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Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms "work," "labor," "job," "employment," "occupation," "profession," "vocation," "task," "toil," "effort," "pursuit," and "calling" form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call "socially reproductive labor"—the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.
This successful introduction to intertextuality deftly introduces this crucial area and relates its significance to key theories and movements in the study of literature. The third edition is updated to include a brand new chapter, looking at intermediality, and how the study of intertextuality has changed over the last ten years. Offering a clear guide to this crucial area, Graham Allen: outlines the history and contemporary use of the term incorporates a wealth of illuminating examples from literature and culture examines the politics and aesthetics of the term relates intertextuality to global cultures and new media Looking at intertextuality in relation to literary and critical theory as well as contemporary culture and media, this book offers a fascinating and useful approach to all aspects of literary studies, especially those dealing with adaptation, media, or comparative studies.
What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers who tackle the question by investigating the effects and reader responses generated by selected extracts of literary prose. The twelve contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection explores a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects - topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory.
As a defining characteristic of what it means to be human, the use of language plays a central role in almost all human activity. Language functions as a cornerstone in the construction of our identity and in the relationships we build. It takes a central role in facilitating every enterprise we undertake, creates the thread which forms our own biographies, and enables us to play a part in the transmission and maintenance of our culture. This pervasive nature of language means that it may form the starting point for an investigation into virtually any aspect of social life. In recent years, this has led to a stretching of the boundaries of language studies, prompted by an intense cross-ferti...
This timely volume explores a wealth of North American literary texts that engage with moral and ethical dilemmas. It ranges from William Dean Howells's and Henry James's realist novels to Edward Sapir's intermedial poems, and from John Muir's unpublished letters and journal of his 1893 tour of the Swiss Alps to Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers and the poetry of Robert Lowell. Many of the contributions also critically engage with and re?ect on some of the most prominent voices in contemporary theoretical debates about ethics such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Em-manuel Levinas, Axel Honneth, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Julia Kristeva. This volume thus aptly covers the panoply of contemporary ethical and moral interventions while at the same time providing distinctively American Studies perspectives.
This volume presents a selection of essays discussing recent developments in genre theory. It furthermore reflects the current research of members of the Swiss Association of North American Studies.
How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation, literary analysis, and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading, editing, and writing will be relevant for several fields, including literary studies, scholarly editing, software studies, and digital humanities.
Soccer has long been known as 'the beautiful game'. This multi-disciplinary volume explores soccer, soccer culture, and the representation of soccer in art, film, and literature, using the critical tools of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric. Including international contributions from scholars of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, and the creative arts, this book begins by investigating the relationship between beauty and soccer and asks what criteria should be used to judge the sport’s aesthetic value. Covering topics as diverse as humor, national identity, style, celebrity, and social media, its chapters examine the nature of fandom, the role of language, and the significance of soccer in contemporary popular culture. It also discusses what one might call the ‘stylistics’ of soccer, analyzing how players, fans, and commentators communicate on and off the pitch, in the press, on social media, and in wider public discourse. The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer makes for fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, culture, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and society.
Widely regarded by critics and fans as one of the best games ever produced for the Sony Playstation, The Last of Us is remarkable for offering players a narratively rich experience within the parameters of cultural and gaming genres that often prioritize frenetic violence by straight white male heroes. The Last of Us is also a milestone among mainstream, big-budget (AAA) games because its development team self-consciously intervened in videogames’ historical exclusion of women and girls by creating complex and agentive female characters. The game’s co-protagonist, Ellie, is a teenage girl who is revealed to be queer in The Last of Us: Left Behind (DLC, 2014) and The Last of Us II (2020)....
The art of the early republic abounds in representations of deception: the villains of Gothic novels deceive their victims with visual and acoustic tricks; the ordinary citizens of picaresque novels are hoodwinked by quacks and illiterate but shrewd adventurers; and innocent sentimental heroines fall for their seducers' eloquently voiced half-truths and lies. Yet, as Philipp Schweighauser points out in Beautiful Deceptions, deception happens not only within these novels but also through them. The fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler invent worlds that do not exist. Similarly, Charles Willso...