By conducting imagined dialogues between selected literary works - Eastern European on one hand, American and English on the other - this book proposes an effective way of reading literature, one that goes beyond the narrowing categories of contemporary critical trends.
By conducting imagined dialogues between selected literary works - Eastern European on one hand, American and English on the other - this book propose...
The dimension of religion in the life and work of Bakhtin has been fiercely contested--and willfully ignored--by critics. Unique in its in-depth focus on this subject, Bakhtin and Religion brings together leading British, American, and Russian scholars to investigate the role of religious thought in shaping and framing Bakhtin's writings. These essays provide an overview of Bakhtin's attitude toward religion in general and Russian Orthodoxy in particular, addressing topics ranging from how Bakhtin's religious ideas informed his linguistic and aesthetic theories to the idea of love...
The dimension of religion in the life and work of Bakhtin has been fiercely contested--and willfully ignored--by critics. Unique in its in-depth focus...
Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences, butBakhtin and the Classics is the first book to focus on the relationship between Bakhtin and classical studies, the discipline in which Bakhtin himself was trained. Clearly demonstrating the fundamental importance of classical literature in his work, Bakhtin and the Classicsexpands our understanding of both Bakhtin's thought and the literary and cultural history of antiquity. The authors, eminent classicists and distinguished critics of Bakhtin, put...
Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences, butBakhtin and the Classi...
In a trenchant critique of the full range of theoretical discourses that have come into favor in literary studies since the 1960s, Tony Hilfer demonstrates that none of the practitioners of these forms of criticism subject their own claims to the kind of suspicious scrutiny that they devote to their own objects of study. Assimilating the critiques that have been made of almost all of the major recent modes of criticism-Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, New Historicism, Foucaultian-Hilfer brings them acutely to bear on his central argument: that these methods systematically fail to live up to...
In a trenchant critique of the full range of theoretical discourses that have come into favor in literary studies since the 1960s, Tony Hilfer demonst...
Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which language and literature truly live, the essays in this volume articulate a productive, new critical approach: ordinary language criticism. With roots in the ordinary language philosophy derived especially from Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century, and in the ideas of American pragmatic philosophy propounded and extended by Stanley Cavell, this approach seeks to return criticism to its grounds in the natural language we all speak; to expose the...
Marking a return of literary study from the remote reaches of abstraction to the realm of the immediate, the particular, and the real in which languag...
In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the "New York Times Magazine" to the "Times Literary Supplement" have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary...
In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the "New York Times Magazine" to the "Times Literary Supplement" have heralded the arrival of a ne...
Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, newspapers, documentaries, artworks, and even in solitude. Through spoken, written, and visual images, survivors' testimonies tell stories that may change history, politics, and life itself. In this book Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and scholar in the field of mental health and human rights, focuses on the testimony of survivors for the hope it might hold-hope expressed by survivors again and again that, no matter what horrors or humiliations...
Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, n...
When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world" - now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale. Only when influenced...
When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. ...
The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about...
The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultu...
Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In "Of Death and Dominion" Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems.
Concentrating on four types of political systems polis, empire, theocracy, and modern mass society systems Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the...
Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexp...
