You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis ava...
Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), the novel born from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood in Haiti and immigration to New York City, was one of the great literary debuts of recent times, marking the emergence of an impressive talent in addition to opening up an entire culture to a broad general readership. This gifted author went on to win the American Book Award in 1999 for her novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), attracting further critical acclaim. Offering an accessible guide for readers and critics alike, this book is the first publication devoted entirely to Danticat’s unique and remarkable work. It is also distinctive in that it addresses all of her published writing up to The Dew Breaker (200...
Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history.
None
For too long the main narratives of motherhood have been oppressive and exclusionary, frequently ignoring issues of female identity—especially regarding those not conforming to traditional female stereotypes. Horrible Mothers offers a variety of perspectives for analyzing representations of the mother in francophone literature and film at the turn of the twenty-first century in North America, including Québec, Ontario, New England, and California. Contributors reexamine the “horrible mother” paradigm within a broad range of sociocultural contexts from different locations to broaden the understanding of mothering beyond traditional ideology. The selections draw from long-established sc...
Dissertation im Fachbereich Nordamerikanische Literatur und Kultur der Universität des Saarlandes. The Implosion of Negativity ist die erste Monografie zu Paul Austers Frühwerk. Bis 1980 betätigte sich Auster zehn Jahre lang fast ausschließlich als Lyriker, um danach nie wieder ein Gedicht zu veröffentlichen. The Implosion of Negativity versucht zu ergründen, wie es zu diesem Bruch kam, und analysiert detailliert Austers poetisches Vorleben. Dabei werden bislang unbeachtete Einflüsse wie Martin Buber und Paul Celan zutage gefördert. Die abschließende Untersuchung von The New York Trilogy zeigt exemplarisch, welche neuen interpretatorischen Ansätze die Kenntnis von Austers vergessen...
What Nazism Did to Psychoanalysis explores the impact Nazism had on the evolution of psychoanalysis and tackles the enigma of the transformation of individual hate into mass psychosis and of the autocratic creation of a neo-reality. Addressing the effects of the Holocaust on the psychoanalytic world, this book does not focus on the suffering of the survivors but the analysis of the concrete mechanisms of destruction that affected language and thought, their impact on the practice of psychoanalysis and the defences that psychoanalysts tried to find against the linguistic, legal and symbolic chaos that struck the foundations of reality. Laurence Kahn discusses the struggle against the appropriation, by the Nazi language, of key terms such as demonic nature, drives, ideals and, above all, the Selbsterhaltungstrieb (the self-preservation drive), which became, with Hitler, the axis of the living space policy, the "Lebensraum". Covering key topics such as trauma, transgenerational issues, silence and secrecy and the depredation of culture, this is an essential work for psychoanalysts and anyone wishing to understand how strongly the development of psychoanalysis was affected by Nazism.
Globalization includes complex processes, easy to identify but difficult to explain. Why, for instance, are globalizing processes so unevenly distributed between poor and wealthy countries? What effect does this uneven distribution have on the everyday lives of ordinary people? The contributors to this volume find answers to these questions in the Mediterranean, a region divided between the people of the north shore, who are engaged with Europe and modernized, and their poorer neighbours to the south, who struggle daily to atain the same standards of living and modes of governance as their more Westernized neighbours. In these two regions’ divergent histories, economies, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, education systems, and political structures lead to explanations not only for uneven globalization but also for the wave of demonstrations for political and cultural autonomy that sparked the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Near East.
‘Famille, je vous ai (encore et toujours à l’esprit?), je vous aime un peu, beaucoup, ou je vous hais énormément?’ What are families like in contemporary France? And what begins to emerge when we consider them from the point of view of recent theoretical perspectives: (faulty) cohesion, (fake) coherence, (carefully planned or subversive) deconstruction, loss (of love, confidence or credibility), or, even (utter) chaos and (alarming) confusion? Which media revamp old stereotypes, generate alternative reinterpretations, and imply more ambiguous answers? What images, scenes or frames stand out in contemporary representations of the family? Uneasy contradictions and ambiguities emerge in this bilingual collection of approaches and genre studies. The family plot seems to thicken as family ties appear to loosen. Has ‘the family’ been lost from sight, or is it being reinvented in our collective imaginary? This book proposes a new series of perspectives and questions on an old and ‘familiar’ topic, exploring the state and status of the family in contemporary literature, culture, critical and psychoanalytic theory and sociology.