Insistence of the Material

Insistence of the Material PDF Author: Christopher Breu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816688913
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Insistence of the Material engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, Christopher Breu examines this literature's focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. In Insistence of the Material, Breu rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. Breu considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon's V., J. G. Ballard's Crash, Dodie Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Breu reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence. Taking his analysis beyond the boundaries of literature, Breu argues that both materiality and subjectivity form sites of resistance to biopolitical control and that new developments in materialist theory advance a conception of social existence in which materiality--rather than language or culture--is the central term.

Insistence of the Material

Insistence of the Material PDF Author: Christopher Breu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816688913
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Insistence of the Material engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, Christopher Breu examines this literature's focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. In Insistence of the Material, Breu rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. Breu considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon's V., J. G. Ballard's Crash, Dodie Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Breu reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence. Taking his analysis beyond the boundaries of literature, Breu argues that both materiality and subjectivity form sites of resistance to biopolitical control and that new developments in materialist theory advance a conception of social existence in which materiality--rather than language or culture--is the central term.

The Bellman

The Bellman PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description


Insistence of the Material

Insistence of the Material PDF Author: Christopher Breu
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452942846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Insistence of the Material engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, Christopher Breu examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. In Insistence of the Material, Breu rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. Breu considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon’s V., J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Breu reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence. Taking his analysis beyond the boundaries of literature, Breu argues that both materiality and subjectivity form sites of resistance to biopolitical control and that new developments in materialist theory advance a conception of social existence in which materiality—rather than language or culture—is the central term.

After the Human

After the Human PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108865151
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and perspectives, it puts into dialogue the major influences from philosophy, literary study, anthropology, and science studies that set the stage for a range of new questions to be asked about the relationship of the human to other life. The book's central argument is that posthumanism's challenge to and disruption of traditional humanist knowledge is so significant as to presage a sea-change from the humanities into the posthumanities. After the Human documents the emergence of posthumanist ideas in the fractures within traditional disciplines, examines the new objects of analysis that thus came into prominence, and theorizes new interdisciplinary methods of study that followed.

Practicing Materiality

Practicing Materiality PDF Author: Ruth M. Van Dyke
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531277
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
It is little wonder that relationships between things and humans are front-and-center in the contemporary social sciences, given the presence of technologies in every conceivable aspect of our lives. From Bruno Latour to Ian Hodder, anthropologists and archaeologists are embracing “thing theory” and the “ontological turn.” In Practicing Materiality, Ruth M. Van Dyke cautions that as anthropologists turn toward animals and things, they run the risk of turning away from people and intentional actions. Practicing Materiality focuses on the practical job of applying materiality to anthropological investigations, but with the firm retention of anthropocentrism. The philosophical discussions that run through the nine chapters develop practical applications for material studies, including Heideggerian phenomenology, Gellian secondary agency, object life histories, and bundling. Seven case studies are flanked by an introduction and a discussion chapter. The case studies represent a wide range of archaeological and anthropological contexts, from contemporary New York City and Turkey to fifteenth-century Portugal, the ancient southwest United States, and the ancient Andes. Authors in every chapter argue for the rejection of subject/object dualism, regarding material things as actively involved in the negotiation of power within human social relationships. Practicing Materiality demonstrates that it is possible to focus on the entangled lives of things without losing sight of their political and social implications.

The Insistence of History

The Insistence of History PDF Author: Geraldine Friedman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804725446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Through a series of theoretically informed readings, this book explores the uncanny effectivity of history in its seeming absence in canonical works by Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire written in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848. The book begins with the discovery that, in these writers, issues of narration and figuration are already taken up in the political and historical questions raised by the two revolutions; conversely, historical-political positioning and representation are involved from the beginning in problems of narration and figuration. This co-implication of aesthetics and history in each other has profound consequences: once historical events take the form of figures, they no longer act as literal, material referents but rather interrogate the status of reference itself. Far from being denied, history becomes a problem for analysis, one whose normative frames of understanding and founding concepts, such as “event,” “experience,” and “chronology,” must be rethought. This can be most easily seen in the fact that the four writers, in their different ways, all miss historical occurrence—not when they try to flee it, as many older accounts of Romanticism have claimed, but just when they attempt to engage it most intensely.

Crafting a Continuum

Crafting a Continuum PDF Author: Peter Held
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961281X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The Arizona State University Art Museum is renowned for its extensive and notable craft collection and features international acquisitions in wood, ceramic, and fiber. This book, edited by the museum's curators, uses the ASU collection to explore the idea of craft within a critical context, as both idea and action. Crafting a Continuum begins with the genesis of the craft collection and relates it to the historical development of craft in the United States and abroad, exploring both anthropological and cultural concepts of the field. Peter Held and Heather Sealy Lineberry present photographs of the museum's objects alongside essays by distinguished scholars to illuminate historical and contemporary trends. Sidebars and essays by writers in the craft field offer a broad overview of the future of contemporary craft.

Mexican Literature in Theory

Mexican Literature in Theory PDF Author: Ignacio M. S�nchez Prado
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501332511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Mexican Literature in Theory is the first book in any language to engage post-independence Mexican literature from the perspective of current debates in literary and cultural theory. It brings together scholars whose work is defined both by their innovations in the study of Mexican literature and by the theoretical sophistication of their scholarship. Mexican Literature in Theory provides the reader with two contributions. First, it is one of the most complete accounts of Mexican literature available, covering both canonical texts as well as the most important works in contemporary production. Second, each one of the essays is in itself an important contribution to the elucidation of specific texts. Scholars and students in fields such as Latin American studies, comparative literature and literary theory will find in this book compelling readings of literature from a theoretical perspective, methodological suggestions as to how to use current theory in the study of literature, and important debates and revisions of major theoretical works through the lens of Mexican literary works.

The Book in Movement

The Book in Movement PDF Author: Magalí Rabasa
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book. Magalí Rabasa travels through the political and literary underground of cities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile to explore the ways that autonomous politics are enacted in the production and circulation of books.

Witnessing the Past

Witnessing the Past PDF Author: Sigrun Meinig
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
ISBN: 9783823361169
Category : Australia
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description