In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden the children sit in their newly restored garden, bursting to express their sense of celebration. Ben the gardener suggests they sing the Doxology hymn, even though ‘He had no opinion of the Doxology and he did not make the suggestion with any particular reverence’. The children imitate a… Read More »
As mentioned previously, we're really excited to be publishing The Late Walter Benjamin this week! On Monday John Schad (the author) gave us an insight into his experience of writing about Walter Benjamin, and today I'm delighted to bring you the first couple of chapters of the book to read, for free, exclusively on our… Read More »
If you have studied Mikhail Bakhtin, then no doubt you will have felt as bewildered as the man himself looks here. Help is at hand in the form of our new book Key Terms in Literary Theory. All week we have been quoting definitions from the book and today we look at the term 'Dialogic'.… Read More »
A new day, a new definition from our Key Terms in Literary Theory. Yesterday we had 'Phallogocentric' so I felt it only right to balance things up a bit and give Hélène Cixous centre stage. L’ecriture feminine L’ecriture feminine is a term coined by Hélène Cixous, in The Laugh of the Medusa (1976), meaning literally… Read More »
Phallogocentric. Fun to say. Perhaps not so fun to get your head around. All week we'll be blogging up definitions from our new book Key Terms in Literary Theory – designed to make difficult terms, concepts and theorists accessible and understandable. This is one of my favourite literary words, what's yours? Phallogocentric Phallogocentric refers to a combination of… Read More »
Chances are, if you’re reading this blog post, you already know something about literary theory; perhaps you are a student, or someone who has wondered what “literary theory” is all about and is looking for some explanations. There are lots of useful guides explaining various types of literary theory but this new book by Mary… Read More »
Day 5 of our photo blog 'Claiming baggage is also a psychological diagnosis of sorts; it is something we say when we seek to displace accountability: “He has a lot of baggage.” This trope was famously literalized in the opening credit scenes of Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate. In many ways, the entire fi m… Read More »
Day 4 of our photo blog 'If screening hinges on pleasure, this in no way means that screening practices are superfluous. Indeed, even at their most pleasurable and seemingly distracting, screens are functional apparatus, administering and facilitating the everyday operations of airports. For instance, Gillian Fuller helpfully outlines the screening function of airport windows in her… Read More »
Day 3 of our photo blog Alain de Botton describing the baggage claim in A Week at the Airport: “. . . in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred to formulate hopeful plans for the future… Read More »
Day 2 of our photo blog The next instalment in our Airports photo week takes us into the advertising world… “Pick a nice spot for your library” (© 2006 Sony Electronics Inc.) ‘In 2006 Sony ran an ad for the Reader (an early e-reading device, to be followed by the more successful Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad,… Read More »