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What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.
Mourning Glory sheds light on troubled times as it shows how passion and prejudice, grief and denial all contributed to the continuing creation of a revolutionary legacy that still affects our understanding of the nature of language and history.
From antiquity through the Enlightenment, disasters were attributed to the obscure power of the stars or the vengeance of angry gods. As philosophers sought to reassess the origins of natural disasters, they also made it clear that humans shared responsibility for the damages caused by a violent universe. This far-ranging book explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today. Marie-Hélène Huet argues that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency that made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy. From the plague of 1720 to the cholera of 1832, from shipwrecks to film dystopias, disasters raise questions about identity and memory, technology, control, and liability. In her analysis, Huet considers anew the mythical figures of Medusa and Apollo, theories of epidemics, earthquakes, political crises, and films such as Blow-Up and Blade Runner. With its scope and precision, The Culture of Disaster will appeal to a wide public interested in modern culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.
What goes on in a college classroom? For all that has been written in recent years about higher education very little attention has been paid to the heart of the matter: teaching. This book, by members of the Amherst College faculty, helps to repair that oversight. Amherst, in defining itself, places a large emphasis, as it should, on the life of the classroom. No faculty member, no matter how senior, is "excused" from teaching; no cadre of graduate students shoulders the load of introductory courses. To teach is the central mission of an Amherst professor. But seldom the only mission. Almost everyone who teaches at Amherst also pursues research. Maintaining the balance is sometimes frustrat...
Multi-disciplinary in approach & cross-European in scope, this volume explores links between the political & the monstrous in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These essays stress the continual reinvention & polemical applications of the monstrous.
Publisher description
The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution. Douthwaite explores how the works within this corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley.
Her book is a sustained reflection on the aims and methods of contemporary translation studies and the most complete account available of the role of translation during a critical period in European history."--BOOK JACKET.
Becoming modern: the autonomy of literary culture -- From mai '68 to the fin-de-millénaire -- Becoming nonmodern: learning from science studies -- Equipment for living: strategy, feedback, networks of discourse -- Keeping up with the past -- Reinventing language and literature.
Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which, over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the form of a child.