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Covering a range of texts from prominent feminist writers, this book examines notions of utopia in twenty-first-century speculative literature.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature--the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects--theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness--and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal. In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars revisit Sontag's groundbreaking lif...
The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and i...
Although virtually unknown in his lifetime, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is counted today among the great nineteenth-century poets. His poetry was collected and published posthumously by his friend Robert Bridges in 1917, and subsequently Hopkins's reputation flowered, though more as a modern writer than as Victorian, and very little as a poetic theorist. Yet the body of Hopkins's critical writing reveals sharp insight into the subject of poetics, and presents an innovative theory that locates primary poetic meaning in 'figures of speech sound.' These 'figures of speech sound' provide the focus for James I. Wimsatt's erudite and original study. Drawing from Hopkins's diaries, letters, s...
This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book's 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical toolbox to be continued. Negativity, judgment and opposition as modes of critique have run out of steam. Critique as an attitude and a manner of enquiry has not.
Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformat...
A former student and collaborator of Jacques Derrida, Catherine Malabou has generated worldwide acclaim for her progressive rethinking of postmodern, Derridean critique. Building on her notion of plasticity, a term she originally borrowed from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and adapted to a reading of Hegel's own work, Malabou transforms our understanding of the political and the religious, revealing the malleable nature of these concepts and their openness to positive reinvention. In French to describe something as plastic is to recognize both its flexibility and its explosiveness-its capacity not only to receive and give form but to annihilate it as well. After defining plasticity in term...
Explores how the experience of time in contemporary British novels reveals the persistence of the utopian imagination today.
In the mid-seventies, both gender studies and humor studies emerged as new disciplines, with scholars from various fields undertaking research in these areas. The first publications that emerged in the field of gender studies came out of disciplines such as philosophy, history, and literature, while early works in the area of humor studies initially concentrated on language, linguistics, and psychology. Since then, both fields have flourished, but largely independently. This book draws together and focuses the work of scholars from diverse disciplines on intersections of gender and humor, giving voice to approaches in disciplines such as film, television, literature, linguistics, translation studies, and popular culture.
The Politics of Silence, Voice and the In-Between: Exploring Gender, Race and Insecurity from the Margins seeks to dismantle the deficit discourses generated through research about people as agency-less and, by extension, objects of study. The book argues that, regardless of marginalisation, people create spaces of liminality where they seek control over their lives by navigating the structures that exclude them. Challenging the false binary of silence as violence and voice as power, the book introduces the idea of an in-between ‘liminal space’ which is created by people to navigate conditions of oppression and move towards a politically stable and inclusive world. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender studies, international development, peace and conflict studies, politics and international relations, sociology and media studies. It will be an important resource for courses incorporating gender, feminist and postcolonial perspectives.