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Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history.
B is for Bitcoin teaches readers their ABCs using terminology used in the Bitcoin world like Altcoin, Bitcoin, Consensus, and more! Show off your love for Bitcoin by reading this book to your child, your friend, or even a nocoiner. Leave it on your coffee table so that you can explain what Bitcoin is for the 100th time to your guests... You know you want to. Graeme Moore is the author of B is for Bitcoin. Graeme fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2014 and never looked back. His first love was hockey, subsequently followed by the Internet, economics, finance, and now Bitcoin. For more information, please visit www.BisforBitcoinBook.com
Climate change and the apocalypse are frequently associated in the popular imagination of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together climatologists, theologians, historians, literary scholars, and philosophers to address and critically assess this association. The contributing authors are concerned, among other things, with the relation between cultural and scientific discourses on climate change; the role of apocalyptic images and narratives in representing environmental issues; and the tension between reality and fiction in apocalyptic representations of catastrophes. By focusing on how figures in fictional texts interact with their environment and deal with the consequences of climate change, this volume foregrounds the broader social and cultural function of apocalyptic narratives of climate change. By evoking a sense of collective human destiny in the face of the ultimate catastrophe, apocalyptic narratives have both cautionary and inspirational functions. Determining the extent to which such narratives square with scientific knowledge of climate change is one of the main aims of this book.
"Mortality and the imminence of dying is the window that frames the vision of this astonishing book. With candor, wit, and a deep humanity, he details a reverence for life out of the ordinary and commonplace of our days." -Joe Stroud
This special issue of the Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Interview with Larry Niven features an interview with the best-selling science fiction author, Larry Niven, in which he discusses the writing craft, the life of a professional writer, and his unique science fiction style. Niven's Ringworld has won many prestigious international awards, and his newly released collection of short stories, The Draco Tavern is one of the best recent examples of structured, literary science fiction. The issue also includes a short story from the editor, Anna Faktorovich, "Coal and Rice" about a struggling Chinese rice farmer and a wealthy, corrupt Chinese businessman. In addition, the first scholarly essay in the volume is from an NPR employee, who's finishing his PhD at Brown. Byrd McDaniel critically evaluates the modern paintings of Kehinde Wiley, a Yale MFA graduate painter whose work has been displayed at some of the top museums around the world. Wiley's painting is also on this issue's cover.
At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of “conflict” and “crisis”, it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on “peripheral” perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the “migrant crisis”, and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.
This volume explores the rich, evolving body of contemporary cultural practices that reflect on a European project of diversity, new dynamics between and across cultures in Europe, and its interactions with the world. There have been calls across Europe for both traditional national identities and new forms of identity and community, assertions of regionalized identity and declarations of multiculturalism and multilingualism. These essays respond to this critical moment by analyzing the literature of migration as a (re)writing of European subjects. They ask fundamental questions from a variety of theoretical and critical standpoints: How do migrants write new identities into and against old ...
Rousseau has been seen as the inventor of the concept of nature; in this collective volume philosophers and literary specialists from France and the United States examine how Rousseau's philosophy can be reinterpreted from the point of view of a constant dialectical debate between nature and culture. In this, Rousseau is our true contemporary.
Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.
Who owns a life? Roman civil law was the basis for eighteenth century South Carolina slavery legislation, and partus sequitur ventrem meant literally "that which is brought forth follows the womb," meaning a child was born a slave if the mother was a slave, free if the mother was free. This sparse yet dense tale captures the centuries-long emotional battle for seed, life, and land proffered, then repossessed as parcels of Lowcountry heirs' property. Along the African Gold Coast, deceased spirits often gathered at the waterside to prepare for the souls' return from whence they came; amidst Sea Island coastal views and tourism ridden over forgotten slave cemeteries, this detached narrative echoes three women who still hover there. Whisper. Drifting. May you stumble upon this allegoric account of captains, traders, planters, soldiers, and cotton and listen just long enough to hear these murmurings from this oceanside graveyard, the aching ancestral chatter above the din of tourism development.