Subject collection: Literary Studies (221 titles, 1971–2015)

In both the real and the symbolic sense, the action of the Liaisons is writing letters, which is to say, giving the phrase an ontological twist, that writing is its own subject. Letters in an epistolary novel recount and reenact simultaneously, without distinction. Doing and telling are congruent, interchangeable, identical activities. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are the principal characters in this novel because they know best how to use the word. They control and direct others through their writing. From our perspective, however, to listen well is an even more critical and fundamental activity than writing well. The ultimate victor in this novel of seduction and deception is not necessarily the one who writes best but rather he, or she, who reads best. Concentrating on the reader places the entire epistolary exchange in a new light and accentuates the use of the word as an instrument of power and the letter as a tool for domination.

This is an interesting book that provides a sane analysis of the relation between form and meaning in the fabliaux. It will henceforth be standard reading for those dealing with what nevertheless remains one of the most problematic genres of Old French Literature for the modern scholar.Keith Busby, Speculum — A Journal of Medieval Studies, Jan. 1990

The Ṛgveda is the oldest of the books that comprise the scriptures of Hinduism. While its age cannot be accurately determined, it can be said with reasonable certainty that it must have existed in its present form at least as early as 1000 BC. It consists of 1,028 hymns, arranged, according to the form in which the Ṛgveda has been transmitted, in ten divisions, called maṇḍalas. This volume consists of a selection of hymns, translated into English and annotated, as well as short introductions to the Ṛgveda as a whole and the different themes around which the selected hymns are grouped, a bibliography, and an index.

This is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Of course, practice presupposes theory, but here the editors choose to keep general theoretical assumptions under cover rather then force them into explicitness. The contributors to this volume were given free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught their fancy. The absence of a predetermined theoretical framework has resulted in an idiosyntractic volume on the different forms of play.

The first major comparative study of African writing in western languages, European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Albert S. Gérard, falls into four wide-ranging sections: an overview of early contacts and colonial developments “Under Western Eyes”; chapters on “Black Consciousness” manifest in the debates over Panafricanism and Negritude; a group of essays on mental decolonization expressed in “Black Power” texts at the time of independence struggles; and finally “Comparative Vistas,” sketching directions that future comparative study might explore. An introductory essay stresses the millennia of writing in Africa, side by side with a richly eloquent and artistic set of vernacular oral traditions; written and oral traditions have become interwoven in adaptations of imported forms and linguistic innovations that challenge traditional “high” literary norms. Gérard uses the mathematical concept of “fuzzy sets” to explain why the focus on “Black Africa” has led him to set aside for future analysis the literatures produced in North Africa, which fall under the influence of Muslim civilization, as well as the diasporic literatures of the New World. Over sixty scholars from twenty-two countries contribute specialized studies of creative writing by leading authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Achebe, Mphahlele, Ngugi, Senghor, Soyinka, and Tutuola. Critical analyses are organized primarily around regions, reflecting different colonial languages imposed through schools and other social institutions. Some authors trace the adaptation of western genres, others identify syncretism with folktales or myths. The volumes are attentive to the heterogeneity of national literatures addressed to polyethnic and multilingual populations, and they note the instrumental politics of language in newly independent states. A closing chapter, “Tasks Ahead,” identifies areas for future scholars to explore.

Le présent ouvrage, composé de deux volumes, réunit la documentation la plus complète et variée qui existe à ce jour dans la matière. Conçu comme un authentique travail collectif, il examine les mouvements littéraires d’avant-garde de 1905–1910 à 1975 successivement sous les angles diachronique (histoire et typologie: vol. I) et synchronique (tendances esthétiques, genres et procédés, relation avec les beaux-arts, la science et la technique, perspectives sociologiques, réception critique: vol. II). Plus de cinquante auteurs, originaires d’une zone s'étendant de la Suède et de la Roumanie à l’Argentine et aux États-Unis, ont collaboré ici, axant leurs enquêtes sur des objectifs analogues, confrontant leurs résultats, résolvant nombre de problèmes, en soulevant d’autres, prospectant non seulement tous les pays d’Europe et d’Amérique, mais jusqu’à l’Afrique du Nord, le Proche-Orient et les Antilles. L’ensemble, complexe et fouillé, offre néanmoins une image cohérente du sujet, non point dogmatique, mais nuancée.



Comme l’exigeait la matière, l’analyse des textes va de pair avec celle des idées, d’intentions et de comportements qui constituent, au même titre que poèmes, romans ou pièces de théâtre, la spécificité des avant-gardes et qui sont parfois devenus monnaie courante, aujourd’hui, dans les beaux-arts et, même, dans la vie quotidienne. Complément des volumes publiés par Ulrich Weisstein (Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon) et Ana Balakian (The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages), l’ouvrage retrace l’une des aventures les plus passionnantes du siècle.

This study seeks to demonstrate that throughout centuries of re-creation, linguistic devices have been used to support both the production and the reproduction of the romances. On the basis of this demonstration, it is argued that it is time to recognize these devices as evaluators and to include a discussion of evaluative mechanisms in the study of the Romancero tradition.

La sémiotique a-t-elle quelque chose à dire sure la littérature en tant que sœur des ‘beaux-arts’? Peut-elle rendre compte des raisons d’une réussite d’écriture? – Intention naïve, dira-t-on, que de vouloir décourvrir, sure la base des seules méthodes structurales, pourquoi une œuvre nous captive. Si le problème, et son enjeu, sont immenses (car il y va de la constitution d’une esthétique structurale), le terrain choisi pour l’aborder est, lui, partiellement défriché: l’écriture dite ‘réaliste’ relève d’une poétique dotée de ses méchanismes propres. A la suite notamment de A.J. Greimas, de H. Mitterand et de Ph. Hamon, D. Bertrand en reprend ici l’ analyse et en approfondit la portée grâce à une exploration systématique des figures de la spatialité dans le Germinal de Zola. Transcendant les distinctions entre figurativité et abstraction, un imaginaire topologique régit les divers niveaux de signification du roman et en garandit l’efficacité symbolique.

William Faulkner was an aviation cadet in Canada in the closing days of WW I. He later owned his own airplane, and even put on a few air shows. When he wrote of flying, as he often did, it was with a great deal of expertise but little concern for the edification of his readers. The result is that many of the five hundred or so passages dealing with aviation in his works are all but incomprehensible to the non-pilot. This work elucidates all the aeronautical references in Faulkner’s fiction and verse which might prove troublesome to the general reader. This monograph contains three main sections: An introduction to flight, designed especially for the non-technical reader and intended to provide enough background in aerodynamics and aircraft design to enable one to follow Faulkner’s argument intelligently; a brief biography of Faulkner as a pilot and aviation enthusiast; and a reader’s guide through the individual works in which aviation plays a part.

The volume presents perspectives in the theory of drama and theatre that are new for the following reasons: 1) the contributions reflect the international cooperation in developing drama and theatre as well as its theories; 2) this collection is the first attempt of presenting papers within the context of (Analytical) Theory of Science; 3) it is the first consistent set of papers starting from semiotics a s a meta-theory. The volume is divided into four sections: I Fundamental of Theatre Research, II Theory of Drama and Theatre, III Descriptive Theatre Research, IV Applied Theatre Research. The fifth and final section offers a selective bibliography of analytical approaches to drama and theatre.

Translating Poetic Discourse argues in favor of a critical model that bridges between translation and women’s studies on theoretical and practical levels. It proposes key-elements to be integrated into the problem of interpretation of contemporary poetry by women, and discusses the links between gender markers and the speech situation in feminist discourse as a systematic problem.

This book will be of interest to scholars of Translation Studies, Women’s Studies, Poetry, Comparative Literature and Discourse.

Mon propos est d'interroger cette Correspondance pour mettre en évidence les structures qui sous-tendent l'oeuvre critique de Flaubert. Bien que celui-ci rêve toute sa vie d'écrire des ouvrages critiques qui seraient à l'écoute de l'oeuvre, il n'en rédige aucun. La Correspondance, par contre, fourmille de commentaires sur d'autres écrivains, particulièrement sur ceux du XIXe siècle. L'opinion qu'il exprime à leur propos est plus révélatrice; car elle est moins soumise aux goûts et aux normes imposés par l'éducation qu'il les ait intégrés ou non. Ces commentaires sont la seule critique qu'il ait jamais écrite. On y trouve rarement des jugements littéraires en tant que tels, mais plutôt des réactions de tempérament utilisant un langage très personnel. Une lecture minutieuse de la Correspondance permet de déchiffrer ce langage métaphorique.

Edited by Anna Balakian, this volume marks the first attempt to discuss Symbolism in a full range of the literatures written in the European languages. The scope of these analyses, which explore Latin America, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as well as West European literatures, continues to make the volume a valuable reference today. As René Wellek suggests in his historiographic contribution, the fifty-one contributors not only make us think afresh about individual authors who are “giants,” but also draw us to reassess schools and movements in their local as well as international contexts. Reviewers comment that this “copious and intelligently structured” anthology, divided into eight parts, traces the conceptual bases and emergence of an international Symbolist movement, showing the spread of Symbolism to other national literatures from French sources, as well as the symbiotic transformations of Symbolism through appropriation and amalgamation with local literary trends. Several chapters deal with the relationships between literature and the other arts, pointing to Symbolism at work in painting, music, and theatre. Other chapters on the psychological aspects of the Symbolist method connect in interesting ways to a vision of metaphor and myth as virtually musical notation and an experimental emphasis on the play afforded by gaps between words. The volume is “a major contribution” to “the most significant exponents” and “essential themes” of Symbolism. The theoretical, historical, and typological sections of the volume help explain why the impact of this important movement of the fin-de-siècle is still felt today.

Scholars and students working on the early courtly and chivalric literature of medieval Europe will have often felt the need for contemporary theoretical material with which to illustrate their arguments about courtesy and chivalry in romances, etc. The present volume, which presents critical editions of the two earliest didactic poems of this kind in the vernacular (both date from the first quarter of the thirteenth century), was conceived partly to fill this need. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Old French literature, but also to those studying other literatures; both texts are known to have circulated in England in the fourteenth century and are therefore of importance for anglicists; L’Ordene de Chevalerie was adapted into Middle Dutch and Italian several times and provides excellent material for comparatists, netherlandists and italianists; moreover, given the germinal place of Old French literature in the culture of the Middle Ages, both poems are worthy of study in the context of the evolution of the ideals of courtesy and chivalry as European literary phenomenon.
Each critical text is accompanied by an extensive literary introduction and philological apparatus, and translations into modern English prose have been appended to render the poems more accessible to non-romanists.

According to the traditional view, meaning presents itself under the form of some kind of identity. To give the meaning of a sentence amounts to being capable of producing some substitute based on the identity of the terms of the sentence. Is then the meaning of a book, or of any text, the capacity of rewriting it? Instead of retaining a double-standard theory of meaning, one for sentences and another for texts, that would allow for an ad hoc gap, the author provides a unified conception, called the question view of language he has developed, known as problematology. He pursues a systematic analysis of questioning in literature and shows how questioning makes the understanding process possible.

Over the years, the Englishes of Singapore and Malaysia have developed into varieties in their own right, ranging from the sub-varieties spoken by people with high levels of English-medium education and of higher socio-economic status. This text volume illustrates this from a range of examples of spoken and written Singapore and Malaysian English as well as advertising pamphlets, newspaper advertisements and literary texts. The introduction to the volume sketches the historical and ethnic background, the increase in the functions of English in the colonial and earlier post-colonial period and the divergent language policies which have led to a decline in the status and functions of English in Malyasia but an ever increasing emphasis on it in Singapore. Each text is accompanied by a set of notes which explain grammatical and lexical characteristics and give information about the background of the text.

It has always been thought difficult, if not impossible, to define what the philosophy of Carlyle was. Ever since the publication of Sartor Resartus in 1833-1834, the view that Carlyle had a theistic conception of the universe has been defended as well as opposed. At a time, therefore, when Carlyle’s work as a whole is being reappraised, his philosophy should first and foremost be dealt with. Carlyle’s life-philosophy is based on the inner experience of a process of ‘conversion’, which set in with an incident that occurred to him at Leith Walk, Edinburgh. This study – which settles the old question of the date of the incident – demonstrates that the inner struggle, the dynamics of which are described most fully in Sartor, is analogous to the Jungian process of individuation. For the first time in critical literature, the basic ideas of Carlyle’s philosophy are thus linked to depth psychology and shown to be analogous to the fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology.

In recent criticism, it has been asserted that the crisis recorded in Sartor is akin to the crisis of doubt said to underlie Jean Paul’s “Rede des todten Christus” (1796), which is probably the first poetic expression of nihilism in European literature and has become a classic. Apart from demonstrating that, in the last fifty years at least, the “Rede” has erroneously been interpreted as a dream of annihilation, this book invalidates the view of Jean Paul as victim of the skepticism of his age, and argues that, contrary to what is usually maintained, the “Rede” is not the document of a crisis, but of a belief which had become antiquated and obsolete for Carlyle.

Ce volume fait partie d'une série de quatre volumes consacrés aux phénomènes littéraires de la période s'étendant des Lumières à l'avènement des mouvements romantiques. Les volumes suivants traiteront de la prose et du théâtre. Sont présentés ici les genres en vers, compte tenu en particulier des changements majeurs qui ont préparé la renaissance et l'épanouissement de la poésie lyrique dans le romantisme européen. En quelques grands chapitres synthétiques, la première partie brosse un tableau des phénomènes marquant l'ensemble de la littérature européenne, tandis que la seconde passe en revue les genres en vers dans différentes zones géographiques ou aires linguistiques. L'évolution littéraire qui s'opéra à l'époque tant dans les Amériques qu'en Europe est analysée dans ce volume sous l'aspect du développement des formes versifiées, avec un luxe de détails inédits et sous des angles particulièrement originaux.

This study provides a critical analysis of the narrative works of Günter Grass, under which Die Blechtrommel, Katz und Mann, Hundejahre und Der Butt. It is of interest to everyone who wants to get a better understanding of the novels of this famous German writer.

Die vorliegende Arbeit sollte beitragen an ein besseres Verständnis der romantischen Literatur im zeitgenössischen Kontext. Es wird untersucht wie die die Klassik und die Romantik sich mit einander verhalten haben anhand von Einzelanalysen. Auf tradiotionelle Grenzen wie Früh-, Hoch- oder Spätromantik wird verzichtet, sowie auch auf die Idee daß in romantische Werke nur aesthetische Tendezen zum Ausdruck kamen; sondern daß auch politisch operative und sozialpolitische funktionale Tendenzen wichtig waren.

Francis M. Rogers, to whom the current volume is in honor of, may be a modest man in principle, but not in his academic pursuits. To call his interests broad in scope is no exaggeration as they cover the fields of linguistics, literature, philology, bibliography, travel narratives and celestial navigation, which is nicely reflected in this volume. Part I concerns general and Luso-Brazilian linguistics (Bernard H. Bichakjian, John B. Jensen, Anthony J. Naro, Joseph M. Piel, Cléa Rameh); Part II Medieval studies: Sheila R. Ackerlind, Donald Stone Jr., Paolo Valesio, Joan B. Williamson; Part III Luso-Brazilian literature (Memória de Lázaro, Frederick C.H. Garcia, David T. Haberly, Jane M. Malinoff, Noami Hoki Moniz, Maria Luisa Nunes, Noêl W. Ortega, Raymond S. Sayers, Nelson H. Vieira); and Part IV on travel literature (Mary M. Rowan, Charity Cannon Willard). This volume also contains a complete bibliography of the writings of Francis M. Rogers.

Le manuscrit 26092 de la célèbre collection de Cheltenham comprend les ouvrages suivants, dont les quatre premiers sont en vers et le cinquième en prose: 1) Hernaut de Beaulande, 2) Renier de Gennes, 3) Girart de Vienne, 4) Galien, 5) La Chronique de Saint-Denis. Une édition critique du quatrième élément est offerte dans le présent volume.

By focusing on the “East European” dialogues and polemics, both contemporary and past, the present volume pursues two aims: 1) It would like to locate the discussion between semiotics and dialectics in an historical context. 2) It would like to make the reader familiar with the solutions proposed by theoreticians like Bakhtin, Lotman, Voloshinov, Fischer and Mukařovský, solutions which, in the past, were frequently ignored by European Marxists, semioticians and sociologists of literature. At present, one cannot help feeling that if they had been familiar with the works of these authors, Marxism, Critical Theory, semiotics and the sociology of literature (of the text) would have evolved differently.