T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination

T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination PDF

Author: Jewel Spears Brooker

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1421426528

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Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.

Metaphors of Confinement

Metaphors of Confinement PDF

Author: Monika Fludernik

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 841

ISBN-13: 019884090X

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Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Better Living Through Criticism

Better Living Through Criticism PDF

Author: A. O. Scott

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0143109979

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The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."

Grand Hotel Abyss

Grand Hotel Abyss PDF

Author: Stuart Jeffries

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-09-20

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1784785717

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Who were the Frankfurt School—Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer—and why do they matter today? In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu. After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

Native Provenance

Native Provenance PDF

Author: Gerald Vizenor

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 149621806X

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Gerald Vizenor's Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native creativity. With erudite and sweeping virtuosity, Vizenor examines how ethnographers and others converted the inherent confidence of native stories into uneasy sentiments of victimry. He explores the connection between Native Americans and Jews through gossip theory and strategies of cultural survivance, and between natural motion and ordinary practices of survivance. Other topics include the unique element of native liberty inherent in artistic milieus; the genre of visionary narratives of resistance; and the notions of historical absence, cultural nihilism, and victimry. Native Provenance is a tour de force of Native American cultural criticism ranging widely across the terrains of the artistic, literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interpreting native stories. Native Provenance is rife with poignant and original observations and is essential reading for anyone interested in Native American cultures and literature.

Reading The Waste Land

Reading The Waste Land PDF

Author: Jewel Spears Brooker

Publisher: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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This book offers fresh commentary on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a book of modernist poetry published in 1922. It aims to be both a part-by-part analysis of the poem with periodic summations and a meditation on the limits of interpretation and the problematic nature of reading in the late 20th century. Bringing both Eliot's philosophical writings and contemporary theory to their interpretation, the authors aim to demonstrate that in his early essays and poems, Eliot anticipated by over 50 years basic insights of contemporary theory. Using The Waste Land as their reference point, they clarify the manner in which modernist texts both insist upon and defeat interpretation.

All that is Solid Melts Into Air

All that is Solid Melts Into Air PDF

Author: Marshall Berman

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780860917854

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The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe PDF

Author: Jayme Stayer

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-09-18

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1443883433

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In late 1910, after graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in philosophy, the young T. S. Eliot headed across the Atlantic for a year of life and study in France, a country whose poets had already deeply affected his sensibility. His short year there was to change him even more decisively, as he rubbed up against the artistic, philosophical, psychological and political currents of early-century Paris. The absorbent mind of Eliot – as shaped by what he later termed “the mind of Europe” – was a node in this interlocking grid of influences. As there is no understanding T. S. Eliot without considering the impact of French art and thought on his development, this volume serves both as a centennial commemoration of Eliot’s year in Paris and as a reconsideration of the role of France and, more widely, Europe, as they bore on his growth as an artist and critic. Most scholarship on Eliot and France has focused on Eliot’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Symbolists and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This old frame of reference is broken apart in favor of a much wider field that still takes Paris as its center but reaches across national borders. The volume is divided into two overlapping sections: the first, “Eliot and France,” focuses on French authors and trends that shaped Eliot and on the personal experiences in Paris that are legible in his artistic development. The second section, “Eliot and Europe,” situates Eliot in a broader matrix, including Anglo-French literary theory, evolutionary sociology, and German influences. Contributors include several highly respected names in the field of modernist studies – including Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jewel Spears Brooker, and Joyce Wexler – as well as a number of well-established Eliot scholars. Reflecting multiple perspectives, this volume does not offer a single, revisionist take on French and European influence in Eliot’s work. Rather, it circles back to familiar territory, deepening and complicating the accepted narratives. It also opens up new veins of inquiry from unexpected sources and understudied phenomena, drawing on the recently published letters and essays that are currently remapping the field of Eliot studies.

Documenting the Documentary

Documenting the Documentary PDF

Author: Barry Keith Grant

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 0814339727

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Originally released in 1998, Documenting the Documentary responded to a scholarly landscape in which documentary film was largely understudied and undervalued aesthetically, and analyzed instead through issues of ethics, politics, and film technology. Editors Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski addressed this gap by presenting a useful survey of the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints. This new edition of Documenting the Documentary adds five new essays on more recent films in addition to the text of the first edition. Thirty-one film and media scholars, many of them among the most important voices in the area of documentary film, cover the significant developments in the history of documentary filmmaking from Nanook of the North (1922), the first commercially released documentary feature, to contemporary independent film and video productions like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and the controversial Borat (2006). The works discussed also include representative examples of many important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts, from mainstream to avant-garde. In all, this volume offers a series of rich and revealing analyses of those "regimes of truth" that still fascinate filmgoers as much today as they did at the very beginnings of film history. As documentary film and visual media become increasingly important ways for audiences to process news and information, Documenting the Documentary continues to be a vital resource to understanding the genre. Students and teachers of film studies and fans of documentary film will appreciate this expanded classic volume.