The Occidentocentric Fallacy

The Occidentocentric Fallacy PDF Author: Igor Grbić
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527518310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
What is literature? The question is difficult enough in itself. However, the West has made any hope of a proper answer literally untenable. It has provincialized literature into its own neighbourhood. This book brings together perspectives from both non-Western cultures and minority cultures within a supposed West (normally downsized to represent a part of Europe and the USA). Also considered, as parts of the problem, are various literature-related asymmetries such as global awards and translation. The prime concern of the book is awakening its readers to the fact that, incredibly but truly enough, literature in its total, all-human realization, is something yet to be discovered. It, thus, will especially appeal to literary scholars, making them conscious of the fact that their literary studies actually take into account only a fragment of literature, as well as university students of literature, in the hope it might prevent them from becoming heirs to their professors.

The Occidentocentric Fallacy

The Occidentocentric Fallacy PDF Author: Igor Grbić
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527518310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is literature? The question is difficult enough in itself. However, the West has made any hope of a proper answer literally untenable. It has provincialized literature into its own neighbourhood. This book brings together perspectives from both non-Western cultures and minority cultures within a supposed West (normally downsized to represent a part of Europe and the USA). Also considered, as parts of the problem, are various literature-related asymmetries such as global awards and translation. The prime concern of the book is awakening its readers to the fact that, incredibly but truly enough, literature in its total, all-human realization, is something yet to be discovered. It, thus, will especially appeal to literary scholars, making them conscious of the fact that their literary studies actually take into account only a fragment of literature, as well as university students of literature, in the hope it might prevent them from becoming heirs to their professors.

Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean PDF Author: Malte Fuhrmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
A fascinating history of nineteenth century Eastern Mediterranean port cities, re-examining European influence over the changing lives of their urban populations.

Great Short Stories of the World

Great Short Stories of the World PDF Author: Barrett Harper Clark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Short stories
Languages : en
Pages : 1096

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Book Description
177 short stories.

MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE IN DIGEST FORM

MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE IN DIGEST FORM PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1186

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Book Description


Hugging the Shore

Hugging the Shore PDF Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812983785
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 897

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least of the reviews here—those that “come about and draw even closer to the land with another nine-point quotation”—are distinguished by a novelist’s style, insight, and accuracy, not just surface sparkle. Indeed, as James Atlas commented, the most substantial critical articles, on Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman, go out as far as Updike’s fiction: They are “the sort of ambitious scholarly reappraisal not seen in this country since the death of Edmund Wilson.” With Hugging the Shore, Michiko Kakutani wrote, Updike established himself “as a major and enduring critical voice; indeed, as the pre-eminent critic of his generation.”

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography PDF Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023151154X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Edward W. Said locates Joseph Conrad's fear of personal disintegration in his constant re-narration of the past. Using the author's personal letters as a guide to understanding his fiction, Said draws an important parallel between Conrad's view of his own life and the manner and form of his stories. The critic also argues that the author, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that mirror a colonialist preoccupation with "civilizing" native peoples. Said then suggests that this dimension should be considered when reading all of Western literature. First published in 1966, Said's critique of the Western self's struggle with modernity signaled the beginnings of his groundbreaking work, Orientalism, and remains a cornerstone of postcolonial studies today.

How to Lie with Maps

How to Lie with Maps PDF Author: Mark Monmonier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602900X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Originally published to wide acclaim, this lively, cleverly illustrated essay on the use and abuse of maps teaches us how to evaluate maps critically and promotes a healthy skepticism about these easy-to-manipulate models of reality. Monmonier shows that, despite their immense value, maps lie. In fact, they must. The second edition is updated with the addition of two new chapters, 10 color plates, and a new foreword by renowned geographer H. J. de Blij. One new chapter examines the role of national interest and cultural values in national mapping organizations, including the United States Geological Survey, while the other explores the new breed of multimedia, computer-based maps. To show how maps distort, Monmonier introduces basic principles of mapmaking, gives entertaining examples of the misuse of maps in situations from zoning disputes to census reports, and covers all the typical kinds of distortions from deliberate oversimplifications to the misleading use of color. "Professor Monmonier himself knows how to gain our attention; it is not in fact the lies in maps but their truth, if always approximate and incomplete, that he wants us to admire and use, even to draw for ourselves on the facile screen. His is an artful and funny book, which like any good map, packs plenty in little space."—Scientific American "A useful guide to a subject most people probably take too much for granted. It shows how map makers translate abstract data into eye-catching cartograms, as they are called. It combats cartographic illiteracy. It fights cartophobia. It may even teach you to find your way. For that alone, it seems worthwhile."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times ". . . witty examination of how and why maps lie. [The book] conveys an important message about how statistics of any kind can be manipulated. But it also communicates much of the challenge, aesthetic appeal, and sheer fun of maps. Even those who hated geography in grammar school might well find a new enthusiasm for the subject after reading Monmonier's lively and surprising book."—Wilson Library Bulletin "A reading of this book will leave you much better defended against cheap atlases, shoddy journalism, unscrupulous advertisers, predatory special-interest groups, and others who may use or abuse maps at your expense."—John Van Pelt, Christian Science Monitor "Monmonier meets his goal admirably. . . . [His] book should be put on every map user's 'must read' list. It is informative and readable . . . a big step forward in helping us to understand how maps can mislead their readers."—Jeffrey S. Murray, Canadian Geographic

Inventing America

Inventing America PDF Author: José Rabasa
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806125398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In Inventing America, José Rabasa presents the view that Columbus's historic act was not a discovery, and still less an encounter. Rather, he considers it the beginning of a process of inventing a New World in the sixteenth century European consciousness. The notion of America as a European invention challenges the popular conception of the New World as a natural entity to be discovered or understood, however imperfectly. This book aims to debunk complacency with the historic, geographic, and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world.

The Spacious Word

The Spacious Word PDF Author: Ricardo Padrón
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226644332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The Spacious Word explores the history of Iberian expansion into the Americas as seen through maps and cartographic literature, and considers the relationship between early Spanish ideas of the world and the origins of European colonialism. Spanish mapmakers and writers, as Padrón shows, clung to a much older idea of space that was based on the itineraries of travel narratives and medieval navigational techniques. Padrón contends too that maps and geographic writings heavily influenced the Spanish imperial imagination. During the early modern period, the idea of "America" was still something being invented in the minds of Europeans. Maps of the New World, letters from explorers of indigenous civilizations, and poems dramatizing the conquest of distant lands, then, helped Spain to redefine itself both geographically and imaginatively as an Atlantic and even global empire. In turn, such literature had a profound influence on Spanish ideas of nationhood, most significantly its own. Elegantly conceived and meticulously researched, The Spacious Word will be of enormous interest to historians of Spain, early modern literature, and cartography.

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness PDF Author: Letizia Modena
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136730605
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.