Beginning in 1963 and continuing through the late 1980s, a loose coterie of like-minded Canadian poets challenged the conventions of writing and poetic meaning by fusing their practice with ...strategies from visual art, sound art, sculpture, installation, and performance. They called it “borderblur.” Borderblur Poetics traces the emergence and proliferation of this node of poetic activity, an avant-garde movement comprising concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry, practiced by poets and artists like bpNichol, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, Penn Kemp, Ann Rosenberg, Gerry Shikatani, Shaunt Basmajian, among others. Author Eric Schmaltz demonstrates how these poets formed an alternative tradition, one that embraced intermediality to challenge the hegemony of Canadian literature established during the heydays of cultural nationalism. He shows the importance of intermediality as a driving cultural force and how its proliferation significantly altered Canadian cultural expression. Drawing on a combination of archival research, historical analysis, and literary criticism, Borderblur Poetics adds significant nuance to theories and criticisms of Canadian literature.
This book presents an innovative African philosophical response to coloniality and the attendant epistemicide of Africa’s knowledge systems, drawing on Igbo thinking. This book argues that theorizing ...modernity requires a critical conversation between African and Western scholarship, in order to unpack its links with coloniality and the subjugation of Africa’s indigenous knowledges. In setting out this discussion, the book also connects with Latin American scholarship, demonstrating how the modern world is structured to marginalize and destroy knowledges from across the Global South. This book draws on Igbo epistemic resources of solidarity thinking, positioned in contrast to capitalist knowledge-patterns, thereby providing an important Africa-driven response to modernity and coloniality. This book concludes by arguing that the Igbo sense of solidarity is useful and relevant to modern contexts and thus constitutes a vital resource for a less disruptive, more balanced, and more wholesome modernity. At a time of considerable global crises, this book makes an important contribution to philosophy both within Africa and beyond.
This study examines how West-German publishing processes were influenced by inner-German relations during the partition of Germany, revealing that publications are products of collective and ...multifactorial processes of negotiation and decision-making between publishing house and author.
Travel reports have shaped the emergence of early U.S. culture and its “geographical imagination” (David Harvey). Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the trans-national imagination ...in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (1778), to Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. In contrast to scholarship that engages a notion of Americanness based primarily on ‘domestic’ outlooks and experiences such as westward expansion (the frontier), the study highlights the function of categories such as the outside world, neighboring nations, and colonial empires in the emergence of U.S. national literary imagination. How does a shift in focus from a discursive ‘domestication’ of North American space to an interest in the Othering of what lies beyond national borders affect the understanding of the emergent national self? These are the kind of questions that begin by seeing the transnational as a fundamental element of national emergence. The monograph ultimately works to demonstrate how travel writing – with very few exceptions – supports and affirms processes of nation-building. Thus, the national narrative evolves from representations of contact scenarios in North America, in the transatlantic world, and around the globe. Without ignoring the roles of national mythology, the analysis concentrates on the continual co-existence of fluid notions of both ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ in times of shifting geographical borders. From such a perspective, travel writing not only contributes to shaping the national imagination and its conceptions of superiority but is also complicit in territorial expansionism and its subjugation of conquered peoples and their respective cultural histories. The present study emphasizes the significance of accounts of non-voluntary movement that embrace captivity narratives, slave narratives, sailor narratives, and reports by individuals who had access to neither publishing nor public culture. Accounts by such authors have often been published posthumously, promoted by printers, professional authors, or scholars. The central focus of analysis, however, examines how American self-fashioning and self-positioning in the world appear in the travel writing of the period. The trans-national imagination engages in a symbolic construction both of the collective national ‘Self’ and of the outside world as the nation’s ‘Other.’ Travel writing functions as a tool in the nation-building process of the United States: a tool that reflects the mindset of the time, a tool that imagines a national community, and a tool that shapes the mindset of a people. The study maintains that travel writing, as a literary format, negotiates the triangular relationship between American post-revolutionary nation-building, continued European colonial expansion in the Americas, and the ongoing existence of indigenous nations. Underlying each of the readings is a common thesis that travel writing defines and negotiates borders, limits, and territorial expansion, and that it does so within the parameters of nation-building.
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.
This volume presents the 14 female winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, e.g. Lagerlöf, Sachs, Jelinek, Müller, Munro. Contributions offers exemplary readings of chosen works, while outlining the ...intellectual profile of each author. They also tackle the questions of female writing and canon formation, and interrogate the conditions and contradictions of artistic creativity.
The study investigates the relationship between Norse and Saami peoples in the medieval period and focuses on the multifaceted portrayal of Saami peoples in medieval texts. Through a systematic ...analysis of the sources, influenced by postcolonial methodologies rooted in interpretations of archaeological material, it demonstrates the many possibilities for reading and including Saami peoples in our narration of medieval Fennoscandian history.
Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access book traces inventions, inventories and interventions of these materials as they pervade our ...day-to-day lives across various forms. By proposing we think of the ways materials configure ‘future artefacts’, and by recognizing the various ways in which materials shape our encounters with the world, the book explores the productive tensions implicit in, and between, concrete and plastic. Drawing ona wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, poems, souvenirs, advertisements, policy documents, environmental art, wrapping,and (popular) science writing, the book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to trace imaginative entanglements with disparate others in the Anthropocene. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The University of Rostock.
This Open access book is a collection of essays and offers an in-depth analysis of silence as an aesthetic practice and a textual strategy which paradoxically speaks of the unspoken nature of many ...inconvenient hidden truths of Irish society in the work of contemporary fiction writers. The study acknowledges Ireland’s history of damaging silences and considers its legacies, but it also underscores how silence can serve as a valuable, even productive, means of expression. From a wide range of critical perspectives, the individual essays address, among other issues, the conspiracies of silence in Catholic Ireland, the silenced structural oppression of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the recovery of silenced stories/voices of the past and their examination in the present, as well as millennial disaffection and the silencing of vulnerability in today’s neoliberal Ireland. The book ’s attention to silence provides a rich vocabulary for understanding what unfolds in the quiet interstices of Irish writing from recent decades. This study also invokes the past to understand the present and, thus, demonstrates the continuities and discontinuities that define how silence operates in Irish culture. Grant FFI2017-84619-P AEI, ERDF, EU (INTRUTHS “Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction”) Funded by the Spanish Research Agency AEI http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund ERDF "A Way of Making Europe"
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.
