Keller not only reinterpreted literary genres like the legend but, with the bildungsroman and the novella, also shaped the forms that psychologically gauge the modern subject. These contributions ...explore Keller’s texts as evidence of a "threshold narratology," which eludes epochal attributions. Keller’s narrative works are thus revealed as a laboratory of transitory poetics.
With the 2020 election, political polarization in the U.S. entered a ludicrous end-stage. Partisanship, once a pseudo-rational system of biases, has devolved to a conflict between incompatible ...realities. In search of some pathway toward consensus, Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading looks to the works of two iconic Russian-American writers whose literary rivalry mirrors the rift between political parties in the U.S. The matchup has all the markings of an evil-twin narrative, pitting Rand, the muse of libertarian conservatism, against Nabokov, the trickster-genius of the Western canon. Their mid-century novels afford a rare opportunity to arbitrate, by proxy, American political grievances and resolve, in print, its electoral dysfunction. Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight mounts this critical intervention into the Blue/Red blood feud and contemplates, in the cognitive challenges of Nabokov’s fiction, a remedy for its polarized politics. To guard against grandstanding, axe-grinding, deck-stacking, inaccuracy, or obfuscation, Stone’s book proceeds by indirection, exploring four scholarly books that all speak to the peculiar relationship between Rand and Nabokov: Gene Bell-Villada’s On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind (2013), Adam Weiner’s How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (2016), Michael Rodgers’s Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives (2018), and Peter Roberts and Herner Saeverot’s Education and the Limits of Reason: Reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov (2018). Each of these books is seriously flawed, but their numerous interlocking problems conspire to reveal, empirically, via negativa, how literature might tip the scales in America’s partisan deadlock. Ultimately, Stone argues that, when our books get tangled up in our politics, their promise—to help us see to the bottom of things and scooch closer to the asymptote of truth and reality—might be something more than a mirage.
This book explores the interrelation of contemporary French theatre and poetry. Using the pictorial turn in the various branches of art and science, its observable features, and the theoretical ...framework of the conceptual metaphor, this study seeks to gather together the divergent manners in which French poetry and theatre address this turn. Poetry in space and theatricality of poetry are studied alongside theatre, especially to the performative aspect of the originally theological concept of ""kenosis"". In doing so the author attempts to make use of the theological concept of kenosis, of central importance in Novarina’s oeuvre, for theatrical and dramatological purposes. Within poetic rituals, kenotic rituals are also examined in the book in a few theatrical practices – János Pilinszky and Robert Wilson, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba – facilitating a better understanding of Novarina’s works. Accompanied by new English translations in the appendices, this is the first English language monograph related to the French essayist, dramaturg and director Valère Novarina’s theatre, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and literature studies.
Colonial memory and interdisciplinary memorialization across Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Belgium Belgian colonialism was short-lived but left significant traces that are still felt in the twenty-first ...century. This book explores how the imperial past has lived on in Belgium, but also in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The contributing authors approach colonial legacies from an interdisciplinary perspective and examine how literature, politics, the arts, the press, cinema, museal practices, architecture, and language policies – but also justice and ethics – have been used to critically revisit this period of African and European history. Whilst engaging with significant figures such as Sammy Baloji, Chokri Ben Chikha, Gaël Faye, François Kabasele, Alexis Kagame, Edmond Leplae, VY Mudimbe, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Joseph Ndwaniye, and Sony Labou Tansi, this book also analyses the role of places such as the AfricaMuseum, Bujumbura, Colwyn Bay, Kongolo, and the Virunga Park to appraise the links between memory and the development of a postcolonial present. Contributors: Sarah Arens (University of Liverpool), Robert Burroughs (Leeds Beckett), Bambi Ceuppens (AfricaMuseum), Matthias De Groof (University of Antwerp), Catherine Gilbert (University of Newcastle), Chantal Gishoma (University of Bayreuth), Hannah Grayson (University of Stirling), Dónal Hassett (University of Cork), Sky Herington (University of Warwick), Nicki Hitchcott (University of St Andrews), Yvette Hutchison (University of Warwick), Albert Kasanda (Charles University, Prague), Maëline Le Lay (CNRS/ THALIM, Sorbonne nouvelle), Reuben Loffman (Queen Mary University of London), Caroline Williamson Sinalo (University of Cork) Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
2019 marked both the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Napoléon’s 250th anniversary. Picking up on this contingency of world history with an ironic wink, the volume analyses in ...retrospect the epoch of European universalism. It focusses on its dialectics, polemically addressing and remembering both 1769 and 1989.
Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth ...of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it. Discussing seminal Romantic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, Isbell provides a foundation through which to investigate core concepts, such as the continuum of Romance, the Romantic hero, and Romantic literature’s characteristic repudiation of its own Romanticism. Unusually for a single-author monograph, the book includes both published and unpublished material covering Romantic creation across Europe and the two Americas. Identifying Romanticism as an international movement, Isbell seeks to emphasise a theme frequently ignored by many academics: the roots of Romanticism, and its variations, as a national art. His arguments are supported by extensive interrogations of the political and historical contexts that moulded the outlooks of the writers and artists central to the period. An Outline of Romanticism in the West underlines the interplay between nationalism, history, and artistic inspiration, and will therefore be of value to students and scholars of literature and history, as well as to general readers with an interest in Romanticism in the West.
This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetimeinherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival ...disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric. This is an open access book.
This volume, the fourth in the complete works of Kurt Schwitters, offers the first complete and annotated edition of Merz, the avant-garde journal for multimedia that appeared between 1923 and 1932 ...under Schwitters’ editorial direction. The volume also includes scholarly contributions that extensively examine the journal’s contents, structure and design from an interdisciplinary perspective.
The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now ...available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne ; The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical ...text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation. Not only does this span of essays trace the evolution of Gabler’s thinking about Joyce’s originality and creative energy. It also reflects the development and maturation of Gabler‘s own genetic criticism and his methodology of genetic editing, which grows in depth and complexity across the collection. The reader will explore Joyce’s life and works through Gabler’s incisive eye, while also examining a progress of his reflections on his edition of Ulysses and the past controversy that beset it. This classic compendium combining well-seasoned scholarship and fresh criticism is an essential read for critics of Modernism, digital humanists, scholars and students of James Joyce, and anyone interested in the art of literary analysis.
