Theory/Theatre provides a unique and engaging introduction to literary theory as it relates to theatre and performance. Fortier lucidly examines current theoretical approaches, from semiotics, poststructuralism, through cultural materialism, postcolonial studies and feminist theory. This new edition includes: * More detailed explanation of key ideas * New 'Putting it into practice' sections at the end of each chapter so you can approach performances from specific theoretical perspectives * Annotated further reading section and glossary. Theory/Theatre is still the only study of its kind and is invaluable reading for beginning students and scholars of performance studies.

    The complete translation, from the Greek of A. O. Prickard's Oxford text, features an introduction by Grube, establishing the historical and critical context of the work, and a biographical index.

    Crammed with fascinating insights, this generous spree takes us through decades of treats for the imagination: escape to other dimensions, flights to other planets, lost worlds, utopias, mechanical creatures and intelligent aliens. Amusing, intelligent and authoritative, it takes us on a tour through that zone where literature and science engage in an eternal flirtation. Examining the great writers SF has produced, and the images that have become the cultural wallpaper of the present day, this comprehensive expedition is for buffs and tenderfoots alike.

    His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

    

    Significantly expanded, this new edition features six new chapters that confront, in different ways, the growing understanding of literary works as cultural practices.These six new chapters are "Popular Culture," "Diversity," "Imperialism/Nationalism," "Desire," "Ethics," and "Class," by John Fiske, Louis Menand, Seamus Deane, Judith Butler, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, and Daniel T. O'Hara, respectively. Each new essay adopts the approach that has won this book such widespread acclaim: each provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies the term permits.Exploring the concepts that shape the way we read, the essays combine to provide an extraordinary introduction to the work of literature and literary study, as the nation's most distinguished scholars put the tools of critical practice vividly to use.

    methodologically innovative... precise and perceptive and conscious... " --Text and Performance QuarterlyWoman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color." --Chandra Talpade MohantyThe idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films... formidable... " --Village Voice... its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities." --ArtpaperHighly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those 'we' label 'other'." --Religious Studies Review

    Now translated in its entirety for the first time, Theory of Prose not only anticipates structuralism and post-structuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Arguing that writers structure their materials according to artistic principles rather than from attempts to imitate "reality," Shklovsky uses Cervantes, Tolstoi, Sterne, Dickens, Bely, and Rozanov to give us a new way of thinking about fiction and, in his most impassioned moments, about the world. Benjamin Sher's lucid translation will allow Shklovsky's Theory of Prose to fulfill its destiny as a major theoretical work of the twentieth century. "A rambling, digressive stylist, Shklovsky throws off brilliant aper�us on every page. . . . Sixty-five years after it first appeared, Theory of Prose remains an exciting book: Like an architect's blueprint, it lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction." (Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World 5-5-91) "This 1929 book by one of the founding fathers of Russian formalism is one of the most important works in the history of literary theory. . . . Shklovsky's enormously influential work is brilliant, provocative, and, by turn, elliptical and digressive. It is also whimsical and sometimes chaotic." (Choice) "[The] essays published in Theory of Prose reveal why Shklovsky might have become the most important literary theorist of our century, had history taken a different course." (Poetics Today) "Clearly there is a happy congruity between Shklovsky's insights and the modern consensus. His observations on various authors and techniques cause one to ponder. A random paragraph causes sudden illumination. This is not a manifesto but the incisive thoughts of a scholar in the quiet of his study. Dalkey Archive Press is to be thanked for making it available again." (ZYX 9-92)

    This second edition reflects how the field is rapidly changing in both its practice and its critical reception. With an entirely new conclusion and all other chapters fully reworked and updated, this volume includes:a concise history of science fiction and the ways in which the genre has been used and defined explanations of key concepts in Science Fiction criticism and theory through chapters such as Gender, Race, Technology and Metaphor examines the interactions between Science Fiction and Science Fact anchors each chapter with a case study drawn from short story, book or film, from Frank Herbert's Dune to Star Wars, from The Left Hand of Darkness to Neuromancer.Introducing the reader to nineteenth-century, Pulp, Golden Age, New Wave, Feminist and Cyberpunk science fictions, this is the essential contemporary guide to a major cultural movement.

    But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present.Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

    Her glory was to have no glory. In Greek tragedy, however, women die violently and, through violence, master their own fate. It is a genre that delights in blurring the formal frontier between masculine and feminine. Through the subtlety of her reading of these powerful and ambiguous texts, Nicole Loraux elicits an array of insights into Greek attitudes toward death, sexuality, and gender.

    A vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is often a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.

    In the years since publication this book has rightly attained the status of a classic. Written for readers with little knowledge of the subject, Sexual/Textual Politics nevertheless makes its own intervention into key debates, arguing provocatively for a commitedly political and theoretical criticism as against merely textual or apolitical approaches.With a new afterword in this edition, Sexual/Textual Politics is a must-read for all those interested in feminist literary theory.

    Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.