Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter
Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary
critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most
...insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a
philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to
Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin
provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied
writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of
mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially
for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades
Project , as well as recent tendencies in the reception of
Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary
debates about modernity and postmodernity.
bAn account of the Scandinavian contributions to the field of Old English studies from the eighteenth century onwards./b The discipline of Old English Studies began in Scandinavia, not England, ...pioneered by the work of the great Danish scholar, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) and continues to flourish in the languages of the region (including Finland). This book offers a history of Scandinavian scholarship, in Neo-Latin, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, as well as Finnish and Sámi, from 1733 to the present day. It surveys the major events and texts in the discipline, and evaluates translations of iBeowulf/i and other Old English prose and verse texts. It argues that nationalism, aesthetics, and spirituality are the chief motivators for Old English studies in the Nordic countries; although Romantic nationalism was a first mover for Old English studies, the qualities Scandinavians now seek in Old English literature-that we all seek-are transnational, existential, spiritual, and human. The study concludes with complete bibliographies of contributions in the Scandinavian languages to Old English studies and of translations of Old English literature into the Scandinavian languages. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
China's most important love comedy, Wang Shifu's
Xixiangji , or The Story of the Western Wing , is a
rollicking play that chronicles the adventures of the star-crossed
lovers Oriole and Student ...Zhang. Since its appearance in the
thirteenth century, it has enjoyed unparalleled popularity. The
play has given rise to innumerable sequels, parodies, and
rewritings; it has influenced countless later plays, short stories,
and novels and has played a crucial role in the development of
drama criticism. This translation of the full and complete text of
the earliest extant version is available in paperback for the first
time. The editors' introduction will inform students of Chinese
cultural and literary traditions.
The act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana maintains, is a political action. Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the ...unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages. The traditional view of translation underwritten by Western philosophy helped colonialism to construct the exotic "other" as unchanging and outside history, and thus easier both to appropriate and control.
Scholars, administrators, and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the bounds of empire. Examining translations of Indian texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Niranjana urges post-colonial peoples to reconceive translation as a site for resistance and transformation.
Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, now finally receives its due in these groundbreaking essays by a ...distinguished group of anthropologists and literary scholars.
The essays move well beyond the simple rubric of "literacy" in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that in certain Western contexts reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation.
Filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality, this collection will attract a broad readership in anthropology, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as in religious, gender, and cultural studies.
Linguists estimate that there are around 7,000 languages in the world, but many are under threat. Translingualism, Translation and Caribbean Poetry is a multi-language poetry collection comprising ...over fifty translations of Curaçao poet Hilda de Windt Ayoubi’s ‘Lenga di mama’ (‘Mother Tongue’), alongside three additional poems each providing a different perspective on the mother tongue. De Windt Ayoubi’s sharp and socially charged poetry has inspired translations from across the world; collected here for the first time, they serve to protect the native languages and cultures – particularly the minority languages – of their translators, who range from expert linguists to speakers of underrepresented languages. In his accompanying essay, Pieter Muysken considers the role of translation in addressing this urgent cultural concern, discussing language loss and revitalization, bilingual translations and mass translations. Complete with maps, language profiles, and the poet’s personal interviews, this collection explores the emotional, cultural and intellectual importance of language conservation through poetry.
Why should anyone, aside from specialist historians and philologists, read Beowulf? This book presents a passionate literary argument for Beowulf as a searching and subtle exploration of the human ...presence. Seamus Heaney praised Beowulf as "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality": how is that true? The poem's current scholarly obsessions and its popular reception have obscured the fact that this untitled and anonymous 3182-line poem from Anglo-Saxon England is a powerful and enduring work of world literature. Beowulf is an early medieval exercise in humanism: it dramatizes, in varied and complex ways, the conflict between human autonomy and the "mind-forg'd manacles" of the world. The poem is as relevant and moving to any reader today as it was during the early Middle Ages. This book serves both as an invitation and introduction to the poem as well as an intervention in its current scholarly context.
This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich ...entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The European city is read against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire and totalitarianism; the American city against the phenomenon of the wilderness, the frontier, and the rise of the megalopolis and the decentered, discontinuous city that followed.
Throughout this book, Lehan pursues a dialectic of order and disorder, of cities seeking to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos. Rooted in Enlightenment yearnings for reason, his journey goes from east to west, from Europe to America. In the United States, the movement is also westward and terminates in Los Angeles, a kind of land's end of the imagination, in Lehan's words. He charts a narrative continuum full of constructs that "represent" a cycle of hope and despair, of historical optimism and pessimism.
Lehan presents sharply etched portrayals of the correlation between rationalism and capitalism; of the rise of the city, the decline of the landed estate, and the formation of the gothic; and of the emergence of the city and the appearance of other genres such as detective narrative and fantasy literature. He also mines disciplines such as urban studies, architecture, economics, and philosophy, uncovering material that makes his study a lively read not only for those interested in literature, but for anyone intrigued by the meanings and mysteries of urban life.
Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia examines the complex interactions between state, ethnic, and linguistic borders in the Himalaya. These case ...studies from Bhutan, China, India, and Nepal show how people in the Himalaya talk borders into existence, and also how those borders speak to them and their identities. These ‘talking borders’ exist in a world where state borders are contested, and which is being irrevocably transformed by rapid social and economic change. This book offers a new perspective on this dynamic region by centring language, and in doing so, also offers new ways of thinking about how borders and language influence each other.
