Textures of Mourning

Textures of Mourning
Author: Reginald R. Jackson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Calligraphy, Japanese
ISBN: 9780472130962

Unfolds the intimate relationship between mourning, writing, reading, painting, and viewing, through The Tale of Genji and its legacy

Material Traces of War

Material Traces of War
Author: Stacey Barker
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0776629212

This volume looks at Canadian women’s experiences of, and contributions to, the world wars through objects, images, and archival documents. The book tells the stories of women who worked as civilians, served in the military, volunteered their time, and grieved lost loved ones, through thematically organized vignettes. The authors place these personal narratives of individual woman, and their related material culture, in the wider context of the world wars while demonstrating that the experience of living through global conflict was as individual as a woman’s particular circumstances. Drawing from the collections of the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and other public and private collections in Canada, Material Traces of War brings largely unknown material culture collections to public view and draws attention to the untold stories of women and war.

A Proximate Remove

A Proximate Remove
Author: Reginald Jackson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520382552

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century text that depicts the lifestyles of aristocrats during the Heian period, A Proximate Remove explores this question by mapping the destabilizing aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological dimensions of experiencing intimacy and loss. The spatiotemporal fissures Reginald Jackson calls "proximate removes" suspend belief in prevailing structures. Beyond issues of sexuality, Genji queers in its reluctance to romanticize or reproduce a flawed social order. An understanding of this hesitation enhances how we engage with premodern texts and how we question contemporary disciplinary stances.

The Way Through the Woods

The Way Through the Woods
Author: Litt Woon Long
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 198480104X

A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing—hunting for mushrooms. “Moving . . . Long tells the story of finding hope after despair lightly and artfully, with self-effacement and so much gentle good nature.”—The New York Times Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after arriving in Norway from Malaysia as an exchange student. They fell in love, married, and settled into domestic bliss. Then Eiolf’s unexpected death at fifty-four left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been her partner and anchor for thirty-two years. Adrift in grief, she signed up for a beginner’s course on mushrooming—a course the two of them had planned to take together—and found, to her surprise, that the pursuit of mushrooms rekindled her zest for life. The Way Through the Woods tells the story of parallel journeys: an inner one, through the landscape of mourning, and an outer one, into the fascinating realm of mushrooms—resilient, adaptable, and essential to nature’s cycle of death and rebirth. From idyllic Norwegian forests and urban flower beds to the sandy beaches of Corsica and New York’s Central Park, Woon uncovers an abundance of surprises often hidden in plain sight: salmon-pink Bloody Milk Caps, which ooze red liquid when cut; delectable morels, prized for their earthy yet delicate flavor; and bioluminescent mushrooms that light up the forest at night. Along the way, she discovers the warm fellowship of other mushroom obsessives, and finds that giving her full attention to the natural world transforms her, opening a way for her to survive Eiolf’s death, to see herself anew, and to reengage with life. Praise for The Way Through the Woods “In her search for new meaning in life after the death of her husband, Long Litt Woon undertook the study of mushrooms. What she found in the woods, and expresses with such tender joy in this heartfelt memoir, was nothing less than salvation.”—Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia and Microbia

Arranging Grief

Arranging Grief
Author: Dana Luciano
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2007-11
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0814752225

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation’s standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history. Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of “sacred time” across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature

Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature
Author: Madeleine C. Seys
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-08-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351747193

We know that way we dress says a lot about us. It’s drilled into us by our parents as children, as adults throughout our working lives, and eternally from the culture surrounding us. Our dress tells the outside world of the culture and era we come from to our social status within that culture. Our dress can be telling of our political views, religious beliefs, sexuality and countless other identifying traits that we can keep hidden or show to the world by our choice of what to wear when heading venturing out. This was absolutely true, famously so, in the Victorian Era in which men and women alike wore their status on their often lavish, embellished sleeves. In her new book, Dr. Madeleine Seyes explores Victorian culture through the lens of fashion in her new book, Double Threads: Fashion and Victorian Popular Literature, which sits at the intersection of the fields of Victorian literary studies, dress and material cultural studies, feminist literary criticism, and gender and sexuality studies.

American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between

American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between
Author: Rebecca A. Sheehan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-03-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190949724

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this crucial question for the emergent field of film philosophy, American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between argues that the films of the American avant-garde do in fact do philosophy and illuminates the ethical stakes of their aesthetic interventions. Author Rebecca A. Sheehan contends that American avant-garde cinema's characteristic self-reflexivity is an interrogation of the modes and stakes of our engagement with the world on and beyond the screen. The book demonstrates this with the theory of the in-between: a pervasive figure that helps clarify how avant-garde cinema's reflections on the creation of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. The book is structured by a taxonomy of the multiple in-betweens evident in American avant-garde filmmaking. Rather than systematically seeking reproductions of particular philosophers' ideas in avant-garde films, Sheehan derives categories of analysis and the philosophical claims they disclose from close readings of the films themselves. This methodology opposes mapping preconfigured philosophical concepts and values onto these films, as too many philosophical approaches to cinema have done, silencing the philosophies uniquely articulated by these films in the interest of making them ventriloquize philosophies advanced elsewhere. The chapters of this book trace three modes of the in-between that function philosophically in American avant-garde cinema: the material, the dimensional, and the conceptual. Although the chapters are organized around discrete aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations that unify several filmmakers, these three presentations of the in-between cut through all the chapters, allowing the subjects of each to converse over the course of the book.

Ink and Tears

Ink and Tears
Author: Rania Huntington
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824867122

How does an extended family, bound by shared history, affection, and duty but divided by generation, gender, status, and personality, memorialize its dead? This fascinating study shows how members of the prominent Yu family passed down their personal and familial memories over five generations, through the traumatic transition from imperial to modern China and amidst the radical change and destruction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their memory writing is unusual and compelling for its quantity, variety, and resonance of themes across generations. It reflects a particular cultural moment and family, yet offers insight into universal practices of writing and remembrance. Ink and Tears begins and ends with the Yu family’s two most famous members: the late Qing writer Yu Yue and his great-great grandson Yu Pingbo, each among the most famous and prolific scholars of their respective generations. Over a span of one and a half centuries, they and their lesser-known female and male kin made use of an impressive diversity of genres—poetry, prefaces, biographies, diaries, correspondence, and strange tales—to preserve their family’s memories. During the times in which they wrote, the technologies of printing and the institutions of publication and book distribution were being transformed, and by the time of the great-grandchildren the language of education and governance, definitions of scholarship and literature, and the map of literary genres had all been remade. The Yus’ memory writing thus reveals not just how different family members remembered and mourned, but the changing tools they had with which to convey their loss. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Rania Huntington focuses on questions of how memory was crafted, preserved, and transmitted as much as on what was remembered, tracing common tropes and shared strategies. Her beautifully observed study will interest scholars of late imperial and early Republican literature and history, as well as readers more broadly concerned with the family, women’s writing, themes of memory and bereavement, and the personal functions of literature.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Death

A Companion to the Anthropology of Death
Author: Antonius C. G. M. Robben
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119222362

A thought-provoking examination of death, dying, and the afterlife Prominent scholars present their most recent work about mortuary rituals, grief and mourning, genocide, cyclical processes of life and death, biomedical developments, and the materiality of human corpses in this unique and illuminating book. Interrogating our most common practices surrounding death, the authors ask such questions as: How does the state wrest away control over the dead from bereaved relatives? Why do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or can human remains acquire agency? The book is a refreshing reassessment of these issues and practices, a source of theoretical inspiration in the study of death. With contributions written by an international team of experts in their fields, A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is presented in six parts and covers such subjects as: Governing the Dead in Guatemala; After Death Communications (ADCs) in North America; Cryonic Suspension in the Secular Age; Blood and Organ Donation in China; The Fragility of Biomedicine; and more. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death is a comprehensive and accessible volume and an ideal resource for senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses such as Anthropology of Death, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, Anthropology of the Body, and Political Anthropology. Written by leading international scholars in their fields A comprehensive survey of the most recent empirical research in the anthropology of death A fundamental critique of the early 20th century founding fathers of the anthropology of death Cross-cultural texts from tribal and industrial societies The collection is of interest to anyone concerned with the consequences of the state and massive violence on life and death

The Living and the Dead

The Living and the Dead
Author: Liz Wilson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791487016

This collection examines the social dimensions of death in South Asian religions, exploring the ritualized exchanges between the living and the dead performed by Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and other religious groups. Using ethnographic and historical tools associated with the comparative and historical study of religion, the contributors also record the voices and actions of marginalized groups—such as tribal peoples, women, and members of lower castes—who are often underrepresented in studies of South Asian deathways, which typically focus on the writings and practices of elite groups. For many religious people, death entails a journey leading to some new condition or place. As the ultimate experience of passage, it is highly ceremonial and ritualized, and those beliefs and practices associated with the moment of death itself—death-bed ceremonies, funerary rites, and rituals of mourning and of remembering—are examined here. The Living and the Dead offers historical depth, ethnographic detail, and conceptual clarity on a subject that is of immense importance in South Asian religious traditions.