Bitter Carnival

Bitter Carnival PDF Author: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.

Bitter Carnival

Bitter Carnival PDF Author: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.

A Carnival of Snackery

A Carnival of Snackery PDF Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0316256463
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 754

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

Filth

Filth PDF Author: William A. Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452906742
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Focusing on 'filth' in literary & cultural materials from London, Paris & their colonial outposts in the 19th & early 20th centuries, the essays in this volume range over topics from the building of sewers to the fictional representation of labouring women as polluting.

Mark at the Threshold

Mark at the Threshold PDF Author: Geoff R. Webb
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047433610
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The discussion concerning Markan characterisation (and Markan genre) can be helpfully informed by Bakhtinian categories. This book uses the twin foci of chronotope and carnival to examine specific characters in terms of different levels of dialogue. Various passages in Mark are examined, and thresholds are noted between interindividual character-zones, and between the hearing-reader and text-voices. Several generic contacts are shown to have shaped the text’s ‘genre-memory’ – in particular, the Graeco-Roman popular literature of the ancient world. The resultant picture is of an earthy, populist Gospel whose “voices” resonate with the “vulgar” classes, and whose spirituality is refreshingly relevant to everyday concerns.

Whiteness

Whiteness PDF Author: Mike Hill
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814735459
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
An anthology of white culture

Pay for Your Pleasures

Pay for Your Pleasures PDF Author: Cary Levine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602606X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Focuses on work by the three artists from the 1970s through the 1990s. Examines their participation in subcultural music scenes and discovers a common political strategy which lead them to create strange and unseemly imates that test the limites of art, gender roles, sex, acceptable behavior, poor taste, and the gag reflex.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury PDF Author: Jonathan R. Eller
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873387798
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
This is a textual, bibliographical and cultural study of 60 years of Bradbury's fiction. The authors draw upon correspondence with his publishers, agents and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, to examine the story of Bradbury's authorship over more than half a century.

Raw Material

Raw Material PDF Author: Erin O'Connor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822326168
Category : Cholera
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Analyzes the intertwined metaphoric language of capitalism and disease in nineteenth-century England.

The Return of Resentment

The Return of Resentment PDF Author: Robert A. Schneider
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658657X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Charts the long history of resentment, from its emergence to its establishment as the word of the moment. The term “resentment,” often casually paired with words like “hatred,” “rage,” and “fear,” has dominated US news analysis since November 2016. Despite its increased use, this word seems to defy easy categorization. Does “resentment” describe many interlocking sentiments, or is it just another way of saying “anger”? Does it suggest an irrational grievance, as opposed to a legitimate callout of injustice? Does it imply political leanings, or is it nonpartisan by nature? In The Return of Resentment, Robert A. Schneider explores these questions and more, moving from eighteenth-century Britain to the aftermath of the French Revolution to social movements throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment felt by people and movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment’s modernity and its ambiguity—how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition. Schneider anatomizes the many ways resentment has been used to label present-day movements, from followers of Trump and supporters of Brexit to radical Islamicists and proponents of identity politics. Addressing our contemporary political situation in a novel way, The Return of Resentment challenges us to think critically about the roles different emotions play in politics.

Disgust

Disgust PDF Author: Winfried Menninghaus
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486311
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Disgust (Ekel, dégoût) is a state of high alert. It acutely says "no" to a variety of phenomena that seemingly threaten the integrity of the self, if not its very existence. A counterpart to the feelings of appetite, desire, and love, it allows at the same time for an acting out of hidden impulses and libidinal drives. In Disgust, Winfried Menninghaus provides a comprehensive account of the significance of this forceful emotion in philosophy, aesthetics, literature, the arts, psychoanalysis, and theory of culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics addressed include the role of disgust as both a cognitive and moral organon in Kant and Nietzsche; the history of the imagination of the rotting corpse; the counter-cathexis of the disgusting in Romantic poetics and its modernist appeal ever since; the affinities of disgust and laughter and the analogies of vomiting and writing; the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis in a theory of disgusting pleasures and practices; the association of disgusting "otherness" with truth and the trans-symbolic "real" in Bataille, Sartre, and Kristeva; Kafka's self-representation as an "Angel" of disgusting smells and acts, concealed in a writerly stance of uncompromising "purity"; and recent debates on "Abject Art."