A Kamigata Anthology

A Kamigata Anthology
Author: Sumie Jones
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2020-02-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0824881818

This is the first of a three-volume anthology of Edo- and Meiji-era urban literature that includes An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850 and A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Metropolis, 1850–1920. The present work focuses on the years in which bourgeois culture first emerged in Japan, telling the story of the rising commoner arts of Kamigata, or the “Upper Regions” of Kyoto and Osaka, which harkened back to Japan’s middle ages even as they rebelled against and competed with that earlier era. Both cities prided themselves on being models and trendsetters in all cultural matters, whether arts, crafts, books, or food. The volume also shows how elements of popular arts that germinated during this period ripened into the full-blown consumer culture of the late-Edo period. The tendency to imagine Japan’s modernity as a creation of Western influence since the mid-nineteenth century is still strong, particularly outside Japan studies. A Kamigata Anthology challenges such assumptions by illustrating the flourishing phenomenon of Japan’s movement into its own modernity through a selection of the best examples from the period, including popular genres such as haikai poetry, handmade picture scrolls, travel guidebooks, kabuki and joruri plays, prose narratives of contemporary life, and jokes told by professional entertainers. Well illustrated with prints from popular books of the time and hand scrolls and standing screens containing poems and commentaries, the entertaining and vibrant translations put a spotlight on texts currently unavailable in English.

Mongrel

Mongrel
Author: William Dicey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016
Genre: Books and reading
ISBN: 9781415206881

"From a carcass competition in the Karoo to a shambolic murder trial in Cape Town, William Dicey's essays freewheel across an open terrain of interests. Dicey is curious and inventive, weaving strands of essay, journalism, fiction and self-reportage into something uniquely his own. Mongrel investigates a range of topics - radical environmentalism, the fault lines between farmer and farm worker, the joys and sorrows of reading - yet drifts of concern and sensibility draw the collection together. Several essays touch on how books can move, and sometimes maul, their readers. Mongrel is idiosyncratic, witty, potent."--From back cover.

Different Essays

Different Essays
Author: Charles Pinwill
Publisher: Balboa Press
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2021-04-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1982290099

These are easily the most challenging essays on the planet. Pinwill is an original conceptual thinker with a dry sense of humor and turn of phrase. Whether its politics, national economics, history, theology or money his writing all comes from somewhere different. You’ll need to buy his essays to discover whether you love or hate them. He has even thrown in the first Profit and Loss Account ever done for the United States, and the first Comprehensive Balance Sheet ever done for Australia, to show us that he is not just a pretty face and a comedian. His “Mongrel Dog” articles are all at the expense of politicians. His pieces on money leave all bankers’ ears burning. He proves with very scholarly accounts that modern nations are profitable, and suggests that the profit might be distributed as a National Dividend rather than a National Debt. Yes, he certainly comes from another place and is going to a different one as well. Walk with him for a mile and you will feel the seductive attraction of his destination.

Mongrel Tongue

Mongrel Tongue
Author: Megin Jimenez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2019-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9780999004975

Poetry. Fiction. Women's Studies. Latinx Studies. A mongrel tongue is a language, like English, made up of words imposed by, borrowed, inherited, pilfered, and misheard from many different languages. A mongrel tongue is a language of the mixed-up descendants of the colonized, the crimson-lipped feminized, the weepy survivors of a fevered nostalgia, and hybrid beasts of the deep. We turn to a mongrel tongue when the stories we've been told have calcified into media narratives, advertising, and purebred political campaigns, and we wish to write another story, whose ending is yet unknown. "With lyrical brilliance and discipline, Megin Jiménez's MONGREL TONGUE swerves through the many ways we live with and among disaster. The narratives here are boundless; everywhere there is a body searching for home, a political exile, a climate refugee, a body that's absorbed, a body that refuses to be absorbed, a body that refuses to disappear into history. I'm thrilled by the vibrancy of this debut, by the worlds it creates amid worlds that make us vanish."--Daniel Borzutzky "These are half stories from a fully experienced observer, peering out at the light that brings her the news. The new world is here still being discovered by a woman we recognize by her likeness to another woman we don't recognize. A hilarious a prophetic book that is tragic at heart."--Fanny Howe "Eschewing purity of all kinds, the prose poems and hybrid pieces in MONGREL TONGUE call themselves novel, document, story, tale, interview, history, invocation. This startling book revels in the translator's gulf, nomadically moving through the clutter of the world, offering slippages and valences galore."--Shanna Compton

Make It the Same

Make It the Same
Author: Jacob Edmond
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231548672

The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.

Selected Political Writings

Selected Political Writings
Author: Stuart Hall
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2017-02-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822372940

Selected Political Writings gathers Stuart Hall's best-known and most important essays that directly engage with political issues. Written between 1957 and 2011 and appearing in publications such as New Left Review and Marxism Today, these twenty essays span the whole of Hall's career, from his early involvement with the New Left, to his critique of Thatcherism, to his later focus on neoliberalism. Whether addressing economic decline and class struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the politics of empire, Hall's singular commentary and theorizations make this volume essential for anyone interested in the politics of the last sixty years.

Cooper's Works

Cooper's Works
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher:
Total Pages: 740
Release: 1855
Genre: American literature
ISBN:

Cyber Zen

Cyber Zen
Author: Gregory Price Grieve
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317293266

Cyber Zen ethnographically explores Buddhist practices in the online virtual world of Second Life. Does typing at a keyboard and moving avatars around the screen, however, count as real Buddhism? If authentic practices must mimic the actual world, then Second Life Buddhism does not. In fact, a critical investigation reveals that online Buddhist practices have at best only a family resemblance to canonical Asian traditions and owe much of their methods to the late twentieth-century field of cybernetics. If, however, they are judged existentially, by how they enable users to respond to the suffering generated by living in a highly mediated consumer society, then Second Life Buddhism consists of authentic spiritual practices. Cyber Zen explores how Second Life Buddhist enthusiasts form communities, identities, locations, and practices that are both products of and authentic responses to contemporary Network Consumer Society. Gregory Price Grieve illustrates that to some extent all religion has always been virtual and gives a glimpse of possible future alternative forms of religion.

Virtual Orientalism

Virtual Orientalism
Author: Jane Naomi Iwamura
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2011
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0199738602

Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American pop culture scene. Jane Iwamura examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Initial engagements with Asian spiritual heritages were mediated by monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals, to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of translation'' - a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the non-sexual, solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable - psychologically, socially, and politically - for American popular culture.