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Challenges postmodernist theories of language and politics which detach language from human bodies and their material practices.
The first volume of Benjamin Studies publishes the keynote lectures of the first Congress of the International Walter Benjamin Association, which took place in Amsterdam, July 1997. Its title bears witness to the most central concepts of Benjamin’s philosophy of culture. Strongly influenced as he was by Kant, Benjamin never lost his inclination to analyse the components of reality as fashioned by ourselves. Because he was also a materialist, for him the modes of fashioning were shaped in turn by the times and places we occupy in history. As a consequence, Benjamin’s theory assigns a pivotal role in the interaction between the world and its inhabitants to the media: language with its plet...
Cultural analysis is devoted to understanding the past as part of the present, as what we have around us. The essays gathered here represent the current state of an emerging field of enquiry.
Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics explores the relationship between Plath's writing and Cold War discourses and argues that the time (1960-1963), the place (England), and the global politics are important factors for us to consider when we consider the rhetoric of Plath's later poetry and fiction. Based on fresh readings arising from new research, this study argues that Plath should not be depoliticized, and examines her writing alongside the discourses of the period as expressed in newspaper reporting, magazines, and BBC radio. In contrasting her relationship with institutions in America in the 1950s with her responses in England to church, the American arms industry, the National Health Service, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament it becomes clear that the process of cultural defamiliarization causes Plath to question the model of the individual artist divorced from society, a model of the writer that had previously seemed so attractive.
To deconstruct a text means to disassemble the various points of view contained within it, and to let them stand fully exposed with all their own presuppositions. When this is done, the contours of these building blocks appear so different from one another that the structural unity of the text is called into question. Biblical scholars will sense how close this process is to familiar methods of form and source criticism. Without jargon, this study sharpens and clarifies the analytical thrust behind such methods. At the same time, it offers a fresh rendering of redaction criticism, inquiring after the often contradictory motives and historical circumstances influencing the evangelists. This book thus provides an intriguing combination of the old and the new.
Post-Nationalist American Studies seeks to revise the cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism that tended to dominate American studies in the Cold War era, adopting a less insular, more transnational approach to the subject.
DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term “democracy.”/div
This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.
The impact of nationalism on the emergence and development of African literature is now well documented. Globalization or the postnational state it seems to herald, the emblematic phenomenon of our era, has not received much attention. Using a cultural studies approach, Beyond Empire and Nation is a fascinating account of the process of globalization in African Literature. The book starts with an analysis of nationalist rhetoric and ideology as exemplified by works such as Things Fall Apart. Thereafter, it dedicates a chapter each to B. Kojo Laing's novels and Nuruddin Farah's Trilogy (Maps, Gifts, and Secrets) as articulations of a globalized, postnational reality. At the heart o the book i...
This reader collects together articles by key historians, literary critics and anthropologists on the cultures of colonialism in the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is divided into three sections: theoretical, emphasizing approaches; the colonisers "at home"; and "away".