Literature Suspends Death

Literature Suspends Death PDF Author: Chris Danta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441177019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of how three important European thinkers-Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot-use the Binding of Isaac to illuminate the sacrificial situation of the literary writer. Danta shows that literature plays a vital and heretical role in these three writers' highly idiosyncratic accounts of the Akedah. His claim is twofold: firstly, that all three authors choose to respond to the Genesis narrative by manifesting literature; and, secondly, that each heretically endows literature-or fiction-with the power to suspend the sacrifice. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac is traditionally read as the story of faith in action. But what does it mean to play the game of not-quite-belief with the story of religious faith? By examining the literary and heretical treatments of Isaac's sacrifice in the work of Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot, this book develops an original account of literature as a form of sacrificial thinking. For each, writing acts, like God's sacrificial demand of Abraham, to suspend the writer's usual relation to his daily and earthly responsibilities.

Literature Suspends Death

Literature Suspends Death PDF Author: Chris Danta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441177019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first book-length study of how three important European thinkers-Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot-use the Binding of Isaac to illuminate the sacrificial situation of the literary writer. Danta shows that literature plays a vital and heretical role in these three writers' highly idiosyncratic accounts of the Akedah. His claim is twofold: firstly, that all three authors choose to respond to the Genesis narrative by manifesting literature; and, secondly, that each heretically endows literature-or fiction-with the power to suspend the sacrifice. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac is traditionally read as the story of faith in action. But what does it mean to play the game of not-quite-belief with the story of religious faith? By examining the literary and heretical treatments of Isaac's sacrifice in the work of Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot, this book develops an original account of literature as a form of sacrificial thinking. For each, writing acts, like God's sacrificial demand of Abraham, to suspend the writer's usual relation to his daily and earthly responsibilities.

The Death of a Nobody

The Death of a Nobody PDF Author: Jules Romains
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The subject of this modern classic is not a man. "It is an event," says Jules Romains, who is considered "the French Dos Passos." The event starts with the death of Jacques Godard, a man of no importance. It unfolds through his brief survival in the minds of others - the porter of his tenement in Paris, his fellow lodgers, a few acquaintances, his old father, who comes up from the country for the funeral, a young stranger who feels that the dead pass into "a great soul that cannot die." The event expresses Romains's belief in "collective beings," the famous theory of "Unanimism." In dramatizing his theory, Romains developed an advanced motion-picture technique when films were in their infancy, a technique of group portraits and sudden shifts from scene to scene that keeps this work far ahead of conventional novels. Here, Romains explores the ideas and the devices used in his twenty-seven-volume masterpiece, Men of Good Will, which André Maurois calls "the boldest attempt to describe completely his own time that any French novelist has made since Balzac."

A Long Strange Trip

A Long Strange Trip PDF Author: Dennis McNally
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307418774
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture. From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes. Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.

The Last Day of a Condemned Man

The Last Day of a Condemned Man PDF Author: Victor Hugo
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513294245
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) is a short novel by Victor Hugo. Having witnessed several executions by guillotine as a young man, Hugo devoted himself in his art and political life to opposing the death penalty in France. Praised by Dostoevsky as “absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote,” The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a powerful story from an author who defined nineteenth century French literature. If you knew when and where you would die, how would you spend your final moments? For Hugo’s unnamed narrator, such an existential question is made reality. Sentenced to death for an unspecified crime, he reflects on his life as its last seconds wane in the shadows of a cramped prison cell. Recording his emotional state, observations, and conversations with a priest and fellow prisoner, the condemned man forces us to not only recognize his humanity, but question our own. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Suspended Apocalypse

Suspended Apocalypse PDF Author: Dylan Rodriguez
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816653496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Suspended Apocalypse is a rich and provocative meditation on the emergence of the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, community, and history, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century military, political, and cultural subjugation of the Philippines by the United States. Suspended Apocalypse critically addresses what Rodríguez calls "Filipino American communion," interrogating redemptive and romantic notions of Filipino migration and settlement in the United States in relation to larger histories of race, colonial conquest, and white supremacy. Contemporary popular and scholarly discussions of the Filipino American are, he asserts, inseparable from their origins in the violent racist regimes of the United States and its historical successor, liberal multiculturalism. Rodríguez deftly contrasts the colonization of the Philippines with present-day disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Mount Pinatubo to show how the global subjection of Philippine, black, and indigenous peoples create a linked history of genocide. But in these juxtapositions, Rodríguez finds moments and spaces of radical opportunity. Engaging the violence and disruption of the Filipino condition sets the stage, he argues, for the possibility of a transformation of the political lens through which contemporary empire might be analyzed, understood, and perhaps even overcome.

Conspiracy in Death

Conspiracy in Death PDF Author: J. D. Robb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780425168134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In a future where human nature remains as predictable as death, a killer plays God and puts innocent lives in the palm of his hand in this novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling In Death series. With the precision of a surgeon, a serial killer preys on the most vulnerable souls of the world’s city streets. The first victim: a sidewalk sleeper, found dead in New York City. No bruises, no signs of struggle. Just a laser-perfect, fist-sized hole where his heart had once been. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is assigned to investigate. But in the heat of a cat-and-mouse game with the killer, Dallas’s job is suddenly on the line. Now her hands are tied...between a struggle for justice—and a fight for her career...

Death Representations in Literature

Death Representations in Literature PDF Author: Adriana Teodorescu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443872989
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
If the academic field of death studies is a prosperous one, there still seems to be a level of mistrust concerning the capacity of literature to provide socially relevant information about death and to help improve the anthropological understanding of how culture is shaped by the human condition of mortality. Furthermore, the relationship between literature and death tends to be trivialized, in the sense that death representations are interpreted in an over-aestheticized manner. As such, this approach has a propensity to consider death in literature to be significant only for literary studies, and gives rise to certain persistent clichés, such as the power of literature to annihilate death. This volume overcomes such stereotypes, and reveals the great potential of literary studies to provide fresh and accurate ways of interrogating death as a steady and unavoidable human reality and as an ever-continuing socio-cultural construction. The volume brings together researchers from various countries – the USA, the UK, France, Poland, New Zealand, Canada, India, Germany, Greece, and Romania – with different academic backgrounds in fields as diverse as literature, art history, social studies, criminology, musicology, and cultural studies, and provides answers to questions such as: What are the features of death representations in certain literary genres? Is it possible to speak of an homogeneous vision of death in the case of some literary movements? How do writers perceive, imagine, and describe their death through their personal diaries, or how do they metabolize the death of the “significant others” through their writings? To what extent does the literary representation of death refer to the extra-fictional, socio-historically constructed “Death”? Is it moral to represent death in children’s literature? What are the differences and similarities between representing death in literature and death representations in other connected fields? Are metaphors and literary representations of death forms of death denial, or, on the contrary, a more insightful way of capturing the meaning of death?

Death Takes a Holiday

Death Takes a Holiday PDF Author: Alberto Cassella
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573607882
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Death suspends activities for three days during which he falls in love with a beautiful girl, and through her realizes why mortals fear him.

Suspended Judgments: Essays On Books and Sensations

Suspended Judgments: Essays On Books and Sensations PDF Author: John Cowper Powys
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations by John Cowper Powys is a thought-provoking collection of essays that explores the intricate relationship between literature, human experiences, and the profound impact they have on our lives. With intellectual depth and lyrical prose, Powys invites readers to suspend their judgments and embark on a journey of literary exploration. Key Aspects of the Book: Literary Analysis: Powys delves into the analysis of various literary works, offering his unique perspectives and interpretations. Through his essays, readers gain insights into the themes, symbolism, and deeper meanings embedded in classic and contemporary literature, fostering a deeper appreciation for the power of storytelling.Human Sensations and Emotions: This book delves into the rich tapestry of human sensations and emotions, examining how literature evokes profound responses within us. Powys explores the ways in which books connect with our innermost selves, ignite our imaginations, and shape our understanding of the world, unraveling the intricate relationship between literature and our lived experiences.Provoking Reflection and Contemplation: Powys's essays encourage readers to engage in deep reflection and contemplation. His thought-provoking ideas and explorations prompt us to question our own beliefs, biases, and preconceived notions, challenging us to see the world and literature from fresh perspectives. Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations, John Cowper Powys, a renowned writer and critic, takes readers on an intellectual journey that bridges the realms of literature and human experiences. His insightful essays offer profound reflections on the power of books to shape our understanding of the world and evoke deep sensations within us. Powys's writings continue to inspire readers to explore the depths of literature, suspend their judgments, and engage with the transformative potential of the written word.

Publishers' Circular and Booksellers' Record of British and Foreign Literature

Publishers' Circular and Booksellers' Record of British and Foreign Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bibliography
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description