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The Aesthetics of Failure
Although Beckett scholarship has in recent decades experienced a renaissance as a result of various poststructuralist approaches that tend to emphasize destabilization and inexpressibility as the defining features of Beckett’s output, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of his aesthetics of failure. This book fits into that renaissance, but draws on a distinct, though rarely addressed, connection that Samuel Beckett’s work shares with that of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. It is within this philosophical context that the significance of Beckett’s aesthetics of failure becomes most visible. Beckett’s work can be described as one of gradual reductio...
Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands
This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitatio...
The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction
The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within exami...
Catching Time
'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.' Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.
Gombrowicz
This book is a short introduction to Witold Gombrowicz’s life and work as one of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century literature and theater, providing intertextual perspectives that allow readers to analyze his short stories, plays, and novels in broad contexts. Gombrowicz (1904–1969) was a writer and philosopher whose experimental literary works belong to the stream of European existentialism and simultaneously mark the birth of postmodernism. In Gombrowicz’s grotesque universe, there is no separation between literature, biography, sexuality, and philosophy. His novels, including Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, and Pornography, contain autobiographical elements, whereas in his renowned Diary, daily life becomes an object of sophisticated philosophical reflection that links introspection with humor and a gift for observation. Gombrowicz: An Introduction is an approachable guide for students and instructors of Slavic literature and culture, comparative literature, philosophy, and theater studies.
Reading Words into Worlds
Reading Words into Worlds asks how it is that reading a novel can feel in some ways like being-in-a-world. The book explores how novels give themselves to readers in ways that mimetically resemble our phenomenological reception of given beings in reality. McReynolds refers to this process as phenomenological mimesis of givenness, and he draws on the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion to explore how masterful novels can make reading ink marks on a page feel like seeing things, feeling things, and meeting (even loving) others. McReynolds blends rigorous phenomenological study with a personable style, first laying out his theory in detail and then applying that theory through close studies of his reading experiences of four British realist masterpieces: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Ultimately, this book offers a grounded phenomenology of novel-reading, illuminating what gives novels such power to not only thrill readers—but to change them.
Drama of the Mind
Drama of the Mind zawiera wybrane referaty wygłoszone w ramach konferencji Beckett in Kraków 2006, omawiające Beckettowską estetykę, wpływy, jakim Beckett podlegał, i wpływ, jaki sam wywierał na innych pisarzy, oraz analizy poszczególnych motywów i utworów, zarówno prozatorskich, jak i dramatycznych. Drama of the Mind presents selected papers from Beckett in Kraków 2006 conference held by the English Department of the Jagiellonian University in November 2006: Gerry Dukes discusses principles of Beckettian “aesthetics of failure.”John McCourt identifies a pattern of influence in Yeats – Joyce relationship, reenacted by Joyce and Beckett.Robert Kusek compares Beckett’s and J.M. Coetzee’s treatment and use of silence.Marcin Tereszewski reads Ill Seen Ill Said through Maurice Blanchot’s critique of sight.Antoni Libera offers a detailed analysis of the ontology of theself in Crapp’s Last Tape.Tomasz Kaczmarek compares Strindberg and Beckett, demonstrating Beckett’s expressionist affiliations.
Representations of Language Learning and Literacy
Representations of language learning and literacy, also known as “literacy narratives” are a staple of literature. They tell stories of conflict that illuminate the sociocultural dynamics whereby we learn to speak, read, and write. Yet, they tend to be read as stories about the “powers” of language and literacy – the power to make someone “human”, to form identity, and improve one’s social status. This book introduces the “literacy narrative approach”, a methodology for the study of literacy narratives that accounts for the conflict that pervades them. It achieves this by focussing on how the texts represent the interactions between writing and other semiotic modes (multimodality). Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, it provides three practical applications of the literacy narrative approach and, in the process, develops a theoretical perspective for thinking about language learning, literacy, and communication as they are practised in the real world.
Urban Communities and Memories in East-Central Europe in the Modern Age
This edited volume studies the logic of community formation and the common view of the past to show how various social bonds of communities functioned during the modern national era of East-Central Europe from the late eighteenth century until today and how multifaceted this group-building really was. Through an overview of selected examples of communities in East-Central European urban centres, mainly the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor empires, the volume shows the potential of re-interpretation or adaptation of the past as a crucial tool for assuring social cohesion and for strengthening the image of group boundaries. It studies not only textual sources...
Science Fiction and Anticipation
Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel presents ten chapters discussing themes related to time travel, utopias, and dystopias in science fiction novels published in America and Europe between the 18th and 20th century. These themes include social progress, freedom and human rights, technological advances, and the issues of ethics, racism, sexism, censorship, and slavery. The contributors analyze novels such as The Year 2440 published in 1771, Paris in the Twentieth Century written by Jules Verne, Blake; or, The Huts of America by Martin Robinson Delany, The Amphibian Man by Alexander Belyaev, Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ashes, Ashes by René Barjavel, The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, Morel’s Invention by Adolfo Bioy Casares, and writers of Spanish, Argentinian, English, and French fictions such as George Orwell, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg and Leopoldo Antonio Lugones Argüello. This book notably presents their sources and influence, the accuracy of their predictions, and their relevance in our very unstable world.
