Rewriting Modernity

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Examines the tendency of post-World War II writers to rewrite earlier narratives by Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and others.

Rewriting the Thirties questions the myth of the 'anti-modernist' decade. Conversely, the editors argue it is a symptomatic, transitional phase between modern and post-modern writing and politics, at a time of cultural and technological change. The text reconsiders some of the leading writers of the period in the light of recent theoretical developments, through essays on the ambivalent assimilation of Modernist influences, among proletarian and canonical novelists including James Barke and George Orwell, and among poets including Auden, MacNeice, Swingler and Bunting, and in the work of feminist writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. In this substantial remapping, the complexity and scope of literary-critical debate at the time is discussed in relation to theatrical innovation, audience attitudes to the mass medium of modernity - cinema - the poetics of suburbia, consumerism and national ideology, as well as the discursive strategies of British and American documentarism.

Original Scholarly Monograph

An innovative study of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy, relating the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault, and phrasing the ethical as the questions of how to read and write after.

This book addresses the major critical and interpretive issues of contemporary experimental poetic texts. Critical approaches, historical contexts, and basic concepts are surveyed in two introductory essays, while the study of poetic movements in historical context and the chronological trajectory of production of experimental texts are discussed in the first major segment of the volume, Experimentation in Its Historical Moment. The principal topic addressed here is the nature of experimental poetry in revolutionary social contexts. The second major theme, focused upon in the section Experimentation in the Language Arts, is that of language as a vehicle for experiments and cognitive quests, aimed not at the production of truth or social emancipation but at experiential aspects of language and language use. Haroldo de Campos's fragmented poetic prose work Galàxias is a highlighted topic of attention, as are poetic and language experiments in Lettrism, Fluxus, sound poetry, and new technological poetries. The development of the basic tenets of Concrete poetry and current critical perspectives on its status in poetical experimentation constitute the basis of the third section of the book, Concrete and Neo-Concrete Poetry. The relationship of historical Concrete poetry to artistic genres is presented, with special emphasis on Brazil and on contemporary visual writing. The section Memoirs of Concrete, in the context of oral history, includes retrospective accounts by two of Concrete poetry's most renowned editors. The closing section of this book presents statements on the theory and practice of avant-garde poetry by 22 participants in the Yale Symphosymposium on Contemporary Poetics and Concretism.

Jean-François Lyotard is one of the most celebrated proponents of what has become known as the 'postmodern'. More than almost any other contemporary theorist, he has explored the relations between knowledge, art, politics and history, in ways that offer radical new possibilities for thinking about modern culture. Simon Malpas introduces students to issues at the heart of Lyotard's work, including *modernity and the postmodern *the sublime *ethics *history and representation *art and the unpresentable *knowledge, the university and the future. Lyotard's work is impossible to dismiss or ignore for anybody who is serious about contemporary literature and culture, and this guide provides the ideal companion to the wide variety of his critical texts.

The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

This volume constitutes a collection of over 40 articles selected from contributions to the Sydney Symposium of January 2003 that - as a part of an International Sydney Festival - was one of the major events related to Samuel Beckett of the last decade. The three sections of the book reflect the most vibrant fields of research in Beckett studies today: Intertextuality and Theory, Philosophy and Theory and Textual Genesis, Contextual Genesis and Language. Scholars from all over the world participating in this collection testify to the durable and universal nature of interest in Beckett's work.

Derridada explores the affinities between the work of Marcel Duchamp and the discipline of deconstruction. It is the first text to explore Duchamp's work in the context of the theories of Derrida and deconstruction.