Results by title

458 books match the query 'Literature' and 8 start with n

cover of Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art

Narrative Discourse

Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art

Patrick Colm Hogan

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

In Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art, Patrick Colm Hogan reconsiders fundamental issues of authorship and narration in light of recent research in cognitive and affective science. He begins with a detailed overview of the components of narrative discourse, both introducing and reworking key principles. Based on recent studies treating the complexity of human cognition, Hogan presents a new account of implied authorship that solves some notorious problems with that concept.
 
In subsequent chapters Hogan takes the view that implied authorship is both less unified and more unified than is widely recognized. In connection with this notion, he examines how we can make interpretive sense of the inconsistencies of implied authors within works and the continuities of implied authors across works. Turning to narrators, he considers some general principles of readers’ judgments about reliability, emphasizing the emotional element of trust. Following chapters take up the operation of complex forms of narration, including parallel narration, embedded narration, and collective voicing (“we” narration). In the afterword, Hogan sketches some subtleties at the other end of narrative communication, considering implied readers and narratees. In order to give greater scope to the analyses, Hogan develops case studies from painting and film as well as literature, treating art by Rabindranath Tagore; films by David Lynch, Bimal Roy, and Kabir Khan; and literary works by Mirabai, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Joseph Diescho.
[more]
cover of Narratives of the American West: Literature and History

Narratives of the American West

Literature and History

Richard W. Etulain

University of Nevada Press, 2027

Narratives of the American West: Literature and History brings together Richard W. Etulain’s most resonant work—along with newly written essays—to reveal how history and storytelling have continually shaped each other in the making of the West. Part historiographical memoir, part wide‑ranging critical survey, the collection moves from Etulain’s Basque upbringing in eastern Washington to his lifetime of teaching, editing, and writing, showing how personal experience and intellectual inquiry converge on the page.

In the tradition of Elliott West’s The Essential West, Etulain maps the field’s major interpretive turns, from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy to West’s“Greater Reconstruction,” and demonstrates how literary craft and historical method inform each other. Along the way, he demythologizes the stories of iconic figures, such as Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Chief Joseph, and Sacagawea, tracing how cultural memory evolves across novels, films, and archives.

Featuring new essays on Wallace Stegner and Elliott West, alongside revised classics on western myths, genres, regions, and peoples, this accessible yet rigorous volume invites readers to embrace narratives that are complex and morally engaged. Essential for scholars, students, and curious general readers alike, Narratives of the American West is a compelling guide to how the West has been written and remembered—and why those stories still matter.

[more]
cover of Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

Terry Eagleton

University of Minnesota Press, 1990

The three essays constituting this volume were originally published as individual pamphlets by the Field Day Theatre Company, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Each deals with the question of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding and analyzing the aftermath of colonization. The authors’ diverse perspectives are demonstrated by the essays’ respective titles: Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment; Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism; and Said, Yeats and Decolonization. The essays have implication beyond their immediate topics, bearing upon questions of feminism, decolonization, and modernism to illuminate problems that belong to other groups and regions.

[more]
cover of Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology

Necessary Nonsense

Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology

Irving Massey

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

What is nonsense? How has it permeated our day-to-day speech and thought processes in order to become a vital part of the way we interpret the world? In Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology, world-renowned expert Irving Massey commits nearly forty years of scholarly musings on the topic of nonsense to the page. Employing a writing style of overlap, repetition, discontinuity, and contradiction in order to describe the history and of grammatical, philosophical, and semantic nonsense, Massey opens his readers to the cognitive possibilities of accepting nonsense as a fundamental human feature.
 
In Necessary Nonsense, Massey explores a range of literary and philosophical subjects, from Immanuel Kant to Lewis Carroll—parsing the ways in which nonsense permeates their writing and dialectics—including an exploration of the inability of those who suffer from Asperger's syndrome to distinguish between metaphor and nonsense, and an investigation of the neural signature of the nonsense words and phrases that occur during the transition from waking to sleep. Massey argues that while nonsense may be the “archenemy of reason,” it is also tied to the intrinsic nature of reason; the two, simply put, cannot exist without each other. Through a stunning array of exploratory topics, Massey concludes that we all live under a canopy of nonsense.
 
 
[more]
cover of Negritude Women

Negritude Women

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Rediscovers the crucial role that women played in the influential Negritude movement.

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by the women who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard.

Through such disparate tactics as Lacascade’s use of Creole expressions in her French prose writings, the literary salon and journal founded by the Martinique-born Nardal sisters, and Roussy-Césaire’s revolutionary blend of surrealism and Negritude in the pages of Tropiques, the journal she founded with her husband, these four remarkable women made vital contributions. In exploring their influence on the development of themes central to Negritude-black humanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultures, and the rehabilitation of Africa-Sharpley-Whiting provides the movement’s first genuinely inclusive history.
[more]
cover of Neoliberal Bonds: Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature

Neoliberal Bonds

Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature

Fernando A. Blanco

The Ohio State University Press, 2015

Fernando A. Blanco’s Neoliberal Bonds: Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature analyzes the sociocultural processes that have reshaped subjectivities in post-Pinochet Chile. By creatively exploring the intersections among memory, gender, post-trauma, sociology, psychoanalysis, and neoliberalism, Neoliberal Bonds draws on Lacan’s notion of perversion to critique the subjective fantasies that people create to compensate for the loss of the social bond in the wake of a dictatorship founded on individualism, competition, and privatization.
 
Neoliberal Bonds vehemently criticizes how Chile’s transition governments, through a series of political and legal maneuvers, created the state’s official memory narratives. Blanco argues that the state, the media, academia, and the neoliberal market colluded to colonize and mediatize the “memory scene.” In contrast to these official narratives, Neoliberal Bonds analyzes alternative memory accounts within the visual arts and literature that push back against the state, its institutions, and its economic allies. These alternative memory narratives highlight the ontological fracture of the new neoliberal subjects; they also bring into sharp relief the urgent need for democratization that still poses a challenge to Chile a quarter century after its “transition to democracy” began.
[more]
cover of Networks of Improvement: Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

Networks of Improvement

Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

Jon Mee

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.

Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In Networks of Improvement, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge.
[more]
cover of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

Edited by Jeff Love and Jeffrey Metzger

Northwestern University Press, 2016

After more than a century, the urgency with which the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche speaks to us is undiminished. Nietzsche explicitly acknowledged Dostoevsky’s relevance to his work, noting its affinities as well as its points of opposition. Both of them are credited with laying much of the foundation for what came to be called existentialist thought. The essays in this volume bring a fresh perspective to a relationship that illuminates a great deal of twentieth-century intellectual history. Among the questions taken up by contributors are the possibility of morality in a godless world, the function of philosophy if reason is not the highest expression of our humanity, the nature of tragedy when performed for a bourgeois audience, and the justification of suffering if it is not divinely sanctioned. Above all, these essays remind us of the supreme value of the questioning itself that pervades the work of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
[more]