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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
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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: Geoff R. Webb
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047433610
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The discussion concerning Markan characterisation (and Markan genre) can be helpfully informed by Bakhtinian categories. This book uses the twin foci of chronotope and carnival to examine specific characters in terms of different levels of dialogue. Various passages in Mark are examined, and thresholds are noted between interindividual character-zones, and between the hearing-reader and text-voices. Several generic contacts are shown to have shaped the text’s ‘genre-memory’ – in particular, the Graeco-Roman popular literature of the ancient world. The resultant picture is of an earthy, populist Gospel whose “voices” resonate with the “vulgar” classes, and whose spirituality is refreshingly relevant to everyday concerns.
Author: Eyolf Østrem
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 9788763502412
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The concepts of genre and ritual are central for the overall occupation with the relationship between the History of the Arts and the History of Christianity in Western Culture. The present volume was planned on the basis of the first annual international conferences at the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals, University of Copenhagen: a collection of 15 essays with a wide range of topics both in terms of chronology and subject matter written. The book is a special issue of the journal TRANSfiguration.
Author: David H. J. Larmour
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806155043
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
In this first comprehensive reading of Juvenal’s satires in more than fifty years, David H. J. Larmour deftly revises and sharpens our understanding of the second-century Roman writer who stands as the archetype for all later practitioners of the satirist’s art. The enduring attraction of Juvenal’s satires is twofold: they not only introduce the character of the “angry satirist” but also offer vivid descriptions of everyday life in Rome at the height of the Empire. In Larmour’s interpretation, these two elements are inextricably linked. The Arena of Satire presents the satirist as flaneur traversing the streets of Rome in search of its authentic core—those distinctly Roman virtues that have disappeared amid the corruption of the age. What the vengeful, punishing satirist does to his victims, as Larmour shows, echoes what the Roman state did to outcasts and criminals in the arena of the Colosseum. The fact that the arena was the most prominent building in the city and is mentioned frequently by Juvenal makes it an ideal lens through which to examine the spectacular and punishing characteristics of Roman satire. And the fact that Juvenal undertakes his search for the uncorrupted, authentic Rome within the very buildings and landmarks that make up the actual, corrupt Rome of his day gives his sixteen satires their uniquely paradoxical and contradictory nature. Larmour’s exploration of “the arena of satire” guides us through Juvenal’s search for the true Rome, winding from one poem to the next. He combines close readings of passages from individual satires with discussions of Juvenal’s representation of Roman space and topography, the nature of the “arena” experience, and the network of connections among the satirist, the gladiator, and the editor—or producer—of Colosseum entertainments. The Arena of Satire also offers a new definition of “Juvenalian satire” as a particular form arising from the intersection of the body and the urban landscape—a form whose defining features survive in the works of several later satirists, from Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh to contemporary writers such as Russian novelist Victor Pelevin and Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh.
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: Michael André Bernstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520414470
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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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: Frank T. Boyle
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804764182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
With much of the intellectual discourse of the last several decades concerned with reconsiderations of modernity, how do we read the works of Jonathan Swift, who ridiculed the modern even as it was taking shape? The author approaches the question of modernity in Swift by way of a theory of satire from Aristotle via Swift (and Bakhtin) that eschews modern notions that satire is meant to reform and correct. Linking satire to Nemesis, the goddess of righteous vengeance, "Swift as Nemesis" develops new readings of Swift's major satires. From his first published work, Swift associates the modern with the new science and represents modernity as a pernicious strain of narcissism that devalues humanistic discourse. In his early satires, he compiles a profane history of the modern in which the new philosophy is an extension of the methodology of alchemists, the debased Roman Catholic Church, and the various Puritan sects. This history culminates in "A Tale of a Tub" with an assault on the intellectual basis of that most formidable of all modern works, Newton's "Principia." In "Gulliver's Travels," Swift attacks modern culture while aiming at individual readers. Novelistic identification with Gulliver's narcissism (beginning with masturbation and encompassing various scatological observations) implicates readers in the larger cultural critique in which Gulliver, paralleling Narcissus, rejects cultures he encounters until he embraces a cultural image that destroys him. The wider cultural implications of Swift's work are evident in the way he uses travel as a metaphor to link the inhuman consequences of European imperialism with the discoveries of the new science. Finally, Swift's works, like the mirror Nemesis uses to destroy Narcissus, are shown to return the narcissistic projections of critics. Recognizing that Narcissus and Echo have become important to the critique of modernism, the author argues that readers will find it useful now to turn to the contextualizing role of Nemesis. She emerges from Swift's critically irreducible satire with an ironic claim on modernity itself.
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: William F. Touponce
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
In his classic study Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft discusses the emergence of what he called spectral literature—literature that involves the gothic themes of the supernatural found in the past but also considers modern society and humanity. Beyond indicating how authors of such works derived pleasure from a sense of cosmic atmosphere, Lovecraft did not elaborate on what he meant by the term spectral as a form of haunted literature concerned with modernity. In Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys, William F. Touponce examines what these three masters of weird fiction reveal about modernity and the condition of being modern in their tales. In this study, Touponce confirms that these three authors viewed storytelling as a kind of journey into the spectral. Furthermore, he explains how each identifies modernity with capitalism in various ways and shows a concern with surpassing the limits of realism, which they see as tied to the representation of bourgeois society. The collected writings of Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury span the length of the tumultuous twentieth century with hundreds of stories. By comparing these authors, Touponce also traces the development of supernatural fiction since the early 1900s. Reading about how these works were tied to various stages of capitalism, one can see the connection between supernatural literature and society. This study will appeal to fans of the three authors discussed here, as well as to scholars and others interested in the connection between literature and society, criticism of supernatural fiction, the nature of storytelling, and the meaning and experience of modernity.
Author: Jonathan R. Eller
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873387798
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 606
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Book Description
This is a textual, bibliographical and cultural study of 60 years of Bradbury's fiction. The authors draw upon correspondence with his publishers, agents and friends, as well as archival manuscripts, to examine the story of Bradbury's authorship over more than half a century.
