Angelaki Humanities – serie

Henri Bergson, central to European philosophy at the beginning of the C20th, is returning to that position at the beginning of the C21st. Bergson's legacy reaches across the disciplines of philosophy, humanities and the arts, and has especial relevance for recent film and video studies (in the area of time, change and difference). This collection includes an original essay by Gilles Deleuze, translated into English for the first time. Hugely impressive international cast including not only Deleuze, but also Worms, Gunter, Ansell Pearson and Timothy S. Murphy. The first in the acclaimed Angelaki Humanities series.

As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy.

This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterises modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two. The book’s central concern is why the aesthetic mysticism that Walter Benjamin called the faith of those ‘who made common cause with Fascism’ continued to be a guiding principle for literary elites and countercultural movements alike. New light is shed on the relationship between occultism and the Pound tradition, especially in terms of Pound’s influence on post-1945 Anglo-American poetry, and a critical theory of ‘late modernism’ is offered which shows how belated notions of cultural redemption have survived in contemporary poetry.This wide-ranging contextual study focuses on the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, and J H Prynne, and explores the development of modernist culture through its theories of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, science, ethnography, and ancient history.

This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterises modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two. The book’s central concern is why the aesthetic mysticism that Walter Benjamin called the faith of those ‘who made common cause with Fascism’ continued to be a guiding principle for literary elites and countercultural movements alike. New light is shed on the relationship between occultism and the Pound tradition, especially in terms of Pound’s influence on post-1945 Anglo-American poetry, and a critical theory of ‘late modernism’ is offered which shows how belated notions of cultural redemption have survived in contemporary poetry.This wide-ranging contextual study focuses on the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, and J H Prynne, and explores the development of modernist culture through its theories of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, science, ethnography, and ancient history.

We may yet find a precise use for the notoriously elusive category ‘postcolonial’, but only on the condition that we abandon its usual associations with plurality, fragmentation, particularity and resistance. This book argues that the category is best used to describe an ultimately singular configuration. A singularity is something that generates the medium of its own existence, in the eventual absence of external criteria and other existences. Like other singularities – pertinent comparisons include aspects of Buddhism and Islam, as well as concepts drawn from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou – what is distinctive about a postcolonial discourse or literature is its abstraction from the domain of relationality. Here, Hallward offers a new conceptual distinction between singular and specific modes of differentiation, which should prove influential in a range of discourses.

In Subversive Spinoza, Antonio Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. For Negri, Spinoza’s philosophy has never been more relevant than it is today to debates over individuality and community, democracy and resistance, and modernity and postmodernity.This collection of essays extends, clarifies and revises the argument of Negri’s influential 1981 book ‘The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics’ and links it directly to his recent work on constituent power, time and empire.

This collection assembles many of the major theorists of postmodernism, across the humanities and the social sciences, to reconsider the nature and significance of the postmodern moment, as historical phase and as theoretical field. The authors look back on their own contributions to the postmodernism debate of the 1980s and 1990s and address the ways in which the contemporary world and their own concerns have developed, and the continuing validity or otherwise of ‘postmodern’ as a master designator of the contemporary.Following a substantial introductory survey, the 15 compact articles include contributions from: Linda Hutcheon, Robert Venturi, Zygmunt Bauman, Douglas Kellner, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Lawrence Grossberg, Gianni Vattimo and Ernesto Laclau. The collection provides an important testimonial source for researchers interested in contemporary theoretical developments, whether in the arts and humanities or the social sciences. It will be a useful text for teachers leading classes with a focus on postwar intellectual history and cultural theory.

John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity. At the heart of the book is Kinsella's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (Kinsella himself writes and teaches in the USA, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an important autobiographical element, as Kinsella explores the pulse of his poetic imagination through significant moments and passages of his life. Whilst theoretically informed, the book is accessibly written and highly engaging.

This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.