Jason Puskar
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804775359
- eISBN:
- 9780804778459
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804775359.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile ...
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This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.Less
This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.
Jinqi Ling
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804778015
- eISBN:
- 9780804782043
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804778015.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged ...
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Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.Less
Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.
Ken K. Ito
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804757775
- eISBN:
- 9780804779623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804757775.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four ...
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At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.Less
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.
Karen Pinkus
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804760324
- eISBN:
- 9780804772877
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804760324.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in ...
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How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.Less
How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.
Michelle Osterfeld Li
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804759755
- eISBN:
- 9780804771061
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804759755.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in ...
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This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical, and, because they have many meanings, can both sustain and undermine authority. The book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It places Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework, focusing on them in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.Less
This book draws from theories of the grotesque to examine many of the strange and extraordinary creatures and phenomena in the premodern Japanese tales called setsuwa. Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical, and, because they have many meanings, can both sustain and undermine authority. The book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It places Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework, focusing on them in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.
Paul Hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical ...
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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.Less
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
Jacques Khalip
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758406
- eISBN:
- 9780804779685
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758406.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques ...
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Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. This book goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. The author explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.Less
Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. This book goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. The author explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.
Maria Boletsi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804782760
- eISBN:
- 9780804785372
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804782760.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” ...
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Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.Less
Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.
Joan Ramon Resina
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758321
- eISBN:
- 9780804787505
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. This book traces the development of that image ...
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Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. This book traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's “coming of age” in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, the book establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, the book draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the “post-historical” city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.Less
Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Barcelona has striven to sustain an image of modernity that distinguishes itself within Spain. This book traces the development of that image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's “coming of age” in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, the book establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. Because the city is an aggregation of knowledge, the book draws from sociology, urban studies, sociolinguistics, history, psychoanalysis, and literary history to produce a complex account of Barcelona's self-reflection through culture. The last chapter offers a glimpse into the “post-historical” city, where temporality has been sacrificed to the spatialization associated with the seductions of the spectacle.
Nora Gilbert
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804784207
- eISBN:
- 9780804784870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804784207.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the ...
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This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—it reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a “censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, the author explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.Less
This book is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife—the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film—it reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a “censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, the author explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.
A.S. Byatt
About Time
The Absurd in Literature
Acceptable Words
Activist Poetics
Against Democracy
