Anecdotal Theory


Book Description

Essays weaving theory, story, and personal narrative into a method of critical writing.




Loving Dr. Johnson


Book Description

The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) initiated two centuries of Johnsonian anatomy-both in medical speculation about his famously unruly body and in literary devotion to his anecdotal remains. Even today, Johnson is an enduring symbol of individuality, authority, masculinity, and Englishness, ultimately lending a style and a name—the Age of Johnson—to the eighteenth-century English literary canon. Loving Dr. Johnson uses the enormous popularity of Johnson to understand a singular case of author love and to reflect upon what the love of authors has to do with the love of literature. Helen Deutsch's work is driven by several impulses, among them her affection for both Johnson's work and Boswell's biography of him, and her own distance from the largely male tradition of Johnsonian criticism—a tradition to which she remains indebted and to which Loving Dr. Johnson is ultimately an homage. Limning sharply Johnson's capacious oeuvre, Deutsch's study is also the first of its kind to examine the practices and rituals of Johnsonian societies around the world, wherein Johnson's literary work is now dwarfed by the figure of the writer himself. An absorbing look at one iconic author and his afterlives, Loving Dr. Johnson will be of enormous value to students of English literature and literary scholars keenly interested in canon formation.




Feeling Canadian


Book Description

“My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!” How did a beer ad featuring an unassuming guy in a plaid shirt become a national anthem? This book about Canadian TV examines how affect and consumption work together, producing national practices framed by the television screen. Drawing on the new field of affect theory, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience and then from body to body. From the most recent Quebec referendum to 9/11 and current news coverage of the so-called “terrorist threat,” media theorist Marusya Bociurkiw argues that a significant intensifying of nationalist content on Canadian television became apparent after 1995. Close readings of TV shows and news items such as Canada: A People’s History, North of 60, and coverage of the funeral of Pierre Trudeau reveal how television works to resolve the imagined community of nation, as well as the idea of a national self and national others, via affect. Affect theory, with its notions of changeability, fluidity, and contagion, is, the author argues, well suited to the study of television and its audience. Useful for scholars and students of media studies, communications theory, and national television and for anyone interested in Canadian popular culture, this highly readable book fills the need for critical scholarly analysis of Canadian television’s nationalist practices.




City of Men


Book Description

In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate between good and bad conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, India, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities. It follows the labor geographies of auto-rickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters to argue that the gendered fabric of urban life needs to be understood as a product of situational forms of cooperation between different social groups. Such an orientation sheds light on the part played by everyday morality and provisional support in upholding male privilege in the city.




Time Signatures


Book Description

Time Signatures engages in a close study of the autobiographical writings of three contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb: Assia Djebar, HZl_ne Cixous, and AbdelkZbir Khatibi. Alluding to music not only as a 'theme' pulsing throughout these writers' works, but also as a means of comprehending their unique, improvisational writing styles, Alison Rice offers readers a new and beautifully constructed way of reading these authors' texts by demonstrating that the form adopted to address topics of concern is as significant as the content itself. The voice of Jacques Derrida intermingles with the timbres of these three writers in fruitful contrapuntal passages, serving as a source of inspiration for conceptualizing language and communicating the self in an unprecedented manner. Time Signatures demonstrates that these individuals write the 'self' in French in ways influenced by sensitivities acquired during their early experiences in a multicultural, multilingual 'colonial' environment in which their ears were trained, and their minds tuned, for translations to come.




Identity Anecdotes


Book Description

"Meticulously attentive to the complex nuances and intricacies of what is too easily glossed as ′cross-cultural communication′, these essays offer us a unique, writerly perspective on what it takes, socially and textually, to reconcile the requirements of an effective shared discourse – cultural studies – with the intrinsic heterogeneity of our divergent glocal realities... an awesomely satisfying and enlightening read." - Ien Ang, University of Western Sydney How is identity produced in global ′textual environments′? What forms of narrative generate solidarity in a world in which globalization and trans-nationality can often appear to be a fait accompli? This brilliant, coruscating book, written by one of the most formidable and original thinkers in cultural studies, examines questions of nationality, identity, the use of anecdote to build solidarity and the role of institutions in shaping culture. Ranging across many fields, including film and media, gender, nationality, globalization and popular culture, it provides a mind-clearing exercise in recognizing what culture is, and how it works, today. Illustrated with a fund of relevant and insightful examples, it addresses the central questions in cultural studies today: identity, post-identity, the uses of narrative and textual analysis, the industrial organization of solidarity and the opportunities and dilemmas of globalization. Penetrating, arresting and inimitable, the book is a major contribution to the field of cultural studies. It is of interest to students of cultural studies, media, film and cultural sociology.




118 Theories of Design[ing]


Book Description

Theories normally seek to explain something. 118 Theories of Design[ing] asks us to question those explanations. By focusing on a broad range of somewhat overlooked and undervalued essays, papers, book articles, words, terms, authors and phenomena that swirl around design[ing], the reader is encouraged to read, reflect and question everything. This original book will appeal to a global market of university faculty heads and deans, museum directors, design educators, design researchers, key design practitioners, publishers, members of the design media, and undergraduate, postgraduate and post-doctoral students of design.




On Liking the Other


Book Description

A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner On Liking the Other: Queer Subjects and Religious Discourses studies the intersection of religious and queer discourses in teacher education. It looks at the sometimes difficult topics rooted in these two particular discourses, which are often seen as unwelcome in both public and private educational spaces. In engaging in such a conversation, the authors seek the ways that these discourses, while steeped in discontent, dilemma, and difficulty, might also offer ways to reorient ourselves amidst twenty-first century educational realities. More to the point, the text puts queer histories and logics into conversations with theologies through the concept of liking. Eschewing the typical antagonism that often defines the relationships between religious and queer discourses, this book looks for resonances and overlaps that might provide new habits for conducting the work of meeting in teacher education classrooms and educational worlds. It is an excellent text for a variety of classrooms and courses. On Liking the Other is structured in three sections, with each section divided into two chapters. Within each section, the authors explore an overarching theme through their distinct, albeit related, perspectives. This is to allow each perspective to be given its due, while also drawing on the knowledge of one another at particular junctures. Like a conversation in person, this recognizes the ways conversations (as opposed to monologues) happen and, in doing so, helps to add clarification and additional details. Kevin J. Burke is a curriculum theorist whose scholarship operates at the intersection of religion, masculinities, and English education. Adam J. Greteman is a philosopher of education whose scholarship operates at the intersection of queer theories, sexualities, and Art education. Both authors are deeply invested in the work of Teacher Education, particularly in thinking through the conundrums of engaging pre-service teachers who bring to Teacher Education classrooms and eventually their own classrooms their religious, gendered, and sexual subjectivities. The conversations here, attempting to orient ourselves differently, are meant to open up space for complicated conversations that are foundational to the work of curriculum. Perfect for courses such as: Queer Theory in Education | Multicultural Education | Critical Educational Foundations | Human Diversity, Power and Opportunity in Social Institutions | Diversity in Education | Diversity and Inclusive Teaching | Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education




Anecdotal Modernity


Book Description

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.




Re(con)figuring Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Leading international scholars present novel dialogues between different psychoanalytic orientations as well as between the particularities of diverse socio-cultural and historical contexts in order to offer critical insights which are highly relevant to the current intellectual debates and social praxis.