Author: Asbjørn Grønstad
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666929433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have on the figuration of our everyday—of microdystopias—and argues that microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in contrast to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an existential sense of shrinking horizons – spatially, temporally, emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our sense of spatial orientation that gradually and discreetly diminishes the horizons of possibilities is demonstrated by examining what the forms of the microdystopic look like when they are aesthetically configured. Contributors analyze the aesthetics that play a particularly central and complex role in mediating, as well as disrupting, the parameters of dystopian emergences and emergencies, reflecting an increasingly uneasy relationship between the fictional, the cautionary, and the real. Scholars of media studies, sociology, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.
Author: Asher Storm
Publisher: RWG Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
Discover a captivating collection of miniature worlds and intricate emotions in "Tiny Tales: Micro-Fiction for the Modern Reader." Step into a realm where stories unfold in mere sentences, inviting you to explore the depths of human experience, imagination, and connection through the power of brevity. In this enchanting anthology, each micro-fiction piece is a gem carefully crafted to transport you to realms both familiar and fantastical. With each turn of the page, you'll encounter characters navigating love's tender whispers, unravel mysteries in a sentence, witness history's grandeur in a hint, and explore the cosmos in a glance. From heartwarming tales of friendship to haunting glimpses of alternate realities, "Tiny Tales" captures the essence of life's profound moments in the most concise yet impactful manner. Dive into the secrets of the universe, embark on journeys of self-discovery, and witness the intricate threads of human connection that transcend time and space. Whether you're a lover of literature or a casual reader, these micro-stories will leave an indelible mark on your heart and mind. Within these pages, you'll find: Brevity's Beauty: A thought-provoking exploration of life's complexities in miniature narratives. Whispers in the Wind: Stories that capture the magic of a hundred words, each revealing a universe of emotions. Coffee-Stained Chronicles: Tales that unfold in the time it takes to savor a cup of coffee, yet linger in your thoughts. Of Shadows and Light: Miniature mythologies that weave the fabric of ancient tales into the modern world. Ephemeral Encounters: Brief meetings that evoke lasting connections between characters, and between you and their stories.
Author: Arthur Redding
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498512674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
What use is thinking? This study addresses the ways in which modern American thinkers have intervened in the public sphere and attempted to mediate relations between social and political institutions and cultural and intellectual production. Chapters on both well-known (Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, C. Wright Mills, Angela Davis) and neglected (Randolph Bourne, Mary McCarthy, Paul Goodman) public intellectuals considers how these figures have address a range of problems, including the dangers and difficulty of critical dissent thought during wartime, the contemporary crisis of the humanities under neoliberalism, the legacy of American anti-intellectualism, academic professionalism, and the perils of consumer culture and popular tastes. This book reviews in as critically sympathetic a manner as possible a select few of the minor and major currents of twentieth-century American radical thinking in order to see where they might take us, and how they inflect our current social and intellectual predicaments. Arguing that any "use-value" theory of intellectual production is limiting, Radical Legacies endeavors to maintain and expand a space and reassert an argument for the importance of sustained critical reflection on our collective dilemmas today. It assesses a practice of thought that is engaged, committed, involved, and timely, without being necessarily “practical” or even useful.
Author: Ruben Moi
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666952591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Literature is an institution per se, as is justice, and these two institutions enact each other in complex ways. Justice appears in many forms from divine right and religious ordainment to metaphysical imperative and natural law, to national jurisdiction, social order, human rights, and civil disobedience. What is just and right has varied in time and place, in war and peace. A sense of justice appears inextricable from human concerns of ethics and morals. Literature includes a vast range of writing from holy texts to banned books. Parts of literature, particularly in the past, have laid down the law. In more recent history, literature has gradually assumed radical roles of critique, subversion, and transformation of the existing law and order, in contents, themes, language, and form. Literature’s Critique, Subversion, and Transformation of Justice offers a selection of research that examines how various types of literature and arts give shape and significance to ideas of justice in various fields.
Author: Benjamin G. Lockerd
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity. Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrepresented his faith. More recently, scholars have begun exploring this dimension of Eliot's thought more carefully and fully. In this book readers will find Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism accurately defined and thoughtfully considered. Essays illuminate the all-important influence of the French Catholic writers he came to know in Paris. Prominent among them were those who wrote for or were otherwise associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française, including André Gide, Paul Claudel, and Charles-Louis Philippe. Also active in Paris at that time was the notorious Charles Maurras, whose influence on Eliot has been exaggerated by those who wished to discredit Eliot's traditionalist views. A more measured assessment of Maurras's influence has been needed and is found in several essays here. A wiser French Catholic writer, Jacques Maritain, has been largely ignored by Eliot scholars, but his influence is now given due consideration. The keynote of Eliot's cultural and political writings is his belief that religion and culture are integrally related. Several contributors examine his ideas on this subject, placing them in the context of Maritain's ideas, as well as those of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. Contributors take account of Eliot's intellectual relationship with such figures as John Henry Newman, Charles Williams, and the expert on church architecture, W. R. Lethaby. Eliot's engagement with other contemporaries who held a variety of Christian beliefs—including George Santayana, Paul Elmer More, C. S. Lewis, and David Jones—is also explored. This collection presents the subject of Eliot's religious beliefs in rich detail, from a number of different perspectives, giving readers the opportunity to see the topic in its complexity and fullness.
Author: Barbara Antoniazzi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
The Wayward Woman takes a fresh look at the Progressive Era, recasting the turn-of-the-century debate on gender roles and prostitution. Recapitulating and transcending extant studies of female delinquency, prostitution literature, and Progressive womanhood, this work understands “female waywardness” as the critical intersection between the rise of female emancipation and the panic inspired by the period’s obsession with sexual enslavement. Concurrently, it explores the Progressive ambivalence about compassion and control which unfolded alongside a war on prostitution that traversed the realms of law, medicine, literature and politics. Drawing on theories of performativity the author develops “the wayward woman” as a capacious analytical category that encompasses all women who, countering the residual injunction of domesticity, brought new forms of femininity into the light of the public sphere: the activist, the professional and the divorcee, but also the female breadwinner, the charity girl and the urban woman of color––among many others. The book investigates the continuum of waywardness that stretches from the high-minded New Woman to the ever-victimized “white slave” as a cultural battlefield where numerous women stepped across the boundaries of class, race and respectability to claim new public personas. At the same time it reads the preoccupation with white slavery both as a symptom of and an antidote to this wave of change. Through an innovating collection of sources which brings together sociological writings, novels, plays, movies and legal documents, the book rearticulates the tensions of the Progressive Era between gender roles, blackness and whiteness, reformers and reformed, the citizens and the state. The Wayward Woman will be of much interest to students and scholars in the fields of American studies, women studies and performance studies.
Author: Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
ISBN: 1611476089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
“Paris” could be the first word of an epic poem. While there are many cultural pilgrimages in Western Arts (The Alhambra, Venice, Mumbai, Machu Picchu, and others), Paris stands above others, flourishing as an image of possibility and sophistication. The city has a rich history with foreign artists and writers, intellectual and political exiles, military leaders and philosophers from all over the globe. Americans have gone to Paris since the colonial period – and their writing about the city is a captivating corpus of literature. Looking into novels, memoirs, poetry and other writings, Paris in American Literatures: On Distance as a Literary Resource examines the role of the French capital in the work of a diverse range of authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Monica Truong, and many others.
Author: Lynnea Chapman King
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810867303
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
In 2005, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, was published to wide acclaim, and in 2007, Ethan and Joel Coen brought their adaptation of McCarthy's novel to the screen. The film earned praise from critics worldwide and was honored with four Academy Awards', including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.
Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.
Author: Stephen J. Webley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351716514
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
This book explores the central role of the zombie in contemporary popular culture as they appear in video games. Moving beyond traditional explanations of their enduring appeal – that they embody an aesthetic that combines horror with a mindless target; that lower age ratings for zombie games widen the market; or that Artificial Intelligence routines for zombies are easier to develop – the book provides a multidisciplinary and comprehensive look at this cultural phenomenon. Drawing on detailed case studies from across the genre, contributors from a variety of backgrounds offer insights into how the study of zombies in the context of video games informs an analysis of their impact on contemporary popular culture. Issues such as gender, politics, intellectual property law, queer theory, narrative storytelling and worldbuilding, videogame techniques and technology, and man’s relation to monsters are closely examined in their relation to zombie video games. Breaking new ground in the study of video games and popular culture, this volume will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including media, popular culture, video games, and media psychology.
