Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel PDF Author: Hilary Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350373834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of 'magical realism', Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds. Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction. A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel PDF Author: Hilary Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350373834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of 'magical realism', Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds. Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction. A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

David Foster Wallace and Author: Marshall Boswell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628924535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text.

Persian Literature as World Literature

Persian Literature as World Literature PDF Author: Mostafa Abedinifard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501354205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature

Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature PDF Author: Tasnim Qutait
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755617614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book offers an in-depth engagement with the growing body of Anglophone Arab fiction in the context of theoretical debates around memory and identity. Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others. Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial state and of pan-Arabism, and the perennial issue of the diaspora's relationship to the homeland. Making a contribution to the transnational turn in memory studies while focusing on a region underrepresented in this field, this book will be of interest for researchers interested in cultural memory, postcolonial studies and the literatures of the Middle East.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty PDF Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0731814908
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme

Novels of the Contemporary Extreme PDF Author: Alain-Philippe Durand
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441162135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This book investigates a new form of fiction that is currently emerging in contemporary literature across the globe. 'Novels of the contemporary extreme' - from North and South America, from Europe, and the Middle East - are set in a world both similar to and different from our own: a hyper real, often apocalyptic world progressively invaded by popular culture, permeated with technology and dominated by destruction. While their writing is commonly classified as 'hip' or 'underground' literature, authors of contemporary extreme novels have often been the center of public controversy and scandal; they, and their work, become international bestsellers. This collection of essays identifies and describes this international phenomenon, investigating the appeal of these novels' styles and themes, the reasons behind their success, and the fierce debates they provoked.

No Longer Human

No Longer Human PDF Author: 太宰治
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811204811
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A young man describes his torment as he struggles to reconcile the diverse influences of Western culture and the traditions of his own Japanese heritage.

Spirits of the Space Age

Spirits of the Space Age PDF Author: Kelly E. Hayes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197516394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Spirits of the Space Age details the historical emergence of The Valley of the Dawn, a highly eclectic new religious movement known for its spectacular material culture and all-encompassing aesthetics. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Kelly E. Hayes offers a narrative portrait of a new religious movement as seen in and through the lives of its founder Aunt Neiva, her most important collaborators, and contemporary adherents.

Real Encounters, Different Dimensions and Otherworldy Beings

Real Encounters, Different Dimensions and Otherworldy Beings PDF Author: Brad Steiger
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
ISBN: 1578594731
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
An expert on the unexplained and paranormal research, Brad and Sherry Steiger turn their unique and remarkable talents to the bold storytelling of encounters with the unknown from throughout the ages. From mysterious strangers and unpredictable beings to weird behavior and paranormal phenomena, they investigate claims of visits from ghastly ghosts, otherworldly creatures, aliens living among us, phantoms, spirits and other accounts of encounters with the unexplained. Over 130 astounding accounts of Real Encounters with the supernatural, such as ... *Visitors from others worlds who have had Earth under surveillance for centuries, conducting their activities in secret-- even abducting humans for their own research and undeclared ends. *Members of secret societies who developed an advanced technology centuries ago which has been kept hidden in underground or undersea cities. *Time Travelers from the Future. Beings who claim to be our descendents from the future who are returning to study the true destiny of humankind. *Ghosts that haunt people, places, and things--and poltergeists that create havoc. *Beasties and monsters found in everyone’s worst nightmares--and sometimes in their campsites, fields, and yards. *Other Dimensional Visitors, Beings, Creatures, or Entities that come not from a faraway world in our solar system or any other, but from an adjacent space-time continuum existing on another vibrational/dimensional frequency or level. *Previously unknown, unidentified terrestrial life-forms, such beings as "sky-critters," "sky fish,” “rods,” and “orbs.” *As yet unknown physical energies that may be activated by the psyche, the unconscious level of the human mind. *Archetypal creatures and entities of the collective unconscious that are the result of energies that are accessible through dreams, meditations, and other states of altered consciousness. *Interactions with beings that have been dubbed elves, fairies, devas throughout the centuries. *The marvelous, creative facet of dreams. *Out-of-body mind-traveling through Time and Space. *Majestic beings who are described in the scriptures of many world religions as angels or demons.