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This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time. Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reproduced and passed on to others in the form of new editions, in adaptations to film and theatre, and, last but not least, in the ways we look at the world and act out our lives. 'The Life of Texts' is designed around particular issues rather than the history of the discipline as such. Each chapter concentrates on a different aspect of 'the life of texts' and introduces the key debates and concepts relevant to its study. The issues discussed range from aesthetics and narrative to intertextuality and intermediality, from reading practices to hermeneutics and semiotics, popular culture to literary canonisation, postcolonial criticism to cultural memory. Key concepts and schools in the field have been highlighted in the text and then collected in a glossary for ease of reference. All chapters are richly illustrated with examples from different language areas.
The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and a living organism, the contributors analyze various literary texts ranging from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, as well as film adaptations and the graphic novel. Apart from the works of canonical writers, attention is also drawn to some long-forgotten authors, along with the most recent instances of popular literature and culture. The exploration of the title metaphor allows the contributors to trace life-like phenomena (e.g. textual birth, maturation, dissemination, death and resurrection) in the texts of writers so remote from each other as Layamon, Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Charles Williams, Ursula Le Guin, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks, J. K. Rowling, or Neil Gaiman.
The Life of a Text offers a vivid portrait of one community's interaction with its favorite text—the epic Ramcaritmanas—and the way in which performances of the epic function as a flexible and evolving medium for cultural expression. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and readers interested in the culture of North India and the performance arts will find breadth of subject, careful scholarship, and engaging presentation in this unique and beautifully illustrated examination of Hindi culture. The most popular and influential text of Hindi-speaking North India, the epic Ramcaritmanas is a sixteenth century retelling of the Ramayana story by the poet Tulsidas. This masterpiece of pre-modern Hindi literature has always reached its largely illiterate audiences primarily through oral performance including ceremonial recitation, folksinging, oral exegesis, and theatrical representation. Drawing on fieldwork in Banaras, Lutgendorf breaks new ground by capturing the range of performance techniques in vivid detail and tracing the impact of the epic in its contemporary cultural context.
Lakota Texts is a treasure trove of stories told in the original language by modern Lakota women who make their home in Denver, Colorado. Sometimes witty, often moving, and invariably engaging and fascinating, these stories are both autobiographical and cultural. The stories present personal experiences along with lessons the women have learned or were taught about Lakota history, culture, and legends. The women share aspects of their own lives, including such rituals as powwows, the sweatlodge, and rites of puberty. The women also include details of the older Lakota world and its customs, revered myths, more recent stories, and jokes. In addition to the valuable light Lakota Texts sheds on the lives of modern Lakota women, these stories also represent a significant contribution to American Indian linguistics. Regina Pustet has meticulously transcribed and translated the stories in a detailed, interlinear format that makes the texts a rich source of information about modern Lakota language itself.
"Love brings us in close, leads us to study the details of a thing, and asks us to return again and again. These are the motivations and ideas that built this book." -Chris Lehman and Kate Roberts You and your students will fall for close reading. In Falling in Love with Close Reading, Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts show us that it can be rigorous, meaningful, and joyous. You'll empower students to not only analyze texts but to admire the craft of a beloved book, study favorite songs and videogames, and challenge peers in evidence-based discussions. Chris and Kate start with a powerful three-step close-reading ritual that students can apply to any text. Then they lay out practical, engaging lessons that not only guide students to independence in reading texts closely but also help them transfer this critical, analytical skill to media and even the lives they lead. Responsive to students' needs and field-tested in classrooms, these lessons include: strategies for close reading narratives, informational texts, and arguments suggestions for differentiation sample charts and student work from real classrooms connections to the Common Core State Standards a focus on viewing media and life in this same careful way. "We see the ritual of close reading not just as a method of doing the academic work of looking closely at text-evidence, word choice, and structure," write Chris and Kate, "but as an opportunity to bring those practices together to empower our students to see the subtle messages in texts and in their lives." Read Falling in Love with Close Reading and discover that the benefits and joy of close reading don't have to stop at the edge of the page. Read a sample from the book to learn more about Chris and Kate's close-reading ritual for students and for an annotated text that shows how it works.
The papers in this volume are based on a 2018 conference in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University in honor of Richard Tarrant, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, on the occasion of his retirement. The breadth of authors, genres, periods, and topics addressed in The Lives of Latin Texts is testament to Richard Tarrant's wide-ranging influence on the fields of Latin literary studies and textual criticism. Contributions on stylistic, dramatic, metapoetic, and philosophical issues in Latin literature (including authors from Virgil, Horace, and Seneca to Ovid, Terence, Statius, Caesar, and Martial) sit alongside contributions on the history of textual transmission and textual editing. Other chapters treat the musical reception of Latin literature. Taken together, the volume reflects on the impact of Richard Tarrant's scholarship by addressing the expressive scope and the long history of the Latin language.
Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).
This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for over forty years. This is a book written for students, whether starting their studies or more experienced, and also for all lovers of literature. At its heart is the conviction that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally: texts talk to us intimately and urgently, inviting us to talk back, intervening in and changing our lives. These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed. They model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, and how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this eloquent and remarkable book.
The textual foundations of works of great cultural significance are often less stable than one would wish them to be. No work of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare survives in utterly reliable witnesses, be they papyri, manuscripts or printed editions. Notions of textual authority have varied considerably across the ages under the influence of different (and differently motivated) agents, such as scribes, annotators, editors, correctors, grammarians, printers and publishers, over and above the authors themselves. The need for preserving the written legacy of peoples and nations as faithfully as possible has always been counterbalanced by a duty to ensure its accessibility to successive generations at different times and in different cultural contexts. The ten chapters collected in this volume offer critical approaches to such authors and texts as Homer, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Eliot, but also Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts uniquely combining word and image, as well as Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) as seen from the angle of music as text. Together the contributors argue that an awareness of what the 'life of texts' entails is essential for a critical understanding of the transmission of culture.
By the Book is Ramona Koval's love letter to books and writing, a tribute to the stories that have changed and enriched her life Ramona Koval is one of Australia's best-loved broadcasters, having spent sixteen years presenting 'The Book Show' on Radio National An internationally respected literary journalist, Ramona has interviewed the best writers in Australia and overseas Born to Yiddish-speaking survivors of the Holocaust and brought up in Melbourne, books were Ramona's lifeline from a young age Her mother famously never censored Ramona's reading, even buying her ten-year-old daughter a copy of the Kama Sutra when asked to In 1995, Ramona won the Order of Australia Media Award for her work on Radio National This gorgeous paperback edition is the perfect gift for anyone who loves books Ramona has legions of dedicated fans across Australia Author lives in St Kilda, Melbourne and is a regular guest of writers' festivals all around Australia and abroad