Disarming words Tageldin, Shaden M
2011., 20110513, 2011, c2011., 2011-06-12, Letnik:
5
eBook
In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the ...colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt--by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882--in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim.
This book proposes a new approach to the study of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian literature. Ranging from Homer and Gilgamesh to Herodotus and the Babylonian-Greek author Berossos, it paints a ...picture of two literary cultures that, over the course of time, became profoundly entwined. Along the way, the book addresses many questions of crucial importance to the student of the ancient world: how did the literature of Greece relate to that of its eastern neighbours? What did ancient readers from different cultures think it meant to be human? Who invented the writing of universal history as we know it? How did the Greeks come to divide the world into Greeks and 'barbarians', and what happened when they came to live alongside those 'barbarians' after the conquests of Alexander the Great? In addressing these questions, the book draws on cutting-edge research in comparative literature, postcolonial studies and archive theory.
TheBildungsroman, or "novel of formation," has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural ...difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. InFormative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature.
Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls "cosmopolitan remainders," identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation.
InFormative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels-Goethe'sWilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann'sThe Epigones, Gustav Freytag'sDebit and Credit, Alfred Döblin'sBerlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann'sDoctor Faustusamong them-that have always been felt to be particularly "German" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.
During the thirty years following ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the first American novelists carried on an argument with their British counterparts that pitted direct democracy against ...representative liberalism. Such writers as Hannah Foster, Isaac Mitchell, Royall Tyler, Leonore Sansay, and Charles Brockden Brown developed a set of formal tropes that countered, move for move, those gestures and conventions by which Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and others created their closed worlds of self, private property, and respectable society. The result was a distinctively American novel that generated a system of social relations resembling today's distributed network. Such a network operated counter to the formal protocols that later distinguished the great tradition of the American novel.In Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse show how these first U.S. novels developed multiple paths to connect an extremely diverse field of characters, redefining private property as fundamentally antisocial and setting their protagonists to the task of dispersing that property—its goods and people—throughout the field of characters. The populations so reorganized proved suddenly capable of thinking and acting as one. Despite the diverse local character of their subject matter and community of readers, the first U.S. novels delivered this argument in a vernacular style open and available to all. Although it differed markedly from the style we attribute to literary authors, Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, such democratic writing lives on in the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and James.
A sea of languages Mallette, Karla; Akbari, Suzanne Conklin
A sea of languages,
c2013., 20131028, 2013, 2013-10-28, 2013-12-06
eBook
Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors including Cervantes and Marco ...Polo were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. 'A sea of languages' brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean. This volume takes as a starting point María Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, 'A sea of languages' will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.
Platonic noise Euben, J. Peter
2003., 20090110, 2009, 2003, 2003-01-01
eBook
Platonic Noise brings classical and contemporary writings into conversation to enrich our experience of modern life and politics. Drawing on writers as diverse as Plato, Homer, Nietzsche, Borges, Don ...DeLillo, and Philip Roth, Peter Euben shows us the relevance of both popular literature and ancient Greek thought to current questions of loss, mourning, and democracy -- all while arguing for the redeeming qualities of political and intellectual work and making an original case against presentism. Juxtaposing ancient and contemporary texts, politics, and culture, Euben reflects on a remarkable range of recent issues and controversies. He discusses Stoic cosmopolitanism and globalization, takes a critical look at Nietzsche's own efforts to make the Greeks speak to the issues of his day, examines a Greek tragedy through Hannah Arendt's eyes, compares the role of comedy in ancient Athens and contemporary America, analyzes political theory as a reaction to an acute sense of loss, and considers questions of agency and morality. Platonic Noise makes a case for reading political theory and politics through literature. Working as much through example as through explicit argument, Euben casts the literary memory of Athenian democracy as a crucial cultural resource and a presence in contemporary political and theoretical debates. In so doing, he reasserts the moral value of what we used to call participatory democracy and the practical value of seeing ourselves with the help of insights from long-gone Greeks.
The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned ...experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast ...precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
As the pace of cultural globalization accelerates, the discipline of literary studies is undergoing dramatic transformation. Scholars and critics focus increasingly on theorizing difference and ...complicating the geographical framework defining their approaches. At the same time, Anglophone literature is being created by a remarkably transnational, multicultural group of writers exploring many of the same concerns, including the intersecting effects of colonialism, decolonization, migration, and globalization.
Paul Jay surveys these developments, highlighting key debates within literary and cultural studies about the impact of globalization over the past two decades.Global Mattersprovides a concise, informative overview of theoretical, critical, and curricular issues driving the transnational turn in literary studies and how these issues have come to dominate contemporary global fiction as well. Through close, imaginative readings Jay analyzes the intersecting histories of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization engaged by an array of texts from Africa, Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Zadie Smith'sWhite Teeth, Junot Díaz'sThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Kiran Desai'sThe Inheritance of Loss, Arundhati Roy'sThe God of Small Things, Vikram Chandra'sRed Earth and Pouring Rain, Mohsin Hamid'sMoth Smoke, and Zakes Mda'sThe Heart of Redness.
A timely intervention in the most exciting debates within literary studies,Global Mattersis a comprehensive guide to the transnational nature of Anglophone literature today and its relationship to the globalization of Western culture.
PDF
