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Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures #1969-1970)
by Lionel Trilling“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.
Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
by Joseph NorthSince the global turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s, movements in literary studies have been diagnostic rather than interventionist: scholars have developed techniques for analyzing culture but have retreated from attempts to transform it. For Joseph North, a genuinely interventionist criticism is a central task facing scholars on the Left today.
Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court
by Sunil SharmaMughal rulers were legendary connoisseurs of the arts, whose patronage attracted poets, artists, and scholars from all parts of the world. Sunil Sharma explores the rise and decline of Persian court poetry in India and the invention of an enduring idea of a literary paradise, perfectly exemplified by the valley of Kashmir.
The Hatred of Literature
by William MarxFor 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature’s continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate <i>Pallada</i>
by Edyta M. BojanowskaMany people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s. Less well known is that on the heels of the Perry squadron followed a Russian expedition secretly on the same mission. Serving as secretary to the naval commander was novelist Ivan Goncharov, who turned his impressions into a book, The Frigate Pallada, which became a bestseller in imperial Russia. In A World of Empires, Edyta Bojanowska uses Goncharov’s fascinating travelogue as a window onto global imperial history in the mid-nineteenth century. Reflecting on encounters in southern Africa’s Cape Colony, Dutch Java, Spanish Manila, Japan, and the British ports of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, Goncharov offers keen observations on imperial expansion, cooperation, and competition. Britain’s global ascendancy leaves him in equal measures awed and resentful. In Southeast Asia, he recognizes an increasingly interlocking world in the vibrant trading hubs whose networks encircle the globe. Traveling overland back home, Goncharov presents Russia’s colonizing rule in Siberia as a positive imperial model, contrasted with Western ones. Slow to be integrated into the standard narrative on European imperialism, Russia emerges here as an increasingly assertive empire, eager to position itself on the world stage among its American and European rivals and fully conversant with the ideologies of civilizing mission and race. Goncharov’s gripping narrative offers a unique eyewitness account of empire in action, in which Bojanowska finds both a zeal to emulate European powers and a determination to define Russia against them.
Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture
by Eric CalderwoodThrough state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain’s colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule. Writers of many political stripes have celebrated convivencia, the fabled “coexistence” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco’s colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain’s colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco’s Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco. Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources—including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts—Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.
What Was Literary Impressionism?
by Michael Fried“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.
On Replacement: Cultural, Social and Psychological Representations
by Jean Owen Naomi SegalThis book is an interdisciplinary study of the human drama of replacement. Is one’s irreplaceability dependent on surrounding oneself by a replication of others? Is love intrinsically repetitious or built on a fantasy of uniqueness? The sense that a person’s value is blotted out if someone takes their place can be seen in the serial monogamy of our age and in the lives of ‘replacement children’ – children born into a family that has recently lost a child, whom they may even be named after. The book investigates various forms of replacement, including AI and doubling, incest and bedtricks, imposters and revenants, human rights and ‘surrogacy’, and intertextuality and adaptation. The authors highlight the emotions of betrayal, jealousy and desire both within and across generations. On Replacement consists of 24 essays divided into seven sections: What is replacement?, Law & society, Wayward women, Lost children, Replacement films, The Holocaust and Psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to anyone engaged in reading cultural and social representations of replacement.
On Replacement: Cultural, Social and Psychological Representations
by Jean Owen Naomi SegalThis book is an interdisciplinary study of the human drama of replacement. Is one’s irreplaceability dependent on surrounding oneself by a replication of others? Is love intrinsically repetitious or built on a fantasy of uniqueness? The sense that a person’s value is blotted out if someone takes their place can be seen in the serial monogamy of our age and in the lives of ‘replacement children’ – children born into a family that has recently lost a child, whom they may even be named after. The book investigates various forms of replacement, including AI and doubling, incest and bedtricks, imposters and revenants, human rights and ‘surrogacy’, and intertextuality and adaptation. The authors highlight the emotions of betrayal, jealousy and desire both within and across generations. On Replacement consists of 24 essays divided into seven sections: What is replacement?, Law & society, Wayward women, Lost children, Replacement films, The Holocaust and Psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to anyone engaged in reading cultural and social representations of replacement.
Language And Literature In A Glocal World (PDF)
by Sandhya Rao MehtaThis collection of critical essays investigates the intersections of the global and local in literature and language. Exploring the connections that exist between global forms of knowledge and their local, regional applications, this volume explores multiple ways in which literature is influenced, and in turn, influences, movements and events across the world and how these are articulated in various genres of world literature, including the resultant challenges to translation. This book also explores the way in which languages, especially English, transform and continue to be reinvented in its use across the world. Using perspectives from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and semiotics, this volume focuses on diasporic literature, travel literature, and literature in translation from different parts of the world to study the ways in which languages change and grow as they are sought to be ‘owned’ by the communities which use them in different contexts. Emphasizing on interdisciplinary studies and methodologies, this collection centralizes both research that theorizes the links between the local and the global and that which shows, through practical evidence, how the local and global interact in new and challenging ways.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory (Belknap Press Ser.)
by David W. BlightNo historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.
Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, And The New Supernatural
by Victoria NelsonThe Gothic has taken a revolutionary turn in this century. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters and devils into heroes and angels and is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture. Nelson argues that this mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Walter Benjamin Ser. #Vol. 1)
by Howard EilandWalter Benjamin was perhaps the twentieth century's most elusive intellectual. His writings defy categorization, and his improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. In a major new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times, as well as extensive commentary on his work.
One-Way Street
by Walter BenjaminPresented in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture, composed of 60 short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces.
The Lives of Frederick Douglass
by Robert S. LevineFrederick Douglass’s changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in his many conflicting accounts of events during his journey from slavery to freedom. Robert S. Levine creates a fascinating collage of this elusive subject—revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.
Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing
by Christopher HagerConsigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings—or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors’ perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.
Alone in America: The Stories That Matter
by Robert A. FergusonWith more people living alone today than at any time in U.S. history, Ferguson investigates loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. Ferguson shows that we can learn, from our literature, how to live alone.
How to be Gay
by David M. HalperinA pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes—aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers—and in the social meaning of style.
Lu Xun's Revolution: Writing In A Time Of Violence
by Gloria DaviesRecognized as modern China’s preeminent man of letters, Lu Xun (1881–1936) is revered as the nation’s conscience, a writer comparable to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Gloria Davies’s vivid portrait gives readers a better sense of this influential author by situating the man Mao Zedong hailed as “the sage of modern China” in his turbulent time and place.
Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals
by Mark EdmundsonAn ARTery Best Book of the Year An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul. “An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.” —Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education “Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.” —Kirkus Reviews
London Fog: The Biography
by Christine L. CortonThe classic London fogs—thick yellow “pea-soupers”—were born in the industrial age and remained a feature of cold, windless winter days until clean air legislation in the 1960s. Christine L. Corton tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and the lasting effects on our culture and imagination of these urban spectacles.
Blake; Or, The Huts of America: Or, The Huts Of America
by Martin R. DelanyMartin R. Delany’s Blake (c. 1860) tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his travels in the U.S., Canada, Africa, and Cuba on a mission to unite blacks of the Atlantic region in the struggle for freedom. Jerome McGann’s edition offers the first correct printing of the work and an authoritative introduction.
Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Harvard Historical Studies #184)
by Sean P. HarveyExploring the morally entangled territory of language and race in 18th- and 19th-century America, Sean Harvey shows that whites’ theories of an “Indian mind” inexorably shaped by Indian languages played a crucial role in the subjugation of Native peoples and informed the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.
American Vandal: Mark Twain Abroad
by Roy MorrisUnintimidated by Old World sophistication or travel to undeveloped parts of the globe, Mark Twain spent a surprising amount of time outside the continental United States. Roy Morris, Jr. focuses on the dozen years he lived overseas and the books he wrote encouraging middle-class Americans to follow him around the world, at the dawn of mass tourism.
The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, And Islands
by Angus FletcherIn a bold and boundary defining work, Angus Fletcher clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining literature and topology—a branch of mathematics—he maps the ways the imagination’s contours are formed by the spherical earth’s patterns and cycles, and shows how the world we inhabit also inhabits us.