You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Theorizing Narrativity is a collective work by an international array of leading specialists in narrative theory. It provides new perspectives on the nature of narrative, genre theory, narrative semiotics and communication theory. Most contributions center on the specificity of literary fiction, but each chapter investigates a different dimension of narrativity with many issues dealt with in innovative ways (including oral storytelling, the law, video games, causality, intertextuality and the theory of reading). There are chapters by Gerald Prince on narrativehood and narrativity, Meir Sternberg on the narrativity of the law-code, Werner Wolf on chance and Peter Hühn on eventfulness in fiction, Jukka Tyrkkö on kaleidoscope narratives, Marie-Laure Ryan on transfictionality and computer games, Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer as well as Monika Fludernik on the narrativity of drama, Beatriz Penas on (non)standard narrativities, David Rudrum on narrativity and performativity, Michael Toolan on textual guidance, John Pier on causality and retrospection, and José Ángel García Landa on retelling and represented narrations.
An analysis of the significance of literature in the work of one of America's most influential contemporary philosophers. Stanley Cavell is widely recognized as one of America's most important contemporary philosophers, and his legacy and writings continue to attract considerable attention among literary critics and theorists. Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature comprehensively addresses the importance of literature in Cavell's philosophy and, in turn, the potential effect of his philosophy on contemporary literary criticism. David Rudrum dedicates a chapter to each of the writers that principally occupy Cavell, including Shakespeare, Thoreau, Beckett, Wordsworth, Ibsen, and Poe, and incorporates chapters on tragedy, skepticism, ethics, and politics. Through detailed analysis of these works, Rudrum explores Cavell's ideas on the nature of reading; the relationships among literary language, ordinary language, and performative language; the status of authors and characters; the link between tragedy and ethics; and the nature of political conversation in a democracy.
This collection charts the origins and consequences of the literature/philosophy dialogue, providing an overview of the field as well as discussing new developments in literary and philosophical scholarship. The collection is divided into four main parts: introductory perspectives; an overview of the key schools of thought; a discussion of debates between literature and philosophy; and an engagement with specific texts.
A collection of essays, grounded in state-of-the-art research that explores contemporary debates at the interface between literature and philosophy. It brings together diverse schools of thought and provides both a useful overview and an examination of one of the most fascinating cross-disciplinary encounters in the humanities today.
This forward-thinking reference volume draws on new developments in philosophy including speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, the new materialisms, posthumanism, analytic philosophy of language and metaphysics, and ecophilosophy alongside close readings of a range of texts from the literary canon.
Transcending Postmodernism: Performatism 2.0 is an ambitious attempt to expand and deepen the theory of performatism. Its main thesis is that, beginning in the mid-1990s, the strategies and norms of postmodernism have been displaced by ones that force readers or viewers to experience effects of aesthetically mediated transcendence. These effects include specific temporal strategies (“chunking”), stylizing separated subjectivity (the genius and the fool being its two main poles) and orienting ethics toward actions taken by centered agents bearing a sacral charge. The book provides a critical overview of other theories of post-postmodernism, and suggests that among five text-oriented theories there is basic agreement on its techniques and strategies.
This book investigates the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for aesthetic understanding. Focusing on the aesthetic elements of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking and the illuminating power of Wittgenstein’s philosophy when considered in connection with the interpretation of specific works of literature, music, and the arts. Taken together, the chapters presented here show what aesthetic understanding consists of and the ways we achieve it, how it might be articulated, and why it is important. At a time of strong renewal of interest in Wittgenstein’s contributions to the philosophy of mind and language, this book offers insight into the connections between philosophical-psychological and linguistic issues and the understanding of the arts.
How do digital media technologies affect society and our lives? Through the cultural theory hypotheses of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and posthumanism, Alan N. Shapiro investigates the social impact of Virtual/Augmented Reality, AI, social media platforms, robots, and the Brain-Computer Interface. His examination of concepts of Jean Baudrillard and Katherine Hayles, as well as films such as Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina, and the TV series Black Mirror, suggests that the boundary between science fiction narratives and the »real world« has become indistinct. Science-fictional thinking should be advanced as a principal mode of knowledge for grasping the world and digitalization.
This study offers a detailed analysis of the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, including the novels of the South African and Australian periods, to demonstrate the development of Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of non-normative embodiment. In this illuminating monograph, Pawel Wojtas demonstrates the extent to which Coetzee's multifaceted depictions of disability offer a sustained critique of the ableist implications of political violence and neoliberal inclusionism alike. Exploring a wide range of notions, such as ocularnormativism, mute speech, eco-disability, disability Gothic, dismodernism, autogerontography, and bibliotherapy, Wojtas shows how Coetzee's 'disabled textuality' provokes a sustained meditation on various forms of cultural denigration of disability experience.
After a substantial new essay examining the nature of a properly skeptical historical inquiry into Jesus of Nazareth in the context of contemporary worldviews, from pre-modernism to meta-modernism, Behold the Man presents revised essays on an eclectic range of issues: from how the Epistle of James treats Jesus as Divine within decades of the crucifixion, and an evaluation of recent arguments about the dating of the Fourth Gospel, to debunking claims about Jesus and “ancient aliens,” and furthering debate about the resurrection. With a foreword by eminent New Testament scholar Craig L. Blomberg, and extensive recommended resources, Behold the Man: Essays on the Historical Jesus represents a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary engagement with historical Jesus studies.