Author: Susan Blakely Klein Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 1684170389 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki’s commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki’s specific ideas fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued. This book examines the contents of these commentaries as well as the qualities of the texts they addressed that lent themselves to an allegorical interpretation; the political, economic, and religious developments of the Kamakura period that encouraged the development of this method of interpretation; and the possible motives of the participants in this school of interpretation. Through analyses of six esoteric commentaries, Susan Blakeley Klein presents examples of this interpretive method and discusses its influence on subsequent texts, both elite and popular.
Author: Claudia Tate Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019536080X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.
Author: David Greven Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 078645458X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
Studying the Star Trek myth from the original 1960s series to the 2009 franchise-reboot film, this book challenges frequent accusations that the Star Trek saga refuses to represent queer sexuality. Arguing that Star Trek speaks to queer audiences through subtle yet provocative allegorical narratives, the analysis pays close attention to representations of gender, race, and sexuality to develop an understanding of the franchise’s queer sensibility. Topics include the 1960s original’s deconstruction of the male gaze and the traditional assumptions of male visual mastery; constructions of femininity in Star Trek: Voyager, particularly in the relationship between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine; and the ways in which Star Trek: Enterprise’s adoption of neoconservative politics may have led to its commercial and aesthetic failure.
Author: M. M. Adjarian Publisher: Greenwood ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This book explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. Through her concentration on the perspectives of women writers, her scrupulous attention to the specific histories of the different islands, her interest in diasporic as well as local writing, her embrace of texts in English, French, and Spanish, her insightful exploration of the poetics of allegory, Maude Adjarian invites us to undertake a fundamental rethinking of the concept of national allegory. This criticism is serious and substantial, scholarly and responsible, but also shrewd, engaging and very refreshing.Ross Chambers, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, The University of Michigan Caribbean writers and literary-cultural theorists have traditionally associated the Caribbean archipelago and Caribbeanness with the female body. In so doing, however, they have erased not only the bodies but the social, historical and national experiences of real Caribbean women. Allegories of Desire explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. By looking at the works of six post-1980 Caribbean women writer—Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, J. J. Dominique, Julia Alvarez and Rosario Ferre—M. M. Adjarian uncovers patterns of female bodily resistance to subordination and oppression. These patterns in turn identify the Caribbean and Caribbeanness with ungendered longings for freedom from the imperial twins of patriarchy and North Atlantic colonialism rather than with an imagined, and ultimately exploited, feminine. This compelling study will shed new light on Caribbean literature.
Author: Negar Mottahedeh Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822381192 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.
Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478005580 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.
Author: Olivier Richon Publisher: Gerhard Steidl Gmbh ISBN: Category : Animals Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
Olivier Richon's work addresses various themes such as the desire for the exotic, the pleasures of imitation, the function of the object in the still life, quotation and appropriation of art history.
Author: Lynn Wells Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004487662 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 190
Book Description
Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction has as its founding premise Ross Chambers’s notion that “one of the important powers of fiction is its power to theorize the act of storytelling in and through the act of storytelling.” In this critical study, Lynn Wells presents detailed readings of novels by five prominent British authors – John Fowles, Angela Carter, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie – with an emphasis on how the texts' self-referential aspects illuminate the acts of reading and writing fiction in contemporary Britain and, by extension, around the world. The book begins by situating contemporary British fiction historically as the product of an “aesthetics of compromise” arising from the “realism versus experimentalism” debate that consumed the English literary establishment during the 1960s. In her discussion of the texts, Lynn Wells then draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches, from narrative and psychoanalytic theory to existentialist philosophy and the historiographic ideas of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Giambattista Vico. These original readings challenge superficial “postmodern” interpretations of contemporary British fiction as pessimistically anti-historical, and reassert the value of readerly engagement and narrative reconstruction of the past.
Author: Susan Blakely Klein
Author: Claudia Tate
Author: David Greven
Author: M. M. Adjarian
Author: M. M. Adjarian
Author: Negar Mottahedeh
Author: Susan Blakeley Klein
Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
Author: Olivier Richon
Author: Lynn Wells