You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing in France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s "revolution of the word" in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines through the work of more than fifty writers up to the present, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, B. S. Johnson, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Georges Perec, Kathy Acker, Iain Sinclair, Hélène Cixous, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five writing strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologising the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.
At a time when the mass media insist on bombarding us with news about natural, political and economic disasters, words, ideas and images associated with such “crises” and “catastrophes” shape to a great extent collective memory and current imagination. Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to stir the debate on the processes and meanings of, as well as on the relations between, fear and fantasy in the globalized world. Collective fears and fantasies are analysed from a number of cross-disciplinary perspectives, promoted by the epistemological underpinnings of comparative literature. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the 17 essays here gathered respond to and ...
Temporalities of Modernism gathers fourteen scholars whose contributions readdress the very tenets of modernism by approaching its multifaceted relationship with time in a series of fresh and original essays. The contemporary energies behind the collection are rooted in the turbulence of the modernist age: relativity, irreversibility, duration, fragmentation, contingency, and the looming threat of the apocalyptic future. The collection includes geographical areas often neglected by the habitual reduction of modernist studies to English-speaking literary high modernism, or to the concentration of famous figures in the traditional capital of modernism—Paris. Thus it offers detailed presentat...
This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.
Poetica et Metrica 2. One of the most fascinating aspects of the poetics of multilingualism is that it reveals national literatures to be an outcome of transcultural reflection. This kind of reflection can surface in lexical borrowings and inventions, in attempts at imitating foreign language features, and in combining and improvising stylistic and linguistic devices. The experiments presented in this book range from idiosyncratic and “forced” solutions to the partly unconscious creation of new genres from situations of cultural contact. Multilingualism, as such, turns out to be basic for the emergence of vernacular literatures. While research on the poetics of multilingualism is usually...
Olga Stehlíková’s poems fashion new worlds, recognisable as our own planet, but not quite as we’ve seen it before. Her images are continually surprising, the language even more so, the humour pitch-dark. David Vichnar’s vibrant translations ably convey the unconventionality of the original Czech in poems that never stray from deep human concerns and anxieties: a camera takes the place of a crucifix above a hospital ward door, a face reflected in a swimming pool is struck out by a “gentle plastic duck”, and when the poet asks “What does a head replay at the moment/ of falling headlong off a staircase/ as long as a bridal veil?”, she also dares an answer. Literary critic Karel Piorecký writes, “Olga Stehlíková’s poems present a unique quality of intensity and complexity. They combine strength of intellect and the insights of literary tradition with arelaxed playfulness and humour. Rationality and irony play a strong role in them, but always combined with a subtle sensitivity and empathy for the fate of humanity in the turbulence of the contemporary world.”
This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.
This book provides a critical introduction to Heidegger’s impact on psychiatry and psychology, and has a focus on the application of his philosophy to psychiatry. This is a complete revision of Heidegger’s existential philosophy in the light of psychopathological phenomena. Readers will find here a philosophical inquiry into the problem of mental disorder, which shows Heidegger’s own philosophy in a new light, uncovering both its strengths and its weak points. The author maps not only Heidegger’s interaction with psychiatric thought, as depicted in his Zollikon Seminars, but also his influence on Swiss phenomenological psychiatry. The work treats Heidegger in a critical way, taking t...
The collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilém Mathesius, the founder of Prague Linguistic Circle and the first Professor of English Language and Literature at Charles University. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives (Mathesius, Vančura and others) and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English Studies with respect to the Prague Structuralism, it will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic as well as modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interd...