The Necropastoral

The Necropastoral PDF Author: Joyelle McSweeney
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
An exploration of poetry as an expression of biology

The Necropastoral

The Necropastoral PDF Author: Joyelle McSweeney
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
An exploration of poetry as an expression of biology

Here Is a Figure

Here Is a Figure PDF Author: Sarah Dowling
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810147920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
A study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures’ refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.

Just Us

Just Us PDF Author: Claudia Rankine
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451190
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

Cacaphonies

Cacaphonies PDF Author: Annabel L. Kim
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.

Goethe Yearbook 22

Goethe Yearbook 22 PDF Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139273
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on environmentalism. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 22 features a special section on environmentalism, edited by Dalia Nassar and Luke Fischer, with contributions on: the metaphor of music in Goethe's scientific work and its influence on Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Uexküll, and Zuckerkandl (Frederick Amrine); his conceptualization of modern civilization in Faust (Gernot Böhme); a non-anthropocentricvision of nature in his writings on the intermaxillary bone (Ryan Feigenbaum); his geopoetics of granite (Jason Groves); the historical antecedents of biosemiotics in "Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen" (Kate Rigby); and the conceptof the "Dark Pastoral" in Werther (Heather I. Sullivan). In addition, there are articles on Goethe as a spiritual predecessor of phenomenology (Iris Hennigfeld); concepts of the "hermaphrodite" in contributions to theEncyclopédie by Louis de Jaucourt and Albrecht von Haller (Stephanie Hilger); on Goethe's poem "Nähe des Geliebten" (David Hill); on the link between commerce and culture in West-östlicher Divan (Daniel Purdy); on Goethe's thoughts on collecting and museums (Helmut Schneider); and on intrigues in the works of J. M. R. Lenz (Inge Stephan). Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Gernot Böhme, Ryan Feigenbaum, Luke Fischer, Jason Groves, Iris Hennigfeld, Stephanie M. Hilger, David Hill, Dalia Nassar, Daniel Purdy, Kate Rigby, Helmut J. Schneider, Inge Stephan, Heather I. Sullivan. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmeris Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain PDF Author: Joseph C. Russo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023686
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

Novels by Aliens

Novels by Aliens PDF Author: Kate Marshall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226827836
Category : Extraterrestrial beings in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
"Twenty-first century fiction and literary study have taken a decidedly weird turn: they show a marked interest in the nonhuman and in the preternatural moods that the nonhuman often evokes. Writers of fiction and criticism are avidly experimenting with strange, even alien perspectives and protagonists. Kate Marshall's Novels by Aliens explores this development broadly while focusing on problems of genre fiction. She identifies three key generic hybrids that harness a longing for the nonhuman: The Old Weird, an alternative tradition within naturalism and modernism for the twenty-first century's cowboys and aliens; Cosmic Realism, the reach for words legible only from space in otherwise terrestrial narratives; and Pseudoscience Fiction, which imagines speculative futures beyond human life on earth. Marshall's book offers sharp and surprising insights about a breathtaking range of authors, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kazuo Ishiguro, Willa Cather to Maggie Nelson"--

This Impermanent Earth

This Impermanent Earth PDF Author: Douglas Carlson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820360287
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 635

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Book Description
With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century’s accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been culled from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States. The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples of what was then called nature writing, through writing after 2000 that gradually redefines the environment in increasingly human terms, to a more inclusive expansion that considers all human surroundings as material for environmental inquiry. Likewise, the approaches range from formal essays to prose works that reflect the movement toward innovation and experimentation. The collection builds as it progresses; later essays grow from earlier ones. This Impermanent Earth is more than a historical survey of a literary form, however. The Georgia Review’s talented writers and its longtime commitment to the art of editorial practice have produced a collection that is, as one reviewer put it, “incredibly moving, varied, and inspiring.” It is a book that will be as at home in the reading room as in the classroom.

Luminol Theory

Luminol Theory PDF Author: Laura E. Joyce
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Representations of forensic procedures saturate popular culture in both fiction and true crime. One of the most striking forensic tools used in these narratives is the chemical luminol, so named because it glows an eerie greenish-blue when it comes into contact with the tiniest drops of human blood.Luminol is a deeply ambivalent object: it is both a tool of the police, historically abused and misappropriated, and yet it offers hope to families of victims by allowing hidden crimes to surface. Forensic enquiry can exonerate those falsely accused of crimes, and yet the rise of forensic science is synonymous with the development of the deeply racist 'science' of eugenics.Luminol Theory investigates the possibility of using a tool of the state in subversive, or radical, ways. By introducing luminol as an agent of forensic inquiry, Luminol Theory approaches the exploratory stages that a crime scene investigation might take, exploring experimental literature as though these texts were 'crime scenes' in order to discover what this deeply strange object can tell us about crime, death, and history, to make visible violent crimes, and to offer a tangible encounter with death and finitude. At the luminol-drenched crime scene, flashes of illumination throw up words, sentences, and fragments that offer luminous, strange glimpses, bobbing up from below their polished surfaces. When luminol shines its light, it reveals, it is magical, it is prescient, and it has a nasty allure.TABLE OF CONTENTS // Preface: Christmas, Colorado, 1996 - Section I. Queer Light: Forensics, Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics - Section II. The Abject Parlour: Polyester Gothic, Traces at the Scene, Christmas in Colorado - Section III. Deadly Landscapes: The Shining, Colorado Histories, The Locus Terriblis - Conclusion: Necrolight, Luminol

The American Sonnet

The American Sonnet PDF Author: Dora Malech
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays showcases the diversity of the American sonnet. 800 years after the sonnet's invention, this volume celebrates the extraordinary development of the sonnet in the hands of American poets-and those living under US empire-from traditional to experimental, political and personal. Edited by poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, this anthology collects and foregrounds an impressive range of 20th and 21st century sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, and presents these alongside a selection of earlier American sonnets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. The critical essays likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies. Malech and Smith capture the central questions for American sonneteers. Who belongs to the tradition of the American sonnet? How do translation and multicultural and transnational identities complicate the Americanness of the "American" sonnet? How do Black, queer, trans, neurodiverse, working class, Appalachian, and Deaf poets claim the sonnet and how does it serve them? How do American poets experiment with meter, stanza, rhyme, lineation, and visuality to make the sonnet their own? And how are American sonneteers writing about love, loss, and trauma in new ways that change the sonnet tradition? The American Sonnet shows the form continuing to function as a poetic bellwether as centuries of poets use its peculiar confines to negotiate questions of nation, race, class, gender, sexuality, diaspora, and poetic tradition"--