Literary Culture in a World Transformed

Literary Culture in a World Transformed PDF Author: William Paulson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729349
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world.

Literary Culture in a World Transformed

Literary Culture in a World Transformed PDF Author: William Paulson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729349
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world.

Bring on the Books for Everybody

Bring on the Books for Everybody PDF Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239197X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a “literary experience” in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins’s analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

A World Transformed

A World Transformed PDF Author: James Walvin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520386256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world. A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste. This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

In the Company of Books

In the Company of Books PDF Author: Sarah Wadsworth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781558495418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

The Idea of World Literature

The Idea of World Literature PDF Author: John Pizer
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Although the term "World Literature" is widely used today, there is little agreement on what it means and even less awareness of its evolution. In this wide-ranging work, John Pizer traces the concept of Weltliteratur in Germany beginning with Goethe and continuing through Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels to the present as he explores its importation into the United States in the 1830s and the teaching of World Literature in U.S. classrooms since the early twentieth century. Pizer demonstrates the concept's ongoing viability through an in-depth reading of the contemporary Syrian-German transnational novelist Rafik Schami. He also provides a clear methodology for World Literature courses in the twenty-first century. Pizer argues persuasively that Weltliteratur can provide cohesion to the study of World Literature today. In his view, traditional "World Lit" classes are limited by their focus on the universal elements of literature. A course based on Weltliteratur, however, promotes a more thorough understanding of literature as a dialectic between the universal and the particular. In a practical guide to teaching World Literature by employing Goethe's paradigm, he explains how to help students navigate between the extremes of homogenization on the one hand and exoticism on the other, learning both what cultures share and what distinguishes them. Everyone who teaches World Literature will want to read this stimulating book. In addition, anyone interested in the development of the concept from its German roots to its American fruition will find The Idea of World Literature immensely rewarding.

Fairy Tales Transformed?

Fairy Tales Transformed? PDF Author: Cristina Bacchilega
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 081433928X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Fairy-tale adaptations are ubiquitous in modern popular culture, but readers and scholars alike may take for granted the many voices and traditions folded into today's tales. In Fairy Tales Transformed?: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder, accomplished fairy-tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega traces what she terms a "fairy-tale web" of multivocal influences in modern adaptations, asking how tales have been changed by and for the early twenty-first century. Dealing mainly with literary and cinematic adaptations for adults and young adults, Bacchilega investigates the linked and yet divergent social projects these fairy tales imagine, their participation and competition in multiple genre and media systems, and their relation to a politics of wonder that contests a naturalized hierarchy of Euro-American literary fairy tale over folktale and other wonder genres. Bacchilega begins by assessing changes in contemporary understandings and adaptations of the Euro-American fairy tale since the 1970s, and introduces the fairy-tale web as a network of reading and writing practices with a long history shaped by forces of gender politics, capitalism, and colonialism. In the chapters that follow, Bacchilega considers a range of texts, from high profile films like Disney's Enchanted, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, and Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard to literary adaptations like Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, and Bill Willingham's popular comics series, Fables. She looks at the fairy-tale web from a number of approaches, including adaptation as "activist response" in Chapter 1, as remediation within convergence culture in Chapter 2, and a space of genre mixing in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 connects adaptation with issues of translation and stereotyping to discuss mainstream North American adaptations of The Arabian Nights as "media text" in post-9/11 globalized culture. Bacchilega's epilogue invites scholars to intensify their attention to multimedia fairy-tale traditions and the relationship of folk and fairy tales with other cultures' wonder genres. Scholars of fairy-tale studies will enjoy Bacchilega's significant new study of contemporary adaptations.

On Literary Worlds

On Literary Worlds PDF Author: Eric Hayot
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199926697
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
On Literary Worlds develops new strategies and perspectives for understanding aesthetic worlds.

Not Born Digital

Not Born Digital PDF Author: Daniel Morris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501339419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives � ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic � the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of �official verse culture,� refers to as �frame lock� and �tone jam.� While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with �screen memory� (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of �found� materials.

Live Literature

Live Literature PDF Author: Ellen Wiles
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030503852
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This ground-breaking book explores the phenomenal growth of live literature in the digitalizing 21st century. Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Readers are immersed in the experience of two contrasting events: a major literary festival and an intimate LGBTQ+ salon. Evocative scenes and observations are interwoven with sharp critical analysis and entertaining conversations with well-known author-performers, reader-audiences, producers, critics, and booksellers. Wiles’s experiential literary ethnography represents an innovative and vital contribution, not just to literary research, but to research into the value of cultural experience across art forms. This book probes intersections between readers and audiences, writers and performers, texts and events, bodies and memories, and curation and reception. It addresses key literary debates from cultural appropriation to diversity in publishing, the effects of social media, and the quest for authenticity. It will engage a broad audience, from academics and producers to writers and audiences.

Teaching, Technology, Textuality

Teaching, Technology, Textuality PDF Author: Michael Hanrahan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230523307
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This collection of original essays discusses the implications of the new media for the creation, delivery and assessment of English studies. Strategies by which digital technologies can serve professional, scholarly and pedagogical needs in a completely new way are explored in the context of the role and mission of humanities in the electronic age.