Narrative Discourse


Book Description

Genette uses Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a work to identify and name the basic constituents and techniques of narrative. Genette illustrates the examples by referring to other literary works. His systemic theory of narrative deals with the structure of fiction, including fictional devices that go unnoticed and whose implications fulfill the Western narrative tradition.




Andre Gide and Curiosity


Book Description

This comprehensive exploration of curiosity in the fiction and life-writing of André Gide (1869-1951) is an important modernist contribution to the field of curiosity in literature and cultural studies more broadly. Curiosity was a credo for Gide. By observing the world and then manifesting in writing these observations, he stimulates the curiosity of readers, conceived as virtual conduits of a curiosity once his own. Using a thematic structure of sexual, scientific and writerly curiosity, this volume identifies processes of curiosity in the life-writing (including the travel-writing) which illuminate processes in the fiction, and vice versa. Theories of fetishism, gender and sexuality are applied to Gide's corpus to illustrate his championing of a masculine curiosity of enlightenment and adventure over a feminised 'curiosité-défaillance' of disobedience and harm, and to explore objects eliciting his incuriosity. Gide's creativity is nourished by his curiosity, as close readings of his work informed by Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic writing on epistemophilia reveal. Curiosity is a rewarding, non-reductionist perspective from which the exceptional variety of Gide's subject matter, style and genre can be more coherently understood. Research draws principally on the six Pléiade volumes of Gide's oeuvre, published 1996-2009.




Tamara de Lempicka


Book Description

A landmark retrospective on the Art Deco painter exploring her intersectional identities Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), the "Baroness with a Brush," is often cast as one of Art Deco's most celebrated artists, though her work transcends categorization, incorporating elements of Cubism and Neoclassicism in a distinctive, sensuous blend of form and function. Lempicka's paintings, including a self-portrait as the driver of a sleek green Bugatti, often depict dazzling, self-assured women, exuding elegance and transgressive sexuality while combining the modern with the classical. This gorgeous survey presents the full arc of Lempicka's career in the context of her life and her evolving identity, including her Polish and Russian origins, her marriages and other relationships, and her time in France, Italy, and the United States. This book unfolds chronologically through three sections that mark the stages of the artist's life and the evolution of her artistic style, with particular focus on her Jewish heritage, her expression of gender, and her sexuality. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Exhibition Schedule: de Young Museum, San Francisco (October 12, 2024-February 9, 2025) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 9-May 26, 2025)




Introducing Comparative Literature


Book Description

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as 'interliterary theory', decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.




The Complete Classical Music Guide


Book Description

What makes Mozart's music so great? Why does a minor chord sound sad and a major chord sound happy? What's the difference between opera and operetta? From Bach to Bernstein, this definitive guide offers a complete survey of the history of classical music. Whether you already love classical music or you're just beginning to explore it, The Complete Classical Music Guide invites you to discover the spirituality of Byrd's masses, the awesome power of Handel's Messiah, and the wonders of Wagner's operas, as well as hundreds of more composers and their masterpieces. This guide takes you on a journey through more than 1,000 years, charting the evolution of musical instruments, styles, and genres. Biographies of major and lesser-known composers offer rich insights into their music and the historical and cultural contexts that influenced their genius. The book explores the features that defined each musical era - from the ornate brilliance of the Baroque, through the drama of Romantic music, to contemporary genres such as minimalism and electronic music. Timelines, quotes, and color photographs give a voice to this music and the exceptionally gifted individuals who created it.




Paratexts


Book Description

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declaration requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions as revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interact with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Gennet's work in contemporary literary theory.




Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought


Book Description

This work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more. The 240 analytical entries examine individuals such as Bergson, Durkheim, Mauss, Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida; specific disciplines such as the arts, anthropology, historiography, psychology, and sociology; key beliefs and methodologies such as Catholicism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and phenomenology; themes and concepts such as freedom, language, media, and sexuality; and istorical, political, social, and intellectual context. --From publisher's decription.




4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts


Book Description

Vache, Jacques Atlas Anti-Classics This book collects together works by four 'writers' on the fringes of the Dada movement in 1920's Paris. All four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon. Yet, their writings - to which they attached so little importance - still exert a powerful allure and were a vital inspiration to the Dada movement.




Antigones


Book Description

According to Greek legend, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the order of Creon, king of Thebes. Sentenced to death by Creon, she forestalled him by committing suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon--between the state and the individual, between man and woman, between young and old--has captured the Western imagination for more than 2000 years. George Steiner here examines the far-reaching legacy of this great classical myth. He considers its treatment in Western art, literature, and thought--in drama, poetry, prose, philosophic discourse, political tracts, opera, ballet, film, and even the plastic arts. A study in poetics and in the philosophy of reading, Antigones leads us to look again at the influence the Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture. "A remarkable feat of intellectual agility."--Washington Post Book World "[An] intellectually demanding but rewarding book. . . consistently stimulating and sometimes disturbing."--The New Republic "An. . . account of the various treatments of the Antigone theme in European languages. . . Penetrating and novel."--The New York Times Book Review "A tradition of intelligence and style lives in this prolific man."--Los Angeles Times "Antigones triumphantly demonstrates that Antigone could fill several volumes of study without becoming tedious or exhausted."--The New York Review of Books




Pulp Surrealism


Book Description

"A 'wonder cabinet' of a book that brings to vivid life again the ephemeral pleasures of flanerie in Paris. Walz is a marvelous guide to the pulp fiction, newspaper sensationalism, and 'disreputable, ' fast-disappearing neighborhoods of Paris that the surrealists not only loved but drew on for inspiration in their revolutionary effort to reconfigure human consciousness in early twentieth-century France." Richard Abel, author of "The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914" and "The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 " "Robin Walz's "Pulp Surrealism" represents an original and creative approach to the cultural history of the French interwar avant-garde. He shifts our focus away from surrealist texts themselves to the conditions of their production and in the process illuminates in fascinating ways the relationship between surrealism and popular culture." Carolyn Dean, author of "The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France" "Pulp Surrealism is the vibrant story of the interplay between avant-garde intellectuals and emerging mass culture in the early years of the twentieth century. In this stimulating history Robin Walz lays bare the many contradictory connections between high and popular culture, and in the process restores to life the brilliant effrontery and joy of the surrealist movement." Tyler Stovall, author of "The Rise of the Paris Red Belt" and "Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light"