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Author: Robert A. Chodat Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801462479 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Ants, ghosts, cultures, thunderstorms, stock markets, robots, computers: this is just a partial list of the sentient things that have filled American literature over the last century. From modernism forward, writers have given life and voice to both the human and the nonhuman, and in the process addressed the motives, behaviors, and historical pressures that define lives—or things—both everyday and extraordinary. In Worldly Acts and Sentient Things Robert Chodat exposes a major shortcoming in recent accounts of twentieth-century discourse. What is often seen as the "death" of agency is better described as the displacement of agency onto new and varied entities. Writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Don DeLillo are preoccupied with a cluster of related questions. Which entities are capable of believing something, saying something, desiring, hoping, hating, or doing? Which things, in turn, do we treat as worthy of our care, respect, and worship? Drawing on a philosophical tradition exemplified by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, Chodat shows that the death of the Cartesian ego need not entail the elimination of purposeful action altogether. Agents do not dissolve or die away in modern thought and literature; they proliferate—some in human forms, some not. Chodat distinguishes two ideas of agency in particular. One locates purposes in embodied beings, "persons," the other in disembodied entities, "presences." Worldly Acts and Sentient Things is a an engaging blend of philosophy and literary theory for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature, narrative studies, psychology, ethics, and cognitive science.
Author: Robert A. Chodat Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801462479 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Ants, ghosts, cultures, thunderstorms, stock markets, robots, computers: this is just a partial list of the sentient things that have filled American literature over the last century. From modernism forward, writers have given life and voice to both the human and the nonhuman, and in the process addressed the motives, behaviors, and historical pressures that define lives—or things—both everyday and extraordinary. In Worldly Acts and Sentient Things Robert Chodat exposes a major shortcoming in recent accounts of twentieth-century discourse. What is often seen as the "death" of agency is better described as the displacement of agency onto new and varied entities. Writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Don DeLillo are preoccupied with a cluster of related questions. Which entities are capable of believing something, saying something, desiring, hoping, hating, or doing? Which things, in turn, do we treat as worthy of our care, respect, and worship? Drawing on a philosophical tradition exemplified by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, Chodat shows that the death of the Cartesian ego need not entail the elimination of purposeful action altogether. Agents do not dissolve or die away in modern thought and literature; they proliferate—some in human forms, some not. Chodat distinguishes two ideas of agency in particular. One locates purposes in embodied beings, "persons," the other in disembodied entities, "presences." Worldly Acts and Sentient Things is a an engaging blend of philosophy and literary theory for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature, narrative studies, psychology, ethics, and cognitive science.
Author: Aaron Jaffe Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452943931 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
Buffed up to a metallic shine; loose fitting, lopsided, or kludgy; getting in the way or getting lost; collapsing in an explosion of dust caught on the warehouse CCTV. Modern things are going their own ways, and this book attempts to follow them. A course of thought about their comings and goings and cascading side effects, The Way Things Go offers a thesis demonstrated via a century-long countdown of stuff. Modernist critical theory and aesthetic method, it argues, are bound up with the inhuman fate of things as novelty becoming waste. Things are seldom at rest. Far more often they are going their own ways, entering and exiting our zones of attention, interest, and affection. Aaron Jaffe is concerned less with a humanist story of such things—offering anthropomorphizing narratives about recouping the items we use—as he is with the seemingly inscrutable, inhuman capacities of things for coarticulation and coherence. He examines the tension between this inscrutability on the one hand, and the ways things seem ready-made for understanding on the other hand, by means of exposition, thing-and-word-play, conceptual art, essayism, autopoesis, and prop comedy. Among other novelties and detritus, The Way Things Go delves into books, can openers, roller skates, fat, felt, soap, joy buzzers, hobbyhorses, felt erasers, sleds, magic rabbits, and urinals. But it stands apart from the recent flood of thing-talk, rebuking the romantic tendencies caught up in the pathetic nature of debris defining the conversation. Jaffe demonstrates that literary criticism is the one mode of analysis that can unpack the many things that, at first glance, seem so nonliterary.
Author: Michael LeMahieu Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199890404 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
Fictions of Fact and Value looks at logical positivism's major influence on the development of postwar American fiction, charting a literary and philosophical genealogy that has been absent from criticism on the American novel since 1945.
Author: Scott W. Klein Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190912138 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
In A Modernist Cinema, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors - Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles - these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art of filmmaking; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography.
Author: Andrew Taylor Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0415509645 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
This book offers a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature, highlighting how literature and philosophy are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.
Author: Lisa Siraganian Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190255269 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Modernism's Other Work challenges our view of relationships between aesthetic autonomy and the world of daily life--a conjuncture that Lisa Siraganian demonstrates has often been misunderstood in critical studies of modernism. Connecting poetry to the visual arts and politics, the author provides new ways to think about modernist art's relationship.
Author: Jeffrey R. Di Leo Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350012815 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 800
Book Description
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, this book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields. In addition, the book includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.
Author: Jennifer Leigh Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351970771 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
"Embodiment" is a concept that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. However, it is a contested term, and the literature is fragmented, particularly within Higher Education. This has resulted in silos of work that are not easily able to draw on previous or related knowledge in order to support and progress understanding. Conversations on Embodiment Across Higher Education brings a cohesive understanding to congruent approaches by drawing on discussions between academics to explore how they have used embodiment in their work. This book brings academics from fields including dance, drama, education, anthropology, early years, sport, sociology and philosophy together, to begin conversations on how their understandings of embodiment have impacted on their teaching, practice and research. Each chapter explores an aspect of embodiment according to a particular disciplinary or theoretical perspective, and begins a discussion with a contributor with another viewpoint. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students from a diverse range of disciplinary areas, as evidenced by the backgrounds of the contributors. It will be of particular interest to those in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology, dance and drama as well as other movement or body-orientated professionals who are interested in the ideas of embodiment.
Author: E. L. McCallum Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 1438467990 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Develops the sustained, relational, dynamic, and reflective attention demanded by Gertrude Steins novel into a theory of reading and critical analysis. Arguing that Gertrude Steins monumental novel The Making of Americans models a radically aesthetic relation to the world, E. L. McCallum demonstrates how the novel teaches us to read differently, unmaking our habits of reading. Each of the chapters works through close readings of Steins text and a philosophical interlocutor to track a series of theoretical questions: what forms queer time, what are the limits of story, how do we feel emotion, how can we agree on a shared reality if interpretation and imagination intervene, and how do particular media shape how we convey this rich experience? The formally innovative agenda and epistemological drive of Steins novel stages rich thought experiments that bear on questions that are central to some of the most vibrant conversations in literary studies today. In the midst of ongoing debates about the practices of reading, the difficulty of reading, and even the impossibility of reading, the moment has come to have a fuller critical engagement with this landmark novel. This book shows how.
Author: Robert Chodat Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190682167 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? When the explanations of the natural sciences become powerfully precise and authoritative, what is the status of our highest words, the languages that articulate our norms and orient our lives? The Matter of High Words examines a constellation of American writers who in the decades since World War II have posed these questions in distinctive ways. Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace are all self-consciously post-WWII authors, attuned to the fragmentation and skepticism that have defined so much of the literary and critical culture of the last century and more. Yet they also attempt to reach back to older forms of thought and writing that are often thought to have dried up-the traditions of prophecy, of wisdom literature, of the sage. Working within this dual inheritance, these authors are drawn equally to both art and argument, "showing" and "telling," shifting continually between narrative and discursive genres. In their essays they act as moralists, promoting the broad, abstract concepts that might inspire action in the face of naturalistic reduction: community, family, courage, fraternity, marriage, friendship, temperance, judgment. In their narratives, they offer particular lives in particular settings, thick descriptions that give flesh to such high words. Rarely do these movements between genres generate a tidy equilibrium; where their essays speak of cooperation and redemption, their narratives display alienation, loss, and failure. But in pursuing such risky, unorthodox strategies, these postwar sages are not only able to challenge some of the dominant naturalistic theories of the last several decades: cognitive science, neo-Darwinian theory, social science, the fact-value divide in analytic philosophy. Through five chapters of detailed analysis and close reading, Chodat explores the question of whether vocabularies of ought and ought-not can still emerge today, and how these concepts might be embodied, and whether such ideas might be found in things.
Author: Robert A. Chodat
Author: Robert A. Chodat
Author: Aaron Jaffe
Author: Michael LeMahieu
Author: Scott W. Klein
Author: Andrew Taylor
Author: Lisa Siraganian
Author: Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Author: Jennifer Leigh
Author: E. L. McCallum
Author: Robert Chodat