You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Summary: "W.G. Sebald, frequently mentioned in the same breath as Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov, is one of the most important European writers of recent decades. He has been lauded by such major cultural commentators as Susan Sontag and Paul Auster, and he has combined wide public appeal with universal critical acclaim. His work is concerned with questions of memory, exile, representation, and, above all else, history. But his approach to history is strikingly different from conventional historiographical writing on the one hand, and from the historical novel on the other. His texts are hybrid in nature, mixing fiction, biography, historiography, travel-writing and memoir, and incorporating numerous photographic images. This volume seeks to respond to the complexities of Sebaldʼs image of history by presenting essays by a team of international scholars, all of whom are acknowledged Sebald experts. It offers a unique and exciting perspective on the dazzling work of one of the major literary figures of our times."--Publisher description.
Distinctive Styles and Authorship in Alternative Comics addresses the benefits and limits of analyses of style in alternative comics. It offers three close readings of works serially published between 1980 and 2018 – Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, and Jason Lutes’ Berlin – and discusses how artistic style may influence the ways in which readers construct authorship.
Narrative Research, once the domain of structuralist literary theory, has over the last 15 years developed into an international and interdisciplinary field. It is now commonly agreed that storytelling functions as a fundamental cognitive tool for sense-making and meaning production, and that human beings structure and communicate lived experience through oral, written and visual stories. Entitled Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, this volume collects fifteen essays which look at narrative and narrativity from various perspectives, including literary studies and hermeneutics, cognitive theory and creativity research, metaphor studies, film theory and intermedia...
What do we see when we see, how do we perceive vision itself, and how do we speak and write about seeing and perception? The articles collected in this volume attempt to observe the constitution of perception, be it of a visual field or visible objects, but also of images which emerge in the mind, e.g. that of the reader in the act of reading. The act of vision is profoundly impure, and ‘seeing’ very much entails other modes of sense-based perception such as listening, touching, feeling, tasting or smelling. Various modes of seeing can moreover be observed within literary texts or in music, dreams, memory or all kinds of bodily experiences like dance, pain, sexuality etc., so that there ...
"Poetics of the Iconotext makes available for the first time in English the theories of the respected French text/image specialist, Professor Liliane Louvel. A consolidation of the most significant theoretical materials of Louvel's two acclaimed books, L'Oeil du Texte: Texte et image dans la litterature anglophone and Texte/Image: Images a lire, textes a voir, this newly conceived work introduces English readers to the most current thinking in French text/image theory and visual studies. Focusing on the full spectrum of text/image relations, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to digital books, Louvel begins by introducing key terms and situating her work in the context of significant deba...
We cannot live a full life unless we know who we are, unless we know the essence of our being. The sciences, which have been immensely helpful in the way in which we live our lives, have been helpless when it comes to telling us how our life should be lived and what its meaning is. Accepting any philosophical or religious belief, on the other hand, limits our freedom to learn directly from personal knowledge of reality, as any preconceived ideas do not only alter its perception, but limit the spectrum of possibilities to which our reason can be applied. To those who do not surrender their right to decide for themselves what reality is, life offers a unique opportunity to apply their insights both in the worlds within and without and either validates or disproves their findings. If they are true to themselves, the continuous feeedback life offers will reveal to them unique characterics of our mind, which are otherwise limited by its own beliefs.
Comparative Literature is changing fast with methodologies, topics, and research interests emerging and remerging. The fifth volume of ICLA 2016 proceedings, Dialogues between Media, focuses on the current interest in inter-arts studies, as well as papers on comics studies, further testimony to the fact that comics have truly arrived in mainstream academic discourse. "Adaptation" is a key term for the studies presented in this volume; various articles discuss the adaptation of literary source texts in different target media - cinematic versions, comics adaptations, TV series, theatre, and opera. Essays on the interplay of media beyond adaptation further show many of the strands that are woven into dialogues between media, and thus the expanding range of comparative literature.
Experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement impinge upon the lives of an ever increasing number of people worldwide, with business class comfort but more often with unrelenting violence. Since the early 1990s, the political and cultural realities of global migration have led to a growing interest in the different forms of “diasporic” existence and identities. The articles in this book do not focus on the external boundaries of diaspora – what is diasporic and what is not? – but on one of its most important internal boundaries, which is indicated by the second term in the title of this book: memory. It is not by chance that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall...
Alterity is not a mere synonym of difference; what it signifies is otherness, a distinction or separation that can entail similarity as well as difference. The articles collected here explore ways to define, situate and negotiate alterity in a manner that does not do away with the other through negation or neutralization but that instead engages alterity as a reconfiguring of identities that keeps them open to change, to a becoming without horizon. Alterity and its situated negotiations with identity are configured through the body, through the psyche and through translational politics. From critical readings of angels, specters, grotesque bodies, online avatars, Sex and the City, pornography in French literature, Australian billboard art, Pina Bausch, Adrian Piper, Kashmiri poetry, contemporary German fiction, Jacques Brault and Northern-Irish poetry, there emerges a vision of identities as multi-faceted constructions that are continually being transformed by the various alterities with which they intersect and which they must actively engage in order to function effectively in the social, political, and aesthetic realm.