Norman Austin has organized his analysis of classical Greek myths around Lacan's dichotomy between (ineffable) Being and the meanings imposed upon Being by culturally determined signifiers. The primary signifiers in myth (the gods), as projections of contradictory meanings, impel human consciousness in contradictory directions: toward heroic ......
Scaramuzza, Scaramouche: the commedia dell'arte figure made a triumphal entry into German literature in the plays of Caspar Stieler (1632–1707). Transformed into a master of language and languages, Scaramutza—social critic, voluptuary, and mouthpiece for his author—ushers in a new type of comedy that depends more on the happy ......
Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England
Long neglected as a marginal and eccentric figure, Thomas Hoccleve (1367–1426) wrote some of the most sophisticated and challenging poetry of the late Middle Ages. Full of gossip and autobiographical detail, his work has made him immensely useful to modern scholars, yet Hoccleve the poet has remained decidedly in the shadow of Geoffrey ......
Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic
The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England ......
Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era. . . . Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and ......
Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era. . . . Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and ......
Figures of Resistance brings together the unpublished lectures and little-seen essays of internationally renowned theorist Teresa de Lauretis, spanning over twenty years of her finest work. Thirty years after the height of feminist theory, this collection invites us to reflect on the history of feminism and take a hard look at where it stands ......
Telling Narratives analyzes key texts from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature to demonstrate how secrets and their many tellings have become slavery's legacy. By focusing on the ways secrets are told in texts by Jessie Fauset, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, and others, Leslie W. Lewis ......
The source of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, the Nibelungenlied occupies a unique place in medieval literary history. Commonly seen as the paradigmatic example of national epic, its interpretation has long been colored by the later evolution of German cultural tradition. In Rules for the Endgame Jan-Dirk Müller argues that the literary ......
