Rethinking Mimesis

Rethinking Mimesis PDF Author: Saija Isomaa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443839582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
Literary mimesis is an age-old concept which has been variously interpreted and at times highly contested, and which has recently been brought back to the forefront of scholarly interest. The debate around mimesis has been reactivated by approaches that re-evaluate its meaning both in the ancient texts in which it first appeared, and in the contemporary discussions of the power of literary representation. This volume presents a selection of central contributions to both the theoretical debate on mimesis and to its up-to-date critical practice. This volume approaches mimesis by emphasising the principles of knowledge, understanding and imagination that have been associated with mimesis since Aristotle’s Poetics. The articles consider the various aspects of the concept throughout history, and explore the ways in which literature produces its peculiar reality effects and negotiates its relationship to value systems connecting it to the world of everyday experience and ethics, as well as to different ideologies, emotions, world views and fields of knowledge. Building on this rich theoretical background, the articles examine the limits and possibilities of mimesis through detailed textual analyses that present acute challenges to our current understanding of literary representation.

Rethinking Mimesis

Rethinking Mimesis PDF Author: Saija Isomaa
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443839582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
Literary mimesis is an age-old concept which has been variously interpreted and at times highly contested, and which has recently been brought back to the forefront of scholarly interest. The debate around mimesis has been reactivated by approaches that re-evaluate its meaning both in the ancient texts in which it first appeared, and in the contemporary discussions of the power of literary representation. This volume presents a selection of central contributions to both the theoretical debate on mimesis and to its up-to-date critical practice. This volume approaches mimesis by emphasising the principles of knowledge, understanding and imagination that have been associated with mimesis since Aristotle’s Poetics. The articles consider the various aspects of the concept throughout history, and explore the ways in which literature produces its peculiar reality effects and negotiates its relationship to value systems connecting it to the world of everyday experience and ethics, as well as to different ideologies, emotions, world views and fields of knowledge. Building on this rich theoretical background, the articles examine the limits and possibilities of mimesis through detailed textual analyses that present acute challenges to our current understanding of literary representation.

Translating Cain

Translating Cain PDF Author: Samantha Joo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1978709854
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unless we recognize the cultural context embedded in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, the significance of Cain’s rejection and consequent violence is often lost in translation. While many interpreters highlight the theme of sibling rivalry to explain Cain’s murderous violence, Samantha Joo relates Cain’s anger and shame to the social marginalization of Kenites in ancient Israel, for whom Cain functions narratively as an ancestor. To better understand and experience Cain’s emotions in the narrative, Joo provides a method for re-contextualizing an ancient story in modern contexts. Drawing from post-colonial theories of Latin America translators, Joo focuses on analogies which simulate the “moveable event” of a story. She shows that novels like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, in which protagonists kill to escape their invisibility, capture the “event” of Cain and Abel. Consequently, readers can empathize with the anger and shame resulting from the social marginalization of Cain through the alienation of a poor, ex-university student, Raskolnikov, and the oppression of a young black man, Bigger Thomas.

Performing Ground

Performing Ground PDF Author: L. Levin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137274255
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Performing Ground explores camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities through space. The book offers a critically rich investigation of how the performative practice of camouflage renders the politics of space, power, and gender (in)visible.

Mimetic Posthumanism

Mimetic Posthumanism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004692053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is tempting to affirm that on and about November 2022 (post)human character changed. The revolution in A.I. simulations certainly calls for an updated of the ancient realization that humans are imitative animals, or homo mimeticus. But the mimetic turn in posthuman studies is not limited to A.I.: from simulation to identification, affective contagion to viral mimesis, robotics to hypermimesis, the essays collected in this volume articulate the multiple facets of homo mimeticus 2.0. Challenging rationalist accounts of autonomous originality internal to the history of Homo sapiens, this volume argues from different—artistic, philosophical, technological—perspectives that the all too human tendency to imitate is, paradoxically, central to our ongoing process of becoming posthuman.

Local Transcendence

Local Transcendence PDF Author: Alan Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226486974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.

Dante's Persons

Dante's Persons PDF Author: Heather Webb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191081876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory PDF Author: Matthew Garrett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108428479
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an approach to understanding all kinds of cultural production: from literary texts to historiography, from film and videogames to philosophical discourse. It takes the long historical view, outlines essential concepts, and reflects on the way narrative forms connect with and rework social forms. The volume analyzes central premises, identifies narrative theory's feminist foundations, and elaborates its significance to queer theory and issues of race. The specially commissioned essays are exciting to read, uniting accessibility and rigor, traditional concerns with a renovated sense of the field as a whole, and analytical clarity with stylistic dash. Topical and substantial, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory is an engaging resource on a key contemporary concept.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction PDF Author: Erin McGlothlin
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814346154
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines textual representations of the consciousness of men responsible for committing Holocaust crimes. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfictioncontains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators’ performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator’s experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator’s consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

Homo Mimeticus

Homo Mimeticus PDF Author: Nidesh Lawtoo
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462703469
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate—for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future. Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies.

Mimesis and the Human Animal

Mimesis and the Human Animal PDF Author: Robert Storey
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810114585
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Mimesis and the Human Animal, Robert Storey argues that human culture derives from human biology and that literary representation therefore must have a biological basis. As he ponders the question "What does it mean to say that art imitates life?" he must consider both "What is life?" and "What is art?" A unique approach to the subject of mimesis, Storey's book goes beyond the politicizing of literature grounded in literary theory to develop a scientific basis for the creation of literature and art.