Exploring travellers’ tales of wonder in contemporary literature, this study challenges a sensibility of disenchantment with travel. It reassesses travel writing as an aesthetically and ethically ...innovative form in contemporary international literature, and demonstrates the crucial role of wonder in the travel narratives of writers such as Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, and W.G. Sebald. Their ‘travellers’ tales of wonder’ are read as a challenge to the hubris of thinking the world too well known, and an invitation to encounter the world – including its most troubling histories – with a sense of wonder.
Matthew Miller'sThe German Epic in the Cold Warexplores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it ...illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post-World War II Germany.Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss'sDie Ästhetik des Widerstands(The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson'sJahrestage(Anniversaries), and Kluge'sChronik der Gefühle(Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic's unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989-91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.Building on Franco Moretti's codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic's ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.
"Storyworlds," mental models of context and environment within which characters function, is a concept used to describe what happens in narrative. Narratologists agree that the concept of storyworlds ...best captures the ecology of narrative interpretation by allowing a fuller appreciation of the organization of both space and time, by recognizing reading as a process that encourages readers to compare the world of a text to other possible worlds, and by highlighting the power of narrative to immerse readers in new and unfamiliar environments.
Focusing on the work of writers from Trinidad and Nigeria, such as Sam Selvon and Ben Okri,The Storyworld Accordinvestigates and compares the storyworlds of nonrealist and postmodern postcolonial texts to show how such narratives grapple with the often-collapsed concerns of subjectivity, representation, and environment, bringing together these narratological and ecocritical concerns via a mode that Erin James calls econarratology. Arguing that postcolonial ecocriticism, like ecocritical studies, has tended to neglect imaginative representations of the environment in postcolonial literatures, James suggests that readings of storyworlds in postcolonial texts helps narrative theorists and ecocritics better consider the ways in which culture, ideologies, and social and environmental issues are articulated in narrative forms and structures, while also helping postcolonial scholars more fully consider the environment alongside issues of political subjectivity and sovereignty.
Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles's pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city's transformation from a seedy frontier ...village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the "Prince of Realtors," William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city's historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city's bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland's quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland's visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man's grit and imagination made California history.
Between Memory and History Ginzburg, Carlo
The Journal of Holocaust Research,
01/02/2023, Volume:
37, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A relationship between Saul Friedländer's autobiographical text When Memory Comes and his historical magnus opus Nazi Germany and the Jews has been suggested by Stéphane Bou. This article develops ...this suggestion, focusing on the narrative choices Friedländer made in his major historical work. An analysis of the use of estrangement and fragmentary evidence unveils their cognitive implications.
This study of the films of Oshima Nagisa is both an essential
introduction to the work of a major postwar director of Japanese
cinema and a theoretical exploration of strategies of filmic style.
For ...almost forty years, Oshima has produced provocative films that
have received wide distribution and international acclaim. Formally
innovative as well as socially daring, they provide a running
commentary, direct and indirect, on the cultural and political
tensions of postwar Japan. Best known today for his controversial
films In the Realm of the Senses and The Empire of
Passion , Oshima engages issues of sexuality and power,
domination and identity, which Maureen Turim explores in relation
to psychoanalytic and postmodern theory. The films' complex
representation of women in Japanese society receives detailed and
careful scrutiny, as does their political engagement with the
Japanese student movement, postwar anti-American sentiments, and
critiques of Stalinist tendencies of the Left. Turim also considers
Oshima's surprising comedies, his experimentation with Brechtian
and avant-garde theatricality as well as reflexive textuality, and
his essayist documentaries in this look at an artist's gifted and
vital attempt to put his will on film.
The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning presents the first philosophical investigation of, arguably, one of the most popular and important painters working today, Gerhard Richter. ...From monochrome painting and photo realism to conceptual art and gesture-expressive painting, Richter has transformed the spectrum of 20th-Century painting. Building upon Gadamer’s notion of ‘formed images’, the book outlines elements of a hermeneutics and a phenomenology of images and paintings. Moreover, the hermeneutic approach to art is combined with the crucial question of how paintings and photographs are related to each other for Richter. The author suggests that paintings “open up” the fixed relation and intentionality of photographs by idealizing and essentializing the content of the photographs. By relying upon a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach, rather than working from abstract theory, The Art of Gerhard Richter provides philosophical insights developed out of Richter’s works of art. Uncovering key philosophical aspects of Richter’s work, the author’s reflections discuss the relation between appearance and essence, the role of faith and hope, the dialectic of distance and nearness, the issues of death and terror, and the role of beauty and landscapes in Richter’s paintings.
Musicologist Henry George Farmer (1882-1965) participated in the First International Congress of Arab Music in Cairo in 1932. His journal and minutes, which are presented in this book, reveal aspects ...and inner-workings of the Congress that have hitherto remained unknown.
The utopia of film Pavsek, Christopher
2012., 20130129, 2013, 2013-02-05
eBook
The German filmmaker Alexander Kluge has long promoted cinema's relationship with the goals of human emancipation. Jean-Luc Godard and Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik also believe in cinema's ...ability to bring about what Theodor W. Adorno once called a "redeemed world." Situating the films of Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge within debates over social revolution, utopian ideals, and the unrealized potential of utopian thought and action, Christopher Pavsek showcases the strengths, weaknesses, and undeniable impact of their utopian visions on film's political evolution. He discusses Godard's Alphaville (1965) against Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero (1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (1994), and he conducts the first scholarly reading of Film Socialisme (2010). He considers Tahimik's virtually unknown masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), along with Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1983); and he constructs a dialogue between Kluge's Brutality in Stone (1961) and Yesterday Girl (1965) and his later The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985) and Fruits of Trust (2009).
From his reporting on Islamic true believers to his descriptions of the postcolonial world, V. S. Naipaul has been a controversial figure in contemporary letters. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul ...has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference -- and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding "strangers." In this book, Dagmar Barnouw explores the sophisticated strategies and experimentations that Naipaul employs in his cultural critique and in his enterprise of learning about and documenting the enduring strangeness of this world.
