Human Rights and Narrated Lives

Human Rights and Narrated Lives PDF Author: K. Schaffer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973660
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.

From New National to World Literature

From New National to World Literature PDF Author: Bruce King
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838268563
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
From New National to World English Literature offers a personal perspective on the evolution of a major cultural movement that began with decolonization, continued with the assertion of African, West Indian, Commonwealth, and other literatures, and has evolved through postcolonial to world or international English literature. Bruce King, one of the pioneers in the study of the new national literatures and still an active literary critic, discusses the personalities, writers, issues, and contexts of what he considers the most important change in culture since modernism. In this selection of forty-five essays and reviews, King discusses issues such as the emergence and aesthetics of African literature, the question of the existence of a “Nigerian literature”, the place of the new universities in decolonizing culture, the contrasting models of American and Irish literatures, and the changing nature of exile and diasporas. He emphasizes themes such as traditionalism versus modernism, the dangers of cultural assertion, and the relationships between nationalism and internationalism. Special attention is given to Nigerian, West Indian, Australian, Indian, and Pakistani literature.

The Routledge Companion to World Literature

The Routledge Companion to World Literature PDF Author: Theo D'haen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136655751
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Book Description
In the age of globalization, the category of "World Literature" is increasingly important to academic teaching and research. The Routledge Companion to World Literature offers a comprehensive pathway into this burgeoning and popular field. Separated into four key sections, the volume covers: the history of World Literature through significant writers and theorists from Goethe to Said, Casanova and Moretti the disciplinary relationship of World Literature to areas such as philology, translation, globalization and diaspora studies theoretical issues in World Literature including gender, politics and ethics a global perspective on the politics of World Literature. The forty-eight outstanding contributors to this companion offer an ideal introduction to those approaching the field for the first time, or looking to further their knowledge of this extensive field.

World Literature Reader

World Literature Reader PDF Author: Theo D'haen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135726167
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
World Literature is an increasingly influential subject in literary studies, which has led to the re-framing of contemporary ideas of ‘national literatures’, language and translation. World Literature: A Reader brings together thirty essential readings which display the theoretical foundations of the subject, as well as showing its conceptual development over a two hundred year period. The book features: an illuminating introduction to the subject, with suggested reading paths to help readers navigate through the materials texts exploring key themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, post/trans-nationalism, and translation and nationalism writings by major figures including J. W. Goethe, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Longxi Zhao, David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova and Milan Kundera. The early explorations of the meaning of ‘Weltliteratur’ are introduced, while twenty-first century interpretations by leading scholars today show the latest critical developments in the field. The editors offer readers the ideal introduction to the theories and debates surrounding the impact of this crucial area on the modern literary landscape.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh PDF Author: Gaurav Desai
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293981
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment. Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh's works and the scholarship on Ghosh. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," present ideas for teaching his works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.

Human Rights and Narrated Lives

Human Rights and Narrated Lives PDF Author: K. Schaffer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973660
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: David Attwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429513755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

Narratives of Disability and Illness in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee PDF Author: Pawel Wojtas
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399522604
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.

Reading as Democracy in Crisis

Reading as Democracy in Crisis PDF Author: James Rovira
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498553877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History explores the dialectic between historical conditions and the reading strategies that arise from them. Chapters covering Plato and Derrida; G.W.F. Hegel; Karl Marx; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Robert Penn Warren; Louise Rosenblatt; Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida; Judith Butler; and Object Oriented Ontology and Digital Humanities provide overviews of and arguments about each subject’s thought in its historical contexts, suggesting how the reading strategies adopted in each case were in part motivated by specific historical circumstances. As the introduction explains, these circumstances often involved forms of democracy in crisis, so that the collection as a whole is an engagement with the dialectic between democracies that are perpetually in crisis and the seemingly unlimited freedom of our reading practices.

Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature

Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature PDF Author: Piero Boitani
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004453679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
Anagnorisis has been called ‘one of the great works of comparative literary criticism of our time’. It is a book that spans the millennia, the adventures of Ulysses in Homer and God’s mysterious appearance to Abraham in Genesis, down not only to Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, but also to Dumas’ Count of Montecristo, Borges’s ‘The Immortal’, and Walcott's Omeros. ‘Anagnorisis’ means ‘recognition’. Aristotle defined it simply as ‘the passage from ignorance to knowledge’. But the knowledge one gains in anagnorisis is neither scientific nor abstract – it is living knowledge in the flesh, as Euripides’ Helen understood when, seeing her husband again after many years, she exclaimed: ‘to recognize those we love is a god.

Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives

Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives PDF Author: Ridvan Askin
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3823379674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This timely volume explores a wealth of North American literary texts that engage with moral and ethical dilemmas. It ranges from William Dean Howells's and Henry James's realist novels to Edward Sapir's intermedial poems, and from John Muir's unpublished letters and journal of his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers and the poetry of Robert Lowell. Many of the contributions also critically engage with and re?ect on some of the most prominent voices in contemporary theoretical debates about ethics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Em-manuel Levinas, Axel Honneth, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Julia Kristeva. This volume thus aptly covers the panoply of contemporary ethical and moral interventions while at the same time providing distinctively American Studies perspectives.