Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies – serie

This book of original essays explores three important areas in comparative literature and history and in cultural studies: the boundaries between history and fiction;women as writers and subjects; and the connection between the early modern, modern and postmodern.New history and new literary studies look at innovative ways to see past cultures in a new light. Traditional methods are used to new ends and writers who are familiar within their cultures are translated to other cultures. This study promotes an expanded understanding of our cultural artifacts in a rapidly changing present. It discusses English-speaking culture in the early modern period in the context of other European cultures and relates Europe to other parts of the world, most notably America.After grounding the discussion of culture in history, identity, dialogue as a genre that crosses the boundaries between philosophy and fiction, the rhetoric of prefaces to historical collections, cosmographies and histories that share something with the techniques of literary and forensic rhetoric, the book proceeds to discuss two central issues in cultural studies today: gender and postmodernity. The final section of the book provides a general assessment through early modern texts of modernity and postmodernity.

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kristeva already engages with their preoccupations. Should the juxtaposition of these practices be conceived as a face-to-face confrontation or rather a gap, a hiatus? Could it be a dialectic? or a diff rance? Should it be thought of in terms of Kristeva's work . . . or Derrida's? Accessible and lively, this book studies the theories on their own terms, in terms of one another, and with regard to the literary text, a privileged object of their attention. It demonstrates that the articulation of the theories shifts under different discursive conditions such that a Derridean reading of the relation is unlikely to coincide with a Kristevan interpretation. It shows why there is no single answer to the question of how the two fit together. And it investigates what is at stake in the strategic uses to which their work is put, whether separately or together.

This collection of original essays brings international and multidisciplinary perspectives to the problem of how to understand and practice editorial mediation: How does editing alter what it seeks to represent? How does it condition the relationship between texts and readers? The different concerns shared by editors of a variety of genres, literary and otherwise, emerge here as constructive new approaches to the theory and practice of editing are explored. The essays make a concerted attempt to assess the implications of postmodern thought on one of the oldest and most fundamental cultural activities, editing The section on theory covers such important subjects as editorial responsibility, the death of the author, and the nature of the authorial voice. The practice section covers actual editing situations in various literary areas and in musicology, recorded music, and the preservation of oral literature. The multidisciplinary volume will find its readers among students of textual criticism, literature, music, and folklore as well as any readers of postmodern criticism.

This book focuses on the relations between the translation and appropriation of classical Chinese poetry by Ezra Pound and some of his contemporaries and the development of Anglo-American Imagist poetry and poetics. It is concerned as much with critical aspects of this correlative relationship as with the question of historical influence and ascription. The author places the early work of Ezra Pound in the context of works of Chinese translation by other contemporary poet-translators such as Arthur Waley and Amy Lowell, and examines the whole notion of an ideogrammic poetry as advocated by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound against an appropriately reconstructed historical and critical context of poetic theory and practice. Closely linked to this is a discussion of Pound's use of personae and modulation of the elegiac in relation to the immediately preceding context of late Victorian elegiac lyricism and Brownigesque dramatic monologue. Through a series of close readings of translations from the Chinese, especially those by Pound, the author shows how the critical problem of what is involved in translating a Chinese poem into a new English poem is closely linked to the particulars of early Modernist literary history. In particular, through tracing the trajectory of a number of central issues and notions, such as absolute, free-floating, metaphor, metaphor as epiphanic image and its relation to syntax, metaphor and parallelism, experiments with rhythm and cadence, the book explores some of the reasons for Fenollosa's and Pound's emphasis on the visual image, the notion of phanopoeia and ideogrammic verbal action as the active perceiving of relations, and closely examines the genesis and significance of Pound's ideogrammic method, as well as the question of cultural misreading and vicarious envisagement, and provides a critical overview of Pound's general engagement with translation.

Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledgeExploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literatureThe work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow ), John Barth (LETTERS , Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey (Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.

Considering a wide range of cultural materials and engaging in a close reading of literary texts, this book draws a compelling comparison between national identity in Europe and the Third World. The author explores historical periods of nation building in Europe (Early Modernism) and the postcolonial world (post-1945 decolonization) to demonstrate that intriguingly similar circumstances of imperial rule, linguistic diversity, and educational systemization facilitated the emergence of national consciousness in both European and non-European countries. By bringing the insights of postcolonial studies to classic canonical dramas of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, the author describes the impact of New World colonial encounters on Spanish and English national formation and self-conception. This book is the first to investigate the rich intertextuality of El Nuevo Mundo (Spain, 1601) and The Tempest (England, 1611). Turning to Ousmane Sembene and Salman Rushdie-perhaps the two most important postcolonial writers-this study shows how their finest novels write back to the European tradition of Lope and Shakespeare and simultaneously represent the trend of postcolonial literature from assertive anticolonial nationalism to postmodern national critique. Tracing developments in the study of nationalism and literature from Louis Althusser and Benedict Anderson through Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Partha Chatterjee, the book's introduction serves as a lucid guide to a central problem in contemporary cultural studies for the general reader or the specialized scholar. Juxtaposing Renaissance etchings, traditional African and Indian sculpture, 19th-century political cartoons, and intriguing works of contemporary art, Making Subject(s) is of unusual interest and visual appeal.

The late Harry Levin had an international reputation as the world's foremost comparatiste, and he was among the most knowledgeable Shakespeare scholars in the world. Before he died, Harry Levin had planned to publish this essay collection which examines key scenes in a number of Shakespeare's plays.

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and discontinuities between them. But how do you compare two theories of the production of difference? What conception of difference do you use to go about it? Any search for a dividing line between Derrida and Kristeva already engages with their preoccupations. Should the juxtaposition of these practices be conceived as a face-to-face confrontation or rather a gap, a hiatus? Could it be a dialectic? or a diff rance? Should it be thought of in terms of Kristeva's work . . . or Derrida's? Accessible and lively, this book studies the theories on their own terms, in terms of one another, and with regard to the literary text, a privileged object of their attention. It demonstrates that the articulation of the theories shifts under different discursive conditions such that a Derridean reading of the relation is unlikely to coincide with a Kristevan interpretation. It shows why there is no single answer to the question of how the two fit together. And it investigates what is at stake in the strategic uses to which their work is put, whether separately or together.

This book focuses on the relations between the translation and appropriation of classical Chinese poetry by Ezra Pound and some of his contemporaries and the development of Anglo-American Imagist poetry and poetics. It is concerned as much with critical aspects of this correlative relationship as with the question of historical influence and ascription. The author places the early work of Ezra Pound in the context of works of Chinese translation by other contemporary poet-translators such as Arthur Waley and Amy Lowell, and examines the whole notion of an ideogrammic poetry as advocated by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound against an appropriately reconstructed historical and critical context of poetic theory and practice. Closely linked to this is a discussion of Pound's use of personae and modulation of the elegiac in relation to the immediately preceding context of late Victorian elegiac lyricism and Brownigesque dramatic monologue. Through a series of close readings of translations from the Chinese, especially those by Pound, the author shows how the critical problem of what is involved in translating a Chinese poem into a new English poem is closely linked to the particulars of early Modernist literary history. In particular, through tracing the trajectory of a number of central issues and notions, such as absolute, free-floating, metaphor, metaphor as epiphanic image and its relation to syntax, metaphor and parallelism, experiments with rhythm and cadence, the book explores some of the reasons for Fenollosa's and Pound's emphasis on the visual image, the notion of phanopoeia and ideogrammic verbal action as the active perceiving of relations, and closely examines the genesis and significance of Pound's ideogrammic method, as well as the question of cultural misreading and vicarious envisagement, and provides a critical overview of Pound's general engagement with translation.

This book of original essays explores three important areas in comparative literature and history and in cultural studies: the boundaries between history and fiction;women as writers and subjects; and the connection between the early modern, modern and postmodern.New history and new literary studies look at innovative ways to see past cultures in a new light. Traditional methods are used to new ends and writers who are familiar within their cultures are translated to other cultures. This study promotes an expanded understanding of our cultural artifacts in a rapidly changing present. It discusses English-speaking culture in the early modern period in the context of other European cultures and relates Europe to other parts of the world, most notably America.After grounding the discussion of culture in history, identity, dialogue as a genre that crosses the boundaries between philosophy and fiction, the rhetoric of prefaces to historical collections, cosmographies and histories that share something with the techniques of literary and forensic rhetoric, the book proceeds to discuss two central issues in cultural studies today: gender and postmodernity. The final section of the book provides a general assessment through early modern texts of modernity and postmodernity.

Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledgeExploring manifestations of game and play throughout the history of Western culture, from Plato to Pynchon, this study traces developments in 20th-century cultural and literary theory of ideas about play in the writings of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, Bernard Suits, James Hans, Mihai Spariosu and Robert Rawdon Wilson. The author emphasizes post-structuralist developments with specific attention to deconstruction and reception theory and argues that deconstruction makes the most significant recent contribution to play theory in its application to language and to literatureThe work also explores the modes and effects of playforms in particular examples of postmodernist fiction. With attention to major works from Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow ), John Barth (LETTERS , Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said ), Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus ) and Peter Carey (Illywhacker ), Edwards acknowledges and deconstructs such basic oppositions as play and seriousness, fiction and truth, difference and identity to explore the literature's cultural/political significance. Seeking to affirm the fiction's continuing social relevance, the readings presented in this book place play irresistibly at the heartland of language, meaning and culture.

Considering a wide range of cultural materials and engaging in a close reading of literary texts, this book draws a compelling comparison between national identity in Europe and the Third World. The author explores historical periods of nation building in Europe (Early Modernism) and the postcolonial world (post-1945 decolonization) to demonstrate that intriguingly similar circumstances of imperial rule, linguistic diversity, and educational systemization facilitated the emergence of national consciousness in both European and non-European countries. By bringing the insights of postcolonial studies to classic canonical dramas of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, the author describes the impact of New World colonial encounters on Spanish and English national formation and self-conception. This book is the first to investigate the rich intertextuality of El Nuevo Mundo (Spain, 1601) and The Tempest (England, 1611). Turning to Ousmane Sembene and Salman Rushdie-perhaps the two most important postcolonial writers-this study shows how their finest novels write back to the European tradition of Lope and Shakespeare and simultaneously represent the trend of postcolonial literature from assertive anticolonial nationalism to postmodern national critique. Tracing developments in the study of nationalism and literature from Louis Althusser and Benedict Anderson through Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Partha Chatterjee, the book's introduction serves as a lucid guide to a central problem in contemporary cultural studies for the general reader or the specialized scholar. Juxtaposing Renaissance etchings, traditional African and Indian sculpture, 19th-century political cartoons, and intriguing works of contemporary art, Making Subject(s) is of unusual interest and visual appeal.