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Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.
How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a w...
Passion's Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of mind and soul from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric that contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an ...
Features a new section on the institutional settings of German Jewish Studies, a Film Forum on Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla, and interviews with Paul Mendes-Flohr and Barbara Honigmann, among other contributions. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing German Jewish Studies forum in North America. Because the locus of scholarship is never incidental, Nexus 6 introduces a new section, "Contexts," to examine, in this case, what it means to pursue German Jewish Studies at a Catholic university, Notre Dame. And because research is never static, it...
Displacing Theory Through the Global South calls for reflection on the historical and geopolitical inequalities that have shaped theorization. It asserts that what appears 'universal' often involves generalizations that flatten the particular. Critiquing the colonialist, imperialist, and Eurocentric perspectives that have historically impacted theorization in general and, more specifically, knowledge production about the so-called Global South, this volume seeks a different form of engagement that moves beyond such strictures. Featuring essays that unsettle distinctions between the general and the particular, it proposes a commitment to expanding notions of universality, making theorization not only relevant and generative, but ultimately, transformative.
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder’s encyclopaedic ‘Natural History’, composed in 37 books, remains an unrivalled compendium of Roman knowledge. Delphi’s Ancient Classics series provides eReaders with the wisdom of the Classical world, with both English translations and the original Latin texts. This comprehensive eBook presents Pliny’s complete extant works, with beautiful illustrations, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Pliny's life and works * Features the complete extant works of Pliny, in both English translation and the original Latin * Concise introduction to the ‘Natural History...
Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante’s late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of ‘virtue and knowledge’ as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses’ many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.
In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic literary genre. Yet a closer look at its history reveals that lyric has always been intertwined with the politics of community formation, from the imagining of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in episodes of collective action, protest, and social resistance. Poetic forms have circulated between languages and traditions from around the world and across time. But how does lyric poetry address or even create communities — and of what kinds? This volume takes a global perspective to investigate poetic communities in dialogue with recent developments in lyric theory and concepts of community. In doing so, it explores both the political potentialities and the perils of lyric poetry.
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.