Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Life Narratives, Creativity, and the Social in the Americas
Resorting to life narratives as a comprehensive umbrella term and embracing hemispheric American studies paradigms, this edited volume explores the interrelations between life narratives, the social world, creativity, and different forms of media to narrate and (re)present the self to see in which way these expressions offer (new) means of (self-) representation within cultural productions from the Americas. Creativity in the context of life narratives nourishes the act of narrating and propels among others the desire to link individual life stories with larger stories of social embeddedness, conditioning, and transformation thus pushing new forms of historiography and other forms of nonfict...
Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions
This is a study of the powers of Gothic in late 20th-century fiction and film. Susanne Becker argues that the Gothic, 200 years after it emerged, exhibits unchanged vitality in our media age and its obsession with incessant stimulation and excitement.
Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.
Ethics of Literary Forms in Contemporary American Literature
This work links ethics and the formal arrangement of literary texts. It shows that specific formal techniques and devices and the overall form of literary texts always have an ethical dimension and beg certain ethical questions. Covering the three main genres of narrative, drama and poetry, the discussion addresses aspects of syntax, line breaks, mise-en-scene and narrative situation as well as the table of contents, list of characters and chapter structure in six texts by contemporary American authors (Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham).
Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education and Societal Contexts
Groundbreaking in its international, interdisciplinary, and multi-professional approach to diversity and inclusion in higher education, this volume puts theory in conversation with practice, articulates problems, and suggests deep-structured strategies from multiple perspectives including performed art, education, dis/ability studies, institutional as well as government policy, health humanities, history, jurisprudence, psychology, race and ethnicity studies, and semiotic theory. The authors—originating from Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Trinidad, Turkey, and the US— invite readers to join the conversation and sustain the work.
Imperative of Narration
This is the first book to deal with the self-reflexive nature of narration of Beckett and Bernhard. Samuel Beckett's and Thomas Bernhard's works are representative of a persisting perplexity with regard to language. The texts of both authors are marked by their narrator's obsessive need to write, which is inextricably intertwined with their profound suspicion of language. The perpetuation of the narration is explained as an imperative, a simultaneously conscious and unconscious command which forces the artist to submit to the creative process. The author places this inexplicable force of the imperative within the context of Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory and Jacques Lacan's concept of desire. The attempt to define and interpret the two authors' prose and drama is displaced by this sense of the infinity of desire (Lacan) and by the eternal becoming of the will (Schopenhauer), which reveal themselves to lie at the heart of Beckett's and Bernhard's creativity.
Ethics in Postmodern Fiction
Postmodern texts have generally been associated with a radical challenge of established conventions and with an "anything goes" mentality, which seems to exclude serious ethical discussion. While the postmodern texts of the American novel and short-story writers Donald Barthelme and William Gass indeed challenge traditional ethical rules, they are nonetheless deeply concerned with moral questions. Using contemporary ethics as its theoretical framework, the study shows that the fiction of Barthelme and Gass not only makes readers aware of the complexity of ethical issues but also argues that the premise for good ethical behavior is to have the right - postmodern - attitude: to be open-minded, flexible, and able to deal with the ambiguities of life. Retrospectively, these findings can also be applied to other postmodern writers to reveal the hidden ethical dimensions of their fictions.
The Chutneyfication of History
Colonizers are driven into a state of panic by the circulation of a 'humble' chapati; a young girl's setting her family's shoes on fire seems comparable to a nuclear attack; a sleepwalker kills two hundred and eighteen turkeys just to be rid of them. Are these events of historical significancei The works of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Bharati Mukherjee seem to suggest that this question might be answered in the affirmative. The anecdote fleshes out what historical facts must elide in their abstraction. This study proposes that the fiction of all three authors can be read through Rushdie's metaphor of the chutneyfication of history. In line with the lighting of shoes and the murder ...
The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction Since the 1960's
Some humanist critics contend that only realist texts have an ethical function, that there is no ethical message behind the parodic and self-conscious games played by experimental fiction and that, since emotion neutralises the ethical faculties, there is no ethical dimension in such excess-pedling postmodernist genres and modes as kitsch, melodrama and romance. Yet, one may argue that the defamiliarisation imposed by parody, metafictional overkill and sundry devices symptomatic of emotional paroxysm on the realist text involves some measure of criticism of received truth and makes for the practice of a non-deontic ethics of truths that is also fairly often an ethics of alterity. This volume examines analytical evidence for the ethical component in key experimental British novels from the 1960's to the present, with special focus on John Fowles, Brigid Brophy, B. S. Johnson, Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes.
