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Power is conventionally regarded as being held by social institutions. We are taught to believe that it is these social structures that determine the environment and circumstances of individual lives. In I Am Dynamite, the anthropologist Nigel Rappaport argues for a different view. Focusing on the lives and works of the writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, refugee and engineer Ben Glaser, Israeli ceramicist and immigrant Rachel Siblerstein, artist Stanley Spencer, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he shows how we can have the capacity and inclination to formulate 'life projects'. It is in the pursuit of these life projects, that is, making our life our work, that we can avoid the structures of ideology and institution.
Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.
Modernism's Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen t...
Tracing a developing fascination with rhythm's significance, its patterns, and its measures, across philosophy, psychology, science, and the whole range of arts, Rhythmical Subjects shows how and why attention to rhythm came to serve as connective tissue between fields of inquiry at a time when modern disciplines were still in the process of formation or consolidation. The concentration on 'rhythm' and its cognates largely arose, Laura Marcus demonstrates, from the desire to reclaim or retain human and natural measures in the face of the coming of the machine and the speed of technological innovation. Rhythmical Subjects uncovers the disparate routes by which rhythm acquired its newfound abi...
Through oral and written narratives, this book examines the interaction between women and the war in Spain, their motivation, the distinctive form of their involvment and the effect of the war on their individual lives. These themes are related to wider issues, such as the nature of memory and the role of women within the public sphere. The extent to which women engaged with this cause surpasses by far other instances of female mobilization in peace-time Britain. Such a phenomenon therefore can offer lessons to those who would wish to encourage a greater degree of interest amongst women in political activities today.
Scripting Empire recovers the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of shrinking British sovereignty, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors, and freelancers at the corporation, including Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Amos Tutuola, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C.L.R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writer...
Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that cons...
Treatments of synesthesia in the arts and humanities generally assume a clear distinction between the neurological condition and the literary device. Synesthetes’ descriptions of colors seen in connection with music, for example, are thought to differ fundamentally from common expressions that rely on transpositions across sensory dimensions (“bright vowels”). This has not always been the case. The distinction emerged over the course of the twentieth century, as scientists sought to constitute “synesthesia” as a legitimate object of modern science. On the Colors of Vowels investigates the ambiguity of visual descriptions of vowels across a wide range of disciplines, casting several...
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows th...
This volume contributes to the fields of lyric poetry and poetics (especially poetic form), aesthetics, and German literature by intervening in debates on the social functions, cognitive and emotional effects, and the value of poetry. It builds on, and moves beyond, previous theories of rhythm to tie meter more particularly to the specificities of poetic language in blending of embodied responses, cultural situations, and linguistic particularities. The book examines the German-language tradition across three centuries, arguing that the interdisciplinarity and richness of metrical theory and practice emerge in the heterogeneity of poetry and its defenders in their specific historical moments...