Category: Literature & Fiction

Book Summary :

The essays collected in this volume address a range of issues that arise when the focus of philosophical reflection on identity is shifted from metaphysical to practical and evaluative concerns. They also explore the usefulness of the notion of narrative for articulating and responding to these issues. The chapters, written by an outstanding roster of international scholars, address a range of complex philosophical issues concerning the relationship between practical and metaphysical identity, the embodied dimensions of the first-personal perspective, the kind of reflexive agency involved in the self-constitution of one's practical identity, the relationship between practical identity and normativity, and the temporal dimensions of identity and selfhood. In addressing these issues, contributors engage with debates in the literatures on personal identity, phenomenology, moral psychology, action theory, normative ethical theory, and feminist philosophy.

Book Summary :

What can we currently make of 'the subject'? Under the sway of structuralism and poststructuralism, critical thinking took a distinctly negative turn, effectively disqualifying any form of subjectivity as a reference point in discussions of textual or literary meaning. Since the mid-1970s, however, throughout the human sciences, human agency has been restored as both a methodological principle and an ethical value: a phenomenon broadly designated as 'the return of the subject'. Yet the returning subject bears the traces of its problematization... The present collection of essays explores the ways in which the subject now 'matters', both in principle and in the variety of critical approaches in authorizes. Essays, which are both literary and theoretical in character, cover authors, texts and issues in French literature from Descartes to the present. A wide range of types of writing is examined, from established forms such as the novel to relatively marginal and generically unsystematized discursive practices such as automatic writing and the 'récit de rêve'. Though it shuns 'closure' in a matter which remains ultimately elusive, this book offers some account of the types of answer which remain open and of those we have learned to leave behind.

Book Summary :

A collection of essays concerning the nature of Renaissance biographies and portraits, which contextualise the works in order to understand their contemporary significance.

Book Summary :

One of the most noticeable features of the Renaissance is what Jacob Burckhardt called the rise of the individual - in politics and religion, in its social life and in the arts, and in the mentality of Renaissance man, with his inclination to explore, to invent and to make new discoveries. Yet this characteristic is also very puzzling to modern people, who see that although the categories of art which depict particular people increased to a spectacular degree in a period when biography and portrait painting were among the most popular genres, and autobiography began to emerge as a genre in itself and painters began to produce self-portraits, an interest individuals is not necessarily the same thing as the more recent interest in the purely personal aspects of individuals. Literary and artistic traditions, social and ideological backgrounds, and the motives for the production of literature have changed profoundly: Renaissance biography and autobiography, portraiture and self-portraiture have little to do with their modern counterparts. Therefore this book stresses that the Renaissance is not predominantly a mirror of modernity, but rather a period of stimulating difference or alterity. The contributors to this collection of essays aim to create a better understanding of Renaissance biographies and portraits through the analysis and reconstruction of the traditions, contexts, backgrounds and circumstances of their production.

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This volume discusses the autobiographical inclination in Canadian literature, exploring works by such writers as Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, John Glassco, and Susanna Moodie. Others works, including the oral memoirs of a Métis, an Inuit’s account as being civil servant in Ottawa, and the autobiographical writings of pioneer women and French missionaries are examined to show the depth and breadth of this tradition in Canada. These texts act as starting points for an indepth look at the relationships between autobiography, biography and fiction in Canadian literature.

Book Summary :

Despite all the assertions towards the end of the twentieth century that the literary subject had expired along with the author, the wave of autobiographies published in German after the Wende was a clear indication that, on the contrary, life stories were very much alive. In this study, Owen Evans examines the work of eight authors - Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger, Ruth Klüger, Günter de Bruyn, Günter Kunert, Christoph Hein, Grete Weil and Monika Maron - who all published personal texts after 1989 dealing either with life in Nazi Germany or the GDR, and in some cases both. By means of close textual analysis, Evans explores the impact these regimes had on the individuals concerned and the contrasting ways in which the authors handle the autobiographical project. They adopt varying textual strategies to render the self on the page, with some employing overt fiction, and yet in each case, the project was clearly motivated by the need to treat psychological wounds inflicted on the self by totalitarianism. In their mapping of the contours of oppression, the texts at the heart of this study combine to offer a powerful defence of literary autobiography, in Germany at least, as a valuable means of tackling the legacy of totalitarianism.

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Reconsidering the relationship between autobiography and self-portraiture, The Body as Medium and Metaphor explores the intertextuality of self-representation in twentieth-century French art. Situating the body as the nexus of intersections between the written word and the visual image, this book rethinks the problematic status of the self. Starting at the twentieth-century's departure from figurative and mimetic representation, this study discusses the work of seminal artists and writers - including Marcel Duchamp, Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Bernard Noël, Gisèle Prassinos, Louise Bourgeois and Orlan - to articulate the twentieth century's radical revisions of subjectivity that originated from and returned to representations of the word, the image, and the body. This volume will be of interest to students of both French Literature and Art History, particularly those who are interested in the interdisciplinary exchanges between visual arts and literature.

Book Summary :

The two volumes on Postcolonialism and Autobiography examine the affinity of postcolonial writing to the genre of autobiography. The contributions of specialists from Northern Africa, Europe and the United States focus on two areas in which the interrelation of postcolonialism and autobiography is very prominent and fertile: the Maghreb and the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. The colonial background of these regions provides the stimulus for writers to launch a program for emancipation in an effort to constitute a decolonized subject in autobiographical practice. While the French volume addresses issues of the autobiographical genre in the postcolonial conditions of the Maghreb and the Caribbean with reference to France, the English volume analyzes the autobiographical writings of David Dabydeen (Guyana), Michelle Cliff, Opal Palmer Adisa, George Lamming, Wilson Harris (Jamaica), and Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) who have maintained their cultural Caribbean origin while living in England or the United States. Critics such as William Boelhower, Leigh Gilmore, Sidonie Smith, and Gayatri Spivak reveal the many layers of different cultures (Indian, African, European, American) that are covered over by the colonial powers. The homeland, exile, the experience of migration and hybridity condition the postcolonial existence of writers and critics. The incorporation of excerpts from the writers' works is meant to show the great variety and riches of a hybrid imagination and to engage in an interactive dialogue with critics.

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Naturalists as well as volunteer workers and medical professionals will enjoy the warm and personal tale of one woman's experiences in the scorching climate and the heart-melting expressions of humanity at this tent hospital in Ethiopia. This book describes the function of a Doctors Without Borders program at the ground level, at the TB mission they established in eastern Ethiopia during 2001. The culture of the Afar people is part of the story as well as the physical surroundings of the mission including the birds and animals of the desert setting. It is also a story about relationships and how like a family a vastly different group of people from all over the world can become when they all share a life of physical hardship but enormous reward. Setting up a hospital and lab in the desert, and battling daily on behalf of people ill with TB, malaria and other tropical diseases, the invaluable organization of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) succeeds against enormous odds. Their success proves what a collection of individuals can do with the skills at hand to make the world a better place - and enjoy the process. The team concept, so vital to the mission concept, comes alive in the author's depiction of the scene at Gahla.The culture of the migratory Afar people, with their fierce reputation and teeth filed to points, and the city lifestyle in Ethiopia's capital Addis are explored. As an avid birder, the author also includes descriptions of the exotic birds, animals and insects of this part of the Rift Valley with its searing heat and volcanic vents. Geologists suggest that one day the entire Afar Triangle may give way in a tectonic shift to become the new Afar Sea. Until then, it is home to a wide range of wonderfully resourceful people and colorful fauna that enliven this "impossibly" hot, dry land.The World Trade Center disaster took place one week after the author's return from a Muslim part of the world and the outpouring of compassionate correspondence she received from the people whom she had just left tells volumes about why we must not tar all Muslims with the brush of terrorism.

Book Summary :

Annotation. Naturalists as well as volunteer workers and medical professionals will enjoy the warm and personal tale of one woman's experiences in the scorching climate and the heart-melting expressions of humanity at this tent hospital in Ethiopia. This book describes the function of a Doctors Without Borders program at the ground level, at the TB mission they established in eastern Ethiopia during 2001. The culture of the Afar people is part of the story as well as the physical surroundings of the mission including the birds and animals of the desert setting. It is also a story about relationships and how like a family a vastly different group of people from all over the world can become when they all share a life of physical hardship but enormous reward. Setting up a hospital and lab in the desert, and battling daily on behalf of people ill with TB, malaria and other tropical diseases, the invaluable organization of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) succeeds against enormous odds. Their success proves what a collection of individuals can do with the skills at hand to make the world a better place - and enjoy the process. The team concept, so vital to the mission concept, comes alive in the author's depiction of the scene at Gahla. The culture of the migratory Afar people, with their fierce reputation and teeth filed to points, and the city lifestyle in Ethiopia's capital Addis are explored. As an avid birder, the author also includes descriptions of the exotic birds, animals and insects of this part of the Rift Valley with its searing heat and volcanic vents. Geologists suggest that one day the entire Afar Triangle may give way in a tectonic shift to become the new Afar Sea. Until then, it is home to a wide range of wonderfully resourceful people and colorful fauna that enliven this "impossibly" hot, dry land. The World Trade Center disaster took place one week after the author's return from a Muslim part of the world and the outpouring of compassionate correspondence she received from the people whom she had just left tells volumes about why we must not tar all Muslims with the brush of terrorism.

Book Summary :

Examines the crucial role that coming-of-age narratives have played in American feminism.

Book Summary :

Tell it to the Dog. is an exquisitely written memoir that is at once playful, heartbreaking and affirming. From a Dublin childhood to London, then on to Europe, to Asia and Australia, there is a deep engagement with the world in this book about growing up, about human and animal connectedness, about friendship, love and loss. Power understands the uncanniness and endurance of memory. He can make us laugh, and then stop us in our tracks at the profundity of this business of meeting life. Each of these short chapters is beautifully complete; together the whole thing shimmers. In the most delightful and subtle of ways, the language, trajectory and wisdom of Tell it to the Dog underscores our need to embrace our own vulnerabilities, to confront our experiences and memories, and to believe as Jane Austen once wrote, that ‘when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure’. ‘With exquisite prose and riotous feeling, Robert Power has created a stained glass window of a book, through which we gaze, as if for the first time, into what it means to live a life.’ - Catherine de Saint Phalle, author of Poum and Alexandre