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The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ways in which the borders between human and nonhuman—including flora,fauna, and technology—become porous, thus questioning traditional onto-epistemological and ethical categories. Bringing together British, American, and postcolonial studies, The Ecopoetics of War covers a variety of historical periods, geographical areas, and literary genres. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, it intertwines war stud...
A Year of Real and Literary Birds is simultaneously an almanac of bird life, a work of interdisciplinary literary scholarship, and a chronicle of family life. The book paints an intimate portrait of a place and a diverse cast of authors by bringing to life the birds within landscapes both literary and actual. Intertwined within each chapter are animal narratives from a diverse sampling of writers, including, among others, Homer, the Brothers Grimm, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Thomas Pynchon, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Mary Oliver, Bronislaw Maj, Mourning Dove, and (repeatedly, given Godfrey’s background as a Hemingway scholar) Ernest Hemingway. Using a blend of ecocriticism, animal studies, close reading, and the techniques of creative nonfiction, Godfrey unpacks the ways that authors and ornithologists spanning the centuries have tried to bridge the gap between human and nonhuman worlds.
James Joyce’s evocations of his characters’ thoughts are often inserted within a commonplace that regards the mind as an interior space, referred to as the ‘inward turn’ in literary scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Emma-Louise Silva reassesses this vantage point by exploring Joyce’s modernist fiction through the prism of 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive – cognition. By merging the 4E framework with cognitive-genetic narratology, an innovative form of inquiry that brings together the study of the dynamics of writing processes and the study of cognition in relation to narratives, Modernist Minds: Materialities of the Mental in the Works of James Joyce delves into the material stylistic choices through which Joyce’s approaches to mind depiction evolved.
The aim of this Element is to offer a reassessment of Beckett's alleged Cartesianism using the theoretical framework of extended cognition - a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the mind's brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. The principal argument defended here is that, despite the Cartesian bias introduced by early Beckett scholarship, Beckett's fictional minds are not isolated 'skullscapes'. Instead, they are grounded in interaction with their fictional storyworlds, however impoverished those may have become in the later part of his writing career.
A rich examination of the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce In this book, Fran O’Rourke examines the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on James Joyce, arguing that both thinkers fundamentally shaped the philosophical outlook which pervades the author’s oeuvre. O’Rourke demonstrates that Joyce was a philosophical writer who engaged creatively with questions of diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge. Beginning with an introduction to each thinker, the book traces Joyce’s discovery of their works and his concrete engagement with their thought. Aristotle and Aquinas equipped Joyce with fundamental principles r...
Writers at War addresses the most immediate representations of the First World War in the prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden; it interrogates the various ways in which these writers contended with conveying their war experience from the temporal and spatial proximity of the warzone and investigates the multifarious impact of the war on the (re)development of their aesthetics. It also interrogates to what extent these texts aligned with or challenged existing social, cultural, philosophical and aesthetic norms. While this book is concerned with literary technique, the rich existing scholarship on questions of gender, trauma and cultural studies on World ...
This is the first book to explore the depth and range of Joyce's relationship with nineteenth-century figures and cultural movements.
The Varieties of Joycean Experience is a collection of ten essays that display the wide range and diversity of perspectives and critical approaches that can be drawn upon to enrich our readings of James Joyce’s works. With special attention to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, these essays explore such problems as the difficulties these books pose to categories and summaries and our understanding of Joyce’s composition methods. The book explores Joyce’s ambiguities around death, scatology, and the weather to propose new understandings of these phenomena as key ways into Joyce’s works. The book concludes with an examination of the tricky problem: what makes an interpretation untenable, and why do Joyce’s works inspire far-fetched and even crackpot readings?
This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies. Cognitive Joyce presents Joyce's relationship to the scientific knowledge and practices of his time and examines his texts in light of contemporary developments in cognitive and neuro-sciences. The chapters pursue a threefold investigation—into the author's "extended mind" at work, into his characters' complex and at times pathological perceptive and mental processes, and into the elaborate responses the work elicits as we perform the act of reading. This volume not only offers comprehensive overviews of the oeuvre, but also detailed close-readings that unveil the linguistic focus of Joyce's drama of cognition.
Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body,” a fiction that holds that an abled body is one which does not participate in or situate experience. The diaphanous abled body unde...