The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century PDF Download

Author: Katharina Donn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000074269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a ‘dia-topian’ literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

Author: Shireen T. Hunter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442233206
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Iranian politics has been marked by sharp ideological divisions and infighting. These divides, kept largely out of public view until the 1990s, came to greater light with the contested 2009 presidential elections. To explain the diverse and complex forces that led to this event and that animate Iran’s current fractured society and polity, author Shireen T. Hunter looks beyond the battle between the forces of reform and reaction, democracy and dictatorship, and considers the historic forces that created the conditions faced by Iran since the revolution. Iran Divided: The Historic Roots of Iranian Debates on Identity, Culture, and Governance in the 21st Century explains historical and political factors and their relevance to Iran today, shedding light on the forces behind Iranian politics and society. This book discusses: historical roots of Iran’s current divisions and debates; Iran versus Islam; secularism versus religion; constitutionalism versus Islamic government; fundamental issues of identity, culture, and governance; aging of the revolutionary coalition; development of new elites; experiences of the Islamic republic; and new international conditions moving the country beyond old divides and ideological rifts toward a new national consensus. A comprehensive survey, the book will be an indispensable tool to any student seeking to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran and its standing in the world today.

Author: Mustafa Kirca
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036403149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The words fear, risk and safety have come to define our contemporary age and have been construed as a dynamic background in the human sciences against which most risk narratives, imaginative or otherwise, can be read. This volume brings together original articles to investigate “cultures of fear” in post-millennial works and covers a wide variety of topics ranging from post-millennial political fictions, post-humanist and postcolonial rewritings to trauma narratives, risk narratives, literary disaster discourses and apocalyptic scenarios. Featuring theoretical and analytical approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as the general reader.

Author: Tristan James Mabry
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812244974
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
For ethnic minorities in Europe separated by state borders—such as Basques in France and Spain or Hungarians who reside in Slovakia and Romania—the European Union has offered the hope of reconnection or at least of rendering the divisions less obstructive. Conationals on different sides of European borders may look forward to increased political engagement, including new norms to support the sharing of sovereignty, enhanced international cooperation, more porous borders, and invigorated protections for minority rights. Under the pan-European umbrella, it has been claimed that those belonging to divided nations would no longer have to depend solely on the goodwill of the governments of their states to have their collective rights respected. Yet for many divided nations, the promise of the European Union and other pan-European institutions remains unfulfilled. Divided Nations and European Integration examines the impact of the expansion of European institutions and the ways the EU acts as a confederal association of member states, rather than a fully multinational federation of peoples. A wide range of detailed case studies consider national communities long within the borders of the European Union, such as the Irish and Basques; communities that have more recently joined, such as the Croats and Hungarians; and communities that are not yet members but are on its borders or in its "near abroad," such as the Albanians, Serbs, and Kurds. This authoritative volume provides cautionary but valuable insights to students of European institutions, nations and nationalism, regional integration, conflict resolution, and minority rights. Contributors: Tozun Bahcheli, Zoe Bray, Alexandra Channer, Zsuzsa Csergő, Marsaili Fraser, James M. Goldgeier, Michael Keating, Tristan James Mabry, John McGarry, Margaret Moore, Sid Noel, Brendan O'Leary, David Romano, Etain Tannam, Stefan Wolff.

Author: Jennifer Gustar
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1782847073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Angela Carter's provocations to laughter and her enchantment with ludic narrative strategies are two key aspects of her aesthetic practice, neither of which has been the focus of sustained study. Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic: Angela Carter at Play responds to this lacuna in Carter criticism. This international collection of eleven essays from acclaimed Carter scholars and emerging voices in the field of Carter studies seeks to reclaim play as a serious undertaking for feminist writing and scholarship and to foreground laughter as a potent affect. While Carter's work turned to comedy in the later years, from the first publication in 1966 until her last in 1992, her fiction, poetry and journalism engaged in sharp social and cultural critique; she habitually engaged this critique through ludic structures and wickedly funny narratives that challenged conventional norms and ways of thinking. Contributors explore the diverse ways in which Carter compelled a complex and often uneasy laughter by means of a controversial aesthetic that merges a persistently ludic sensibility with a biting intransigent wit. This volume draws on theories of play, surrealism, feminism, as well as studies of feminist humour and Carter's own journals and diaries to reveal the ways in which her work moves readers towards the unexpected. This volume will be of relevance both to scholars of Carter's work and of feminist humour more generally; as well, it will be of interest to students and general readers of Carter's fiction, journalism and poetry.

Author: Karl A. Plank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000338967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest raised expectations of what a novel might do. As he understood fiction to aim at what it means to be human, so he hoped his work might relieve the loneliness of human suffering. In that light, The Fact of the Cage shows how Wallace’s masterpiece dramatizes the condition of encagement and how it comes to be met by "Abiding" and through inter-relational acts of speaking and hearing, touching, and facing. Revealing Wallace’s theology of a "boneless Christ," The Fact of the Cage wagers that reading such a novel as Infinite Jest makes available to readers the redemption glimpsed in its pages, that reading fiction has ethical and religious significance—in short, that reading Infinite Jest makes one better. As such, Plank’s work takes steps to defend the ethics of fiction, the vital relation between religion and literature, and why one just might read at all.

Author: Grant Hamilton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000390551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Étienne Balibar writes that today we are at the end of capitalism. This is not because capitalism has run its course or has met an irresistible force, but because there can be no purer form of capitalism than the one we have today. Taking seriously the idea that this strain of capitalism has not only seized the urban environment but is the urban environment, works by Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Penelope Lively, Peter Ackroyd, and J.G. Ballard are read as representative of a loosely allied group of London writers who have anticipated, critiqued, and offered up various avenues of resistance to the deleterious effects of this most vigorous strain of capitalism. Writing on the city by charting a politics of reconnection to the real that necessarily unsettles the epistemological and ontological ground upon which both modernity and capitalism sit, this stable of writers makes clear the ways in which the sheer materiality of the urban environment profoundly influences the being and thinking of individuals. In so doing, these writers produce works which when read together give the coordinates of an altermodernity that might just allow capitalism to reach its final conclusion.

Author: Beatriz Pérez Zapata
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000407152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This monograph analyses Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time as trauma fictions that reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political facets of trauma. Starting with Smith’s humorous critique of psychoanalysis and her definition of original trauma, this volume explores Smith’s challenge of Western theories of trauma and coping, and how her narratives expose the insidiousness of (post)colonial suffering and unbelonging. This book then explores transgenerational trauma, the tensions between remembering and forgetting, multidirectional memory, and the possibilities of the ambiguities and contradictions of the postcolonial and diasporic characters Smith depicts. This analysis discloses Smith’s effort to ethically redefine trauma theory from a postcolonial and decolonial standpoint, reiterates the need to acknowledge and work through colonial histories and postcolonial forms of oppression, and critically reflects on our roles as witnesses of suffering in global times.

Author: Tymon Adamczewski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000195872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World offers an important contribution to thinking about the artist and his work. Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, the volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic artist. The chapters, organized around three broad thematic sections (Geographies, Receptions and Perspectives), address the notions of audience, performance and identity, allowing to map out the structure of feeling and authenticity, both, in the case of the artist and his audience. Taking its cue from the collapse of the so-called high-/ low culture split following from the Nobel Prize, the book explores the argument that Dylan (and all popular music) can be interpreted as literature and offers discussions in the context of literary traditions, or visual culture and music. This contributes to a nuanced and complex portrayal of the seminal cultural phenomenon called Bob Dylan.

Author: Tom McAlindon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000578658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A study of the poetry of Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin in relation to their shared preoccupation with time, change, and loss, the most ancient and fertile theme in lyric and reflective verse, known to earlier English poets as mutability. Though the importance of the socio-political and ideological context is in every case acknowledged, the literary-history context is viewed as primary: hence the introductory survey of foundational Renaissance and Romantic poets with whose work Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin were thoroughly familiar. Although a preoccupation with the subject of time and change in the work of these three poets is a critical commonplace, no one has ever isolated it for special attention, or used it to link them either together or with their historical predecessors. This is an entirely new approach to their work. The critical methodology employed is evidential and analytical rather than theoretical, focussed throughout on the meaning and the mood of each poem and the distinctive individuality of each poet.