Specters of World Literature

Specters of World Literature
Author: Mattar Karim Mattar
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474467059

At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

Specters of World Literature

Specters of World Literature
Author: Mattar Karim Mattar
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474467067

At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.

Specters of Marx

Specters of Marx
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136758607

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

Specters

Specters
Author: Radwa Ashour
Publisher: Interlink Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781566568326

Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize. Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their married and unmarried lives, and their respective books. With her novel’s structure, Ashour pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka (the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life and beyond).

Approaches to World Literature

Approaches to World Literature
Author: Joachim Küpper
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2013-12-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3050064951

The present volume introduces new considerations on the topic of “World Literature”, penned by leading representatives of the discipline from the United States, India, Japan, the Middle East, England, France and Germany. The essays revolve around the question of what, specifically in today's rapidly globalizing world, may be the productive implications of the concept of World Literature, which was first developed in the 18th century and then elaborated on by Goethe. The discussions include problems such as different script systems with varying literary functions, as well as questions addressing the relationship between ethnic self-description and cultural belonging. The contributions result from a conference that took place at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, in 2012.

The Spectre of Comparisons

The Spectre of Comparisons
Author: Benedict Anderson
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1998-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781859841846

The Spectre of Comparisons contains important theoretical and historical considerations about the nature of nationalism & the prospects for the Left in the so-called New World Disorder.

Specters of Mother India

Specters of Mother India
Author: Mrinalini Sinha
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2006-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822387972

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Brocken Spectre

Brocken Spectre
Author: Jacques J. Rancourt
Publisher: Alice James Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1948579448

Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorializing and romanticizing tragedy.

The Specter of Races

The Specter of Races
Author: Anke Birkenmaier
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813938805

Arguing that race has been the specter that has haunted many of the discussions about Latin American regional and national cultures today, Anke Birkenmaier shows how theories of race and culture in Latin America evolved dramatically in the period between the two world wars. In response to the rise of scientific racism in Europe and the American hemisphere in the early twentieth century, anthropologists joined numerous writers and artists in founding institutions, journals, and museums that actively pushed for an antiracist science of culture, questioning pseudoscientific theories of race and moving toward more broadly conceived notions of ethnicity and culture. Birkenmaier surveys the work of key figures such as Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Haitian scholar and novelist Jacques Roumain, French anthropologist and museum director Paul Rivet, and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, focusing on the transnational networks of scholars in France, Spain, and the United States to which they were connected. Reviewing their essays, scientific publications, dictionaries, novels, poetry, and visual arts, the author traces the cultural study of Latin America back to these interdisciplinary discussions about the meaning of race and culture in Latin America, discussions that continue to provoke us today.