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This book explores the contradictions of biography. It charts shifting approaches to the writing and reading of biographies, from post-hagiographical attitudes of the Enlightenment, heroic biographies of Romanticism and irreverent modernist portraits through to contemporary experiments in politically committed and hybrid forms of life writing. The book shows how biographical texts in fact destabilise the models of historical visibility, cultural prominence and narrative coherence that the genre itself seems to uphold. Addressing the fraught relationships between genre and gender, private and public, image and text, life and narrative that play out in the modern biographical tradition, Metabiography suggests new possibilities for reading, writing and thinking about this enduringly popular genre.
From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.
Theories of Hope: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Human Experience is a collection of essays dedicated to inquiring into the nature of hope in its multiple and varied guises. Looking specifically at the ways in which some experiences of hope emerge within contexts of marginalization, transgression, and inquiry, this volume seeks to explore the experiences of hope through a lens of its more challenging aspects.
A collection on the incorporation of untranslated fragments from other languages within modernist writing. It explores non-translation in modernist fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing by writers such as Antonin Artaud, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Stephane Mallarme, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Carlos Williams.
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This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context. Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory. This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a ‘theory of biography’. Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.
Role-playing games offer a chance to pretend, make believe, and share fantasy. They often invoke heavy themes into their game play: morality, violence, politics, spirituality, or sexuality. Although interesting moral debates perennially appear in the media and academia concerning the appropriateness of games’ ability to deal with such adult concepts, very little is known about the intersection between games, playfulness, and sexuality and what this might mean for players. This book offers an in-depth, ethnographic look into the phenomenon of erotic role-play through the experiences of players in multiplayer and tabletop role-playing games. Brown explores why participants engage in erotic role-play; discusses the rules involved in erotic role-play; and uncovers what playing with sexuality in ludic environments means for players, their partners, and their everyday lives. Taken together, this book provides a rich, nuanced, and detailed account of a provocative topic.
The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its "ontological turn," offers a vision of anthropology as "the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought." After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours--in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own--he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such "other" metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage.
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In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.