Fantasm and Fiction

Fantasm and Fiction PDF Author: Peter Schwenger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734721
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Also, drawing on artists' books, drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, the author illuminates the process of textual visualization.

Fantasm and Fiction

Fantasm and Fiction PDF Author: Peter Schwenger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734721
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Also, drawing on artists' books, drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, the author illuminates the process of textual visualization.

Narrative Bodies

Narrative Bodies PDF Author: D. Punday
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Although the body has recently emerged throughout the humanities and social sciences as an object revealing the power and limits of representation, the study of narrative has almost entirely ignored human corporeality. As this book shows, attention to the body raises uncomfortable questions about the historicity of basic narrative concepts like character, plot, and narration - questions that critics would often prefer to ignore. Daniel Punday argues that narrative itself is a concept constructed by modern-day critics based on assumptions about identity, desire, movement and place that depend on modern ways of thinking about corporeality.

Intermedialities

Intermedialities PDF Author: Henk Oosterling
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739146556
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called 'intermedialities.' The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory. The 'intermedial' approach to social relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter (being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not only engagements between already constituted positions but even more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and ethical analysis of the 'in-between' enables a conception of community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with others rather than on an identification with a shared identity. Investigations of 'in-betweenness,' both as medium specific and between heterogeneous 'sites' of inquiry, range here from philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the political circulation of money and power to the operation of new technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these complex intersections between media, materiality, art, and the philosophy and politics of the in-between suggest, the project of intermedialities provides new ways of rethinking relations among arts, politics, and science.

The Theological and the Political

The Theological and the Political PDF Author: Mark Lewis Taylor
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 0800697898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Princeton's Mark Lewis Taylor has always worked at the intersection of the political and theological. Now, in this intense and exciting work, he explores in a systematic way how those two dimensions of human reality can be conceived anew and together.Taylor argues that the decline of political discourse, the justification of torture and preemptive war, mass incarceration, the misuse of religion to justify atrocity, and most especially the sheer weight of suffering in the world¹all these developments urge us to reconceive theology itself. In conjunction with the latest insights of political theory, decolonial thought, and spectral theories in contemporary philosophy, Taylor suggests that the political is the context of the theological and a realm in which we can discern, beyond simple categories of transcendence and immanence, a transimmanence that is theologically illuminative and politically liberating" -- Publisher description.

The Unconcept

The Unconcept PDF Author: Anneleen Masschelein
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143843555X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The Unconcept is the first genealogy of the concept of the Freudian uncanny, tracing the development, paradoxes and movements of this negative concept through various fields and disciplines from psychoanalysis, literary theory and philosophy to film studies, genre studies, sociology, religion, architecture theory, and contemporary art. Anneleen Masschelein explores the vagaries of this 'unconcept' in the twentieth century, beginning with Freud's seminal essay 'The Uncanny,' through a period of conceptual latency, leading to the first real conceptualizations in the 1970s and then on to the present dissemination of the uncanny to exotic fields such as hauntology, the study of ghosts, robotics and artificial intelligence. She unearths new material on the uncanny from the English, French and German traditions, and sheds light on the specific status of the concept in contemporary theory and practice in the humanities. This essential reference book for researchers and students of the uncanny is written in an accessible style. Through the lens of the uncanny, the familiar contours of the intellectual history of the twentieth century appear in a new and exciting light.

Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture

Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture PDF Author: Justin D. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317632850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This volume, a collection with contributions from some of the major scholars of the Gothic in literature and culture, reflects on how recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. The engaging essays look into the links between technologies and the proliferation of the Gothic seen in an excess of Gothic texts and tropes: Frankensteinesque experiments, the manufacture of synthetic (true?) blood, Moreauesque hybrids, the power of the Borg, Dr Jekyll’s chemical experimentations, the machinery of Steampunk, or the corporeal modifications of Edward Scissorhands. Further, they explore how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: Gothic in social media, digital technologies, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth/ic communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema. Contributors address how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice, asking significant questions: How has the technology of the Gothic contributed to the writing of self and other? How have Gothic technologies been gendered, sexualized, encrypted, coded or de-coded? How has the Gothic manifested itself in new technologies across diverse geographical locations? This volume explores how Gothic technologies textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational, and global contexts. It will be of interest to scholars of the literary Gothic, extending beyond to include fascinating interventions into the areas of cultural studies, popular culture, science fiction, film, and TV.

The Tears of Things

The Tears of Things PDF Author: Peter Schwenger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816646319
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
We surround ourselves with material things that are invested with memories but can only stand for what we have lost. Physical objects—such as one’s own body—situate and define us; yet at the same time they are fundamentally indifferent to us. The melancholy of this rift is a rich source of inspiration for artists. Peter Schwenger deftly weaves together philosophical and psychoanalytical theory with artistic practice. Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp; Joseph Cornell’s boxes; Edward Gorey’s graphic art; fiction by Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, and Louise Erdrich; the hallucinatory encyclopedias of Jorge Luis Borges and Luigi Serafini; and the corpse photographs of Joel Peter Witkin. However, these representations of objects perpetually fall short of our aspirations. Schwenger examines what is left over—debris and waste—and asks what art can make of these. What emerges is not an art that reassembles but one that questions what it means to assemble in the first place. Contained in this catalog of waste is that ultimate still life, the cadaver, where the subject-object dichotomy receives its final ironic reconciliation. Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word, and Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature.

The Old Story, with a Difference

The Old Story, with a Difference PDF Author: Julian Wolfreys
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 081421021X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick's Vision explores in radically different ways from most approaches to nineteenth-century studies the tropes and metaphors of vision in Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Julian Wolfreys provides a close reading of Dickens' Pickwick Papers and argues that this novel is an exemplary text for the re-consideration of concepts such as literature, history, the novel, and the whole notion of Victorian studies. True to the purpose of the Victorian Critical Interventions Series, Wolfreys challenges scholars to rethink the use of a canonical text in Victorian literature. Challenging the commonplaces of historicist criticism, and demonstrating the need for a return to close reading, The Old Story, with a Difference presents a reading of the novel grounded in the twinned rigors of materialist historiography and theoretical inflections tending toward attentiveness to epistemological and linguistic concerns. Through such an orientation, Wolfreys unpacks the relation between the tropes of visuality and matters of memory, history, and the necessity of fiction to bear witness to the cultures, past and present, from which literature becomes generated and which it mediates. In doing so, he situates an argument for rethinking Dickens' novel as the inaugural novel of Victorian fiction par excellence, in that novel's efforts to remain open to the traces of the past in particular ways. The Old Story, with a Difference holds profound implications for the study not only of Dickens' works but Victorian literature and culture in general. Provocative and inventive, this ambitious analysis will challenge, goad, and invite the reader to return to acts of materialist reading informed by ethical and ideological urgency, rather than relapsing into the commonplaces of humanist cliché.

Monstrous Things

Monstrous Things PDF Author: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147668829X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
An indispensable resource for students and researchers of paranormal myth and media, this book explores the undead and unholy in literature, film, television, and popular culture. Following an introduction to frightful manifestations in media, sections address ghosts, vampires, and monsters individually, and each section includes a broad consideration of the ghost, vampire or monster in American culture. The section dedicated to ghosts examines the "spectral turn" of popular culture and the ghost's relation to justice and mourning, with particular attention to Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. In the vampires section, the author considers the undead bloodsucker's relationship to anti-Semitism, suicide, and cinema. The third section discusses monsters in relation to topics such as global pandemics, terrorism, mass shootings, "stranger danger," and social otherness, with attention to a range of popular culture texts including the films IT and It Follows.

The Spectralities Reader

The Spectralities Reader PDF Author: Maria del Pilar Blanco
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441136894
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the “spectral turn” of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.