Transgressive Truths and Flattering Lies


Book Description

This book explores the formative correlations and inventive transmissions of Anglophone Arab representations ranging from early 20th century Mahjar writings to contemporary transnational Palestinian resistance art. Tracing multiple beginnings and seminal intertexts, the comparative study of dissonant truth-making presents critical readings in which the notion of cross-cultural translation gets displaced and strategic unreliability, representational opacity, or matters of act advance to essential qualities of the discussed works' aesthetic devices and ethical concerns. Questioning conventional interpretive approaches, Markus Schmitz shows what Anglophone Arab studies are and what they can become from a radically decentered relational point of view. Among the writers and artists discussed are such diverse figures as Rabih Alameddine, William Blatty, Kahlil Gibran, Ihab Hassan, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emily Jacir, Walid Raad, Ameen Rihani, Edward Said, Larissa Sansour, and Raja Shehadeh.




Symbolism 21


Book Description

Special Focus: Law and Literature This special focus issue of Symbolism takes a look at the theoretical equation of law and literature and its inherent symbolic dimension. The authors all approach the subject from the perspective of literary and book studies, foregrounding literature’s potential to act as supplementary to a very wide variety of laws spread over historical, geographical, cultural and spatial grounds. The theoretical ground laid here thus posits both literature and law in the narrow sense. The articles gathered in this special issue analyse Anglophone literatures from the Renaissance to the present day and cover the three major genres, narrative, drama and poetry. The contributions address questions of the law’s psychoanalytic subconscious, copyright and censorship, literary negotiations of colonial and post-colonial territorial laws, the European ‘refugee debate’ and migration narratives, fictional debates on climate change, contemporary feminist drama and classic 19th-century legal narratives. This volume includes two insightful analyses of poetic texts with a special focus on the fact that poetry has often been neglected within the field of law and literature research. Special Focus editor: Franziska Quabeck, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.




Philosophy in the Islamic World


Book Description

Philosophy in the Islamic World is a comprehensive and unprecedented four-volume reference work devoted to the history of philosophy in the realms of Islam, from its beginnings in the eighth century AD down to modern times. The focus of this fourth installment of the series, divided into two volumes, is the 19th and 20th centuries and geographically on the Arab countries, the Ottoman-Turkish region, Iran, and Muslim South Asia. During this time philosophy was pursued at Islamic institutions and increasingly in Western-style universities, but philosophy also had an impact beyond academia. In each chapter, an international expert on philosophy in this period explores the teachings of individual philosophers, philosophical movements (philosophy of religion, logical empiricism, deconstructionism, etc.), and schools (for instance the continuation of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy of being). Debates over cultural authenticity, political rule, gender, and other major issues are also presented. This is the English version of the relevant volume of the Ueberweg, the most authoritative German reference work on the history of philosophy, which updates the German version (Philosophie in der Islamischen Welt Band 4/1: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Arabischer Sprachraum, Basel: Schwabe, 2021) by providing references to the latest scholarly literature. Contributors Katajun Amirpur, Sadik Jalal al-Azm, Serpil Çakır, Frank Darwiche, Bettina Dennerlein, Sarhan Dhouib, Zeynep Direk, Michael Frey, Urs Gösken, Ursula Günther, Reza Hajatpour, Jan-Peter Hartung, Christoph Herzog, Elisabeth Susanne Kassab, Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, Kata Moser, Sait Özervarlı, Nils Riecken, Sajjad Rizvi, Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino, Roman Seidel and Harald Viersen.







Touchstones


Book Description

One of Latin America's most garlanded novelists—and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature—Mario Vargas Llosa is also an acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones collects Vargas Llosa's brilliant readings of seminal twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum; incisive essays on political and social thinkers; and contemporary pieces on 9/11 and the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq. Fantastically intelligent, inspired, and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection of essays from one of the world's leading writers and intellectuals.




Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey, a Festschrift


Book Description

This is a collection of invited papers that honours Professor Jacob Mey on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Professor Mey is, and has for a long time been, at once one of the most respected, enterprising, industrious, scholarly and, now, avuncular members of the numerous linguistics communities in which he has worked. He has made, over a distinguished working life, significant contributions to all of the sub-disciplines of linguistics, from phonetics, through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and especially pragmatics. He has sought to make connections between these sub-disciplines and broader areas of thought. These connections have resulted in ground breaking advances in, for example, Japanese sociolinguistics, pragmatics and artificial intelligence, Marxist linguistics, pragmatics and therapy, pragmatics and machine-processed information, gender and language, literary pragmatics and societal pragmatics. The collection ends with an in-depth discussion between Professor Mey and one of the editors in which Professor Mey speaks fully and frankly about his life in language and language in life.




Proceedings AIC 2003 Bangkok


Book Description




Aging and Old-Age Style in Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser


Book Description

Explores the performance of aging in the "late style" of Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser. Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people. This book explores the representation and performance of aging in recent "late-style" German-language fiction. It situates the authors chosen as case studies -- Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser -- in their biographical and social contexts and explores the significance of their aesthetic figuring of aging for debates raging both in Germany and internationally. In particular, the book looks at gender, generations, and trauma and their impact on how writers "narrativize" aging. Finally, it examines the "timeliness" of these different representations and late-style performances of aging in the context of the shift of social, political, and economic power away from the declining societies of theWest to the ascendant societies of the East. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.




In a Manner of Morall Playe


Book Description

This book investigates and interprets various social ideologies in the moralities and interludes, dramatic texts of the late medieval period. Most of the selected plays have not been previously analyzed from the perspective of the linguistic and ideological content. Seen within the larger cultural context, mainly compared with other non-dramatic texts of the period, these texts represent rich sources of those social ideologies whose aim was to create principled individuals and a morally sound, well-functioning society.




Prayers for the Assassin


Book Description

SEATTLE, 204. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline. New York and Washington, D.C., are nuclear wastelands. At the edge of the empire, Islamic and Christian forces fight for control, and rebels plot to regain free will....