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Author: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.
Author: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Get Book Here
Book Description
"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.
Author: Molly Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
This exploration of the Stuart preoccupation with the darker side of the psyche suggests that fascination with evil perhaps precipitated the radical sociopolitical and cultural changes of the midcentury and that recurring depictions of declining patriarchal authority in plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley made possible the cultural assault on monarchy and patriarchy of the period.
Author: Jacob Boas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004426620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
In Cultural Criticism in the Netherlands, 1933-40, Jacob Boas offers a broad selection of the newspaper columns of legendary Dutch cultural critic Menno ter Braak noteworthy for their enduring literary and historical relevance.
Author: James F. Burke
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804729369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The churches and manuscripts of medieval Europe incessantly juxtapose imagery depicting sacred themes with likenesses of the crudest and basest nature. Drawing on the contrast between Bakhtin's concepts of the carnivalesque and the domain of the law, this book examines such opposites in six major works of pre-1350 Spanish literature.
Author: William A. Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452906742
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
Focusing on 'filth' in literary & cultural materials from London, Paris & their colonial outposts in the 19th & early 20th centuries, the essays in this volume range over topics from the building of sewers to the fictional representation of labouring women as polluting.
Author: Cary Levine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602623X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Pettibon—these Southern California artists formed a “bad boy” trifecta. Early purveyors of abject art, the trio produced work ranging from sculptures of feces to copulating stuffed animals, and gained notoriety from being perverse. Showing how their work rethinks transgressive art practices in the wake of the 1960s, Pay for Your Pleasures argues that their collaborations as well as their individual enterprises make them among the most compelling artists in the Los Angeles area in recent years. Cary Levine focuses on Kelley’s, McCarthy’s, and Pettibon’s work from the 1970s through the 1990s, plotting the circuitous routes they took in their artistic development. Drawing on extensive interviews with each artist, he identifies the diverse forces that had a crucial bearing on their development—such as McCarthy’s experiences at the University of Utah, Kelley’s interest in the Detroit-based White Panther movement, Pettibon’s study of economics, and how all three participated in burgeoning subcultural music scenes. Levine discovers a common political strategy underlying their art that critiques both nostalgia for the 1960s counterculture and Reagan-era conservatism. He shows how this strategy led each artist to create strange and unseemly images that test the limits of not only art but also gender roles, sex, acceptable behavior, poor taste, and even the gag reflex that separates pleasure from disgust. As a result, their work places viewers in uncomfortable situations that challenge them to reassess their own values. The first substantial analysis of Kelley, McCarthy, and Pettibon, Pay for Your Pleasures shines new light on three artists whose work continues to resonate in the world of art and politics.
Author: Susan M. Felch
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810118256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
This work investigates the role of religious thought in shaping and framing Bakhtin's writings. The authors explore Bakhtin's idea of faith - an abstract codification of a belief system - and a feeling for faith which involves the active participation of persons, both human and divine.
Author: David Musgrave
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pope’s Dunciad among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the longer, more encylopedic form (Varro-Petronius-Boethius), and their subsequent fusion during the Renaissance. It also contains an account of the critical reception of the genre, with the term ‘Menippean satire’ first being used by Justus Lipsius in 1581. Finally, Menippean satire is described as a literary version of the grotesque, and a brief theory of the grotesque in the modern period as ‘radical heterogeneity’ is outlined. This is also the foundation of a new definition of Menippean satire, drawing on previous definitions by Frye, Bakhtin and Kirk, and revising them for the modern period. The following chapters examine iconic works as examples of Menippean satire and of the grotesque. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the nose in Menippean satire and comic literature generally, and reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in this context. It also gives an account of metaphor as a ‘grotesque transformation’. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the stomach in Menippean satire and symposiastic literature, and reads Peacock’s Gryll Grange in this context. The link between the stomach as a figure of thinking in comic literature is the basis for an account of symbolic structuring as ‘grotesque association’. Chapter 4 is a close reading of the scatological imagery of Pope’s Dunciad, and how scatology generally tends towards a cyclical metaphysics. It also relates changes in print technology and copyright laws to the reticular scatological structure of the Dunciad. Chapter 5 argues for Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Menippean satire, focusing on the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme as a missing premise, as an example of ‘under-mindedness’ and as an ironic aspect of the fragmentation typical of late Romantic Menippean satires. Chapter 6 examines Urquhart’s eccentric The Jewel as a satire on the referential function of language, reading it in the context of projections for a universal language from this period. The final chapter identifies some key works by Derrida and Barthes as Menippean satires, noting the resurgence of the form in some postmodern and deconstructive writing.
Author: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520377745
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Author: Robert A. Schneider
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658657X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Charts the long history of resentment, from its emergence to its establishment as the word of the moment. The term “resentment,” often casually paired with words like “hatred,” “rage,” and “fear,” has dominated US news analysis since November 2016. Despite its increased use, this word seems to defy easy categorization. Does “resentment” describe many interlocking sentiments, or is it just another way of saying “anger”? Does it suggest an irrational grievance, as opposed to a legitimate callout of injustice? Does it imply political leanings, or is it nonpartisan by nature? In The Return of Resentment, Robert A. Schneider explores these questions and more, moving from eighteenth-century Britain to the aftermath of the French Revolution to social movements throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment felt by people and movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment’s modernity and its ambiguity—how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition. Schneider anatomizes the many ways resentment has been used to label present-day movements, from followers of Trump and supporters of Brexit to radical Islamicists and proponents of identity politics. Addressing our contemporary political situation in a novel way, The Return of Resentment challenges us to think critically about the roles different emotions play in politics.
