: Alaric Hall
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
As the global banking boom of the early twenty-first century expanded towards implosion, Icelandic media began calling the country's celebrity financiers útrásarvíkingar: “raiding vikings.” This new coinage encapsulated the macho, medievalist nationalism which underwrote Iceland's exponential financialisation. Yet within a few days in October 2008, Iceland saw all its main banks collapse beneath debts worth nearly ten times the country's GDP.Hall charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world's liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times.As Iceland's biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the “developing world” in Iceland's post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland's traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world.The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.

Author: Sofia Ahlberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367637996
Category : Crises
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students - from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic. Addressing the impact on students' ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses: Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux. This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

Author: P. Jay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137398035
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Demonstrating that the supposed drawbacks of the humanities are in fact their source of practical value, Jay explores current debates about the role of the humanities in higher education, puts them in historical context, and offers humanists and their supporters concrete ways to explain the practical value of a contemporary humanities education.

Author: Mark Greif
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400852102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities—race, religious faith, and the rise of technology—that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.

Author: Olga Bezhanova
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The book explores novels, essays and poetry published by Spanish writers in response to the global economic crisis that began in 2008. Spain has been experiencing the crisis in a particularly painful way, and the artistic response to these traumatic events has been powerful and abundant. The literature of the crisis is pointing to the probability that the crisis is not a temporary problem that will be resolved once and for all if correct economic measures are taken. To the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the losses in long-term employment, the growing precariousness of work, the increased economic insecurity, the citizens' disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to withstand the pressures of global capital, the erosion of the welfare state, and the explosive growth in inequality that we associate with the crisis are not likely to be reversed. Spanish artists are exploring the reasons behind Spain's particularly painful experience of the crisis and, at the same time, are placing the suffering that the crisis is causing in Spain within the context of global developments that are ensuring its durability. Essays by Antonio Muñoz Molina and Lucía Etxebarria, novels by Rafael Chirbes, Luis García Montero, Benjamín Prado, and Belén Gopegui, and poetry by the artists who contributed to the collections titled En legítima defensa. Poetas en tiempos de crisis and Marca(da) España. Retrato poético de una sociedad en crisis point to the necessity of expanding our vision of the crisis from the purely financial to a broader definition that will include the changes the crisis augurs for the areas of human existence that lie outside the strictly economic realm.

Author: Robert Kiely
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Incomparable Poetry: An Essay on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and Irish Literature is an attempt to describe the ways in which the financial crisis of 2007-8 impacted literature in Ireland, and thereby describe the ways in which poetry engages with, is structured by, and wrestles with economic issues.Ireland and its contemporary poetry is a particularly suitable case study for studying the effect of the economic crisis on Anglophone poetry, because poetry in Ireland has a special relationship to the state and economy due to its status as a postcolonial nation-state. Beginning with a summary of recent Irish economic and cultural history, and moving across experimental and mainstream poetry, this essay outlines how the poetry of Trevor Joyce, Leontia Flynn, Dave Lordan, and Rachel Warriner addresses in its form and content the boom years of the Celtic Tiger and the financial crisis.Incomparable Poetry also discusses the concerns and historical contexts these poets have turned to in order to make sense of these events - including Chinese history, accountancy, sexual violence, and Iceland's economic history. In contemporary Irish poetry, the author argues, we see a significant interest in matching capitalism's accounting abilities, but in this attempt, these poems often end up broken by the imposition of an external conceptual framework or economic logic. Robert Kiely grew up in Cork, Ireland and now lives in London. His critical work has been published in Irish University Review, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Parish Review, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. His chapbooks include How to Read (Crater, 2017) and Killing the Cop in Your Head (Sad, 2017). He is Poet-in-Residence at University of Surrey for 2019-20.

Author: Maxine Alterio
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
ISBN: 1742532691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In July 1915 the hospital ship Maheno leaves Wellington with seventy New Zealand nurses on board. Addie Harrington and Meg Dutton are assigned to the same cabin. Quiet and cautious, Addie is taken aback by her impetuous, fun-loving roommate. The two women seem to have little in common other than a desire to serve their country. But as they care for injured and dying soldiers in Egypt and France, they discover that deep connections can develop under unusual circumstances. When Meg meets British surgeon Wallace Madison, she falls for him immediately and amidst the chaos of overloaded military hospitals they embark on an intense love affair. Addie suspects Wallace has much to hide and fears the relationship will destroy her friend. 'Maxine Alterio brings a novelist's eye to the startling story of New Zealand's World War I nurses. I was enthralled and moved by the lives of these women and their experiences of war.' Laurence Fearnley, award-winning novelist

Author: Shawn Coyne
Publisher: Black Irish Entertainment LLC
ISBN: 1936891360
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
WHAT IS THE STORY GRID? The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not. The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult). The Story Grid is a tool with many applications: 1. It will tell a writer if a Story ?works? or ?doesn't work. 2. It pinpoints story problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer, revealing exactly where a Story (not the person creating the Story'the Story) has failed. 3. It will tell the writer the specific work necessary to fix that Story's problems. 4. It is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attic drawer. 5. It is a tool that can inspire an original creation.

Author: Sylvia Walby
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150950320X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.