Literary Culture in a World Transformed

Literary Culture in a World Transformed
Author: William Paulson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1501729349

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Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world.

Recoding World Literature

Recoding World Literature
Author: B. Venkat Mani
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0823273423

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Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

Bring on the Books for Everybody

Bring on the Books for Everybody
Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2010-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 082239197X

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Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a “literary experience” in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins’s analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

In the Company of Books

In the Company of Books
Author: Sarah Wadsworth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781558495418

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Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

A World Transformed

A World Transformed
Author: James Walvin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520386256

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A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world. A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste. This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

The Idea of World Literature

The Idea of World Literature
Author: John Pizer
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2006-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807131199

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Although the term "World Literature" is widely used today, there is little agreement on what it means and even less awareness of its evolution. In this wide-ranging work, John Pizer traces the concept of Weltliteratur in Germany beginning with Goethe and continuing through Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels to the present as he explores its importation into the United States in the 1830s and the teaching of World Literature in U.S. classrooms since the early twentieth century. Pizer demonstrates the concept's ongoing viability through an in-depth reading of the contemporary Syrian-German transnational novelist Rafik Schami. He also provides a clear methodology for World Literature courses in the twenty-first century. Pizer argues persuasively that Weltliteratur can provide cohesion to the study of World Literature today. In his view, traditional "World Lit" classes are limited by their focus on the universal elements of literature. A course based on Weltliteratur, however, promotes a more thorough understanding of literature as a dialectic between the universal and the particular. In a practical guide to teaching World Literature by employing Goethe's paradigm, he explains how to help students navigate between the extremes of homogenization on the one hand and exoticism on the other, learning both what cultures share and what distinguishes them. Everyone who teaches World Literature will want to read this stimulating book. In addition, anyone interested in the development of the concept from its German roots to its American fruition will find The Idea of World Literature immensely rewarding.

The Essays of Chitta Ranjan Das on Literature, Culture, and Society

The Essays of Chitta Ranjan Das on Literature, Culture, and Society
Author: Ananta Kumar Giri
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527547817

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This volume brings together the essays of Chitta Ranjan Das (1923-2011), a creative experimenter and writer, on literature, culture, life and the human condition. It presents a different vision and version of the post-colonial imagination and social and literary criticism which is rooted in soil, soul and cosmos. While a majority of post-colonial discourse is still predominantly metropolitan, giving us very little discussion on creative endeavours in different language spaces of India and the world, this book presents radical new pathways and creative collaborations which break conventional boundaries between the periphery and the centre, literature and life, mother languages and metropolitan languages, and East and West. It offers a new archaeology of knowledge as a regenerative archaeology of life where knowledge, action and devotion come together for new explorations and transformations. It broadens and deepens our universe of discourse on literature, philosophy and world transformations, and is a monumental contribution to alternative imagination and cosmopolitan experimentation.

Not Born Digital

Not Born Digital
Author: Daniel Morris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501339419

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Not Born Digital addresses from multiple perspectives � ethical, historical, psychological, conceptual, aesthetic � the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics, the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the human voice, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry. The premise of Not Born Digital is that the innovative contemporary poets studied in this book engage obscure and discarded, but nonetheless historically resonant materials to unsettle what Charles Bernstein, a leading innovative contemporary U.S. poet and critic of �official verse culture,� refers to as �frame lock� and �tone jam.� While other scholars have begun to analyze poetry that appears in new media contexts, Not Born Digital concerns the ambivalent ways page poets (rather than electronica based poets) have grappled with �screen memory� (that is, electronic and new media sources) through the re-purposing of �found� materials.

Before We Were Free

Before We Were Free
Author: Julia Alvarez
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 030743317X

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Anita de la Torre never questioned her freedom living in the Dominican Republic. But by her 12th birthday in 1960, most of her relatives have emigrated to the United States, her Tío Toni has disappeared without a trace, and the government’s secret police terrorize her remaining family because of their suspected opposition of el Trujillo’s dictatorship. Using the strength and courage of her family, Anita must overcome her fears and fly to freedom, leaving all that she once knew behind. From renowned author Julia Alvarez comes an unforgettable story about adolescence, perseverance, and one girl’s struggle to be free.

On Literary Worlds

On Literary Worlds
Author: Eric Hayot
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199926697

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On Literary Worlds develops new strategies and perspectives for understanding aesthetic worlds.