Category: Literary Criticism

By Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari

Strength de Kafka. Politique de Kafka. Déjà les lettres d'amour sont une politique où Kafka se vit lui-même comme un vampire. Les nouvelles ou les récits tracent des devenirs-animaux qui sont autant de lignes de fuite actives. Les romans, illimités plutôt qu'inachevés, opèrent un démontage des grandes machines sociales présentes et à venir. Au second même où il les brandit, et s'en sert comme d'un paravent, Kafka ne croit guère à l. a. loi, à los angeles culpabilité, à l'angoisse, à l'intériorité. Ni aux symboles, aux métaphores ou aux allégories. Il ne croit qu'à des architectures et à des agencements dessinés par toutes les formes de désir. Ses lignes de fuite ne sont jamais un shelter, une sortie hors du monde. C'est au contraire un moyen de détecter ce qui se prépare, et de devancer les « puissances diaboliques » du proche avenir. Kafka aime à se définir linguistiquement, politiquement, collectivement, dans les termes d'une littérature dite « mineure ». Mais l. a. littérature mineure est l'élément de toute révolution dans les grandes littératures. Kafka est paru en 1975.

By Marshall Brown, Hugh Bar Nisbet

This most recent quantity within the celebrated Cambridge historical past of Literary feedback addresses literary feedback of the Romantic interval, mainly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by means of across the world revered teachers and discover various key subject matters and subject matters. The ebook is designed to aid readers find crucial info and to advance techniques and viewpoints

By John Foley

Adopting an interdisciplinary method, encompassing philosophy, literature, politics and historical past, John Foley examines the entire breadth of Camus' rules to supply a accomplished and rigorous learn of his political and philosophical inspiration and an important contribution to a number of debates present in Camus learn. Foley argues that the coherence of Camus' suggestion can most sensible be understood via a radical realizing of the techniques of 'the absurd' and 'revolt' in addition to the relation among them. This e-book encompasses a designated dialogue of Camus' writings for the newspaper Combat, a scientific research of Camus' dialogue of the ethical legitimacy of political violence and terrorism, a reassessment of the existing postcolonial critique of Camus' humanism, and a sustained research of Camus' most crucial and regularly ignored paintings, L'Homme révolté (The Rebel).

By Christopher Prendergast

Marcel Proust used to be lengthy the thing of a cult during which the most aspect of examining his nice novel looking for misplaced Time was once to discover, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now stay in much less convinced instances, in ways in which position nice pressure at the assumptions and ideology that made these prior readings attainable. This has resulted in a brand new demeanour of analyzing Proust, opposed to the grain. In Mirages and Mad ideals, Christopher Prendergast argues the case in a different way, with the grain, at the foundation that Proust himself used to be prey to self-doubt and located a number of, if oblique, methods of letting us understand. Prendergast lines intimately the destinations and kinds of a quietly nondogmatic but insistently skeptical voice that questions the redemptive aesthetic the radical is so frequently taken to have a good time, bringing the reader to wonder if that aesthetic is yet one other example of the mirage or the mad trust that, in different guises, figures prominently in looking for misplaced Time. In tracing the modalities of this self-pressuring voice, Prendergast levels all over, throughout a multiplicity of principles, subject matters, assets, and stylistic registers in Proust's literary concept and writing perform, attentive at each element to inflections of element, in a sustained account of Proust the skeptic for the modern reader.

"From Bergson to Sebald, Prendergast's new ebook demonstrates his fabulous succeed in. Delving into the smallest info and biggest rules, in addition to Proust's personal 'truth written due to figures,' this research of his skeptic standpoint is as deep because it is wide."--Mary Ann Caws, writer of Marcel Proust

"Christopher Prendergast extracts new and unique meanings out of the best-known pages in Proust. this can be the profitable upshot of shut and perspicuous readings that demonstrate ambiguities and paradoxes in passages whose interpretations are frequently taken with no consideration. Prendergast's admiration, faraway from blinding him, results in his researching the power in Proust's free ends."--Antoine Compagnon, Collge de France and Columbia University

"Through exemplary shut analyzing and noteworthy awareness to textual element, this ebook bargains a high-powered serious argument that basically pits Proust opposed to himself--the romantic aesthete opposed to the ironic doubter, the author who conquers time opposed to the person who knows how completely misplaced it may be. This paintings will problem and change many present readings of Proust and, via implication, different writers."--Michael wooden, Princeton University

"In Mirages and Mad ideals, Prendergast identifies a skeptical pressure in Proust's writing marking the novelist's resistance to his personal obvious ideals. this can be the paintings of an immense critic on the best of his video game: witty, profound, and hugely readable, whereas assembly most sensible criteria of scholarship in its demonstrate of erudition and appreciate for assets. It merits to be commonly read."--Michael Sheringham, college of Oxford

"[A] deliciously wealthy interrogation of the French novelist's oeuvre. . . . Prendergast has baked a millefeuille of a booklet the following, crisp, wealthy and multilayered. learn it for its exposition of jokes, of magic, attraction and spectrality, of the Proustian physique (a position 'where we are living yet now not the place we're at home'), in addition to for its awkward questions. Refusing to regard Proust as a celebrant, this booklet interrogates his gloriously mad undertaking, whereas additionally amply gratifying its goal to 'stay alert, with the most alert minds of contemporary literature.'"--Mary Bryden, instances better schooling

By Eavan Boland

"Boland bargains encouragement to girls poets of the long run. . . . Her shiny imagery will beguile many."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

These inspiring essays from the prestigious poet Eavan Boland are either serious and deeply own, revealing the journey, ardour, and fight of changing into a lady poet. during this thematic sequel to her vintage Object Lessons, Boland strains her personal stories as a lady, spouse, and mom and their influence on her poetry, and he or she seems to be to an international the place she will switch the poetic earlier in addition to the current.

By Caroline Levine

Types bargains a strong new solution to 1 of the main urgent difficulties dealing with literary, serious, and cultural reviews today--how to attach shape to political, social, and old context. Caroline Levine argues that varieties manage not just artistic endeavors but in addition political life--and our makes an attempt to grasp either artwork and politics. Inescapable and regularly troubling, types form each point of our event. yet kinds don't impose their order in any easy means. a number of shapes, styles, and preparations, overlapping and colliding, generate advanced and unpredictable social landscapes that problem and unsettle traditional analytic versions in literary and cultural studies.

Borrowing the concept that of "affordances" from layout idea, this booklet investigates the explicit ways in which 4 significant forms--wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks--have based tradition, politics, and scholarly wisdom throughout classes, and it proposes fascinating new methods of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads either formalist and antiformalist theorists, together with Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and he or she bargains enticing money owed of a variety of items, from medieval convents and glossy subject parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the tv sequence The Wire.

The result's a appreciably new mind set approximately shape for the subsequent new release and crucial studying for students and scholars around the humanities who needs to combat with the matter of shape and context.

By Jonathan Lethem

What's a novelist presupposed to do with modern tradition? And what's modern tradition sup­posed to do with novelists? within the Ecstasy of effect, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the "white elephant" position of the author as public highbrow, arrives at an striking diversity of answers.

A constellation of formerly released items and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he's written, this quantity sheds gentle on an array of subject matters from intercourse in cinema to medicines, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, Sept. 11, e-book traveling, and Marlon Brando, in addition to on a shelf's worthy of his literary versions and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James wooden, and oth­ers. And, writing approximately Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn via twenty years of writing, Lethem sheds an both powerful mild on himself.

BONUS fabric: This variation comprises an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens.

By Michael Ferber

This can be the 1st dictionary of symbols to be in accordance with literature, instead of 'universal' mental archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that all of us often stumble upon (such as swan, rose, moon, gold), and provides hundreds and hundreds of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary concentrates on English literature, yet its entries variety extensively from the Bible and classical authors to the 20th century, taking in American and eu literatures. For this new version, Michael Ferber has integrated over twenty thoroughly new entries (including undergo, holly, sunflower and tower), and has extra to a few of the current entries. Enlarged and enriched from the 1st version, its knowledgeable type and wealthy references make this ebook a necessary instrument not just for literary and classical students, yet for all scholars of literature.

By Yoko Kawaguchi

During this interesting and wide-ranging booklet, Yoko Kawaguchi explores the Western portrayal of eastern women—and geishas in particular—from the mid-nineteenth century to the current day. She argues that during the West, jap girls have come to embrace convinced rules approximately female sexuality, and he or she analyzes how those rules were expressed in different artwork kinds, starting from fiction and opera to the visible arts and song video clips. one of several works Kawaguchi discusses are the artwork feedback of Baudelaire and Huysmans, the opera Madama Butterfly, the sculptures of Rodin, the Broadway play Teahouse of the August Moon, and the foreign most sensible vendor Memoirs of a Geisha. Butterfly's Sisters additionally examines the impression on early twentieth-century theatre, drama, and dance thought of the functionality kinds of the actresses Madame Hanako and Sadayakko, either previously geishas.

By Joni Tevis

Utilizing such versions as Joseph Cornell’s field structures, loopy quilts, and specimen displays,
Joni Tevis areas fragments in dating to one another for you to puzzle out misplaced histories,
particularly these of girls. Navigating the peril and pleasure of outward journeys
complicated through an inward eager for domestic, The rainy Collection follows Tevis via several
adventures that coalesce right into a narrative imbued with the sunshine of Tevis’s Southern upbringing.
Written with a poet’s lyricism, a scientist’s precision, and a theologian’s figuring out of
the global because it shifts round us, The rainy Collection is the intriguing debut of a particular voice.

"Tevis’s writing, a exhibit for her pursuits in faith, memoir, typical learn and women’s
history, is certain and specific, and during this selection of musings, she builds colossal rules out of small fragments...Far from the common memoir or essay assortment, this quantity showcases a different, meticulous and welcoming voice.”
— Publishers Weekly