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458 books match the query 'Literature' and 20 start with m

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Machines of the Mind

Katharine Breen

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters.

Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great’s reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.

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Macroanalysis

Digital Methods and Literary History

Matthew L. Jockers

University of Illinois Press, 2013

In this volume, Matthew L. Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture.

Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.

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Made Under Pressure

Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960–1991

Natalia Kamovnikova

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with literary translators, Made Under Pressure offers an insider's look at Soviet censorship and the role translators played in promoting foreign authors—including figures like John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner.

Natalia Kamovnikova chronicles the literary translation process from the selection of foreign literary works to their translation, censorship, final approval, and publication. Interviews with Soviet translators of this era provide insight into how the creative work of translating and the practical work of publishing were undertaken within a politically restricted environment, and recall the bonds of community and collaboration that they developed.

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Making History

Studies in Rabbinic History, Literature, and Culture in Honor of Richard L. Kalmin

Carol Bakhos

SBL Press, 2024

Essays in this volume honor Richard L. Kalmin, one of the leading scholars of rabbinic literature. Volume contributors explore a variety of topics related to Kalmin’s wide-ranging work from the development of the Talmud to rabbinic storytelling, from the transmission of tales across geographic and cultural boundaries to ancient Jewish and Iranian interactions. Many of the essays reflect current trends in how scholars use ancient Jewish literary sources to address questions of historical import. Contributors include Carol Bakhos, Beth A. Berkowitz, Noah Bickart, Robert Brody, Joshua Cahan, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Steven D. Fraade, Shamma Friedman, Alyssa M. Gray, Judith Hauptman, Christine Hayes, Catherine Hezser, Marc Hirshman, David Kraemer, Marjorie Lehman, Kristen Lindbeck, Jonathan S. Milgram, Chaim Milikowsky, Michael L. Satlow, Marcus Mordecai Schwartz, Seth Schwartz, Burton L. Visotzky, and Sarah Wolf.

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Making Sense in Life and Literature

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

University of Minnesota Press, 1992

“The translation of these essays by Gumbrecht on literary theory and history marks the appearance in English of one of Europe’s 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.” --Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz

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Making Sense of Literature

John Reichert

University of Chicago Press, 1978

In this commonsense approach to the fundamental issues involved in understanding and evaluating literary works, John Reichert examines the method and structure of rational critical argument and its relationship to the nature of reading. With clarity and vigor, he shows how we can cut through competing critical languages to sort right readings from wrong ones, better from worse. His incisive analyses are augmented by illustrations from distinguished critics writing about major literary works.

Reichert considers criticism broadly as the imparting of one's understanding of a poem or play or novel to another reader. When the rhetorical function of critical language is recognized, seemingly distinct approaches to literature can be seen as different though often compatible means to a single end. He contends that the critic's job is not to report a personal response but to describe how a reader—any reader—ought to respond to a particular work. This necessitates postulating the author's intention at every turn, so that criticism becomes an account of what the author does to the reader by means of the work.

Taking off from recent developments in the philosophy of language, Reichert proposes answers to questions such as: What is involved in the understanding of metaphor, irony, and fiction? What knowledge must the reader bring to the text to understand it? And in what ways may the meaning of the text be regarded as stable? He sets out to refute attempts by Beardsley, Peckham, Kermode, Culler, and Ellis, among others, to define the essential nature or function of literature. Finally, with a simple account of how the everyday assessments we make of people and actions apply to literary works, Reichert demonstrates that full evaluative arguments are never purely formal or "literary," but always, in a broad sense, moral.

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Making World Literature

Actors, Institutions, and Networks in the United States since 1890

Anna Muenchrath

University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

From universities to governments, the Big Five publishers to Amazon, the influence of institutions abounds in US publishing. A diverse array of books from around the globe have been made into world literature in the US, selected by editors, publishers, and bureaucrats, produced by non-profits and for-profit presses of all sizes, and distributed through schools, publishing programs, and bookstores. The resulting world literary canon is the product of complex negotiations between individual preferences and institutional mandates, as well as economic, cultural, and pedagogical logics. While book publishing has fallen increasingly under the sway of global capitalism, yet the literary world remains made up of a series of individuals making choices about whom to fund, teach, translate, edit, and publish. The “world” of world literature, Anna Muenchrath argues, is a heterogeneous network of people whose circulation of literature is necessarily imbricated in the market economy, but whose selections might resist that economy and open new literary futures. Through archival research and close readings, this book considers what those participating are trying to do in circulating a text, and what communities they are helping to form or strengthen.

Making World Literature posits that network theory can effectively model the agency of actors and institutions in the literary field, making visible both the long-term accrual of power, as well as the choices of authors, translators, editors, and readers who do not simply replicate the values of a global literary marketplace, but divert, question, and undermine them. Muenchrath closely examines the paratexts and archival documents surrounding moments of global circulation in and through institutions like US world literature anthologies, the Council of Books in Wartime, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Oprah’s Book Club, and Amazon’s translation imprint. The granularity of these case studies reveals the increasingly limited agency of the individual in the global literary field, demonstrating how such players are important actors, and how their choices open up further options for later actors seeking to take texts down new paths toward or after publication.

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Many Californias

Literature from the Golden State

Gerald W. Haslam

University of Nevada Press, 1999

Haslam divides the state into five regions, selecting prose and poetry from each that reflects their history, terrain, and culture. Many Califonias features sixty-seven authors ranging from Jack London to Maxine Hong Kingston, making it the most diverse general-interest anthology available.

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Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”

A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary

Bonnie S. McDougall

University of Michigan Press, 1980

The writings of Mao Zedong have been circulated throughout the world more widely, perhaps, than those of any other single person this century. The “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” has occupied a prominent position among his many works and has been the subject of intense scrutiny both within and outside China. This text has undoubted importance to modern Chinese literature and history. In particular, it reveals Mao’s views on such questions as the relationship between writers or works of literature and their audience, or the nature and value of different kinds of literary products.

In this translation and commentary, Bonnie S. McDougall finds that Mao was in fact ahead of many of his critics in the West and his Chinese contemporaries in his discussion of literary issues. Unlike the majority of modern Chinese writers deeply influenced by Western theories of literature and society (including Marxism), Mao remained close to traditional patterns of thought and avoided the often mechanical or narrowly literal interpretations that were the hallmark of Western schools current in China in the early twentieth century.

Many of the detailed discussions on the “Talks” in the West have been concerned with their political and historical significance. However, since Mao is a literary figure of some importance in twentieth-century China, McDougall finds it worthwhile to follow up his published remarks on the nature and source of literature and the means of its evaluation. By better understanding the complex and revolutionary ideas contained in the “Talks,” McDougall suggests we may acquire the necessary analytical tools for a more fruitful investigation into contemporary Chinese literature.

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Margins in the Classroom

Teaching Literature

Kostas Myrsiades and Linda S. Myrsiades, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Margins in the Classroom was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

For today's teacher of literature, facing a minefield of politics and theory, this book arrives as a much needed guide through the multiplying cultural anxieties of the college classroom. Margins in the Classroom brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution.

Grounded in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, political economy, sociology, and philosophy, these essays apply new theoretical models to the traditional canon, identify new bodies of literature, and show how theory can be used to analyze these new literatures. Focusing on the politics of teaching and theory in the classroom, the authors explore the present practice and future implications of changing textual analysis, literary theory, and pedagogy. Their essays address the politics of literature as it affects the classroom, the design of courses, and the creation of new courses. They mold theory to the variety of classroom populations and materials the teacher of literature encounters today. The resulting volume bridges the differences between the languages of the classroom instructor and the contemporary theorist. Margins in the Classroom is unique in both the breadth and the depth of its concern over the disturbing, if electric, impact of changes in criticism, theory, and pedagogy in college literature classes as we approach the next century of academic instruction.

Kostas Myrsiades is professor of comparative literature, and Linda S. Myrsiades is professor of English, both at West Chester University. Kostas Myrsiades is editor of College Literature, where Linda S. Myrsiades is an associate editor.

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Marx for Cats

A Radical Bestiary

Leigh Claire La Berge

Duke University Press, 2023

At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.

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Marxist Literary Criticism Today

Barbara Foley

Pluto Press, 2019

In the first introduction to Marxist literary criticism in decades, Barbara Foley argues that Marxism continues to offer the best framework for exploring the relationship between literature and society. She lays out in clear terms the principal aspects of Marxist methodology—historical materialism, political economy, and ideology critique—as well as key debates about the nature of literature and the goals of literary criticism and pedagogy. Examining a wide range of texts through the empowering lens of Marxism—from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, from Frederick Douglass’s ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ to Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’—Foley provides a clear and compelling textbook of Marxist literary criticism.

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Masterpiece Theatre

An Academic Melodrama

Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Rutgers University Press, 1995

Is there a plot against the life of letters today?!!!! A mysterious assailant has tied a nameless text to a railroad track near Boondock State University. While young untenured English professor Jane Marple enlists a group of odd and oddly rivalrous academicians to help her identify and save the text, a coalition of powerful conservatives begins to suspect and rally against a left-wing conspiracy. But all are foiled when the amnesiac text is abducted on the Euro-Centric Express, where Ms. Marple encounters a number of suspiciously eccentric theorists temporarily set loose from their usual haunts in Marxist, deconstructionist, new historicist, and postcolonial circles. You'll laugh with our heroine, you'll cry with her, but you'll never guess how--using the very latest technology and in the midst of sometimes sinister stage and screen celebrities--she brings the last of three thrilling episodes in the canon wars to an end at a WOW (Writers of the World) conference set in the heart of the Big Apple.

In this hilarious romp through the culture wars, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar send up everyone including, sometimes, themselves, while at the same time they speculate seriously on the future of literature and literacy in a society where both are increasingly endangered. The cast includes well-known critics, politicians, writers, pop stars, media personalities, and a juicy assortment of technocrats, CEOs, and other culture vultures. Any similarities you find between these characters and actual persons, living or dead, are probably glaring. So, hum the opening notes of Masterpiece Theatre as you sit back, relax, and consider (yes!) the fate of the printed word in Western civilization.

Masterpiece Theatre is the latest--and funniest--round in the culture wars. No member of Modern Language Association, lover of literature and literacy, cultural pundit, or talking head should be without a copy.

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Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition

Warren D. Anderson

University of Michigan Press, 1988

To be born into the middle or upper classes of Matthew Arnold's England was in a sense to be born into the classical tradition. The precise contour and uses of the tradition, in Arnold's thought and writing, are the subject of this unique study by Warren D. Anderson. In Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, Anderson shows how the young poet first experimented with his classical heritage, how he moved toward deep involvement and then withdrew to a more objective position. The author examines Arnold's school and university background, his poetry and later prose, his relationship to Stoicism and Epicureanism. The resulting study is absolutely central to an appreciation of Arnold and to an understanding of the classical foundations of Western literature. It shows clearly and accurately the ways in which the nineteenth century interpreted the fifth century B.C.

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Modern American Grotesque

Literature and Photography

James Goodwin

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.

A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

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Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

By Jonathan Goldman

University of Texas Press, 2011

The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

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