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Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms "work," "labor," "job," "employment," "occupation," "profession," "vocation," "task," "toil," "effort," "pursuit," and "calling" form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call "socially reproductive labor"—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.
This book examines the theoretical devices of "Yugoslav" and "post-Yugoslav" literature. The author analyzes selected literary examples from the region through the lens of a contemporary post-Deleuzean philosophy of time, extricating discussions of post-ism from traditional chronological framing.
The topic of colour in literature is usually addressed in terms of semantics and figurative uses of colour. Entangled with Colour: New Materialist Explorations in English Colour Writing presents another take on colour in literary texts. It introduces the practice of colour writing, which stresses the relationality between colour, matter, words and affects. With precursors in fin-de-siècle and modernist literature, a genre of colour writing has evolved since the end of the 20th century with Derek Jarman ́s Chroma, Maggie Nelson ́s Bluets and Han Kang ́s The White Book. This study demonstrates how these texts create a material-discursive dimension of colour which in turn requires a rethink...
Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.
This forward-thinking, non-traditional reference work uniquely maps out how new developments in 21st century philosophy are entering into dialogue with the study of literature. Going beyond the familiar methods of analytic philosophy, and with a breadth greater than traditional literary theory, this collection looks at the profound consequences of the interaction between philosophy and literature for questions of ethics, politics, subjectivity, materiality, reality and the nature of the contemporary itself.
Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and horror meet. Employing rigorous analysis, incisive experimentation, and novel invention, this anthology asks about the use that speculation can make of horror and horror of speculation, about whether philosophy is fictional or fiction philosophical, and about the relationship between horror, the exigencies of our wor...
What is narrative? Ridvan Askin brings together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn to answer this question. Through this process, he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Askin argues against the established consensus of narrative theory for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive.
Walking the Mobius Strip locates Richard Powers's fiction at the crossroads of postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics and argues that this paradigm shift shapes the models of knowledge and understanding that underwrite his work. The readings of Plowing the Dark, Galatea 2.2, and The Echo Maker are inspired by Jacques Lacan's image of cognition as a Mobius strip on which different forms of propositional and non-propositional knowledge bleed into and depend upon one another. Drawing on feminist epistemology and psychoanalysis, this study highlights Powers's interest in the non-propositional aspects of cognition, that is, in all that escapes the frameworks of scientific empiricism and can only be known through the mediation of fictional narrative. It reveals a deep dissatisfaction in the novels with the suggestion that knowledge and understanding must be objective and rational, and elucidates Powers's idea that fiction can be a powerful tool for integrating various kinds of knowledge.
For centuries, critics, poets, poet-scholars, and philosophers have either openly proclaimed or tacitly assumed the long poem as the highest expression of literary ambition and excellence. Rethinking the North American Long Poem focuses on the North American variant of this notorious form—notorious because of its often forbidding and difficult character, particularly with respect to the dialectics of content and form, aesthetics and politics, matter and genre. In nine essays and a contextual introduction, the editors and contributors scrutinize seminal long poems by North American writers, including Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, Muriel Rukeyser’s The B...
This timely volume explores a wealth of North American literary texts that engage with moral and ethical dilemmas. It ranges from William Dean Howells's and Henry James's realist novels to Edward Sapir's intermedial poems, and from John Muir's unpublished letters and journal of his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers and the poetry of Robert Lowell. Many of the contributions also critically engage with and re?ect on some of the most prominent voices in contemporary theoretical debates about ethics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Em-manuel Levinas, Axel Honneth, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Julia Kristeva. This volume thus aptly covers the panoply of contemporary ethical and moral interventions while at the same time providing distinctively American Studies perspectives.