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These essays on literary theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism describe, in their form and content, the end of criticism, even while performing the endlessness of that endgame. In a sense, the book deconstructs all forms of critique and criticism, including deconstruction, and including its own self. That the book is so painfully aware of the futility of its own enterprise, even while pursuing it relentlessly and with such critical rigor, is what makes this a book of masocriticism as well as about masocriticism.
These essays on literary theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism describe, in their form and content, the end of criticism, even while performing the endlessness of that endgame. In a sense, the book deconstructs all forms of critique and criticism, including deconstruction, and including its own self. That the book is so painfully aware of the futility of its own enterprise, even while pursuing it relentlessly and with such critical rigor, is what makes this a book of masocriticism as well as about masocriticism.
Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities of self-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial and indigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope of self-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingual consciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybrid contexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self, generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts that offer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.
A frequent complaint against contemporary American fiction is that too often it puts off readers in ways they find difficult to fathom. Books such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Don DeLillo's Underworld seem determined to upset, disgust, or annoy their readers—or to disorient them by shunning traditional plot patterns and character development. Kathryn Hume calls such works "aggressive fiction." Why would authors risk alienating their readers—and why should readers persevere? Looking beyond the theory-based justifications that critics often provide for such fiction, Hume offers a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise seem difficult to enjoy. In her reliable and sympathetic guide, Hume considers roughly forty works of recent American fiction, including books by William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. Hume gathers "attacks" on the reader into categories based on narrative structure and content. Writers of some aggressive fictions may wish to frustrate easy interpretation or criticism. Others may try to induce certain responses in readers. Extreme content deployed as a tactic for distancing and alienating can actually produce a contradictory effect: for readers who learn to relax and go with the flow, the result may well be exhilaration rather than revulsion.
An analysis of the sustaining vitality behind contemporary American poetry from 1975 to the 2003, these 12 essays examine both exemplary innovators and the social context in which innovation is resisted, acclaimed, or taken for granted.
This book is about Raymond Federman and his incredible textual obsession with Samuel Beckett. Federman was a scholar of Beckett, postmodern theorist, a self-translator and avant-garde novelist. Born in Paris in 1928, all of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Federman escaped thanks to his mother, who hid him in a closet. After the war, he migrated to America and devoted his life to scholarship and creative writing. In both, he devoted his life to Beckett. Federman’s creative and theoretical writings contaminate and pervert each other just as, in his novels, French contaminates English and fiction perverts reality. His work is centered on the details of his survival, enacting a perpetual return to the closet, as previous studies have demonstrated. By examining Beckettian (and by extension Joycean) intertextuality in the novels of Raymond Federman, this study traces the contours of a second closet.
Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, the author argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique. He explains how violent images work upon the world.
If culture is suspect, what of cultural theory? At a moment when culture's traditional caretakers -- humanism, philosophy, anthropology, and the nation-state -- are undergoing crisis and mutation, this volume charts the tensions and contradictions in the development and deployment of the concept of culture. A genuinely interdisciplinary venture, In Near Ruins brings together respected writers from the fields of history, anthropology, literary criticism, and communications. Together their essays present an intriguing picture of "culture" at the edges of humanism, of the politics of critical inquiry amid current social transformations, of the status and practice of historical knowledge in an age of theory. Skeptical of the concept of culture but fascinated with cultural forms, the authors take up diverse topics, from debates over sexuality in the contemporary United States to relations between empire, capitalism, and gender in nineteenth-century Britain; from poverty in U.S. inner cities to violence in war-torn Sri Lanka; from the operation of nostalgia on cultural practices in Japan to anthropological forms of state power in Indonesia and the writing of history in India. Linked by a common urge to think through the aesthetics and politics of particular social relations amid a variety of globalizing forces -- revolution, colonialism, nationalism, and the disciplinary institutions of the academy itself -- these writers contribute to the ongoing work of remapping the terrain of cultural analysis and reevaluating the stakes in such a daunting effort.
Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available through select distribution partners.
Why are today's students not realizing their potential as critical thinkers? Although educators have, for two decades, incorporated contemporary cultural studies into the teaching of composition and rhetoric, many students lack the powers of self-expression that are crucial for effecting social change. Acts of Enjoyment presents a critique of current pedagogies and introduces a psychoanalytical approach in teaching composition and rhetoric. Thomas Rickert builds upon the advances of cultural studies and its focus on societal trends and broadens this view by placing attention on the conscious and subconscious thought of the individual. By introducing the cultural theory work of Slavoj Zizek, Rickert seeks to encourage personal and social invention—rather than simply following a course of unity, equity, or consensus that is so prevalent in current writing instruction. He argues that writing should not be treated as a simple skill, as a na•ve self expression, or as a tool for personal advancement, but rather as a reflection of social and psychical forces, such as jouissance (enjoyment/sensual pleasure), desire, and fantasy-creating a more sophisticated, panoptic form. The goal of the psychoanalytical approach is to highlight the best pedagogical aspects of cultural studies to allow for well-rounded individual expression, ultimately providing the tools necessary to address larger issues of politics, popular culture, ideology, and social transformation.