Graphic narratives' singular capacity to represent human
embodiment
Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent
embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A
group of ...authors from various countries and disciplines explore the
unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment
as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit.
Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary
comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic
narrative can shed new light on everyday experiences. Essays
examine topics that are easily recognized as anchored in the body
as well as experiences like migration and concepts like
environmental degradation and compassion that emanate from or
impact on our embodied states.
Graphic Embodiments is of interest to scholars and
students across various interdisciplinary fields including comics
studies, gender and sexuality studies, visual and cultural studies,
disability studies and health and medical humanities.
Contributors: Frederick Luis Aldama (Ohio State University),
Jodi Cressman (Dominican University), Lisa DeTora (Hofstra
University), KJ Dykstra (University of Manitoba), Antonio J.
Ferraro (Ohio State University), Carl Fisher (California State
University at Long Beach), Barbara Grüning (University of Milan
Bicocca), Jordana Greenblat (York University), Alison Halsall (York
University), Michael J. Klein (James Madison University), Jeannie
Ludlow (Eastern Illinois University), Lauren Rizzuto (Tufts
University), Evelyn Rogers (Moorpark College), Shreya Sengai
(Northeastern University)
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed
Content).
"This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume ...is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relationships to sickness and hypochondria – highlighting Austen’s artful literary techniques and her powers of human observation. Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlett is a brilliant contribution to the field of Jane Austen studies, both in its accessible style (which preserves the oral register of the original lectures), and in its foregrounding of the reader in a warm, compelling and incisive conversation about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether first-time readers, students or scholars."
Hesiod's Cosmos offers a comprehensive interpretation of both the Theogony and the Works and Days and demonstrates how the two Hesiodic poems must be read together as two halves of an integrated ...whole embracing both the divine and the human cosmos. After first offering a survey of the structure of both poems, Professor Clay reveals their mutually illuminating unity by offering detailed analyses of their respective poems, their teachings on the origins of the human race and the two versions of the Prometheus myth. She then examines the role of human beings in the Theogony and the role of the gods in the Works and Days, as well as the position of the hybrid figures of monsters and heroes within the Hesiodic cosmos and in relation to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.
The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive ...for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.
The essay analyzes the poetry of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen from the perspective of recent theories on posthumanism. I argue that Andresen's body of work could be read as an example of ...posthuman literature, in that the author gives center-stage to animals, plants and things, who become active participants in her poetry. The article focuses specifically on the issue of language and contends that Andresen tacitly adopts a materialistic standpoint in her texts, foreshadowing what theorists such as Karen Barad or Rosi Braidotti have dubbed "agential realism" or "vital materialism." For Andresen, language is not separate from the materiality of the things themselves, and there is a continuity stretching from human language and literature to the existence of all other entities. The essay ends by teasing out the ethical consequence of such a stance.
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