Böcker i Literary & Cultural Theory-serien

Cartographies of Culture

Walter Benjamin is one of the most important figures of modern culture. The authors focus within this book on Benjamin as a philosopher, but also as a writer. Philosophical and philological readings are accompanied by essays presenting his biography.

The book's argument revolves around the notion of apocalypse as metaphor, narrating a paradigmatic change in the discourse of postmodern identity. Drawing from science fiction studies, literary and cultural theory as well as popular cinema, it proposes a post-apocalyptic reading of late-capitalist culture.

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse. Rhetoric places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses and literary history examines the temporal succession of the literary systems.

This book analyzes Mo Yan's writings as well as other scholarly interpretations of his writings. The author stakes out a Marxist approach to theorizing the class ideology that underwrites what Mo Yan says he "knows" of the "nebulous terrain" where one supposedly experiences moments of "transcending" or going "beyond" class and politics.

The contributions in this volume examine literary and other texts as well as cultural and political discourses in relation to issues of identity formation and dis-formation, of self and society and of the socially local within the global. All these issues come into play through the exploration of the fantasmatic space of mutual mis-recognition and mythmaking between coloniser and colonised, between ¿Africä and ¿Europe¿.

Contemporary materialism, in its varied configurations, persistently challenges claims that the body can be relegated to a subservient position when compared to reason. In most pertinent colonial and postcolonial studies the body is seen as a text, upon and by means of which signs of difference are instituted. Yet, to be able to test and appreciate to what extent the postcolonial body was and remains today a battleground for discursive control, it is helpful to start with the awareness of the somatics of the traveller himself ¿ his agreement to and with his own person or lack thereof vis-à-vis other bodies, his translation of the somatic into the semantic. The traveller¿s body, when rendered in writing, becomes a symbolic construct which enters into a relation with the represented world, and the nature of this multifaceted, troubled alliance ¿ if alliance it is ¿ forms the main theme of this book.