The Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog presents: a production on Manuel Portela’s Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities in three parts. Part 1, Part 3 Episode 2: Literary Simulation Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten.—Fernando Pessoa, Book of… Read More »
The Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog presents: a production on Manuel Portela’s Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities in three parts. Episode 2, Episode 3 Dramatis personae:Difficult and Theoretical Author (A)Curious and Distracted Reader (R) Episode 1: This Book is for You And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless.—Fernando… Read More »
Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, by Dominic O’Key, is out now Thank you for joining us today, Dominic. Tell us, how would you describe your book in just one sentence? Reading literature can help us think and rethink our relationships with animals; here’s how. Could you unpack this a bit and explain the main topics… Read More »
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.
Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy, by Jonathan Dil, is out now How would you describe your book in one sentence? This books looks at how Haruki Murakami started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy and how he transformed this therapeutic impulse into a literary career of global acclaim. What drew to you… Read More »
This post was originally published at the LSE Review of Books and is reproduced here with permission. As Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka publishes his first novel in 48 years, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola offer a window on the literary giant, reflecting on their new book, Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation. There are twice as many works on… Read More »
Translation, interpretation, metaphor, word choice, feeling. Judgement. Justice. Responsibility. There’s a lot going on in Rivky Mondal’s chapter on Roger Fry’s translations of Mallarmé. A paper that appears to be focussed on the niceties of Fry’s translational choices and the various reactions to them raises myriad large-scale issues, perhaps because translation itself is such a powerful trope as well as activity. Think about it: translation is a mug’s game. An original text sits before a reader who wishes to commute it into different language and yet retain the essence of the original.
The first thing to note about Sonita Sarker’s essay is that it offers a necessary challenge to and reorientation of the various definitions of responsible reading that appear throughout this volume. Responsible reading can and should take on any number of meanings, even contradictory meanings, in the chapters that appear here. But what responsible reading should never suggest is a “mandatory curriculum” that becomes a burden that the reader “does not ask to carry but becomes hers to bear.”
This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Kathryn Carney In “Absolutely Small: Anarchism and the Aesthetics of Affirmation,” Roger Rothman draws on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic thought and Gustav Landauer’s Weimar vein of utopian anarchism to argue for importing anarchist politics… Read More »