Obsolete Objects In The Literary Imagination

Author : Francesco Orlando
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300138210
Total Pages : 520 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination written by Francesco Orlando and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.

Author : Samuel Frederick
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501761579
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Redemption of Things written by Samuel Frederick and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that to collect things, however, always entails displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.

Author : William Viney
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1472525531
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Waste written by William Viney and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are people so interested in what they and others throw away? This book shows how this interest in what we discard is far from new - it is integral to how we make, build and describe our lived environment. As this wide-ranging new study reveals, waste has been a polarizing topic for millennia and has been treated as a rich resource by artists, writers, philosophers and architects. Drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Bruno Latour and many others, Waste: A Philosophy of Things investigates the complexities of waste in sculpture, literature and architecture. It traces a new philosophy of things from the ancient to the modern and will be of interest to those working in cultural and literary studies, archaeology, architecture and continental philosophy.

Author : Allegra Iafrate
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271085355
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Long Life of Magical Objects written by Allegra Iafrate and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a series of powerful artifacts associated with King Solomon via legendary or extracanonical textual sources. Tracing their cultural resonance throughout history, art historian Allegra Iafrate delivers exciting insights into these objects and interrogates the ways in which magic manifests itself at a material level. Each chapter focuses on a different Solomonic object: a ring used to control demons; a mysterious set of bottles that constrain evil forces; an endless knot or seal with similar properties; the shamir, known for its supernatural ability to cut through stone; and a flying carpet that can bring the sitter anywhere he desires. Taken together, these chapters constitute a study on the reception of the figure of Solomon, but they are also cultural biographies of these magical objects and their inherent aesthetic, morphological, and technical qualities. Thought-provoking and engaging, Iafrate’s study shows how ancient magic artifacts live on in our imagination, in items such as Sauron’s ring of power, Aladdin’s lamp, and the magic carpet. It will appeal to historians of art, religion, folklore, and literature.

Author : Efterpi Mitsi
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030269051
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination written by Efterpi Mitsi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.

Author : Alan Munton
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443886688
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Silent Life of Things written by Alan Munton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ever-growing interest in the analysis of materiality has found its expression in many studies of objects and objecthood, of things and “thingness”. Combining cultural, phenomenological, semiotic, and philosophical approaches, this collection of eleven essays proposes a journey into “the silent life of things”, into those aspects of materiality that are not immediately visible and require both increased attention and a sense of intuition. It focuses on the subtle changes that materiality operates upon our subjectivity and upon our status as producers, users, possessors, negotiators and manipulators of objects, and analyses the ways in which materiality is constantly redefined by consumerism and the strategies it adopts in order to resist commodification. In the process, the collection explores different ways of deciphering what materiality, in its reliable concreteness or its “magical materialism”, tries to tell us: all the silent stories that “things” accumulate while circulating among people, societies and cultures; the narratives they weave when amassed, collected, archived or transformed into cultural commodities; the secrets they reveal when witnessing the gradual commodification of their owners – of their bodies, lives and souls. The Silent Life of Things: Representing and Reading Commodified Objecthood establishes a new paradigm for reading and interpreting commodified materiality, and its participation in the establishment of a new aesthetics of consumerism.

Author : Marie-Laure Ryan
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496239237
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Object-Oriented Narratology written by Marie-Laure Ryan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2024-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Object-Oriented Narratology explores the representation of objects from a narratological point of view, combining an object-centered approach with specific text studies and arguing for the cultural meanings of objects and their power and influence on the behavior of characters, while acknowledging the independence of their existence from human perception.

Author : Philip Tsang
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421441357
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Obsolete Empire written by Philip Tsang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book shows that a large part of the British empire's history took place in the minds of distant readers who were by turns inspired, entranced, and agonized by English literature"--

Author : Daniel Marrone
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496807324
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Forging the Past written by Daniel Marrone and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once familiar and hard to place, the work of acclaimed Canadian cartoonist Seth evokes a world that no longer exists--and perhaps never existed, except in the panels of long-forgotten comics. Seth's distinctive drawing style strikingly recalls a bygone era of cartooning, an apt vehicle for melancholy, gently ironic narratives that depict the grip of the past on the present. Even when he appears to look to the past, however, Seth (born Gregory Gallant) is constantly pushing the medium of comics forward with sophisticated work that often incorporates metafiction, parody, and formal experimentation. Forging the Past offers a comprehensive account of this work and the complex interventions it makes into the past. Moving beyond common notions of nostalgia, Daniel Marrone explores the various ways in which Seth's comics induce readers to participate in forging histories and memories. Marrone discusses collecting, Canadian identity, New Yorker cartoons, authenticity, artifice, and ambiguity--all within the context of comics' unique structure and texture. Seth's comics are suffused with longing for the past, but on close examination this longing is revealed to be deeply ambivalent, ironic, and self-aware. Marrone undertakes the most thorough, sustained investigation of Seth's work to date, while advancing a broader argument about how comics operate as a literary medium. Included as an appendix is a substantial interview, conducted by the author, in which Seth candidly discusses his work, his peers, and his influences.

Author : Thomas M. Allen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108397255
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Time and Literature written by Thomas M. Allen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Part one, Origins, addresses fundamental issues that can be traced back to the beginnings of literary criticism. Part two, Developments, shows how thinking about Time has been crucial to various interpretive revolutions that have impacted literary theory. Part three, Application, illustrates the centrality of temporal theorising to literary criticism in a variety of contemporary approaches, from ecocriticism and new materialisms to media and archive studies. The first anthology to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on the temporality of literary language from across different national and historical periods, Time and Literature will appeal to academic researchers and interested laypersons alike.