What constitutes a border situation? How translatable and "portable" is the border? What are the borders of words surrounding the border? In its five sections, Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line intends to address these issues as it brings together visions of border dynamics from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The volume opens with "Part I: (B)orders and lines: A Theoretical Intervention," which explores the circle and the cross as spatial configurations of two contradictory urges, to separate and divide on the one hand, and to welcome and allow passage on the other....

Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno's concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Levinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term "mimesis" as both a "world-reflecting" and a "world-creating" mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix...

Thus book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre's theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja's writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Aug 's notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells' space of flows, and Michel de Certeau's theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic...

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations;...