New Arrivals: PN 1 - PN 1529.9999
Showing 1 - 25 of 82 new items.
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© 2016,The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, ishow increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greaterpressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work intothe meaning and value of literary reading.Seth Lerer presents an original take on tradition in the literary imagination. He asks how we can have an unironic, affective relationship to the literary past in an age marked by historical self-consciousness, critical distance, and shifts in cultural literacy. Tradition: A Feeling for the LiteraryPast ranges through a set of fiction, poetry, and criticism that makes up our inherited traditions and that also confronts the question of a literary canon and its personal and historical meaning. How are we taught to have a felt experience of literary objects? How do we make our personalanthologies of reading to shape social selves? Why should we care about what literature does both to and for us? This book affirms the value of close and nuanced reading for our understanding of both past and present. Its larger goal is to explore the ways in which the literary past makes us, and in the process, how we create canons for reading, teaching, and scholarship. The writers discussed here were allgreat readers. Dickens and Orwell, Rushdie and Bradbury, Dickinson and Frost, Anne Bradstreet and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Chaucer, Dante, Virgil - they all built their literary structures on the scaffold of their bookshelves. Lerer demonstrates how reading the past generates the literary present,and imagines our literate future.
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© 2016,In Unclaimed Experience , Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century-both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it-we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not. Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth's wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour ; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child. In this twentieth-anniversary edition of her now classic text, a substantial new afterword addresses major questions and controversies surrounding trauma theory that have arisen over the past two decades. Caruth offers innovative insights into the inherent connection between individual and collective trauma, on the importance of the political and ethical dimensions of the theory of trauma, and on the crucial place of literature in the theoretical articulation of the very concept of trauma. Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.
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© 2015,One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decadesâe(tm) worth of Helen Vendlerâe(tm)s essays, book reviews, and occasional proseâe"including the 2004 Jefferson Lectureâe"in a single volume. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevensâe(tm)s memorable formulation, inhabit âeoea geography of the dead.âe These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each centuryâe(tm)s scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture. All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendlerâe"Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Grahamâe"are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and others in the work of todayâe(tm)s poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetryâe(tm)s beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy.
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© 2015,The first collection of Joseph Campbell's writings and lectures on the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, a central focus of his celebrated scholarship, edited and introduced by Arthurian scholar Evans Lansing Smith, PhD, the chair of Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. In this new volume of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, editor Evans Lansing Smith collects Campbell's writings and lectures on Arthurian legends, including his never-before-published master's thesis on Arthurian myth, "A Study of the Dolorous Stroke." Campbell's writing captures the incredible stories of such figures as Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere as well as the larger patterns and meanings revealed in these myths. Merlin's death and Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, for example, are not just vibrant stories but also central to the mythologist's thinking. The Arthurian myths opened the world of comparative mythology to Campbell, turning his attention to the Near and Far Eastern roots of myth. Calling the Arthurian romances the world's first "secular mythology," Campbell found metaphors in them for human stages of growth, development, and psychology. The myths exemplify the kind of love Campbell called amor, in which individuals become more fully themselves through connection. Campbell's infectious delight in his discoveries makes this volume essential for anyone intrigued by the stories we tell--and the stories behind them.
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© 2016,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 animinated 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."
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© 2014,William Shakespeare's written vocabulary consisted of 17,245 words, including hundreds that were coined or popularized by him. Some of the words never went further than their appearance in his plays, but others--like bedazzled , hurry , critical, and anchovy --are essential parts of our standard vocabulary today. Many other famous and lesser-known writers have contributed to the popular lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , Sir Walter Scott ranks second to Shakespeare in first uses of words and giving a new and distinct meaning to already existing words ( Free Lances for freelancers). John Milton minted such terms as earthshaking , lovelorn , by hook or crook , and all Hell broke loose , and was responsible for introducing some 630 words. Gifted lexicographer Paul Dickson deftly sorts through neologisms by Chaucer ( a ha ), Jane Austen ( base ball ), Louisa May Alcott ( co-ed ), Mark Twain ( hard-boiled ), Kurt Vonnegut ( granfalloon ), John le Carrè ( mole ), William Gibson ( cyberspace ), and many others. Presenting stories behind each word and phrase, Dickson enriches our appreciation of the English language in a book as entertaining as it is enlightening.
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© 2016,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 animinated 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."
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© 2016,For more than a decade, writers have turned to William Germano for his insider's take on navigating the world of scholarly publishing. A professor, author, and thirty-year veteran of the book industry, Germano knows what editors want and what writers need to know to get their work published. Today there are more ways to publish than ever, and more challenges to traditional publishing. This ever-evolving landscape brings more confusion for authors trying to understand their options. The third edition of Getting It Published offers the clear, practicable guidance on choosing the best path to publication that has made it a trusted resource, now updated to include discussions of current best practices for submitting a proposal, of the advantages and drawbacks of digital publishing, and tips for authors publishing textbooks and in open-access environments. Germano argues that it's not enough for authors to write well--they also need to write with an audience in mind. He provides valuable guidance on developing a compelling book proposal, finding the right publisher, evaluating a contract, negotiating the production process, and, finally, emerging as a published author. "This endlessly useful and expansive guide is every academic's pocket Wikipedia: a timely, relevant, and ready resource on scholarly publishing, from the traditional monograph to the digital e-book. I regularly share it, teach it, and consult it myself, whenever I have a question on titling a chapter, securing a permission, or negotiating a contract. Professional advice simply does not get any savvier than this pitch-perfect manual on how to think like a publisher."--Diana Fuss, Princeton University
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© 2014,Magical Realism analyzes its evolution as well as its manifestations in different cultures. Several essays discuss the struggle between the hegemonic imposition of western modernity and subaltern, ethnicized, nonwestern conceptualizations in the Third Wor
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© 2016,The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Reflecting the development of postcolonial literary studies into a significant and intellectually vibrant field, this Companion explores genres and theoretical movements such as magical realism, crime fiction, ecocriticism, and gender and sexuality. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book offers insight into the representative movements, cultural settings, and critical reception that define the postcolonial novel. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape, and will serve as a valuable resource to students and established scholars alike.
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© 2016,The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Reflecting the development of postcolonial literary studies into a significant and intellectually vibrant field, this Companion explores genres and theoretical movements such as magical realism, crime fiction, ecocriticism, and gender and sexuality. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book offers insight into the representative movements, cultural settings, and critical reception that define the postcolonial novel. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape, and will serve as a valuable resource to students and established scholars alike.
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© 2015,The last thirty years have witnessed one of the most fertile periods in the history of children's books: the flowering of imaginative illustration and writing, the Harry Potter phenomenon, the rise of young adult and crossover fiction, and books that tackle extraordinarily difficult subjects.The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature provides an indispensable and fascinating reference guide to the world of children's literature. Its 3,500 entries cover every genre from fairy tales to chapbooks; school stories to science fiction; comics to children's hymns. Originally published in 1983, the Companion has been comprehensively revised and updated by Daniel Hahn. Over 900 new entries bring the book right up to date. A whole generation of new authors and illustrators are showcased, with books like Dogger, The Hunger Games, and Twilight making their firstappearance. There are articles on developments such as manga, fan fiction, and non-print publishing, and there is additional information on prizes and prizewinners.This accessible A to Z is the first place to look for information about the authors, illustrators, printers, publishers, educationalists, and others who have influenced the development of children's literature, as well as the stories and characters at their centre. Written both to entertain and toinstruct, the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to Children's Literature is a reference work that no one interested in the world of children's books should be without.
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© 2014,Over the past century or more, the genres of fantasy, horror, and supernatural fiction have increasingly expanded beyond literature and into an array of media film, television, comic books, and art. Many of the leading figures in the field engage in multimedia enterprises that allow their work to reach a much wider public than the mere readers of books. In Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy, Jason V Brock analyzes the intersection of literature, media, and genre fiction in essays, reviews, and pioneering interviews. Beginning with the pulp magazines of the 1920s, Brock studies such dynamic figures as H. P. Lovecraft, Forrest J Ackerman, Harlan Ellison, and the Southern California writers known collectively as The Group Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, and William F. Nolan. This collection also includes filmmakers Roger Corman, George Romero, and Dan O Bannon, and such fantasy artists as H. R. Giger. Graced with dozens of photographs from the author s personal collection, this wide-ranging study offers a kaleidoscopic look at the multifarious ways in which fantasy, horror, and the supernatural have permeated our culture. Brock himself a fiction writer, critic, and filmmaker concludes the book with touching eulogies to the recently deceased Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen. Highlighting so many figures essential to the understanding of fantasy and horror, Disorders of Magnitude will appeal to fans of these fiction genres around the world."
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© 2015,Using children's and young adult literature is a great way to enhance a variety of college classes in fields as varied as biology, computer game development, political science and history. This collection of new essays by educators from a number of disciplines describes how to use such works as Where the Wild Things Are, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Swamp Thing, Percy Jackson, and Harry Potter to introduce complex concepts and spark interest in difficult subjects. The contributors describe innovative teaching strategies using dystopian fiction, graphic narratives, fairy tales and mythology. Often overlooked or dismissed by teachers, children's literature can support student learning by raising levels of academic rigor, creativity and critical thinking.
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© 2009,"Classroom Cheats Turn to Computers." "Student Essays on Internet Offer Challenge to Teachers." "Faking the Grade." Headlines such as these have been blaring the alarming news of an epidemic of plagiarism and cheating in American colleges: more than 75 percent of students admit to having cheated; 68 percent admit to cutting and pasting material from the Internet without citation. Professors are reminded almost daily that many of today's college students operate under an entirely new set of assumptions about originality and ethics. Practices that even a decade ago would have been regarded almost universally as academically dishonest are now commonplace. Is this development an indication of dramatic shifts in education and the larger culture? In a book that dismisses hand-wringing in favor of a rich account of how students actually think and act, Susan D. Blum discovers two cultures that exist, often uneasily, side by side in the classroom. Relying extensively on interviews conducted by students with students, My Word presents the voices of today's young adults as they muse about their daily activities, their challenges, and the meanings of their college lives. Outcomes-based secondary education, the steeply rising cost of college tuition, and an economic climate in which higher education is valued for its effect on future earnings above all else. These factors each have a role to play in explaining why students might pursue good grades by any means necessary. These incentives have arisen in the same era as easily accessible ways to cheat electronically and with almost intolerable pressures that result in many students being diagnosed as clinically depressed during their transition from childhood to adulthood. However, Blum suggests, the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting. On one hand, professors and administrators regard plagiarism as a serious academic crime, an ethical transgression, even a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality. Students, on the other hand, revel in sharing, in multiplicity, in accomplishment at any cost. Although this book is unlikely to reassure readers who hope that increasing rates of plagiarism can be reversed with strongly worded warnings on the first day of class, My Word opens a dialogue between professors and their students that may lead to true mutual comprehension and serve as the basis for an alignment between student practices and their professors' expectations.
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© 2015,To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways--guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry's ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain potent even now. In How Poems Think , Reginald Gibbons presents a rich gallery of poetic inventiveness and continuity drawn from a wide range of poets--Sappho, Pindar, Shakespeare, Keats, William Carlos Williams, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Gibbons explores poetic temperament, rhyme, metonymy, etymology, and other elements of poetry as modes of thinking and feeling. In celebration and homage, Gibbons attunes us to the possibilities of poetic thinking.
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© 2015,How do you write good research articles -- articles that are interesting, compelling, and easy to understand? How do you write papers that influence the field instead of falling into obscurity? Write It Up offers a practical and revealing look at how productive researchers write strong articles. The book's guiding idea is that academics should write to make an impact, not just to get something published somewhere. Your work will be more influential if you approach it reflectively and strategically. Based on his experience as an author, journal editor, and reviewer, Paul Silvia offers systematic approaches to problems like picking journals; cultivating the right tone and style; managing collaborative projects and co-authors; crafting effective Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion sections; and submitting and resubmitting papers to journals. With its light-hearted style and practical advice, Write It Up will help graduate students struggling with writing their first paper, early career professors who need advice on how to write better articles, and seasoned academic writers looking to refresh their writing strategy or style.
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© 2015,How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era--which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression--there was a special belligerence to this question. It was a cultural period that envisioned many different models of itself: to the Cubists, it looked like a vast jigsaw puzzle; to the Expressionists, it resembled a convulsive body; to the Dadaists, it brought to mind a heap of junk following an explosion. In Putting Modernism Together , Daniel Albright searches for the center of the modernist movement by assessing these various artistic models, exploring how they generated a stunning range of creative work that was nonetheless wound together aesthetically, and sorting out the cultural assumptions that made each philosophical system attractive. Emerging from Albright's lectures for a popular Harvard University course of the same name, the book investigates different methodologies for comparing the evolution and congruence of artistic movements by studying simultaneous developments that occurred during particularly key modernist years. What does it mean, Albright asks, that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , published in 1899, appeared at the same time as Claude Debussy's Nocturnes --beyond the fact that the word "Impressionist" has been used to describe each work? Why, in 1912, did the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel such striking artistic kinship? And how can we make sense of a movement, fragmented by isms, that looked for value in all sorts of under- or ill-valued places, including evil (Baudelaire), dung heaps (Chekhov), noise (Russolo), obscenity (Lawrence), and triviality (Satie)? Throughout Putting Modernism Together , Albright argues that human culture can best be understood as a growth-pattern or ramifying of artistic, intellectual, and political action. Going beyond merely explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age of aesthetic extremism.
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© 2015,Beyond Bombshells analyzes the cultural importance of strong women in a variety of current media forms. Action heroines are now more popular in movies, comic books, television, and literature than they have ever been. Their spectacular presence represents shifting ideas about female agency, power, and sexuality. Beyond Bombshells explores how action heroines reveal and reconfigure perceptions about "how" and "why" women are capable of physically dominating roles in modern fiction, indicating the various strategies used to contain and/or exploit female violence. Focusing on a range of successful and controversial recent heroines in the mass media, including Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games books and movies, Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels and films, and Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies and comic books, Brown argues that the role of action heroine reveals evolving beliefs about femininity. While women in action roles are still heavily sexualized and objectified, they also challenge preconceived myths about normal or culturally appropriate gender behavior. The ascribed sexuality of modern heroines remains Brown's consistent theme, particularly how objectification intersects with issues of racial stereotyping, romantic fantasies, images of violent adolescent and preadolescent girls, and neoliberal feminist revolutionary parables. Individual chapters study the gendered dynamics of torture in action films, the role of women in partnerships with male colleagues, young women as well as revolutionary leaders in dystopic societies, adolescent sexuality and romance in action narratives, the historical import of non-white heroines, and how modern African American, Asian, and Latina heroines both challenge and are restricted by longstanding racial stereotypes.
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© 2015,"Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period"--
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