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This book includes information about more than seven thousand black people who lived in Clark County, Kentucky before 1865. Part One is a relatively brief set of narrative chapters about several individuals. Part Two is a compendium of information drawn mainly from probate, military, vital, and census records.
Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and deni...
The most intriguing aspect of Cormac McCarthy’s writing is the irresistible premonition that his sentences carry an exceptional potential, that after each subsequent reading they surprise us with increasingly deeper layers of meaning, which are often in complete contradiction to the readers’ initial intuitions. His novels belong to the kind that we dream about at night, that follow us and do not let themselves be forgotten. Cormac McCarthy’s prose has been read in the light of a variety of theories, ranging from Marxist criticism, the pastoral tradition, Gnostic theology, the revisionist approach to the American Western, to feminist and eco-critical methodology. The perspective offered...
Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibil...
Even as "network" has become a contemporary keyword, its overuse has limited its analytic usefulness. In the enthusiasm that orbits the concept, the network is too easily taken up as a term that we should already know. Patrick Jagoda claims that we do not, in fact, know networks, in part because of their very ubiquity and variety. His book shows how a range of popular aesthetic forms mediate our experience of networks and yield up greater insight into this critical concept. Each chapter of "Network Aesthetics" considers how a different contemporary genre makes sense of decentralized network structure, from fiction, film, and television to popular videogames such as Introversion's "Uplink," experimental games such as Jason Rohrer's "Between," and emergent transmedia storytelling forms such as "Alternate Reality Games." Jagoda wants to show that network aesthetics, in all of these cases, are not simply the quality of a genre; more substantively, they are a critical corollary to an era in which interconnection has become a key cultural framework. "Network Aesthetics" cuts through the cliches of sublime interconnection and illuminates the ordinary, lived aspects of networked life.
Demonstrates the persistence of realism's characteristic concerns - sympathy, melodrama, gender and class - in the most aesthetically innovative works of modernist fiction.
A book like this is long overdue because not many are aware of the numerous intersections between Philip Roth's fiction and world literature. In highlighting these intersections and uneasy passages, this comparative approach offers an important contribution to Philip Roth studies as well as to comparative literary study in general. The fourteen chapters on this book summon Roth's intertextual links to authors ranging from the anonymous writer of the medieval play Everyman, through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, Ellison, Coover, and the New York intellectuals in the United States, to Swift, Chekhov, Svevo, Kafka, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Camus, and Klíma in Europe, and on to Coetzee in South Africa. ...
The prospect of increasing longevity has turned aging and old age into a topic of concern in Western societies. The discourse of age and the proliferation of narrative in contemporary media culture both transgress disciplinary boundaries. Addressing the "narratives of life" from different disciplinary angles this volume aims to explore the scope of a narrative gerontology. Aging and the stories that are told about it or from within are transnational and transcultural phenomena. While aging is thus a universal process, attention is also drawn to the categories of difference that it evokes: Historical, social and cultural differences as well as gender differences.
For better or worse, Rorty has shaped the trajectory of academic philosophy. A decade after his passing, his legacy is ever present, especially in context of the growth of the far right, the struggle over the meaning of justice and equity, and the ecological crises we face. Edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Rorty and Beyond brings together leading international philosophers from the United States and Europe to reevaluate Rorty’s legacy and explore what lies beyond his life and work. This collection covers a diverse territory, exploring Rorty’s legacy regarding theories of truth, accounts of nature and naturalism, the historical situation of professional philosophy, the private and public aspects of religion, the place of literature in cultural politics, and points beyond Rorty, such as what we may hope for after his critical attack on certainty and ultimacy. Scholars, specialists, and those new to Rorty will all find insight, useful criticism, and edification in this volume.