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The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which wer...
Posthumanism is both a descriptive and a prescriptive term. Firstly, it registers a shift beginning in the late 1960s and epitomized by Foucault's “the death of Man”. Secondly, it refers to the future and a new relationship with the non-human, along with a different understanding of human exceptionalism. In Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future, Zahi Zalloua interrogates this future and shows that “post-” does not necessarily mean 'after' or that what comes after is more advanced than what has gone before. He pursues this line of inquiry across four distinct, yet interrelated, figures: cyborgs, animals, objects, and racialized and excluded 'others'. These figures disrupt the narrative of the 'human' and its singularity and by reading them together, Zalloua determines that it is only when posthumanist discourse is combined with psychoanalysis that subjectivity can be properly examined.
"Gillespie belongs to an endangered scholarly species: that of the real comparatists...."---Comparative Literature --
With the message that everything in a sense is alive, thus allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across human and nonhuman realms, the new materialisms have captivated the minds of many academics, artists, and intellectuals by stressing that it is time to return to a premodern mindset and discard modernity and its concepts of secularization, autonomy, and finitude. The Embarrassment of Being Human not only demonstrates how these magical materialisms are beset by grave theoretical and practical inconsistencies and self-contradictions. It also demonstrates how their demand for humans to step down and allow for an emancipation of things qualifies the new materialisms as a metaphysics of neoliberalism that reproduces and fortifies the self-contradictions rampant in the current neoliberal hegemony. While helping us to gain a comprehensive understanding of the tenets of the eerie ills of our epoch, the critique of the new materialisms can furthermore inspire us to appreciate how the exact inversion of the new materialist complex amounts to a revitalization of the modern project. A revitalization that is critical to think our epoch differently.
Migration and Literature offers a thought-provoking analysis of the thematic and formal role of migration in four contemporary and canonized novelists.
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The first comprehensive scrutiny of the theories associated with new materialisms including speculative realism, new materialism, Object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory. One of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades, new materialisms embody a critique of modernity and a pledge to regain immediate reality by focusing on the materiality of the world – human and nonhuman – rather than a post-structuralist focus upon texts. Against New Materialisms examines the theoretical and practical problems connected with discarding modernity and the human subject from a number of interdisciplinary angles: ontology and phenomenology to political theory, mythology and ecology. With contributions from international scholars, including Markus Gabriel, Andrew Cole, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the essays here challenge the capacity of new materialisms to provide solutions to current international crises, whilst also calling into question what the desire for such theories can tell us about the global situation today.