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Theory That Matters
“Covering an impressive scope of subjects in literary and cultural theory, from Freud, Heidegger and Barthes to Fish, Rorty and Bhabha, Theory That Matters offers a welcome up-to-date assessment of the state of the discipline. Such a recapitulation serves as a point of departure for the examinations of the new practices across the arts and media and of the innovative interpretative tools suggested by these practices. The contributors take their examples from an amazing variety of contexts and thus prove that the very dynamics of theory is a fascinating phenomenon. Succeeding several recent anthologies that have cast doubt on the aims of theory, the present volume launches its defence and, at the same time, demonstrates that this is not to be achieved at the expense of praxis. The book clearly shows that theory owes its currency to its multiple functions, among others, as a procedure of interpretation, a vehicle for philosophical reflection, and a formulation of an ideological stance.” – Marek Paryz, Associate Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw; Editor of the Polish Journal for American Studies
Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory
In Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory, Charles Altieri skillfully dissects the benefits and limitations of Materialist theory for works of art. He argues that while Materialist theory can intensify our awareness of how art can foreground sensual dimensions of experience, it does not yet serve as an adequate description of much of what we experience as mental activity--especially in the domain of art, which depends on active imaginations and constructive energies for which no Materialist theory is yet adequate. He carefully shows how constructive imaginations operate in a range of modernist poetry that is especially attentive to the mind's powers because it provides alternatives to Impressionist sensibilities, which thrive on Materialist modes of attention. These modernists turned to versions of Hegel's idea of the "inner sensuousness," stressing how a work's very construction can provide different levels of sensuousness inseparable from the work of self-consciousness.
Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics
Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics views textual and extra-textual worlds as intimately connected, as forming a continuum, in fact. The essays – on literature, philosophy and the arts – gathered here derive their theoretical inspirations from two realms where embodiment and agency are particularly stressed: namely, from philosophical somaesthetics, a discipline proposed by Richard Shusterman in 1999, and from performance studies, remarkable for its current expansion. In most general terms, the point of convergence for somaesthetics and performativity is their stressing the agency of the embodied and sentient human self. The contributors explore the question of agency in its vario...
Tools of Their Tools
The book explores the role of communication technologies in American cultural practice over the last 150 years. Communication technologies are here understood to include audio and visual reproduction technologies, analogue telecommunications such as traditional telephony, radio and television broadcasts, digital telecommunications, computer-mediated communications, telegraphy, and computer networks. The study of the impact of such technologies is a way to explore the various flows and tensions of American culture. How has American society molded communication technologies? How have they, in turn, shaped American history? Are Americans still, in the words of Thoreau, "tools of their tools"? More so or less than during the philosopher's Walden days? How do America's cultural, ethical, and economic assumptions determine and limit the ways in which telecommunications function in American society? Fascinating questions abound.
Friendly Metaphors
This is a collection of essays to celebrate 45 years of Professor Aleksander Szwedek's academic endeavour and his impressive contribution to the development of linguistics in Poland and abroad. The articles seek to represent an eclectic range of topics in linguistics, literature and cultural studies. They reflect the versatile and influential nature of Professor Szwedek's work, and have been contributed by colleagues and former pupils, now active in a variety of academic fields, within English studies. All have been inspired in various ways by the work and teaching of Aleksander Szwedek.
Infrathin
"The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's name for the thinnest shade of difference: that between, say, the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole on its target, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. In this book, the esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff shows how such differences occur at the level of words and argues that it is this infrathin space, this micropoetics of language, that separates poetry from prose. Perloff treats the relationship between Duchamp and Gertrude Stein; ranges over Concrete, Objectivist, and Black Mountain poetry; and gives stunning readings of poets from Eliot, Yeats, and Pound to Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, and Rae Armantrout. Poetry, Perloff shows us, exists in the play of the infrathin, and it is the poet's role to create unexpected relationships-verbal, visual, and sonic-from the finest nuances of language"--
Attention Equals Life
Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is ...
Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind
Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind traces the multiple relations between the mind and the contemporary novel. The contributors here examine various types of narrative fiction, ranging from the postmodern novels of J. M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan through the experimental prose of Leslie Scalapino to the popular fiction of James Dashner and Christopher Moore. On the one hand, they investigate novelistic representations of various mind-related issues, including different states of consciousness, Alzheimer’s disease, thought experiments and formation of the self. On the other, by analysing and evaluating in these contexts such narrative devices as unreliable narration, development of conceptual n...
Levity of Design
How can poetry embrace morality through focusing on metaphrasts? What is the relation between an allummette and the alpha rhythm? Why is it that money has turned into a metonym of goodness and success? And above all, is it still possible to think of the human subject as a viable category in late modernity? These are some of the questions that J. H. Prynne’s poetry addresses. Levity of Design voices a critique of present-day society very much from within, and seeks to demonstrate how Prynne has contrived to single-handedly overcome the impasse created by the legacy of poststructuralism. In a milieu of avant-garde linguistic experiment developed from the modernist techniques of Pound and Olson, but also from the early Eliot as well as Velimir Khlebnikov, and against the background of the writings of Heidegger and Adorno, these poems develop a language in which the notion of man can be restituted.
