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Embodying Pragmatism is the first monograph in English devoted to Richard Shusterman, an internationally renowned philosopher and one of today's most innovative thinkers in pragmatism and aesthetics. The book presents a comprehensive account of Shusterman's principal philosophical ideas concerning pragmatism, aesthetics, and literary theory (including such themes as interpretation, aesthetic experience, popular art, and human embodiment - culminating in his proposal of a new discipline called «somaesthetics»). As Shusterman's philosophical writings involve a dialogue with both analytic and continental traditions, this monograph not only offers a critical vision of contemporary pragmatist thought but also situates Shusterman and pragmatism within the current state of theory.
Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral--University of Opole)
What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.
The subsequent chapters of the book deal with selected questions from Jeanette Winterson's fiction, such as gender issues, love and eroticism, language and time, constituting areas within which Winterson's characters seek their identity. As they contest and repudiate clichés, stereotypes and patterns, their journey of self-discovery is accomplished through transgression. The book analyzes how the subversion of phallogocentric narrative and scenarios entails the reenvisaging of relations between the genders and reconceptualization of female desire. The author attempts to determine the consequences of Winterson's manipulations with gender, sexuality and time, and her disruption of the binary system.
The correlated concepts of the déjà-vu and the authentic suggest that all cultural productions are per se palimpsests whose construction is the result of such processes as reprise, recycling, and recuperating. Reprise is approached as various forms of citation, reference and intertextuality; recycling is defined as commodification and intellectual impoverishment; while recuperating implies the ideological process that makes reappropriation possible. By covering a wide spectrum of research interests, from literature to music, art and the cinema, the seventeen contributions in English or in French explore the political and ethical implications inherent in the creation of culture.
This volume discusses a variety of aspects of cross-curricularity in language learning and teaching. It highlights the multidimensional character of language classes conducted at different educational levels, from pre-school to the university level, and discusses several important issues from a theoretical perspective, providing certain practical solutions and implications to the enumerated problems. The material of the book is divided into four parts, essentially reflecting the main areas of interest here. These parts deal with such notions as language learning and teaching; media in foreign language didactics; art and literature in language education; and (inter-)culturality and cross-curricularity in language learning and teaching. The book will be particularly useful to teacher-practitioners and scholars interested in various forms of integrating the content of different school subjects in language education.
The book At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness) addresses the problem of literary dialogue as it appears in the philosophical, poetic and aesthetic discourses in the last two centuries. Central to the dialogue with Other(ness) is a background discussion of the idea of friendship as an encounter with another individual, with another man, with God (or gods) and also with another culture, the issues present in Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty's concept of intersubjectivity becomes a crucial point in the creative construction of the philosophy of dialogue, whose ideological antecedents date back to the times of Plato. At the border of language, or at ...
In Reconsidering (Post-)Yugoslav Time: Towards the Temporal Turn in the Critical Study of (Post-)Yugoslav Literatures, authors outline a concept of (post)-Yugoslav temporality and scrutinize its analytical value in the memory and cultural studies.
Peopled with diasporas and individuals, the space of exile persistently exists, though it cannot be circumscribed. Papers collected in the volume traverse that space in various directions, shedding some light on its manifold regions, niches, and chasms. Through raising diverse questions of ontology, subjectivity, power, otherness, domination, meaning, etc., the book aims at fulfilling its modest task of foregrounding points of orientation in the space's topography, and perhaps of tracing out paths linking its different areas.
Spoiling the Cannibals' Fun? is not a volume about Captain Cook, unless one thinks the story of his having been eaten in the Polynesian tropics is not so much about the nourishing of the barbarians with a white man's flesh, as one which raises a number of questions relating to, broadly understood, cultural encounters in which some sort of cannibalisation is always at stake. For example, an encounter with the other is inevitably also an encounter of what Penelope Deutscher sees as «the cannibal or 'eating' subject who is always already the other 'in us'», an encounter which questions «the integrity of the subject's boundaries». This volume takes up such various metaphorical senses of cannibalism and cannibalisation, and explores the ways they function within diverse domains and niches of culture (and elsewhere).