To write about your contemporaries, whose work is enmeshed in the stuff of your life, is risky business. But as Susan Suleiman demonstrates in this lively and personal book, that risk is what makes such a critical encounter worthwhile. "Risking Who One Is" shows how the process of self-recognition in the reading or viewing of contemporary work can lead to larger considerations about culture and society--to increased historical awareness and collective action. Through subtle and incisive readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Gordon, Julia Kristeva, Richard Rorty, Helene Cixous, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Angela Carter, Elie Wiesel, and others, Suleiman engages in a fascinating dialogue with those who have shared her place and time, and whose preoccupations meet her own. Through Suleiman's encounter with them, these writers and artists enter an exchange with each other, and with us as readers. These encounters open new perspectives on motherhood and its conflicts, on creativity and love, on the intersections of history, memory, and autobiography, and on the politics and poetics of postmodernism. In "Risking Who One Is," Suleiman offers us a new way of looking at issues that are both personal and historical, defining the life of our times.
OC The translation of these essays by Gumbrecht on literary theory and history marks the appearance in English of one of EuropeOCOs most learned, productive, and inventive scholars. Their range is extraordinary. They show that Gumbrecht is not only a sophisticated theorist and historian of literature, but a master practitioner of cultural studies.OCO --Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz
Why do Americans, and so often, American writers, profess moral sentiments and yet write so little in the traditionally "moralistic" genres of maxim and fable? What is the relation between "moral" concerns and literary theory? Can any sort of morality survive the supposed nihilism of deconstruction? Jefferson Humphries undertakes a discussion of questions like these through a comparative reading of the ways in which moral issues surface in French and American literature. Humphries takes issue with the "amoral" view of deconstruction espoused by many of its detractors, arguing that the debate between the theory's advocates and opponents comes down to two opposing literary and moral traditions. While the American tradition views morality as a rigid system capable of being enforced by injunctions along the lines of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not," the French tradition conceives of morality as a function of a relentless and unsentimental pursuit of truth, and finally, an admission that "truth" is not a static thing, but rather an ongoing process of rigorous thought.
This collection consists of essays and reviews that address social, political, and cultural issues which arose in connection with literature broadly conceived in the wake of World War I, and extending throughout the twentieth century. It covers France, with essays on individual writers and on French intellectuals between the wars; Germany and Romania; and essays on problems of literary criticism that also discuss the history of the novel and the question of 'realism'.
A strategy for reading Heschel's major works, as well as a new route to understanding religious writing in general: a lucid study of modern religious and ethical thought using literary criticism.
How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? Jeffrey Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others--the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest--are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. A grand and sweeping statement, The Civil Sphere is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.
Carol Newsom illuminates the relation between the aesthetic forms of Job and the claims made by its various characters. Her innovative approach makes possible a new understanding of the unity of the book that rejects its dismantling in historical criticism and the flattening of the text that characterizes many final form readings. Additionally, she rehabilitates the moral perspectives represented by certain voices of the book that modern critics have treated with disdain.
An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep
Colonial New Englanders would have found our modern notions of free speech very strange indeed. Children today shrug off harsh words by chanting "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me," but in the seventeenth century people felt differently. "A soft tongue breaketh the bone," they often said. Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. Author Jane Kamensky re-examines such famous Puritan events as the Salem witch trials and the banishment of Anne Hutchinson to expose the ever-present fear of what the puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, Kamensky points out, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should ones voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of familiar stories of Puritan New England, Kamensky develops new ideas about the relationship between speech and power both in Puritan New England and, by extension, in our world today.
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