Author: Cathy Moses
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135706301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment when postmodern critiques proclaim the death of the subject and the inaccessibility of historical truth. Of primary concern is the question of how narrative fictions conceive of strategies of resistance to oppression in an age in which the identity politics of the sixties and seventies have given way to positional subjectivities, fluid identities, and coalition politics. Through interpretive readings of the works of well-known authors Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko, critically acclaimed novelist David Bradley, the well-respected but little-studied novelist Russell Banks, and the relatively unknown Leslie Feinberg, whose fiction challenges accepted notions of gender, the author explores a range of practices that place notions of identity in crucial relationship to resistance praxis. Dissenting fictions emerge in this study as imaginative narratives that perform substantial cultural work, reworking classical liberal notions of subjectivity and agency. These novels address the failure of conventional individual agency and imagine an interactive agency grounded in an awareness of both a political economy and historic power relations.
Dissenting Fictions
Author: Cathy Moses
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135706301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment when postmodern critiques proclaim the death of the subject and the inaccessibility of historical truth. Of primary concern is the question of how narrative fictions conceive of strategies of resistance to oppression in an age in which the identity politics of the sixties and seventies have given way to positional subjectivities, fluid identities, and coalition politics. Through interpretive readings of the works of well-known authors Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko, critically acclaimed novelist David Bradley, the well-respected but little-studied novelist Russell Banks, and the relatively unknown Leslie Feinberg, whose fiction challenges accepted notions of gender, the author explores a range of practices that place notions of identity in crucial relationship to resistance praxis. Dissenting fictions emerge in this study as imaginative narratives that perform substantial cultural work, reworking classical liberal notions of subjectivity and agency. These novels address the failure of conventional individual agency and imagine an interactive agency grounded in an awareness of both a political economy and historic power relations.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135706301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment when postmodern critiques proclaim the death of the subject and the inaccessibility of historical truth. Of primary concern is the question of how narrative fictions conceive of strategies of resistance to oppression in an age in which the identity politics of the sixties and seventies have given way to positional subjectivities, fluid identities, and coalition politics. Through interpretive readings of the works of well-known authors Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko, critically acclaimed novelist David Bradley, the well-respected but little-studied novelist Russell Banks, and the relatively unknown Leslie Feinberg, whose fiction challenges accepted notions of gender, the author explores a range of practices that place notions of identity in crucial relationship to resistance praxis. Dissenting fictions emerge in this study as imaginative narratives that perform substantial cultural work, reworking classical liberal notions of subjectivity and agency. These novels address the failure of conventional individual agency and imagine an interactive agency grounded in an awareness of both a political economy and historic power relations.
Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions
Author: Lynn Staley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027104022X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027104022X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Fictions of Dissent
Author: Sigrid Anderson Cordell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317324072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Fin-de-siècle fiction by British female aesthetes and American women regionalists stages moments of rebellion when female characters rise up and insist on the right to maintain control of their creations. Cordell asserts that these revolutionary acts constitute a transatlantic conversation about aesthetic practice and creative ownership.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317324072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Fin-de-siècle fiction by British female aesthetes and American women regionalists stages moments of rebellion when female characters rise up and insist on the right to maintain control of their creations. Cordell asserts that these revolutionary acts constitute a transatlantic conversation about aesthetic practice and creative ownership.
Signs of Dissent
Author: Dawn Fulton
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813927152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits. By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean," "African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813927152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits. By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean," "African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.
Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America
Author: Stephen J. Hartnett
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780252027222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
"Drawing on a rich array of persuasive materials - including speeches and debates, novels and poems, newspaper articles and advertisements, daguerreotypes and paintings, protest pamphlets, reform manifestos, and scientific reports - Hartnett investigates how cultural fictions were presented, how they reflected or exploited larger cultural norms, and why some were more persuasive than others."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780252027222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
"Drawing on a rich array of persuasive materials - including speeches and debates, novels and poems, newspaper articles and advertisements, daguerreotypes and paintings, protest pamphlets, reform manifestos, and scientific reports - Hartnett investigates how cultural fictions were presented, how they reflected or exploited larger cultural norms, and why some were more persuasive than others."--BOOK JACKET.
The Dissent Channel
Author: Elizabeth Shackelford
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 154172447X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
A young diplomat's account of her assignment in South Sudan, a firsthand example of US foreign policy that has failed in its diplomacy and accountability around the world. In 2017, Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn't do that, she said, "I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door." With that, she sat down to write her story and share an urgent message. In The Dissent Channel, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford shows that this is not a new problem. Her experience in 2013 during the precarious rise and devastating fall of the world's newest country, South Sudan, exposes a foreign policy driven more by inertia than principles, to suit short-term political needs over long-term strategies. Through her story, Shackelford makes policy and politics come alive. And in navigating both American bureaucracy and the fraught history and present of South Sudan, she conveys an urgent message about the devolving state of US foreign policy.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 154172447X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
A young diplomat's account of her assignment in South Sudan, a firsthand example of US foreign policy that has failed in its diplomacy and accountability around the world. In 2017, Elizabeth Shackelford wrote a pointed resignation letter to her then boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She had watched as the State Department was gutted, and now she urged him to stem the bleeding by showing leadership and commitment to his diplomats and the country. If he couldn't do that, she said, "I humbly recommend that you follow me out the door." With that, she sat down to write her story and share an urgent message. In The Dissent Channel, former diplomat Elizabeth Shackelford shows that this is not a new problem. Her experience in 2013 during the precarious rise and devastating fall of the world's newest country, South Sudan, exposes a foreign policy driven more by inertia than principles, to suit short-term political needs over long-term strategies. Through her story, Shackelford makes policy and politics come alive. And in navigating both American bureaucracy and the fraught history and present of South Sudan, she conveys an urgent message about the devolving state of US foreign policy.
Dissenting Women in Dickens' Novels
Author: Brenda Ayres
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.
Resisting Dialogue
Author: Juan Meneses
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959811
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959811
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.
Temporary
Author: Hilary Leichter
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 156689574X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 156689574X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161
Book Description
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature
Author: Will Robins
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience. Using late Medieval English literature, including some of Chaucer's writings, these essays do not try to define a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine or religious, but instead analyze intersections of the sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two categories are mutually constitutive rather than antithetical. With essays by former students of John V. Fleming, the collection pays tribute to the Princeton University professor emeritus through wide-ranging scholarship and literary criticism. Including reflections on depictions of Bathsheba, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Margery Kempe, these essays focus on literature while ranging into history, philosophy, and the visual arts. Taken together, the work suggests that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience. Using late Medieval English literature, including some of Chaucer's writings, these essays do not try to define a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine or religious, but instead analyze intersections of the sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two categories are mutually constitutive rather than antithetical. With essays by former students of John V. Fleming, the collection pays tribute to the Princeton University professor emeritus through wide-ranging scholarship and literary criticism. Including reflections on depictions of Bathsheba, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Margery Kempe, these essays focus on literature while ranging into history, philosophy, and the visual arts. Taken together, the work suggests that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world.