Author: Groupe de recherches anglo-américaines de ToursPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Ré-inventer le réel
Author: Groupe de recherches anglo-américaines de ToursPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Exotic Memories
Author: Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804765763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto 'savage' or 'primitive' cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism. In concentrating on writers from the age of the New Imperialism (1880-1920), this book reveals an important contradiction at the heart of the exoticist impulse: the very expansion that enabled European writers to go in search of exotic Others ensured the eventual disappearance of the exotic. Turn-of-the-century writers of exoticism thus give voice to a deep nostalgia both for the values supposedly lost to the West in its process of modernization and for those once exotic places in which they found, with increasing disappointment, not pristine innocence but merely the traces of their own culture. The author concentrates on four writers - Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad - although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. The works of these four writers foreground attitudes and assumptions useful for understanding a wide array of phenomena: an examination of these works shows how nostalgia for a cultural Other was built into the intellectual configuration of modernism, throws light on the early history of anthropology, and helps us understand features of our own cultural formation that are becoming increasingly important in today's global village. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the 'weak thought' of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose poststructuralist theories are only now becoming known in the United States. 'Weak thought' seeks to supersede outmoded, metaphysical categories of thought, not by replacing them with something new, but by an elegaic, recollective, and rhetorical dwelling within those categories. The author also makes creative use of narrative theory, and draws on the recent 'new historicism', reading literary texts to excellent effect against the historical events that made them possible.
A History of the Surrealist Novel
Author: Anna WatzPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 678
Book Description
A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This approach extends received narratives regarding surrealism's geographical locations and considers its transnational movement and modes of circulation. Moreover, it challenges critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine terms, and which tie the movement to the interwar or early post-war years. This book will appeal both to scholars and students of surrealism and its legacies, modernist literature, and the history of the novel.
Handbook of Diachronic Narratology
Author: Peter HühnPublisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110616645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1033
Book Description
This handbook brings together 42 contributions by leading narratologists devoted to the study of narrative devices in European literatures from antiquity to the present. Each entry examines the use of a specific narrative device in one or two national literatures across the ages, whether in successive or distant periods of time. Through the analysis of representative texts in a range of European languages, the authors compellingly trace the continuities and evolution of storytelling devices, as well as their culture-specific manifestations. In response to Monika Fludernik’s 2003 call for a "diachronization of narratology," this new handbook complements existing synchronic approaches that tend to be ahistorical in their outlook, and departs from postclassical narratologies that often prioritize thematic and ideological concerns. A new direction in narrative theory, diachronic narratology explores previously overlooked questions, from the evolution of free indirect speech from the Middle Ages to the present, to how changes in narrative sequence encoded the shift from a sacred to a secular worldview in early modern Romance literatures. An invaluable new resource for literary theorists, historians, comparatists, discourse analysts, and linguists.
Author: Publisher: Editions Bréal
ISBN: 2749523028
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
Figures of Chance II
Author: Anne DupratPublisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040021743
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404
Book Description
Figures of Chance II: Chance in Theory and Practice proposes a multidisciplinary analysis of cultural phenomena related to notions of chance and contingency. Alongside its transhistorical companion volume (Figures of Chance I), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, by varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. This volume reevaluates the role played by figurative representations of chance in contemporary discourses about chance and contingency. Written by seven interdisciplinary teams, and encompassing philosophy, literature, history of science, sociology, mathematics, cognitive science, information science, and art history, this text puts scientific conceptions of chance into dialogue with their contemporary literary and artistic representations. It thus brings out the central role played by art in the human perception of chance, and in our methods for projecting the future, in order to better understand contemporary human attitudes in the face of risk.
Queneau's Fiction
Author: Christopher ShorleyPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521303974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
A general study of Queneau in English, originally published in 1985, which offers a straightforward introduction to his novels and short stories.
Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature
Author: Paul FoxPublisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
ISBN: 3838255739
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
This collection seeks to examine the intersections of aesthetics and morality, of what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. The inclination toward either the artistic or social perspective in each essay has been rendered more straightforwardly by employing capitalization for aesthetic Decadence, and the lower-case to illustrate moral decadence.Both artistic and social values are inflected by their histories, and, as time passes, so the definition of what it means to be D/decadent alters. The very ideas of the decline from a higher standard, of social malaise, of aesthetic ennui, all presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. Purportedly decadent artists focused upon the fleeting present, ascribed value to experiencing the aesthetic moment in its purest form, and it was precisely due to this focus upon living in, and for, the moment that society often responded by expressing moral contempt for the perceived hedonism of art. The aesthetic rejection of contemporary value added to the conflict between the literary and social inflections of Decadent interpretation. The truly decadent was condemned by artists as the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself. This conflict underlies the range of essays in the collection.
African Sociological Review
Author: Re-Reading Zola and Worldwide Naturalism
Author: Marie-Sophie ArmstrongPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445
Book Description
Re-Reading Zola and Worldwide Naturalism continues the discussion of Émile Zola and French naturalism with examinations of unexplored areas of the founding father’s project and legacy. In addition to offering essays on Zola’s lesser known naturalist contemporaries, the volume extends the investigation of the naturalist literary current to include areas of Europe outside France, as well as the Americas and Asia, tracking its persistence in various forms through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The authors pay particular attention to the ways naturalism was conceived and then received, including in other channels, undergoing transformations in new social conditions and creating other versions of the basic precepts. This work features multidisciplinary and comparative approaches to the study of naturalism, paying tribute to Anna Gural-Migdal—a Professor of French Literature and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, in Canada, who specializes in the visual aspect of Zola’s Rougon Macquart novels and the transfer of these strategies to naturalist film. She has been a leader in the field of Zola and naturalism in her role as president of the AIZEN for almost fifteen of its twenty years of existence.