Allegories of Writing PDF Download

Author: Bruce Clarke
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426241
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This is a theoretical study of human metamorphosis in Western literature.

Author: Jane Poyner
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821416863
Category : Animal rights
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.

Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231075695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The Corporeal Self argues that questions about identity, conceived in bodily terms, are not only relevant for Melville and Hawthorne, the two nineteenth-century authors whose works are positioned at opposite extremes of the consideration of human identity, but lie at the heart of the American literary tradition, and have, in that tradition, their own revisionary status.

Author: Dan Sicoli
Publisher: Pudding House Publications
ISBN: 9781589982611
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Author: R. Barton Palmer
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813070252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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The rise of an influential new family of poetry in the Middle Ages This book is the first collective examination of late medieval intimate first-person narratives that blur the lines between author, narrator, and protagonist and usually feature personification allegory and courtly love tropes, creating an experimental new family of poetry. In this volume, contributors analyze why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries. The editors identify and discuss three predominant forms within this family: debate poetry, dream allegories, and autobiographies. Contributors offer textual analyses of key works from late medieval German, French, Italian, and Iberian literature, with discussion of developments in England, as well. Allegory and the Poetic Self offers a sophisticated, theoretically current discussion of relevant literature. This exploration of medieval “I” narratives offers insights not just into the premodern period but also into Western literature’s subsequent traditions of self-analysis and identity crafting through storytelling.

Author: Eric Jager
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226391168
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In today's increasingly electronic world, we say our personality traits are "hard-wired" and we "replay" our memories. But we use a different metaphor when we speak of someone "reading" another's mind or a desire to "turn over a new leaf"—these phrases refer to the "book of the self," an idea that dates from the beginnings of Western culture. Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the modern day. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a "book of the heart" modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art. For instance, medieval saints' legends tell of martyrs whose hearts recorded divine inscriptions; lyrics and romances feature lovers whose hearts are inscribed with their passion; paintings depict hearts as books; and medieval scribes even produced manuscript codices shaped like hearts. "The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as artifact on our language and culture. Reading this book broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas."—Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf

Author: Paul De Man
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300028454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts--their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values--are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."--Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."--Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism, '... which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."--Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 2048

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Author: Matilde Battistini
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 9780892368181
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"The purpose of this volume is to provide today's readers and museum-goers with a tool for orienting themselves in the world of images and learning to read the hidden meanings of certain famous paintings."--Introduction.

Author: Kenneth Borris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521781299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined precipitously around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry, particularly in the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Through wide-ranging consideration of Homeric and Virgilian reception and its influence on both continental and English literary theory, he shows that allegorical epic tended to double for and displace epic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyses the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry. Whereas standard literary history assumes Sidney opposes allegory, and that Milton minimises or rejects it in following Spenser, Borris's detailed readings demonstrate that Sidney and Milton are also major allegorists, and that Spenser remained so even in the latter books of The Faerie Queene. This book was first published in 2000.