Author : Mireille Gansel
Publisher : Feminist Press at CUNY
Page : 84 pages
File Size : 38,15 MB
Release : 2017-11-20
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1936932083
Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything—including their native languages—to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam. Gansel’s debut conveys the estrangement every translator experiences by moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.
Author : Moa Martinson
Publisher : Feminist Press at CUNY
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 49,29 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780935312386
About this novel, which focuses on two young women early in the 20th century, both victims of sexual abuse, as they struggle to gain for themselves and their children the rights and opportunities usually denied to poor women, Tillie Olsen said, "I love and am ineradicably grateful for this book, this writer, as I have been but to a few dozen others in my lifetime... Images, scenes, relationships, comprehensions portrayed here will never leave us. She is a writer of international stature and significance."
Author : Liliana Colanzi
Publisher : Deep Vellum Publishing
Page : 125 pages
File Size : 13,16 MB
Release : 2017-05-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1628972408
A young woman suffers a mental breakdown because of her repressive and religious mother. A group of children is fascinated by the sudden death of a friend. A drug trafficking couple visits Paris at the same time as a psychopathic cannibal. A mysterious wave travels through a university campus, driving students to suicide. A photographer witnesses a family’s surface composure shatter during a portrait session. A worker on Mars sees ghostly animals in the desert and longs for an impossible return to Earth. A plastic surgeon botches an operation and hides on a sugar cane plantation where indigenous slavery is practiced. Horror and the fantastic mark the unstable realism of Our Dead World, in which altered states of consciousness, marginalized peoples, animal bodies, and tensions between tradition and modernity are recurring themes. Liliana Colanzi’s stories explore those moments when the civilized voice of the ego gives way to the buzzing of the subconscious, and repressed indigenous history destabilizes the colonial legacy still present in contemporary Latin America. Colanzi is considered by critics to be one of the most promising voices of the new Latin American narrative, and this book is an ambitious formal and thematic leap.
Author : Eugene Costello
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 14,29 MB
Release : 2018-03-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1351213377
Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject. This volume brings together recent advances in the study of European transhumance during historical times, from Sweden to Spain, Romania to Ireland, and beyond that even Newfoundland. While the focus is on the archaeology of seasonal sites used by shepherds and cowherds, the contributions exhibit a high degree of interdisciplinarity. Documentary, cartographic, ethnographic and palaeoecological evidence all play a part in the examination of seasonal movement and settlement in medieval and post-medieval landscapes. Notwithstanding the obvious diversity across Europe in terms of livestock, distances travelled and socio-economic context, an extended introduction to the volume shows that cross-cutting themes are now emerging, including mobility, gendered herding, collective land-use, the agency of non-elite people and competition for grazing and markets. The book will appeal not only to archaeologists, but to historians, geographers, ethnographers, palaeoecologists and anyone interested in rural lifeways across Europe.
Author : Ernest H. Latham
Publisher : Center For Romanian Studies
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 34,86 MB
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 9789739432047
This book, by words and photographs, illustrates and explains the central role that the ballad the Miorita plays in Romanian culture. By combining the insights of an American and a Romanian scholar with a vision of Romanian pastoral life developed by a leading American photographer, the reader is introduced to one of the most complicated and elusive cultural icons in European civilization. It is, however, one that continues to permeate Romanian culture and offers, to those who take the time to study it, an approach to life which will resonate closely with much modern experience and understanding. The Miorita may fairly be described as the great, defining ballad of the Romanian personality and culture. Thus, it ranks in Romanian self-consciousness with the Iliad and the Odyssey for the Greeks, Beowulf for the Anglo-Saxons, the Lay of the Host of Igor for the Russians, the Ballad of Kosovo for the Serbs, El Cid for the Spanish, or the Nibelungenlied for the Germans. All of these works provide their respective nationalities with items of national identity, common symbols that echo through the national culture, common ideals which inspire and shape the national personality, a common world view which in time infects the national approach to philosophy, religion and, not infrequently, history and politics. Only as a document of national identity, however, may the Miorita be said to be similar to these other defining documents. In practically every other aspect it is a unique national document, at least among the nationalities within European civilization.
Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 39,13 MB
Release : 2014-11-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0141971819
In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. They created no empires. Even the hallucinogenic plant, the soma, which appears at the centre of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now. Following the 'hundred paths' of the Satapatha Brahmana, an impressive exegesis of Vedic ritual, Ardor indicates that it may be possible to reach what is closest by passing through that which is most remote, as 'the whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further'.
Author : Estela Portillo Trambley
Publisher : Feminist Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 48,25 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781558615021
An epic tale of a Mexican-American girl's journey into womanhood and independence on both sides of the border. The sole novel of beloved Chicana author Estela Portillo Trambley is an important rediscovery. This classic Mexican-American coming-of-age story was written in the 1980s during the rich burgeoning of Latino literature that also brought us such writers as Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chavez. The novel is the captivating story of Trini, a girl born in the rural Tarahumaran region of Mexico, who loses her mother at an early age and shares her family's struggle to squeeze a living out of her beautiful but inhospitable land. Trini is a vital novel of the Mexican-American experience, appropriate for young adults as well as adult readers.
Author : Charles G. Häberl
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 42,85 MB
Release : 2019-11-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 3110487861
Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.
Author : Gabriel Josipovici
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 37,45 MB
Release : 2010-09-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 030016582X
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.
Author : Mia Couto
Publisher : Biblioasis
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 32,98 MB
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1927428025
A RADIO FRANCE-CULTURE/TÉLÉRAMA BEST WORK OF FICTION BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMÕES PRIZE AND THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE “Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa.""—Doris Lessing “By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic.”—Henning Mankell Mwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He’s been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden. The eighth novel by the internationally bestselling Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanito’s struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman’s arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father’s story and the world are heard once more. The Tuner of Silences has been published to acclaim in more than half a dozen countries. Now in its first English translation, this story of an African boy's quest for the truth endures as a magical, humanizing confrontation between one child and the legacy of war.
