Download Free Reading Blindly Literature Otherness And The Possibility Of An Ethical Reading Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Reading Blindly Literature Otherness And The Possibility Of An Ethical Reading and write the review.

Taiwan’s status as an island surrounded by powerful nation states has forced upon it a history of permeable borders and an ever fluctuating cultural subjectivity. Originally inhabited by Austronesian tribal peoples, the island has over the centuries fallen under the political, economic, and cultural influences of the Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese occupiers. Globalization has further transformed and complicated Taiwan’s vistas of political reforms, cultural productions, and ethnic re-composition. Such gradual but radical transformation has, in countless ways, encouraged the nation-state identity and identification to vacillate between insularism and globalization. This collection is an example of the multitude of voices that speak for Taiwan. These selected essays, contributed by scholars from different countries (Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, UK, and USA), engage with the debates on Taiwan’s identity and nationhood while also attempting to step beyond the nationalistic frame. Whereas the openness to new ideas may alter our perspectives, this collection reminds us to embrace external influences without forgetting to celebrate our unbroken, unique historical legacy.
With the world visibly present in students' lives through technology, mass and social medias, economic interdependency, and global mobility, it is more important than ever to develop curriculum that is intercultural. In Teaching Globally: Reading the World Through Literature, a community of educators show us how to use global children's literature to help students explore their own cultural identities. Edited by Kathy Short, Deanna Day, and Jean Schroder, this book explains why global curriculum is important and how you can make space for it within district and state school mandates. Teaching Globally is built around a curriculum framework developed by Short and can help teachers integrate a global focus into existing literacy and social studies curricula, evaluate global resources, guide students as they investigate cross-cultural issues, and create classroom activities with an intercultural perspective. Filled with vignettes from K-8 urban, suburban, and rural schools that describe successes and struggles, Teaching Globally aims to integrate global literature into classrooms and challenge students to understand and accept those different from themselves. The book also includes extensive lists of recommendations, websites, professional books, and an appendix of global text sets as mentioned by the authors. '
The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamin’s and Derrida’s concept of ‘afterlife’ as ‘overliving’, this book proposes that reading Benjamin’s and Derrida’s writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possesses a ‘messianic’ quality. Developing this idea in relation to the many rewritings and translations of Don Quijote, particularly the multiple rewritings by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Chapman asserts that texts consist of a structure of potential for endless translation that continually promises the overcoming of language, history and textuality itself.
This book examines the emergence of existentialism in Mexico in the 1940s and the quest for a genuine Mexican philosophy that followed it. It focuses on the pivotal moments and key figures of the Hyperion group, including Emilio Uranga, Luis Villoro, Leopoldo Zea, and Jorge Portilla, who explored questions of interpretation, marginality, identity, and the role of philosophy. Carlos Alberto Sánchez was the first to introduce and emphasize the philosophical significance of the Hyperion group to readers of English in The Suspension of Seriousness, and in the present volume he examines its legacy and relevancy for the twenty-first century. Sánchez argues that there are lessons to be learned from Hyperion's project not only for Latino/a life in the United States but also for the lives of those on the fringes of contemporary, postmodern or postcolonial, economic, political, and cultural power.
Reading Blindly attempts to conceive of the possibility of an ethics of reading--"reading" being understood as the relation to an other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and therefore prior to any attempt at assimilating what is being read to the one who reads. Hence, "reading" can no longer be understood in the classical tradition of hermeneutics as a deciphering according to an established set of rules as this would only give a minimum of correspondence, or relation, between the reader, and what is read. In fact, "reading" can no longer be understood as an act, since an act by necessity would impose the rules of the reader upon the structure of what (s)he encounters; in other words the reader would impose herself upon the text. Since it is neither an act nor a rule-governed operation, "reading" needs to be thought as an event of an encounter with an other--and more precisely an other which is not the other as identified by the reader, but heterogeneous in relation to any identifying determination. Being an encounter with an undeterminable other--an other who is other than other--"reading" is hence an unconditional relation, a relation therefore to no fixed object of relation. Hence, "reading" can be claimed to be the ethical relation par excellence. Since "reading" is a pre-relational relationality, what the reader encounters, however, may only be encountered before any phenomenon: "reading" is hence a non-phenomenal event or even the event of the undoing of all phenomenality. This is a radical reconstitution of reading positing blindness as that which both allows reading to take place and is also its limit. As there is always an aspect of choice in reading--one has to choose to remain open to the possibility of the other-- Reading Blindly, by extension, is also a rethinking of ethics; constantly keeping in mind the impossibility of articulating an ethics which is not prescriptive. Hence, Reading Blindly is ultimately an attempt at the impossible: to speak of reading as an event. And since this is un-theorizable--lest it becomes a prescriptive theory-- Reading Blindly is the positing of reading as reading, through reading, where texts are read as a test site for reading itself. Ostensibly, Reading Blindly works at the intersections of literature and philosophy; and will interest readers who are concerned with either discipline. However as reading is re-constituted as a pre-relational relationality, it is also a re-thinking of communication itself--a rethinking of the space between; the medium in which all communication occurs--and by extension, the very possibility of communicating with each other, with another. As such, this work is, in the final gesture, a meditation on the finitude and exteriority in literature, philosophy--calling into question the very possibility of correspondence, and relationality--and hence knowledge itself. For all that can be posited is that reading first and foremost is an acknowledgement that the text is ultimately unknowable; where reading is positing, and which exposes itself to nothing--and is in fidelity to nothing--but the possibility of reading.
Swallowing a World analyzes a series of massive and meandering late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection upon the effects of globalization to show that contemporary maximalism is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right.
A meditation on the human relationships to language and the exigencies of its figuration.
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.