Archaeology of Babel

Archaeology of Babel
Author: Siraj Ahmed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503604047

For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Oral Tradition and Book Culture

Oral Tradition and Book Culture
Author: Pertti Anttonen
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2018-09-28
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9518580073

A new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. The present volume is highly relevant to anyone interested in oral cultures and their relationship to the culture of writing and publishing. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective?

Participation

Participation
Author: Claire Bishop
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Participation in art has become a prevalent and contested phenomenon since the 1990s. Artists have increasingly sought to create situations and events that invite spectators to become active participants, in dialogue both with their context and with each other. This reader charts a historical lineage and theoretical framework for this tendency, presented through the writings of artists, curators and philosophers from the late 1950s to the present--Publisher's description.

Theory of Literature

Theory of Literature
Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 9781628972832

Theory of Literature was born from the collaboration of Ren Wellek, a Vienna-born student of Prague School linguistics, and Austin Warren, an independently minded "old New Critic." Unlike many other textbooks of its era, however, this classic kowtows to no dogma and toes no party line. Wellek and Warren looked at literature as both a social product--influenced by politics, economics, etc.--as well as a self-contained system of formal structures. Incorporating examples from Aristotle to Coleridge, written in clear, uncondescending prose, Theory of Literature is a work which, especially in its suspicion of simplistic explanations and its distrust of received wisdom, remains extremely relevant to the study of literature today.

The World, the Text, and the Critic

The World, the Text, and the Critic
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1983
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674961876

Said demonstrates that critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault and by influences like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. But, he argues, these forces have compelled literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.