In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments ...of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe,The Language of the Gods in the World of Menasks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.
What have Lumière in common with Wachowski? More than one hundred years separate these two pairs of brothers who astonished, quite similarly, the film spectator of their respective time with special ...effects of movement: a train rushing into the audience and a bullet flying in slow motion. Do they belong to the same family of "cinema of attractions"? Twenty years ago Tom Gunning introduced the phrase "cinema of attractions" to define the essence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 1906. His term scored an immediate success, even outside the field of early cinema. The present anthology questions the attractiveness and usefulness of the term for both pre-classical and post-classical cinema. With contributions by the most prominent scholars of this discipline (such as Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Thomas Elsaesser, Charles Musser, Scott Bukatman and Vivian Sobchack) this volume offers a kaleidoscopic overview of an important historiographical debate.
The quest for epic Zatti, Sergio; Looney, Dennis
The quest for epic,
c2006, 20060616, 2006, 2014, 2006-01-01
eBook
Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti'sThe Quest for Epicis a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by ...one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today. An original and challenging work,The Quest for Epicdocuments the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century.
Zatti focuses on Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to Tasso'sJerusalem Delivered, written at the end of the century, but also touches briefly on Boiardo, Ariosto's great predecessor at the Estense court in Ferrara, as well as on Pulci, Trissino, and many other Italian writers of the period. Zatti highlights the critical debates over narrative form in the sixteenth century that become signposts on the way to literary modernity and the eventual rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli's introduction provides context by mapping Zatti's criticism and situating it among Italian and Anglo-American literary critical studies, making a case for the contribution this book will have for English-language readers.
Suellen Diaconoff situates French-language texts from Moroccan women writers in a discourse of social justice and reform, arguing that they contribute to the emerging national debate on democracy and ...help to create new public spaces of discourse and participation.
'Surfacing' the politics of desire Vallury, Rajeshwari S
'Surfacing' the politics of desire,
c2008, 20080809, 2008, 2008-01-01, 2008-08-09
eBook
"Surfacing" the Politics of Desirere-examines the "myths" of masculine desire in order to challenge this premise, placing literature at the centre of recent feminist debates over the ontology and ...politics of sexual difference.
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, ...property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Between 1550 and 1650, Europe was swept by a fascination with wondrous accounts of monsters and other marvels - of valiant men slaying dragons, women giving birth to animals, young girls growing ...penises, and all manner of fantastic phenomena. Known as 'fairy tales,' these stories had many guises and inhabited a variety of literary texts. The first two collections of such fairy tales published on the continent, Giovan Francesco Straparola'sLe piacevoli nottiand Giambattista Basile'sLo cunto de li cunti, were greeted with much enthusiasm at home and abroad and essentially established a new literary genre. Contrary to popular thought, Italy, not Germany or France, was the birthplace of the literary fairy tale.
This fascination with the marvellous also extended to the worlds of science, medicine, philosophy, and religion, and many treatises from the period focused on discussions of monsters, demons, magic, and witchcraft. InFairy-Tale ScienceSuzanne Magnanini looks at these 'science fictions' and explores the birth and evolution of the literary fairy tale in the context of early modern discourses on the monstrous. She demonstrates how both the normative literary theories of the Italian intellectual establishment and the emerging New Science limited the genre's success on its native soil. Natural philosophers, physicians, and clergymen positioned the fairy tale in opposition in opposition to science, fixing it as a negative pole in a binary system, one which came to define both a new type of scientific inquiry and the nascent literary genre. Magnanini also suggests that, by identifying their literary production with the monstrous and the feminine, Straparola and Basile contributed to the marginalization of the new genre.
A wide-ranging yet carefully crafted study,Fairy-Tale Scienceinvestigates the complex interplay between scientific discourse and an emerging literary genre, and expands our understanding of the early modern European imagination.
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