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Author: Todd Compton Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. It views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression and are necessary, yet dangerous, to society.
Author: Todd Compton Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 460
Book Description
This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. It views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression and are necessary, yet dangerous, to society.
Author: Katharine Quarmby Publisher: Granta Books ISBN: 1846273463 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
Every few months there's a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It's easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable and fundamental truth about how our society treats its most unequal citizens. In Scapegoat, Katharine Quarmby looks behind the headlines to question and understand our discomfort with disabled people. Combining fascinating examples from history with tenacious investigation and powerful first person interviews, Scapegoat will change the way we think about disability - and about the changes we must make as a society to ensure that disabled people are seen as equal citizens, worthy of respect, not targets for taunting, torture and attack.
Author: Adam J. Sorkin Publisher: Popular Press ISBN: 9780879724481 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
These fourteen original essays on the politics of literature investigate aspects of our understanding of the political muse, with a focus on American writing since World War II. Essays include: "American Literature, Politics, and the Last Good War," "The Literary Art of the Hollywood Ten," "The Plight of the Left-Wing Screenwriter," and "Amiri Baraka and the Politics of Popular Culture."
Author: Anne DeLong Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739170449 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 179
Book Description
Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, this study uncovers a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized “Other-possession,” an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity. This study interrogates the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity through an examination of Romantic poetry, prose, and theory that utilizes mesmeric and Medusan metaphors to suggest creative inspiration.Building on recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon, this work suggests that the mesmeric Medusan muse not only enables creativity for women writers but also provides a mirror in which they view (and through which they give voice to) their own societal oppression. The mesmeric Medusan muse in Romantic-era literature—from the Ancient Mariner and the Frankenstein monster to the tragic, abandoned Sapphic poetess—often represents the face of oppression, an unwelcome and monstrous truth in nineteenth-century British society. For women writers in particular, braving the stare of the Medusan muse enhances empathy, and therefore inspiration and literary productivity.
Author: Brian Collins Publisher: MSU Press ISBN: 1628950129 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
In the beginning, says the ancient Hindu text the Rg Veda, was man. And from man’s sacrifice and dismemberment came the entire world, including the hierarchical ordering of human society. The Head Beneath the Altar is the first book to present a wide-ranging study of Hindu texts read through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory of the sacrificial origin of religion and culture. For those interested in Girard and comparative religion, the book also performs a careful reading of Girard’s work, drawing connections between his thought and the work of theorists like Georges Dumézil and Giorgio Agamben. Brian Collins examines the idea of sacrifice from the earliest recorded rituals through the flowering of classical mythology and the ancient Indian institutions of the duel, the oath, and the secret warrior society. He also uncovers implicit and explicit critiques in the tradition, confirming Girard’s intuition that Hinduism offers an alternative anti-sacrificial worldview to the one contained in the gospels.
Author: François Proulx Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1487505477 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 403
Book Description
Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-si?cle novel of formation in France. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen's masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie st?rile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, Fran?ois Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, many of which have rarely been studied, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen's reading habits. Against this cultural backdrop, he illuminates all that was at stake in representations of the male reader by prominent novelists of the period, including Jules Vall?s, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barr?s, Andr? Gide, and Marcel Proust. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Fin-de-si?cle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how Gide and Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-si?cle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.
Author: Mary Lynn Kittelson Publisher: Open Court Publishing ISBN: 9780812693638 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
In The Soul of Popular Culture, leading writers and critics, many of them influenced by the thought of C. G. Jung, draw upon the insights of depth psychology to delve into the meanings of TV programs like Star Trek and Fawlty Towers, movies such as The Piano and The Silence of the Lambs, and other contemporary media, as well as the public preoccupation with such issues as abortion, AIDS, the O.J. Simpson trial, and our enduring fascination with Elvis.
Author: Ευφροσύνη Σπέντζου Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780199240043 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.
Author: Jennifer Larson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317296745 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 430
Book Description
Understanding Greek Religion is one of the first attempts to fully examine any religion from a cognitivist perspective, applying methods and findings from the cognitive science of religion to the ancient Greek world. In this book, Jennifer Larson shows that many of the fundamentals of Greek religion, such as anthropomorphic gods, divinatory procedures, purity beliefs, reciprocity, and sympathetic magic arise naturally as by-products of normal human cognition. Drawing on evidence from across the ancient Greek world, Larson provides detailed coverage of Greek theology and local pantheons, rituals including processions, animal sacrifice and choral dance, and afterlife beliefs as they were expressed through hero worship and mystery cults. Eighteen in-depth essays illustrate the theoretical discussion with primary sources and include case studies of key cult inscriptions from Kyrene, Kos, and Miletos. This volume features maps, tables, and over twenty images to support and expand on the text, and will provide conceptual tools for understanding the actions and beliefs that constitute a religion. Additionally, Larson offers the first detailed discussion of cognition and memory in the transmission of Greek religious beliefs and rituals, as well as a glossary of terms and a bibliographical essay on the cognitive science of religion. Understanding Greek Religion is an essential resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Greek culture and ancient Mediterranean religions.
Author: Todd Compton
Author: Todd Compton
Author: Katharine Quarmby
Author: Adam J. Sorkin
Author: Anne DeLong
Author: Brian Collins
Author: François Proulx
Author: Mary Lynn Kittelson
Author: Dr. Dorn
Author: Ευφροσύνη Σπέντζου
Author: Jennifer Larson