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9 From Film to literature: theoretical debates and the critical erasure of Beckett’s cinema Matthijs Engelberts In an age in which belief in metanarratives and the stark oppositions upon which they tend to rely is thought to be dwindling in postmodern societies, and identities are increasingly perceived as constructed, heterogeneous and porous, it is no wonder that contemporary theory no longer forcefully opposes word and image as two radically distinct entities. The study of the relations between literature and film, for instance, no longer seeks to find new
Sustainability is a notoriously fraught and slippery term, and yet one that is now well-established in mainstream usage across the contemporary world. While sustainability is widely discussed and theorised across range of disciplines, this book sets out to consider what innovations literary scholarship might bring to the sustainability debate, and indeed what sustainability as a concept might bring to literary scholarship. Putting forward a range of essays by leading and upcoming scholars, this book takes a non-prescriptive and critically reflective stance towards the problem of sustainability – a stance we describe as critical sustainability. Essays in this collection accordingly undertake a range of approaches, from applying tools of literary enquiry in order to interrogate sustainability’s paradoxes, to investigating the ways in which literature envisages sustainability or plays out its tropes. Overall, this book seeks to demonstrate how sustainability’s difficulties might open up a productive opportunity for interrogation and exploration of the kind that literary scholars and ecocritics are ideally placed to carry out.
7 Music, language and literature Language and music The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. The attempt to explain language in representational terms in the empiricist tradition that eventually leads to analytical philosophy, and the understanding of language as a form of social action and as constitutive of the world we inhabit in the hermeneutic tradition give rise to very different conceptions of music. One paradigmatic
9 Robert Eaglestone Critical knowledge, scientific knowledge and the truth of literature Introduction: criticism has the character of knowledge, but it is not a kind of scientific knowledge At the now-famous conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 that introduced both structuralism and what one could call, roughly, ‘post-structuralism’ to the USA, the critic Georges Poulet meditated about the nature of reading: a book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you
This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the identity of the esuli, one of Italy‘s subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.
This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) provides a necessary context for late medieval literature. Many of the major writers of the period, in a variety of different languages, lived either all or most of their lives under the shadow of war, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Giovanni Boccaccio and Bridget of Sweden. The essays collected here investigate how authors use strategies including translation, adaptation and allegory in order to respond to the war. Simultaneously, they make a case for reconsidering how literature like women's visionary writing or lyric poetry, not generally seen as war literature, form part of the broader context of European warfare. As it extends the boundaries of what counts as war literature, the volume also moves beyond the traditional Anglo-French framing of the conflict by considering authors enmeshed in the conflict through proxy battles, diplomatic ties and ideological disputes. While covering English and French writers explicitly writing to the war, like John Lydgate or Alain Chartier, it also explores the war writing of prominent Welsh, Scottish and Italian authors, like Dafydd ap Gwilym, Walter Bower and Catherine of Siena. The book models a synthetic and transnational literary history of conflict that will pave the way for future scholarship in earlier and later periods. The chapters in this volume show how literature did more than reflect the realities of the Hundred Years War; it was also a crucial site for contesting the claims of war as literary writers crafted ways to actively intervene in the conflict.
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
Anglo-Saxon ‘things’ could talk. Nonhuman voices leap out from the Exeter Book Riddles, telling us how they were made or how they behave. In The Husband’s Message, runic letters are borne and a first-person speech is delivered by some kind of wooden artefact. Readers of The Dream of the Rood will come across a tree possessing the voice of a dreaming human in order to talk about its own history as a gallows and a rood. The Franks Casket is a box of bone that alludes to its former fate as a whale that swam aground onto the shingle, and the Ruthwell monument is a stone column that speaks as if it were living wood, or a wounded body.
This book uncovers the voice and agency that these nonhuman things have across Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture. It makes a new contribution to ‘thing theory’ and rethinks conventional divisions between animate human subjects and inanimate nonhuman objects in the early Middle Ages. Anglo-Saxon writers and craftsmen describe artefacts and animals through riddling forms or enigmatic language, balancing an attempt to speak and listen to things with an understanding that these nonhumans often elude, defy and withdraw from us. The active role that things have in the early medieval world is also linked to the Germanic origins of the word, where a þing is a kind of assembly, with the ability to draw together other elements, creating assemblages in which human and nonhuman forces combine. Anglo-Saxon things teach us to rethink the concept of voice as a quality that is not simply imposed upon nonhumans but which inheres in their ways of existing and being in the world; they teach us to rethink the concept of agency as arising from within groupings of diverse elements, rather than always emerging from human actors alone.
The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs is an exciting, new open access journal
hosted jointly by The Humanitarian Affairs Team at Save the Children UK, and
Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires MSF (Paris) and the
Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. It
will contribute to current thinking around humanitarian governance, policy and
practice with academic rigour and political courage. The journal will challenge
contributors and readers to think critically about humanitarian issues that are
often approached from reductionist assumptions about what experience and
evidence mean. It will cover contemporary, historical, methodological and
applied subject matters and will bring together studies, debates and literature
reviews. The journal will engage with these through diverse online content,
including peer reviewed articles, expert interviews, policy analyses, literature
reviews and ‘spotlight’ features.
Our rationale can be summed up as
follows: the sector is growing and is facing severe ethical and practical
challenges. The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs will provide a space for serious
and inter-disciplinary academic and practitioner exchanges on pressing issues of
international interest.
The journal aims to be a home and platform for
leading thinkers on humanitarian affairs, a place where ideas are floated,
controversies are aired and new research is published and scrutinised. Areas in
which submissions will be considered include humanitarian financing, migrations
and responses, the history of humanitarian aid, failed humanitarian
interventions, media representations of humanitarianism, the changing landscape
of humanitarianism, the response of states to foreign interventions and critical
debates on concepts such as resilience or security.
This review article charts the general direction of scholarship in James Baldwin studies between the years 2015 and 2016, reflecting on important scholarly events and publications of the period and identifying notable trends in criticism. While these years witnessed a continuing interest in the relationship of Baldwin’s work to other authors and art forms as well as his transnational literary imagination, noted in previous scholarly reviews, three newly emergent trends are notable: an increased attention to Baldwin in journals primarily devoted to the study of literatures in English, a new wave of multidisciplinary studies of Baldwin, and a burgeoning archival turn in Baldwin criticism.