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Surveying a wide range of cultural controversies, from the Mapplethorpe affair to Salman Rushdie's death sentence, Wendy Steiner shows that the fear and outrage they inspired are the result of dangerous misunderstanding about the relationship between art and life. 27 halftones.
Life Itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever begins by questioning the paradox between Boon's international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the peculiarly reductive biographical interpretations regularly uttered by some of his fellow countrymen and contemporaries. She looks for answers in Boon's misinterpreted "primitive" Flemish and analyzes the so-called refined pseudo-primitive style within both the grotesque tradition (Kafka, van Ostaijen, Gogol) and the skeptical, radical tradition of Nietzsche. In addition, she offers fresh insight into Boon's character Boontje, seen by many as a diminutive for the writer himself, outlining the sublime and slightly sinister relation of this quasi-comical character to its mighty creator.
Describes the life of the Yale University professor behind the deconstruction movement, who at the time of his death was one of the most influential literary critics in America but was later revealed to be a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
Situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. This volume situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. Running alongside recent post-structuralist theories, the textuality of such matters as literary discourse, history, media, philosophy and religion has emerged as a focal point of debate in the humanities. The essays here examine how questions of the canon, genres, and transformation of texts challenge the present epistemological situation; taking an interdisciplinary approach to textual readings, their methodology is drawn from a range of literary figures and critics, including Lessing, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. The study also addresses the controversial predicament of subjectivity asone of the key terms in current literary and historical scholarship.
In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figur...
Avant-Garde and Criticism sheds new light on the complex aims, functions, practices and contexts of art-criticism in relation to the European avant-garde. Although many avant-garde works and the avant-gardes of various countries have been analyzed, considerably less attention has been given to the reviews in newspapers and journals on avant-garde literature, art, architecture and film. This volume of Avant-Garde Critical Studies will look at how art critics operated in a strategic way. The strategies of avant-garde criticism are diverse. Art critics, especially when they are artists themselves, attempt to manipulate the cultural climate in their favour. They use their position to legitimize ...
Tome III traces Kierkegaard's influence on Anglophone philosophy. It has long been thought that Kierkegaard played no role in this tradition, which for years was dominated by analytic philosophy. In this environment it was common to dismiss Kierkegaard along with the then current European philosophers who were influenced by him. However, a closer look reveals that in fact there were several thinkers in the US, Canada and Great Britain who were inspired by Kierkegaard even during the heyday of analytic philosophy. Current thinking now suggests that Kierkegaard has made some serious inroads into mainstream Anglophone philosophy, with many authors seeking inspiration in his works for current discussions concerning ethics, personal identity, philosophy of religion, and philosophical anthropology.
One of the aims of the book is to shed more light on the notion Neue Sachlichkeit in its appearance in a variety of fields as painting, architecture, music, photography and literature, in order to get a clearer idea of its scope. Several contributions will do so by analysing the heterogeneity in the use of the term concerning its function in the fight for recognition in the art-fields around 1930 - in other words, Neue Sachlichkeit will be analysed as a positioning strategy. Especially its participation in the broader discourse on modernity, as well as its international and intermedial dimension will be highlighted, often using the historical avant-garde as point of reference. From this perspective, the present volume wants to be read as a plea for a differentiated description of the many shared aspects and some differences between the avant-garde and Neue Sachlichkeit.
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the sp...