Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz

Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz PDF

Author: William McClellan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-04

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13: 1137548797

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Drawing on the work of Holocaust writer Primo Levi and political philosopher Giorgio Agamben McClellan introduces a critical turn in our reading of Chaucer. He argues that the unprecedented event of the Holocaust, which witnessed the total degradation and extermination of human beings, irrevocably changes how we read literature from the past. McClellan gives a thoroughgoing reading of the Man of Law’s Tale, widely regarded as one of Chaucer’s most difficult tales, interpreting it as a meditation on the horrors of sovereign power. He shows how Chaucer, through the figuration of Custance, dramatically depicts the destructive effects of power on the human subject. McClellan’s intervention, which he calls “reading-history-as-ethical-meditation,” places reception history in the context of a reception ethics and holds the promise of changing the way we read traditional texts.

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries PDF

Author: Helen Hickey

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1526129175

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This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally occurring affinities that emerge from Trigg's ongoing legacy; containing diverse methodological approaches and themes, they engage with Chaucer through ecocriticism, medieval literary and historical criticism, and medievalism. The contributors, trailblazing international specialists in their respective fields, honour Trigg's distinctive and energetic mode of enquiry (the symptomatic long history) and intellectual contribution to the humanities. At the same time, their approaches exemplify shifting trends in Chaucer scholarship. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, these scholars speak to and alongside each other, but their essays are also attentive to 'hearing Chaucer speak' then, now and in the future.

Witness Literature in Byzantium

Witness Literature in Byzantium PDF

Author: Adam J. Goldwyn

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3030788571

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This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

Reading Auschwitz

Reading Auschwitz PDF

Author: Mary Lagerwey

Publisher: AltaMira Press

Published: 1998-10-27

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1461614740

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"My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did not feel." —From the Foreword Most of us learn of Auschwitz and the Holocaust through the writings of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Remarkable as their stories are, they leave many voices of Auschwitz unheard. Mary Lagerwey seeks to complicate our memory of Auschwitz by reading less canonical survivors: Jean Amery, Charlotte Delbo, Fania Fenelon, Szymon Laks, Primo Levi, and Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She reads for how gender, social class, and ethnicity color their tellings. She asks whether we can—whether we should—make sense of Auschwitz. And throughout, Lagerwey reveals her own role in her research; tells of her own fears and anxieties presenting what she, a non-Jew born after the fall of Nazism, can only know second-hand. For any student of the Holocaust, for anyone trying to make sense of the final solution, Reading Auschwitz represents a powerful struggle with what it means to read and tell stories after Auschwitz.

Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653-1759

Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653-1759 PDF

Author: H. Weber

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0230614485

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This book surveys the genesis of the modern conception of memory where gender becomes crucial to the processes of memorialization and suggests ways in which technology opens a new chapter in the history of memory.

At Home with Ivan Vladislavić

At Home with Ivan Vladislavić PDF

Author: Gerald Gaylard

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1000854094

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At Home With Ivan Vladislavić is the first comprehensive analysis of the works of Ivan Vladislavić. Bringing a flaneur’s "internal GPS" to postcolonial Johannesburg, Vladislavić established a critical sense of home via an intimate knowledge of geography and history. This sense of belonging can have positive ecological effects as we tend to protect what we know. The flaneur’s deep word hoard also helped him to develop a minimalist style, which was not only a means of living sustainably in the city, but in its humour and close attention to detail a way to make greening the city more of a joy than a duty. In this way, Vladislavić created a culture of sustainability. Introduction and Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

The Critics and the Prioress

The Critics and the Prioress PDF

Author: Hannah Johnson

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-04-19

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0472122819

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Of all the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, in which a young schoolboy is murdered by Jews for singing a song in praise of the Virgin Mary, poses a problem to contemporary readers because of the antisemitism of the story it tells. Both the Tale’s antisemitism and its “Chaucerianism”—its fitness or aptness as part of the Chaucerian canon—are significant topics of reflection for modern readers, who worry about the Tale’s ethical implications as well as Chaucer’s own implications. Over the past fifty years, scholars have asked: Is the antisemitism in the tale that of the Prioress? Or of Chaucer the pilgrim? Or of Chaucer the author? Or, indeed, whether one ought to discuss antisemitism in the Prioress’s Tale at all, considering the potential anachronism of expecting medieval texts to conform to contemporary ideologies. The Critics and the Prioress responds to a critical stalemate between the demands of ethics and the entailments of methodology. The book addresses key moments in criticism of the Prioress’s Tale—particularly those that stage an encounter between historicism and ethics—in order to interrogate these critical impasses while suggesting new modes for future encounters. It is an effort to identify, engage, and reframe some significant—and perennially repeated—arguments staked out in this criticism, such as the roles of gender, aesthetics, source studies, and the appropriate relationship between ethics and historicism. The Critics and the Prioress will be an essential resource for Chaucer scholars researching as well as teaching the Prioress’s Tale. Scholars and students of Middle English literature and medieval culture more generally will also be interested in this book’s rigorous analysis of contemporary scholarly approaches to expressions of antisemitism in Chaucer’s England.

2001

2001 PDF

Author: Susan Sarah Cohen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-02-18

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 3110956942

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This work includes international secondary literature on anti-Semitism published throughout the world, from the earliest times to the present. It lists books, dissertations, and articles from periodicals and collections from a diverse range of disciplines. Written accounts are included among the recorded titles, as are manifestations of anti-Semitism in the visual arts (e.g. painting, caricatures or film), action taken against Jews and Judaism by discriminating judiciaries, pogroms, massacres and the systematic extermination during the Nazi period. The bibliography also covers works dealing with philo-Semitism or Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hate. An informative abstract in English is provided for each entry, and Hebrew titles are provided with English translations.

My Gay Middle Ages

My Gay Middle Ages PDF

Author: A. W. Strouse

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2015-05-13

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 0615830005

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In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse's "gay lifestyle." Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would "get in from behind" on cultural history, Strouse instead does a "reach around." He eschews academic "queer theory" as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of "gross indecency"). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval. "Today, almost nobody reads Boethius, which if you ask me is a crying shame. Because Boethius is so gay. First of all, the heroine of the Consolation is this great big fierce diva, whose name is Lady Philosophy. She's a Lady, and she doesn't stand for anybody's crap. At the beginning of the book, Boethius is crying, all alone in prison, depressed that he's lonely and loveless and is going to be killed. Lady Philosophy descends from the heavens, a la Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The first thing Boethius notices about her is that she's wearing an amazing dress with Greek letters embroidered on it-they stand for practical and theoretical philosophy. Her dress has been torn to shreds by the hands of uncouth philosophers. They didn't know how to treat a lady." (from "My Boethius") TABLE OF CONTENTS // The Most Famous Medievalist in the World - My Boethius - Memory Houses - The President of the Medieval Academy Made Me Cry - My Medieval Romance - The Formation of a Persecuting Society - The Medieval Heart is Like a Penis - Jilted Again - My Orpheus - Medieval Literacy - My Cloud of Unknowing - The Post-Medieval Unconscious - Coda: The Dedication"

Writing History

Writing History PDF

Author: Stefan Berger

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1474255906

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The third edition of Writing History provides students and teachers with a comprehensive overview of how the study of history is informed by a broader intellectual and analytical framework, exploring the emergence and development of history as a discipline and the major theoretical developments that have informed historical writing. Instead of focusing on theory, this book offers succinct explanations of key concepts that illuminate the study of history and practical writing, and demonstrates the ways they have informed practical work. This fully revised new edition comprehensively rewrites and updates original chapters but also includes new features such as: - new chapters on postcolonial, environmental and transnational history; - chapter introductions setting them within the context of historiography; - a new substantive introduction from the editors, providing a useful road-map for students; - an expanded glossary. In its new incarnation Writing History is, more than ever, an invaluable introduction to the central debates that have shaped history.