Books on the topic 'Critical Stylistics'
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1
Jeffries, Lesley. Critical Stylistics. London: Macmillan Education UK, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04516-4.
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Jeffries, Lesley. Critical stylistics: The power of English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Critical stylistics: The power of English. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Moore, Thomas Edward. The Sis quintets per a instruments d'arc i orgue Clave Obligat by Antonio Soler: A stylistic analysis with critical commentary. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1985.
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On the poetics of the Utendi: A critical edition of the nineteenth-century Swahili poem "Utendi wa Haudaji" together with a stylistic analysis. Zürich: Lit, 2011.
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Burke, Michael. Stylistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
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Burke, Michael. Stylistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
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Creative Writing And Stylistics Creative And Critical Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
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Critical Analysis of Fiction: Essays in Discourse Stylistics (Costerus New Series). Editions Rodopi, 1992.
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Kennedy, Victor Robert, ed. Words, Music, and Propaganda: Book of Abstracts. University of Maribor Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.18690/um.ff.9.2022.
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The fifth Words and Music conference, organized by the English Department of the Faculty of Arts and the Music Department of the Faculty of Education at the University of Maribor, explores the relation between words, music and propaganda, and the place of that relation in history and in modern contemporary culture. The conference includes presentations from the fields of musicology, history, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalytic theory, Marxism, feminist theory, and translation studies, and from different critical perspectives, such as literary and linguistic analysis, Gender Studies, ethnomusicology, critical musicology, stylistics, and popular music studies, applied to genres including folk and protest music, American and European jazz, popular and classical music, rock, and rap.
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Nose: A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol's Story. Academic Studies Press, 2021.
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Blank, Ksana. Nose: A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol's Story. Academic Studies Press, 2021.
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"the Nose": A Stylistic and Critical Companion to Nikolai Gogol's Story. Academic Studies Press, 2021.
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Masters, Ben. Twenty-First-Century Excess. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0005.
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This chapter evaluates the legacy of Burgess, Carter, and Amis by examining the work of a new generation of excessive English stylists, including Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell. It begins by showing how arguments similar to those made against stylistic prolixity in the aftermath of World War Two have resurfaced post-9/11. It goes on, through close readings of three novels (NW, Darkmans, Cloud Atlas), to show how this newer generation of writers has adapted and expanded the methods of the earlier stylists of excess by staging a return to ideas of character, interiority, and empathy in a way that still prioritizes authorial style and amplitude. With reference to Dorothy Hale’s notion of the aesthetics of alterity, it shows how these authors have made innovative use of free indirect style and polyphony to create a critical empathy that self-reflexively trains us to apprehend its own limitations.
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Jordan, Randolph. Acoustical Properties. Edited by Yael Kaduri. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199841547.013.44.
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One of the defining thematic preoccupations in the fiction filmmaking of Philippe Grandrieux, one of the leading figures in French Art Cinema, is that of the politics of property. InSombre, La Vie Nouvelle, andUn Lac, the relationship dynamics between a woman and a variety of agents competing to claim her are mapped out in the overlap between different registers of space. This overlap opens up complex dynamics between differing spatial practices that are evident within Grandrieux’s narratives and the stylistics with which he shapes them, breaking down conventional understanding of the distance between screen and audience. This chapter argues that one cannot account for the richness of spatial practice in these films without attention to the representation of acoustic space. Drawing on recent concepts in sound studies and critical geography, and expanding upon the literature on Grandrieux’s work, the author focuses on instances of spatial delineation that defines elements of owned property in each of these films.
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Matzner, Sebastian, and Gail Trimble, eds. Metalepsis. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846987.001.0001.
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‘Metalepsis’ is a classical term. Ancient critics, however, only used it within the confines of rhetoric and stylistics to describe certain usages akin to metaphor and metonymy. In the twentieth century, metalepsis was then reframed much more broadly as a crossing of the boundaries that separate distinct narrative worlds. This modern notion of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette, has proved highly insightful for exploring interactions between the worlds of author and text, such as scenarios in fiction—typically postmodern, typically novelistic or cinematic—where an author and a character enter into conversation. Yet metalepsis has a much greater potential to address all sorts of transgressions between ‘worlds’ or ‘levels’, not only in postmodern but also pre-modern literature. If metalepsis consists fundamentally in the breaking down of barriers, to what sort of barriers and what sort of transgressions can the concept be fruitfully applied? Can it be used within approaches other than narratology? Does metalepsis require recognizable levels of reality and fictionality, and if so, what role might be played by other planes, such as the past, the mythical, or the divine? What form does metalepsis take in less obviously ‘narrative’ genres (such as lyric poetry)? And how should it be understood in visual media (such as vase-painting)? As classicists begin to examine what metalepsis might mean in ancient literature, this volume uses such questions to consider where metalepsis can most productively join other critical concepts in classical research, and how explorations of ancient metalepsis might change, refine, or extend our understanding of the concept itself.
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Saylor, Eric. What Is Pastoralism? University of Illinois Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252041099.003.0002.
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This chapter establishes a framework for understanding pastoralism from both expressive and stylistic perspectives. The first half of the chapter draws upon the work of various literary critics (including Paul Alpers, Terry Gifford, and Annabel Patterson) in order to establish three broad thematic or topical categories for pastoral artworks: Arcadian, soft, and hard. The remainder of the chapter examines pastoralism in terms of its style, providing an overview of both the musical traits associated with it and the major critical and interpretive issues they raise—most notably, concerns with pastoralism’s perceived engagement with the feminine.
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Godfrey, Laura Christine. Creating a Nonpatriarchal Lineage in Bertha Harris’s Lover. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039805.003.0010.
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Bertha Harris' 1976 novel Lover garnered critical attention for its postmodern style, its commentary on lesbian identity, its use of nonlinear time in narration, and its redefinition of familial relations. Yet, one stylistic choice that is most apparent in reading the novel is absent from most critical investigation. Throughout the novel, Harris prefaces each chapter with an epigraph about a female saint, usually consisting of a few sentences on her life and death, yet these prominent pieces have been overlooked by all but one critic in the small pantheon of Lover criticism. This chapter proposes that Harris uses saints' narratives to provide alternative biological and familial connections in her creation of a nonpatriarchal lineage for women who seek to escape the confines of traditional gender roles.
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Berman, Joshua A. Conclusion: A New Path Forward. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658809.003.0015.
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The conclusion argues that to renew the field of Pentateuchal criticism—indeed, the historical-critical paradigm in biblical studies more broadly—historical-critical scholars will need to adopt three new priorities in their work. The first is an epistemological shift toward modesty in our goals and toward accepting contingency in our results. The second is a far greater understanding of the rhetorical and compositional practices of the ancient Near East as we adduce notions of what constitutes a fissure in a text and how the biblical texts grew over time. Finally, scholars will need to ground their compositional theories in a new level of linguistic and stylistic analysis, which is now available through the recently launched Tiberias Project: A Web Application for the Stylistic Analysis and Categorization of Hebrew Scriptures, directed by the author of the book, Joshua Berman, and the computational linguist, Moshe Koppel.
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Freeze, Timothy. Popular Music and the Colloquial Tone in the Posthorn Solos of Mahler’s Third Symphony. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199316090.003.0010.
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The posthorn solos in the trios of the third movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony have polarised critical and scholarly opinion regarding their stylistic origins. My examination places the posthorn solos in the context of the popular music of Mahler’s day. Drawing on contemporary reviews, sheet music, and military band manuscripts in Austrian and German archives, I uncover palpable references, since forgotten or neglected, both to the genre of sentimental trumpet solos, common in salon music and band concerts, and to posthorn stylisations distinctive to popular music. Mahler demonstrably knew these repertoires, and critics often cited them in reviews. These allusions do not negate the solos’ likenesses to folk song and the sound of actual posthorns. Rather, Mahler’s score refers to multiple musical styles without being reducible to any one of them.
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Mirka, Danuta, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199841578.001.0001.
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The concept of topics was introduced into the vocabulary of music scholars by Leonard Ratner to account for cross-references between eighteenth-century styles and genres. The emergence of this phenomenon followed the rapid proliferation and consolidation of stylistic and generic categories. While music theorists and critics classified styles and genres, defining their affects and proper contexts for their usage, composers crossed the boundaries between them, using stylistic conventions as means of communication with the audience. Such topical use of styles and genres out of their proper contexts and their mixtures with other styles and genres became the hallmark of South-German instrumental music, which engulfed the so-called Viennese Classicism. Since this music did not develop its own aesthetics and, in its days, received no adequate critical appraisal, topic theory developed from Ratner’s seminal insight by Wye J. Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, and others can be considered a theory of this music, andThe Oxford Handbook of Topic Theorygoes some way toward reconstructing its aesthetic underpinnings. The volume grounds the concept of topics in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism; documents historical reality of individual topics on the basis of eighteenth-century sources, traces the origins of topical mixtures to transformations of eighteenth-century musical life, and relates topical analysis to other kinds of music analysis conducted from the perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners. It lays the foundation under further investigation of musical topics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
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Clayton, Wickham. SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL! University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830319.001.0001.
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SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL!: Experiencing Friday the 13th, is the first book entirely devoted to the analysis of the Friday the 13 th franchise. The story a film tells is usually filtered through a particular perspective, or point of view. This book argues that slasher films, and the Friday the 13th movies particularly, use all the stylistic tools at their disposal to create a complex and emotionally intense approach to perspective, which develops and shifts across the decades. Chapter one discusses the history of perspective in horror, and the different critical conversations around this. Chapter two looks at the use of camerawork, specifically point-of-view camerawork in the way these films visually communicate perspective. The fourth chapter talks about the way sound and editing work together to communicate perspective and experience in the death sequences these movies capitalize upon. The fourth chapter considers the perspective of viewers, and how each movie speaks to viewers who are either familiar or unfamiliar with the ongoing story in the series. The final chapter first explains how these trends look across a chronological timeline, and what this tells us about the historical development of perspective before looking at the influence these stylistic approaches have had on ‘serious’ film, particularly those recognized by the Hollywood critical establishment.
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Saylor, Eric. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252041099.003.0001.
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The introduction lays out the paradoxical nature of early twentieth-century pastoral music, contrasting its large-scale popularity among listeners with its long-term critical dismissal. However, if considered as a manifestation of what Peter Stansky calls the “radical domestic”—the bringing about of significant cultural changes incrementally, so as to avoid political and social disruption—then pastoralism actually reflects an important facet of British musical modernism. Arising after 1920, this new idiom departed from more traditional evocations of the pastoral associated with the Romantic era, but still embraced a similarly broad array of topics even as the stylistic range began to narrow.
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Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. Suspiria. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9780993238475.001.0001.
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As one of the most globally recognisable instances of 20th-century Eurohorror, Dario Argento's Suspiria (1976) is poetic, chaotic, and intriguing. The cult reputation of Argento's baroque nightmare is reflected in the critical praise it continues to receive almost 40 years after its original release, and it appears regularly on lists of the greatest horror films ever. For fans and critics alike, Suspiria is as mesmerising as it is impenetrable: the impact of Argento's notorious disinterest in matters of plot and characterisation combines with Suspiria's aggressive stylistic hyperactivity to render it a movie that needs to be experienced through the body as much as through emotion or the intellect. For its many fans, Suspiria is synonymous with European horror more broadly, and Argento himself is by far the most famous of all the Italian horror directors. If there was any doubt of his status as one of the great horror auteurs, Argento's international reputation was solidified well beyond the realms of cult fandom in the 1990s with retrospectives at both the American Museum of the Moving Image and the British Film Institute. This book considers the complex ways that Argento weaves together light, sound and cinema history to construct one of the most breathtaking horror movies of all time, a film as fascinating as it is ultimately unfathomable.
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Levin, Yael. Joseph Conrad. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001.
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The book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad’s contribution to literary history. It utilizes emerging critical modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction, to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition. It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad’s writing and uncover the author’s exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito. Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction: character, narration, focalization, language, and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer conceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and interdependent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavors have long been held separate from Conrad’s. In the spirit of current reexaminations of modernism and critical endeavors to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad’s art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand, and evaluate information. Thematic, stylistic, and philosophical instantiations of the slow are offered here as a gauge for this meaningful transformation.
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Whitesell, Lloyd. Wonderful Design. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190843816.001.0001.
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Glamour is an elusive aspect of cinematic style. This book critically examines previous scholarship on glamour; defines the concept as a compound of artifice, allure, and magic; and examines the phenomenon at work in the genre of the film musical. The focus is on the role of music in representing glamour, and the stylistic and semiotic conventions by which glamour is embodied in sound. The book develops an analytical framework that applies across media, the better to appreciate music’s collaborative role within multimedia spectacle. First, glamour is situated as one of a handful of “style modes” orienting stylistic treatment in musical numbers. Second, glamour is shown to blend four distinct aesthetic parameters: sensuousness, restraint, elevation, and sophistication. Instead of being interpreted in relation to film narrative, the musical number is treated as a semiautonomous locus of meaning and expression, with its own formal demands and the power to eclipse narrative logic. Dozens of musical numbers are analyzed, drawn from more than eighty films, exploring glamour from the perspectives of arranging and orchestrational technique, the fantasies awoken in the spectator, and the invocation of magical belief. Anticonsumerist critiques of glamour are evaluated alongside counterarguments upholding glamour’s transformative and sustaining potential. Concluding discussion shows how the musical genre has affinities with the hybrid aesthetic of “magical realism.”
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Türk, Johannes. At the Limits of Rhetoric. Edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199916931.013.40.
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This chapter analyzes the systematic relationship of Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre to rhetoric, arguing that his work cannot be detached from its engagement in a simultaneously metaphysical and historical polemic. The encounter between history and metaphysics manifests in the dimension of the commonplace. Schmitt’s contributions to political theory can be understood as attempts to shift the commonplaces through which his time defines itself. Tracing the influence of Schmitt’s early literary criticism on his legal writing, the chapter demonstrates that for him, literature is a school of rhetoric, an exemplary dimension in more than one sense: it is a normative, ethical, and stylistic authority. While Schmitt’s books are contributions to specific legal, political, and critical discourse, they also claim to contribute to the great and urgent concerns of a community. This dimension inherits the genus grande and places his oeuvre at the limits of rhetoric.
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Bloomer, W. Martin. Latinitas. Edited by Daniel S. Richter and William A. Johnson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199837472.013.5.
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This chapter examines the idea of Latinitas, Latinity, the quality of writing and speaking a pure Latin, which in its history from the beginnings of Latin literature in the third century bce has been both a socio-linguistic and a literary critical, stylistic category. Constitutive influences have been the standardization of the language of the capital as the language of an empire, the development of Latin literary styles, and the teaching of Latin in the various Roman schools. Latin was the dialect of Latium, the sociolect of the ruling elite, the language of imperial and military administration, and as a consequence of the last a far-flung language. Latinity as a norm thus faced considerable challenges. In the context of the later schools, ancient and medieval, Latinity came to be a norm to preserve the written language and a science (grammar) to discover and check rules of orthography and expression.
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Bauer, Nancy. Simone De Beauvoir: The Second Sex. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190608811.003.0007.
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This chapter is a reprint of a book review of the new translation of The Second Sex, which raises questions about its success in rendering Beauvoir’s thought into English. Siding with critical scholars like Toril Moi, Bauer argues that Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation is disappointing. The translation obscures Beauvoir’s philosophical insights by too often sacrificing readability and clear renditions of Beauvoir’s reasoning to word-by-word translations of Beauvoir’s long sentences and uncommon stylistic choices. This is due to the inexperience of the translators, who, Bauer claims, had never before translated such French theoretical writing and had no experience dealing with the “conceptual and rhetorical challenges” of Le deuxiéme sexe. Overall, Bauer’s review echoes the long history of the discounting of and underappreciation of feminist work as reflected in translation practices that assume women’s interests, writing, and scholarship to be tangential to scholarly research.
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Nelson, Louis P. Church Building and Architecture. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199644636.003.0018.
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Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.
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Conolly, Jez, and Emma Westwood. Seconds. Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800859289.001.0001.
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Seconds: John Frankenheimer's criminally overlooked monolith of paranoia, part Science Fiction, part Body Horror, part noir thriller cum black comedy, a film found at the intersection of the post-McCarthy mindset, European Art Cinema, the suburban identity nightmares of The Twilight Zone and the mid-life crises of malehood aroused by 1960s counterculture. Arguably the bleakest mainstream Hollywood film ever made, it was famously booed at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and was a box office failure upon release. Over time, the film’s critical reception has gradually turned to acknowledge its significance in the scheme of American Cinema but, throughout the wider Science Fiction Cinema community, it remains surprisingly under appreciated. This book sets out to shed light on the film’s many attributes, from its stylistic significance to its political commentary, countering the critical dismissal of a film suffering from ‘personality disorder’ to suggest that instead Seconds turned its inner identity crisis from a vice into a virtue. In the spirit of the finest Science Fiction, Seconds is both emblematic of the time in which it was made and perpetually relevant to new audiences as a portent of things to come or, for that matter, a startling reveal of the hidden here and now.
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Golburt, Luba. Alexander Pushkin as a Romantic. Edited by Paul Hamilton. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.27.
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This chapter maintains that Pushkin’s artistic project illuminates a paradoxical convergence of nationalism and internationalism at the core of both European and Russian Romanticism: the period’s concurrent commitment, on the national as well as individual scale, to creative solipsismandto circuits of intellectual exchange opened up by the Enlightenment across Europe; its introspection and extroversion; its vitalizing yet ambivalent comparatism. Pushkin’s formal and stylistic versatility appears to revel in, but also critically interrogate, the creative possibilities inherent in a country fashioning its modern national culture by means of appropriation. This investment in comparative cultural (de)construction, at once playful and serious, persists as a unifying thread throughout Pushkin’s otherwise insistently versatile oeuvre and could be productively singled out as the defining feature of his Romanticism.
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Pravadelli, Veronica. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038778.003.0001.
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This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.
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Dawson, Anna. Studying The Lord of the Rings. Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800348530.001.0001.
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Unquestionably the first cinematic phenomenon of the twenty-first century, Peter Jackson's trilogy was a project of enormous artistic vision and financial risk. It is also a rich text for those studying film and media, perhaps for the first time. Studying The Lord of the Rings is the first book to consider the films in these terms, looking in turn at each of the major concepts: their complex origins and narrative structure; issues of representation masculinity, femininity and race; their generic patterns (to which genre do the films belong?) and thematic concerns; their industrial context from theatrical release to DVD extended editions; film language fusing classical mise-en-scène with cutting-edge technological practice. The aim throughout is to highlight critical debates and key terms, to relate these to the texts and to explore their stylistic and cultural impact. This Student Edition (a previously published Instructor's Edition is available) brings the story up to date with reflections on The Hobbit films.
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Leighton, Angela. Walter Pater’s Dream Rhythms. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198737827.003.0014.
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This chapter considers how Walter Pater, singing master of the aesthetes, constantly pushes language beyond the purely grammatical and expositional, in order to think through an idea which may not be simply recoverable as a ‘statement’. Many critics have pointed to Pater’s stylistic tricks of delay and postponement—terms which by their very nature suggest ‘something’ to be delayed or postponed. What is interesting, however, is the way that postponement might be in the very nature of Pater’s thinking, connected to his philosophical sense of life as a non-heuristic, passenger experience. In particular, the chapter looks at his oddly fussy punctuation, especially his dashes, both as a means to notate the rhythms of his writing, but also as a way to signal pauses which radically derail the logic of thought.
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Darrigol, Olivier. Atoms, Mechanics, and Probability. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816171.001.0001.
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One of the pillars of modern science, statistical mechanics, owes much to one man, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906). As a result of his unusual working and writing styles, his enormous contribution remains little read and poorly understood. The purpose of this book is to make the Boltzmann corpus more accessible to physicists, philosophers, and historians, and so give it new life. The means are introductory biographical and historical materials, detailed and lucid summaries of every relevant publication, and a final chapter of critical synthesis. Special attention is given to Boltzmann’s theoretical tool-box and to his patient construction of lofty formal systems, even before their full conceptual import could be known. This constructive tendency largely accounts for his lengthy style, for the abundance of new constructions, for the relative vagueness of their object, and for the puzzlement of commentators. This book will help the reader cross the stylistic barrier and see how ingeniously Boltzmann combined atoms, mechanics, and probability to invent new bridges between the micro- and macro-worlds.
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Wilson, Deirdre. Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0011.
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This concluding chapter reflects in general terms on some aspects of relevance theory that have been fruitfully used in the analyses in this volume, and on some aspects of literary communication that have been seen by both supporters and critics of relevance theory as showing the need for modifications to the inferential mechanisms it proposes. After distinguishing comprehension (identifying the intended import of a communicative act) from interpretation (going beyond the intended import to draw one’s own conclusions), it discusses a range of stylistic and rhetorical effects—typically created by departures from expected syntax, lexis, or prosody—which provide tentative cues to ostension and therefore create greater expectations of relevance. It ends by considering how relevance theory might deal with the ‘non-propositional effects’ associated with images, emotions, and sensorimotor processes while remaining within the bounds of a properly inferential theory.
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Foltz, Jonathan. Fables of Detachment. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190676490.003.0002.
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This chapter outlines the way that film shaped key modernist debates about aesthetic form and the elevation of literature as a form of art. It draws on a range of contemporaneous theories of aesthetic form—from those of Roger Fry and Clive Bell to those of Vernon Lee, José Ortega y Gasset, I. A. Richards, and William Empson—and suggests that critics have failed adequately to credit the historical anxiety about media and mediation implicit in modernist constructions of autonomy. The desire to distinguish the purity of artistic form from ordinary modes of lived perception frequently led theorists to ponder, and puzzle at, the remarkable impurity of cinema. Indeed, film in the modernist period was commonly understood as a figure of aesthetic paradox: lacking the purposive form and stylistic nuance of true art, yet also exemplifying the detachment from life that art was held to achieve.
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Uva, Christian. Sergio Leone. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190942687.001.0001.
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Spectacle, myth, fable. These are the main categories that have traditionally defined Sergio Leone’s cinematic production, but it is necessary to underline how much they are fueled by a profound, layered political interest. Leone’s cinema bears witness to a critical outlook both on the subjects it showcases and on its representational means. Far from any militancy and escaping ideological classifications, Leone’s perspective is problematic and unreconciled: it is grounded in the coexistence of different elements in a state of perennial productive tension and instability. The adjective “political” takes on a deeper meaning when it is used to denote the director’s ability to narrate and interpret key aspects of Italian national identity and history. The abstract quality of his production relies on an original use of different genres, particularly sword-and-sandal and the Spaghetti Western, which allowed Leone to insert frequent symbolic references to both history and then-current events. On the stylistic level, his constant disobedience to classical models and his need to revolutionize forms were motivated by an authorial desire to make films politically, though still within a conception of cinema as an industrial spectacle.
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Mitchell, Neil. Carrie. Liverpool University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733728.001.0001.
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Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, Carrie (1976), is one of the defining films of 1970s ‘New Hollywood’ style and a horror classic. The story of a teenage social outcast who discovers she possesses latent psychic powers that allow her to deliver retribution to her peers, teachers, and abusive mother, Carrie was an enormous commercial and critical success and is still one of the finest screen adaptations of a King novel. This book not only breaks the film down into its formal components — its themes, stylistic tropes, technical approaches, uses of colour and sound, dialogue, and visual symbolism — but also considers a multitude of other factors contributing to the work's classic status. The act of adapting King's novel for the big screen, the origins of the novel itself, the place of Carrie in De Palma's oeuvre, the subsequent versions and sequel, and the social, political, and cultural climate of the era (including the influence of second wave feminism, loosening sexual norms, and changing representations of adolescence), as well as the explosion of interest in and the evolution of the horror genre during the decade, are all shown to have played an important part in the film's success and enduring reputation.
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Saylor, Eric. Afterword. University of Illinois Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252041099.003.0007.
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The disparate approaches to English pastoralism considered within this book—whether evoking scenes and characters from classical poetry, depicting an imaginary past or a hoped-for future, responding to the landscape, commenting on contemporary social and political challenges, providing spiritual sustenance for the living, or eulogizing the dead—firmly banish outdated clichés of it as little more than folky-wolky roister-doistering. Instead, pastoralism stands revealed as a subtle and flexible expressive mode capable of transcending the circumstances and surroundings of its creation, conveyed by a distinctive and highly adaptable array of stylistic traits. But in the wake of Finzi’s death in 1956 and Vaughan Williams’s only two years later, English pastoral music fell into relative obscurity. Composers who had written pastoral works in previous decades (including Howells, Ireland, and Bliss) had either largely turned away from the idiom or limited it to certain smaller-scale or niche contexts (such as church music, in Howells’s case). Meanwhile, the rise of both a prominent British avant-garde musical movement during the later 1950s and an extraordinarily vital pop music scene in the following decade made it difficult for the older, less demonstrative pastoral style to hold the public or critical imagination....
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Shippey, Tom. Hard Reading. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781382615.001.0001.
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This book makes an argument for the intellectual ambition and intellectual achievement of science fiction, a genre consistently undervalued by professional literary critics. It is pointed out repeatedly how much the genre owes to developments in anthropology, history, and other “soft sciences”; how the authority of the hard sciences is both asserted and challenged; and how the authority of ancient myths and modern values are likewise interrogated, with widely variant results. Science fiction, it is argued, has been a collective “thinking machine” for authors and readers alike, often (and especially in its early years) people without academic experience or intellectual support. It has been (but increasingly less so) a genre for autodidacts. Reading and writing it is nevertheless an education in itself, as the author shows with repeated personal prefaces both to the book as a whole and to each chapter. Science fiction, finally, has its own rhetoric, seen in neologisms, paratextual devices, anachronisms, breaches of stylistic decorum, and the manipulation of degraded information, techniques little understood by and often incomprehensible to critics used only to the conventions of mainstream literature. All these features contribute to the description of science fiction as hard reading, but correspondingly rewarding reading. They have made science fiction the most characteristic literary genre of the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries.
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Kleppinger, Kathryn A. Branding the 'Beur' Author. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781381960.001.0001.
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Branding the Beur Author analyzes mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France (often called beurs). Launched in the early 1980s, conversations between journalists and ‘beur’ authors delve into contemporary debates such as racism in the 1980s and Islam in French society in the 1990s. But the interests of journalists looking for sensational subject matter also heavily shape the promotion and reception of these novels: only the ‘beur’ authors who use a realist style to write about the challenges faced by the North African immigrant population in France—and who engage on-air with French identity politics and immigration—receive multiple invitations to participate in interviews. Previous scholarship has taken a necessary first step by analyzing the social and political stakes of this literature (using labels such as ‘beur’ and/or ‘banlieue,’ to designate its urban, economically distressed setting), but this book argues that this approach reproduces the selection criteria deployed by the media that determine which texts receive commercial and critical support. By demonstrating how minority-based literary labels such as ‘francophone’ and ‘postcolonial’ are always already defined by the socio-political context in which such works are published and promoted, this book establishes that these labels are tautological and cannot reflect the thematic and stylistic richness of beur (and other minority) production in France.
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Harford Vargas, Jennifer. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190642853.003.0001.
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This introduction lays out the book’s key terms and methodologies. First it asserts that there is a subgenre of Latina/o fiction that depicts the aftermath of Latin American authoritarian regimes alongside authoritarian structures and discourses of power that minorities and migrants face in the United States and that these novels dramatize these linkages at the levels of both content and form. It then outlines how these novels broaden the thematic concerns, character types, and stylistic features of this subgenre through their development of a Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary and deployment of narrative form to critically represent forms of dictatorial power. Furthermore, it positions these novels as postdictatorship and postmemory novels to mark their geographic, historical, generational, thematic, and conceptual distance and difference from Latin American political regimes and novels. It ends by laying out the conceptual utility of its pan-ethnic and transnational Latina/o literary analyses. It thus demonstrates how genre provides a means to understanding shared formal strategies and political concerns across Latina/o groups, at the same time demonstrating how to unpack hemispheric relations through the aesthetic forms and transnational subjectivities that constitute the imaginative horizon of the Latina/o dictatorship novel.
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Kennedy, Sue, and Jane Thomas, eds. British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621822.001.0001.
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British Women Writers 1930 – 1960: Between the Waves contributes to the vital recuperative work on mid-twentieth century writing by and for women. Fourteen original essays from leading academics and emerging critical voices shed new light on writers commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of the fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism of a selection authors including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. The neologism ‘interfeminism’, coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’, locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths which have traditionally overshadowed its members. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing, the volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the inter- and post- bellum anticipate the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterize second and third wave feminism. Exploration of popular women’s magazines of the period, and new archival material, add an innovative dimension to this study of the literature of a volatile and transformative period of British social and cultural history.
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Kudryavtseva, Tamara V., and Alla A. Strelnikova, eds. Russia – Germany: Literary Encounters (after 1945). A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/978-5-9208-0683-3.
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This book continues to introduce the reader to Russian-German literary relations in the 20th century. The results of the first stage of the research were presented in the collective work Russia — Germany: Literary Encounters (1918–1945) published by A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2017 with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research grant no. № 17-04-16003. The present study analyzes mutual influences, intersections, typological similarities, receptive projections and imagological concepts occurring at the borders of the cultural spaces of Germany and Russia in the second half of the 20th and the first third of the 21st century. The aim of this work is to complement or amend the existing knowledge of the literary and cultural interactions of the two countries after 1945. Like in the first book, special attention is paid to identifying the mechanisms of the perception of a foreign literature in the context of national regulatory language usage paradigm. The book studies direct and indirect contacts between the two literatures and helps isolate single elements of critical reflection in the field of meaning-making and on the level of the formation of motific, aesthetic and stylistic models of the text. This work, which includes the articles written by thirty Russian researches, is of theoretical and practical value and appeals to specialists in comparative studies, intercultural communication, history of German and Russian literature, as well as to a wide audience interested in these problems.
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Seeley, William P. Attentional Engines. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190662158.001.0001.
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What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.
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Beasley, Rebecca. Russomania. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198802129.001.0001.
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Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature’s emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in ‘life’ at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.