From Literature to Cultural Literacy

by Segal, Naomi; Koleva, Daniela

• ISBN13: 9781137429698
• ISBN10: 1137429690
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In current contexts one can be a literary scholar and yet be working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. Something has happened to both the researchers and the discipline that has transformed this humanities domain, bringing it into a sharper focus to investigate the readability of contemporary social issues. The essays in this book, written by scholars from ten countries, range across this research domain, renamed 'literary-and-cultural studies', or LCS. LCS depends on four key concepts – textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity – which characterize both the material and the methods of their research. The 16 essays look at four broad fields: cultural memory; migration and translation; electronic textuality; and biopolitics, biosociality and the body. The aim of the collection is to deploy and enhance cultural literacy, a way of looking at social and cultural issues – especially issues of change and mobility – through the lens of literary thinking.
 

Author Biography

Naomi Segal is Professorial Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her books include Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch; André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy; The Adulteress's Child; Narcissus and Echo; The Unintended Reader; and The Banal Object. She is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des palmes académiques and a member of the Academia Europaea.
Daniela Koleva is Associate Professor at Sofia University, Bulgaria. She has edited a number of books, including Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions (2012), Stories of Historians: Biographical Narratives of the 1981 Graduates of Sofia University (with Vanya Elenkova, 2012) and 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989 (with Nicolas Hayoz and Leszek).

Table of Contents

Introduction; Naomi Segal
PART I: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
1. Section Introduction; Daniela Koleva
2. Visual Recall in the Present: Critical Nostalgia and the Memory of Empire in Portuguese Culture; Isabel Capeloa Gil
3. Textualized Memories of Politics: Turkish Coup d'état Novels; Sibel Irzik
4. Can Developers Learn from Art? Janet Cardiff's 'The Missing Voice' in Spitalfields; Ricarda Vidal
PART II: MIGRATION AND TRANSLATION
5. Section Introduction; Loredana Polezzi
6. Migrant Poet(h)ics; Borbála Faragó
7. Translating the In-Between: Literatures of Performance and the Relationship between Language, Literature and Society; Robert Crawshaw
8. Lost (and Gained) in Migration: the writing of migrancy; Mary Gallagher
PART III: ELECTRONIC TEXTUALITY
9. Section Introduction; Leopoldina Fortunati
10. Non-Consumptive Reading; Susan Schreibman
11. Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather than on the Decline; Kathleen Fitzpatrick
12. I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player; Espen Aarseth
PART IV: BIOSOCIALITY, BIOPOLITICS AND THE BODY
13. Section Introduction; Ulrike Landfester
14. Human Enhancement: is it 'Mere' Science Fiction? The Rise and Rise of Disembodied Ethics; Heather Bradshaw-Martin
15. History in the Gene? How Biohistories are Implicated in Biopolitics and Biosocialities; Marianne Sommer
16. Between Hybrid and Graft; Uwe Wirth
Index