Magic Science And Empire In Postcolonial Literature

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Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature

Kathleen Renk
Magic Science and Empire in Postcolonial Literature Book PDF

Author : Kathleen Renk
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2012-03-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136582318

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Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature by Kathleen Renk Pdf

This book examines the ways in which contemporary British and British postcolonial writers in the after-empire era draw connections between magic (defined here as Renaissance Hermetic philosophy) and science. Writers such as Tom Stoppard, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Atwood critique both imperial science, or science used in service to empire, and what Renk calls "imperical science," a distortion of rational science which denies that reality is holistic and claims that nature can and should be conquered. In warning of the dangers of imperical science, these writers restore the connection between magic and science as they examine major shifts in scientific thinking across the centuries. They reflect on the Copernican Revolution and the historic split between magic and science, scrutinize Darwinism, consider the relationship between Victorian science and pseudo-science, analyze twentieth-century Uncertainty theories, reject bio/genetic engineering, call for a new approach to science that reconnects science and art, and ultimately endeavor to bring an end to the imperial age. Overall, these writers forge a new discourse that merges science with the arts and emphasizes a holistic philosophy, a view shared by both Hermetic philosophy and recent scientific theories, such as chaos or complexity theory. Along with recent books that focus on the relationship between contemporary literature and science, this work focuses on contemporary British literature’s critique of science and the ways in which postcolonial literature addresses the relationship between magic, science, and empire.

Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature

Cameron Fae Bushnell
Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature Book PDF

Author : Cameron Fae Bushnell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780415539562

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Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature by Cameron Fae Bushnell Pdf

This book reads representations of Western music in literary texts to reveal the ways in which artifacts of imperial culture function within contemporary world literature. Bushnell argues that Western music’s conventions for performance, composition, and listening, established during the colonial period, persist in postcolonial thought and practice. Music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods (Bach through Brahms) coincides with the rise of colonialism, and Western music contains imperial attitudes and values embedded within its conventions, standards, and rules. The book focuses on the culture of classical music as reflected in the worlds of characters and texts and contends that its effects outlast the historical significance of the real composers, pieces, styles, and forms. Through examples by authors such as McEwan, Vikram Seth, Bernard MacLaverty, Chang-rae Lee, and J.M. Coetzee, the book demonstrates how Western music enters narrative as both acts of history and as structures of analogy that suggest subject positions, human relations, and political activity that, in turn, describes a postcolonial condition. The uses to which Western music is put in each literary text reveals how European art music of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is read and misread by postcolonial generations, exposing mostly hidden cultural structures that influence our contemporary understandings of social relations and hierarchies, norms for resolution and for assigning significance, and standards of propriety. The book presents strategies for thinking anew about the persistence of cultural imperialism, reading Western music simultaneously as representative of imperial, cultural dominance and as suggestive of resistant structures, forms, and practices that challenge the imperial hegemony.

Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature

Christin Hoene
Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South Asian Literature Book PDF

Author : Christin Hoene
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2014-08-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317679165

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Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature by Christin Hoene Pdf

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

Rethinking Empathy through Literature

Meghan Marie Hammond,Sue J. Kim
Rethinking Empathy through Literature Book PDF

Author : Meghan Marie Hammond,Sue J. Kim
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317817376

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Rethinking Empathy through Literature by Meghan Marie Hammond,Sue J. Kim Pdf

In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Cognition, Literature, and History

Mark J. Bruhn,Donald R. Wehrs
Cognition Literature and History Book PDF

Author : Mark J. Bruhn,Donald R. Wehrs
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2013-11-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317936862

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Cognition, Literature, and History by Mark J. Bruhn,Donald R. Wehrs Pdf

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

Trauma in Contemporary Literature

Marita Nadal,Mónica Calvo
Trauma in Contemporary Literature Book PDF

Author : Marita Nadal,Mónica Calvo
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2014-03-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134738038

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Trauma in Contemporary Literature by Marita Nadal,Mónica Calvo Pdf

Trauma in Contemporary Literature analyzes contemporary narrative texts in English in the light of trauma theory, including essays by scholars of different countries who approach trauma from a variety of perspectives. The book analyzes and applies the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in trauma theory, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, absence vs. loss, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, nachträglichkeit, transgenerational trauma, the process of acting out and working through, introjection and incorporation, mourning and melancholia, the phantom and the crypt, postmemory and multidirectional memory, shame and the affects, and the power of resilience to overcome trauma. Significantly, the essays not only focus on the phenomenon of trauma and its diverse manifestations but, above all, consider the elements that challenge the aporias of trauma, the traps of stasis and repetition, in order to reach beyond the confines of the traumatic condition and explore the possibilities of survival, healing and recovery.

Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film

Andrew Taylor,Áine Kelly
Stanley Cavell Literature and Film Book PDF

Author : Andrew Taylor,Áine Kelly
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780415509640

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Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film by Andrew Taylor,Áine Kelly Pdf

This book offers a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature, highlighting how literature and philosophy are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

Literature and the Glocal City

Ana María Fraile-Marcos
Literature and the Glocal City Book PDF

Author : Ana María Fraile-Marcos
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317682165

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Literature and the Glocal City by Ana María Fraile-Marcos Pdf

The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection’s most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of ‘glocality’, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.

Shipwreck in Art and Literature

Carl Thompson
Shipwreck in Art and Literature Book PDF

Author : Carl Thompson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2014-05-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136161537

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Shipwreck in Art and Literature by Carl Thompson Pdf

Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

Class and the Making of American Literature

Andrew Lawson
Class and the Making of American Literature Book PDF

Author : Andrew Lawson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2014-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136774249

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Class and the Making of American Literature by Andrew Lawson Pdf

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film

Maria Beville
The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film Book PDF

Author : Maria Beville
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2013-10-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135052300

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The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film by Maria Beville Pdf

This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

Basuli Deb
Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture Book PDF

Author : Basuli Deb
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2014-11-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317632115

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Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture by Basuli Deb Pdf

This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

Feminist Theory Across Disciplines

Shira Wolosky
Feminist Theory Across Disciplines Book PDF

Author : Shira Wolosky
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2013-05-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136668463

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Feminist Theory Across Disciplines by Shira Wolosky Pdf

Defying traditional definitions of public and private as gendered terms, and broadening discussion of women’s writing in relation to feminist work done in other fields, this study addresses American women’s poetry from the seventeenth to late-twentieth century. Engaging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, history, political theory, religious culture, cultural studies, and poetics, this study provides entry into some of the founding feminist discussions across disciplines, moving beyond current scholarship to pursue an interpretation of feminism’s defining interests and assumptions in the context of women’s writing. The author emphasizes and explores how women’s writing expresses their active participation in community and civic life, emerging from and shaping a woman’s selfhood as constituted through relationships, not only on the personal level, but as forming community commitments. This distinctive formation of the self finds expression in women’s voices and other poetic forms of expression, with the aesthetic power of poetry itself bringing different arenas of human experience to bear on each other in mutual interrogation and reflection. Women poets have addressed the public world, directly or through a variety of poetic structures and figures, and in doing so they have defined and expressed specific forms of selfhood engaged in and committed to communal life.

American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship

Joni Adamson,Kimberly N. Ruffin
American Studies Ecocriticism and Citizenship Book PDF

Author : Joni Adamson,Kimberly N. Ruffin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-01-04
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781135078836

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American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship by Joni Adamson,Kimberly N. Ruffin Pdf

This collection reclaims public intellectuals and scholars important to the foundational work in American Studies that contributed to emerging conceptions of an "ecological citizenship" advocating something other than nationalism or an "exclusionary ethics of place." Co-editors Adamson and Ruffin recover underrecognized field genealogies in American Studies (i.e. the work of early scholars whose scope was transnational and whose activism focused on race, class and gender) and ecocriticism (i.e. the work of movement leaders, activists and scholars concerned with environmental justice whose work predates the 1990s advent of the field). They stress the necessity of a confluence of intellectual traditions, or "interdisciplinarities," in meeting the challenges presented by the "anthropocene," a new era in which human beings have the power to radically endanger the planet or support new approaches to transnational, national and ecological citizenship. Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common—namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground—and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups—ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional—that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision. Read together, the essays included in American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship create a "methodological commons" where environmental justice case studies and interviews with activists and artists living in places as diverse as the U.S., Canada, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Taiwan and the Navajo Nation, can be considered alongside literary and social science analysis that contributes significantly to current debates catalyzed by nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, hurricanes, and climate change, but also by hopes for a common future that will ensure the rights of all beings--human and nonhuman-- to exist, maintain, and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes

Narrative Space and Time

Elana Gomel
Narrative Space and Time Book PDF

Author : Elana Gomel
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2014-02-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781134519705

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Narrative Space and Time by Elana Gomel Pdf

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal distortions of relativity have passed into culture at large. This book examines whether narrative can be used to represent these "impossible" spaces. Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines’ "dream-time" to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. More recently, from Alice’s adventures in Wonderland to contemporary science fiction’s obsession with black holes and quantum paradoxes, counter-intuitive spaces are a prominent feature of modern and postmodern narrative. With the rise and popularization of science fiction, the inventiveness and variety of impossible narrative spaces explodes. The author analyses the narrative techniques used to represent such spaces alongside their cultural significance. Each chapter connects narrative deformation of space with historical problematic of time, and demonstrates the cognitive and perceptual primacy of narrative in representing, imagining and apprehending new forms of space and time. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between narratology, cultural theory, science fiction, and studies of place.