Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary

Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary PDF Author: Kaisa Kaakinen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319518208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.

Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary

Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary PDF Author: Kaisa Kaakinen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319518208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.

Control of the Imaginary

Control of the Imaginary PDF Author: Luiz Costa Lima
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816615632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book

Book Description
Control of the Imaginary was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In Control of the Imaginary Luiz Costa Lima explains how the distinction between truth and fiction emerged at the beginning of modern times and why, upon its emergence, fiction fell under suspicion. Costa Lima not only describes the continuous relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity over a broad time-frame—the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century—but he uses this occasion to reexamine the literary traditions of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany. The book reconstructs the dominant frames in the European tradition between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere. Costa Lima manages to synthesize positions from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and history without separating the theoretical discussion from his historical reconstructions. The first chapter situates the problem and grounds the emergent distinction between truth and fiction in a very close analysis of one of the first European historians, Fernao Lopes, who sets the tone for the condemnation of fiction in the name of the truth of history and the potential for individual interpretation. Costa Lima pursues these notions through the aesthetic debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the writings of the French historian Michelet. He also devotes an illuminating chapter to the invention of the strictures imposed on fiction.

The Imaginary and Its Worlds

The Imaginary and Its Worlds PDF Author: Laura Bieger
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611684064
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book

Book Description
The Imaginary and Its Worlds collects essays that boldly rethink the imaginary as a key concept for cultural criticism. Addressing both the emergence and the reproduction of the social, the imaginary is ideally suited to chart the consequences of the transnational turn in American studies. Leading scholars in the field from the United States and Europe address the literary, social, and political dimensions of the imaginary, providing a methodological and theoretical groundwork for American studies scholarship in the transnational era and opening new arenas for conceptualizing formations of imaginary belonging and subjectivity. This important state-of-the-field collection will appeal to a broad constituency of humanists working to overcome methodological nationalism. The Imaginary and Its Worlds: An Introduction * LITERARY IMAGINARIES * Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America - Ramon Saldivar * The Necessary Fragmentation of the (U.S.) Literary-Cultural Imaginary - Lawrence Buell * Imaginaries of American Modernism - Heinz Ickstadt * SOCIAL IMAGINARIES * William James versus Charles Taylor: Philosophy of Religion and the Confines of the Social and Cultural Imaginaries - Herwig Friedl * The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community: A Perspective of Figurational Sociology on the Cultural Imaginary - Christa Buschendorf * Russia's Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman's Pacific - Lene Johannessen * Form Games: Staging Life in the Systems Epoch - Mark Seltzer * POLITICAL IMAGINARIES * Real Toads - Walter Benn Michaels * Obama Unwound: The Romanticism of Victory and the Defeat of Compromise - Christopher Newfield * Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries - Donald E. Pease * Coda. The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer - Winfried Fluck * Contributors * Index

The Imaginary Puritan

The Imaginary Puritan PDF Author: Nancy Armstrong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520359984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse challenge traditional accounts of the origins of modern Anglo-American culture by focusing on the emergence of print culture in England and the North American colonies. They postulate a modern middle class that consisted of authors and intellectuals who literally wrote a new culture into being. Milton's Paradise Lost marks the emergence of this new literacy. The authors show how Milton helped transform English culture into one of self-enclosed families made up of self-enclosed individuals. However, the authors point out that the popularity of Paradise Lost was matched by that of the Indian captivity narratives that flowed into England from the American colonies. Mary Rowlandson's account of her forcible separation from the culture of her origins stresses the ordinary person's ability to regain those lost origins, provided she remains truly English. In a colonial version of the Miltonic paradigm, Rowlandson sought to return to a family of individuals much like the one in Milton's depiction of the fallen world. Thus the origin both of modern English culture and of the English novel are located in North America. American captivity narratives formulated the ideal of personal life that would be reproduced in the communities depicted by Defoe, Richardson, and later domestic fiction. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Imaginary Films in Literature

Imaginary Films in Literature PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004306331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
Alternating theoretical essays with case studies, Imaginary Films in Literature focuses on a particular and suggestive form of ekphrasis: the description of imaginary, non-existent movies.

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia PDF Author: Anne Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113670728X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book

Book Description
Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period. Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book addresses the contributing forces and comparative implications of the formation of religious and communitarian sensibilities as expressed through the imagination of the past, and suggests how these relate to each other within and across traditions in South Asia. By bringing diverse materials together, this book presents new commonalities and distinctions that inform a larger understanding of how religion and other cultural formations impinge on the concept of temporality, and the representation of it as history.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison PDF Author: Alshaymaa Mohamed Ahmed
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666921637
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book

Book Description
Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities places comparative literature in a postcolonial context in order to widen its traditional scope and thereby pay greater attention to the relationship between indigenous and hegemonic cultures.

The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction

The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction PDF Author: Philip Babcock Gove
Publisher: Octagon Press, Limited
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Get Book

Book Description


Storytelling and Ethics

Storytelling and Ethics PDF Author: Hanna Meretoja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351965778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
In recent years there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature and art but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding, and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts), interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism), and history (traumatic histories of violence, cultural history). The collection analyses ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and art to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the ethics of storytelling relates to the contemporary arts as they work with, draw on, and contribute to historical imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities, and the relation to the non-human. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices, and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma PDF Author: Colin Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351025201
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Get Book

Book Description
Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.