Books in the Literary & Cultural Theory series

The book presents the poetics of European litanic verse (genre structure, versification, rhetorical figures), with a particular focus on the space-time matrix within which the litanic world is depicted. Examples are mostly taken from Latin, English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, Scandinavian and Slavic poetry from Antiquity to Early Modernity.

Disruptive Fluidity explores the textual tropes of liquidity in contemporary reconstructions of modern subjectivity. Arguing that the subject can be construed as a textual product of the imagery of solid body boundaries, this study comprises a gradually unfolding story of the poetics of the body / self.

Embodying Pragmatism

Undertakes the pioneering task of employing the notion of palimpsest in the multi-layered and changing cultural landscape specific to East Central Europe. This book includes essays that probe the palimpsest across the ages.

Body, Letter, and Voice

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.

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¿.

This collection assembles a number of chapters engaging different strands of Heidegger's philosophy to explore issues relevant to contemporary media studies. Principal Heideggerian concepts have been drawn upon to explore photography, audiovisual production culture, the selfie phenomenon, and social media activism in the cultures of the West.

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 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.

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.

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.

Cartographies of Culture

A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture?

This book is the result of a shared conviction of the necessity to advance the international discourse on criticism. It positions itself within contemporary considerations of the theory and practice of criticism and presents texts by Polish scholars (e.g. literary critical theory, feminism, genre studies, and comparative literature).

This volume consists of articles on imagery in the poetry of various literary canons. The articles present new research based on individual approaches for each particular canon within a wide span from socio-cultural environment to semantic and cognitive properties of specific images.