Author: Kris Pint
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9042030933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy’. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling. The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and philosophical intertexts of Barthes’ ‘active semiology’ (Lacan, Kristeva, Winnicott, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault), while the second part discusses his growing attention for the intimate, bodily involvement in the act of reading. Subsequently, this study shows how Barthes’ phantasmatic reading strategy radically reviews the notions of space, detail and the untimely in fiction, as well as the figure of the author and his own role as a teacher. It becomes clear that the interest of Barthes’ lecture courses goes well beyond semiology and literary criticism, searching the answer to the ethical question par excellence: how to become what one is, how to live a good life.
The Perverse Art of Reading
Author: Kris Pint
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9042030933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy’. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling. The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and philosophical intertexts of Barthes’ ‘active semiology’ (Lacan, Kristeva, Winnicott, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault), while the second part discusses his growing attention for the intimate, bodily involvement in the act of reading. Subsequently, this study shows how Barthes’ phantasmatic reading strategy radically reviews the notions of space, detail and the untimely in fiction, as well as the figure of the author and his own role as a teacher. It becomes clear that the interest of Barthes’ lecture courses goes well beyond semiology and literary criticism, searching the answer to the ethical question par excellence: how to become what one is, how to live a good life.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9042030933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
‘I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy’. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the Collège de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling. The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and philosophical intertexts of Barthes’ ‘active semiology’ (Lacan, Kristeva, Winnicott, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault), while the second part discusses his growing attention for the intimate, bodily involvement in the act of reading. Subsequently, this study shows how Barthes’ phantasmatic reading strategy radically reviews the notions of space, detail and the untimely in fiction, as well as the figure of the author and his own role as a teacher. It becomes clear that the interest of Barthes’ lecture courses goes well beyond semiology and literary criticism, searching the answer to the ethical question par excellence: how to become what one is, how to live a good life.
The Lost Art of Reading
Author: David L. Ulin
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 157061721X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 89
Book Description
Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 157061721X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 89
Book Description
Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Nabokov, Perversely
Author: Eric Naiman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801460239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801460239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.
The Perverse Library
Author: Craig Douglas Dworkin
Publisher: Information as Material
ISBN: 9781907468032
Category : Art and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The Perverse Library includes Professor Craig Dworkin's bibliography (2,427 titles), a supplementary bibliography of absent and imagined books, and an accompanying essay arguing libraries are in fact defined not by what they contain, but by what books they exclude or fail to include. The essay also investigates the histories of libraries, makes a theoretical argument about the relation of canons to architectural space, and explores the psychology of collecting – including the pathology of bibliomania: 'He had but one idea, one love, one passion: books. And this love, this passion burned within him, consuming his days, devouring his existence.' Although they present themselves as figures of rational organization, library catalogues and classification systems can only hope to distract from the aberrant chaos they cannot exorcise. Published to accompany the exhibition The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, 4 September – 31 October 2010, curated by Simon Morris.
Publisher: Information as Material
ISBN: 9781907468032
Category : Art and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The Perverse Library includes Professor Craig Dworkin's bibliography (2,427 titles), a supplementary bibliography of absent and imagined books, and an accompanying essay arguing libraries are in fact defined not by what they contain, but by what books they exclude or fail to include. The essay also investigates the histories of libraries, makes a theoretical argument about the relation of canons to architectural space, and explores the psychology of collecting – including the pathology of bibliomania: 'He had but one idea, one love, one passion: books. And this love, this passion burned within him, consuming his days, devouring his existence.' Although they present themselves as figures of rational organization, library catalogues and classification systems can only hope to distract from the aberrant chaos they cannot exorcise. Published to accompany the exhibition The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, 4 September – 31 October 2010, curated by Simon Morris.
Perverse Romanticism
Author: Richard C. Sha
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.
Birds Art Life
Author: Kyo Maclear
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154206
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
"A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this ... meditation on creativity and life"--
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154206
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
"A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this ... meditation on creativity and life"--
Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse
Author: P. O'Connor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403978700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse contains analysis of sexual perversion and narrative creativity in fictions from the Latin American boom and post-boom. O'Connor's main argument is that orthodox criticism of Latin American literature has neglected the eccentric singularities of other fictive trends in the corpus (especially in the second half of the twentieth-century). At the same time, by examining these eccentric singularities in their relationship to mainstream trends in the Latin American corpus, O'Connor forces his readers to view these master narratives and major trends (such as modernismo or magical realism) from surprisingly new angles. Five of the authors discussed (Puig, Lezama, Lima, Cortazar and Sarduy) have an established place in the Latin American literary canon. A fifth one, Rosario Ferre, may have come close to achieving that status with her earlier fictions. Others (Felisberto Hernandez, Alicia Borinsky, Cristina Peri Rossi and Silvia Molloy) are less well known, but they are certainly highly significant authors for scholars and students of contemporary Latin American fiction.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403978700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse contains analysis of sexual perversion and narrative creativity in fictions from the Latin American boom and post-boom. O'Connor's main argument is that orthodox criticism of Latin American literature has neglected the eccentric singularities of other fictive trends in the corpus (especially in the second half of the twentieth-century). At the same time, by examining these eccentric singularities in their relationship to mainstream trends in the Latin American corpus, O'Connor forces his readers to view these master narratives and major trends (such as modernismo or magical realism) from surprisingly new angles. Five of the authors discussed (Puig, Lezama, Lima, Cortazar and Sarduy) have an established place in the Latin American literary canon. A fifth one, Rosario Ferre, may have come close to achieving that status with her earlier fictions. Others (Felisberto Hernandez, Alicia Borinsky, Cristina Peri Rossi and Silvia Molloy) are less well known, but they are certainly highly significant authors for scholars and students of contemporary Latin American fiction.
The Rose Garden
Author: Kristjana Gunnars
Publisher: Red Deer, Alta. : Red Deer College Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.
Publisher: Red Deer, Alta. : Red Deer College Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 138
Book Description
Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.
Pretty
Author: Rosalind Galt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153465
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Book Description
Film culture often rejects visually rich images, valuing simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as more provocative, political, and truly cinematic. Although cinema challenges traditional ideas of art, this opposition to the decorative continues a long-standing aesthetic antipathy to feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal and colonial perspective along with the preference for fine over decorative art, filmmakers, critics, and theorists tend to denigrate cinema's colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions. Condemning this exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scène, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements—styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art house cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from handmade experimental films to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge! and Amelie, pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, using visual exuberance to communicate distinct sexual and political identities. Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, a singular representation of cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art and film theory and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, woven with the threads of political agency.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153465
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Book Description
Film culture often rejects visually rich images, valuing simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as more provocative, political, and truly cinematic. Although cinema challenges traditional ideas of art, this opposition to the decorative continues a long-standing aesthetic antipathy to feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal and colonial perspective along with the preference for fine over decorative art, filmmakers, critics, and theorists tend to denigrate cinema's colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions. Condemning this exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scène, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements—styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art house cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from handmade experimental films to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge! and Amelie, pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, using visual exuberance to communicate distinct sexual and political identities. Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, a singular representation of cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art and film theory and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, woven with the threads of political agency.
The Pleasure of the Text
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374521608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 84
Book Description
What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374521608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 84
Book Description
What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism . . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard