Founding Fictions

Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Jennifer R. Mercieca and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extended analysis of how Americans imagined themselves as citizens between 1764 and 1845 Founding Fictions develops the concept of a “political fiction,” or a narrative that people tell about their own political theories, and analyzes how republican and democratic fictions positioned American citizens as either romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. By re-telling the stories that Americans have told themselves about citizenship, Mercieca highlights an important contradiction in American political theory and practice: that national stability and active citizen participation are perceived as fundamentally at odds.

Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Amy Boesky and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of utopian writing in early modern England, Founding Fictions traces the development of the genre from the publication of Thomas More's Utopia (1516) through Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). Amy Boesky sees utopian literature rising alongside new social institutions that helped shape the modern English nation. While utopian fiction explicitly advocates a reorganization of human activity, which appears liberal or progressive, utopias represent reform in self-critical or qualitative ways. Early modern utopias, Boesky demonstrates, are less blueprints for reform than they are challenges to the very possibility of improvement. After an initial discussion of More's Utopia, Boesky devotes subsequent chapters to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the Civil War Utopias of Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Gott, and Gerrard Winstanley, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing-world, and Henry Neville's Isle of Pines. Relating the English public school to More's Utopia, and early modern laboratories to Bacon's New Atlantis, Boesky shows how utopists explored the formation of cultural identity through new institutional models. Utopias of the 1640s and 1650s are read against new emphasis on work as the panacea for social ills; Cavendish's Blazing-world is seen as reproducing and reassessing restoration centers of authority in the court and theater; and finally, Neville's Isle of Pines and Behn's Oroonoko are read as interrogating the authorities of the English colony. Despite widely divergent backgrounds, says Boesky, these utopists shared a sense that national identity was shaped less by individuals than by institutions, which they praise for producing trained and trainable citizens instilled with the values of the modern state: obedience, discipline, and order. While the utopia tells its story partly to justify the goals of colonialism and to enforce differences in class, gender, and race, it also tells a concurrent and less stable story that criticizes these ventures and exposes their limitations.

Download or read book Cult Fictions written by Sonu Shamdasani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversial claims that C.G. Jung, founder of analytical psychology, was a charlatan and a self-appointed demi-god have recently brought his legacy under renewed scrutiny. The basis of the attack on Jung is a previously unknown text, said to be Jung's inaugural address at the founding of his 'cult', otherwise known as the Psychological Club, in Zurich in 1916. It is claimed that this cult is alive and well in Jungian psychology as it is practised today, in a movement which continues to masquerade as a genuine professional discipline, whilst selling false dreams of spiritual redemption. In Cult Fictions, leading Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani looks into the evidence for such claims and draws on previously unpublished documents to show that they are fallacious. This accurate and revealing account of the history of the Jungian movement, from the founding of the Psychological Club to the reformulation of Jung's approach by his followers, establishes a fresh agenda for the historical evaluation of analytical psychology today.

Download or read book Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean written by and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cola Debrot's «My Black Sister» and Boeli van Leeuwen's A Stranger on Earth are two pivotal works from the early period of postcolonial Dutch-language fiction from the Dutch Caribbean. Each portrays different aspects of the predicament of postcolonial identity, gender, race, and politics in the vein best known as «tropic existentialism». Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean is suitable for courses on Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature, and will be of great interest to readers of fiction in general.

Download or read book The Founding written by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and published by Sphere. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brilliant, a definite page turner. They combine real historical events with fascinating fictional characters. The twenty-three volumes of the Morland Dynasty series has been completely repackaged in the most elegant style, using contemporaneous artwork for each period. This wonderful series opens with the back drop of the Wars of the Roses with the marriage between Eleanor Morland and a scion of the influential house of Beaufort. It is a union which establishes the powerful Morland dynasty and in the succeeding volumes of this rich tapestry of English life, we follow their fortunes through war and peace, political upheaval and social revolution, times of pestilence and periods of plenty, and through the vicissitudes which afflict every family - love and passion, envy and betrayal, birth and death, great fortune and miserable penury... The Morland Dynasty is entertainment of the most addictive kind.

Download or read book Cultural Techniques written by Jörg Dünne and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary cultural techniques research lab at the University of Erfurt. Taking up an impulse from media studies, its contributions examine —from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history, literary (and media) studies, and the history of science reconstruct seemingly fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order. Ranging from manual and philological "paper work" to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly, these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors.

Download or read book Reading World Literature written by Sarah Lawall and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As teachers and readers expand the canon of world literature to include writers whose voices traditionally have been silenced by the dominant culture, fundamental questions arise. What do we mean by "world"? What constitutes "literature"? Who should decide? Reading World Literature is a cumulative study of the concept and evolving practices of "world literature." Sarah Lawall opens the book with a substantial introduction to the overall topic. Twelve original essays by distinguished specialists run the gamut from close readings of specific texts to problems of translation theory and reader response. The sequence of essays develops from re-examinations of traditional canonical pieces through explorations of less familiar works to discussions of reading itself as a "literacy" dependent on worldview. Reading World Literature will open challenging new vistas for a wide audience in the humanities, from traditionalists to avant-garde specialists in literary theory, cultural studies, and area studies.