Genius

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Scott Spector

"Scott Spector's cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called Prague circle and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice."--BOOK JACKET.

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Brenda F. Berrian and Aart Broek

For review see: Sue N. Greene, in Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide, vol. 65, no. 1 & 2 (1991); p. 94-96; Jennifer Jackson, in The Caribbean Writer, vol. 5 (1991); p. 125-126; Stefanie Gehrke, in Caribbean writers = Les auteurs Caribéens, ed. by Marlies Glaser & Marion Pausch (1994); p. 226.

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Derek C. Maus

Overview: Although 2002 MacArthur Fellowship recipient Colson Whitehead ardently resists overarching categorizations of his work, Derek C. Maus argues in this volume that Whitehead's first six books are linked by a careful balance between adherence to and violation of the wisdom of past generations. Whitehead bids readers to come along with him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine accepted notions of truth. Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's fiction from his 1999 novel The Intuitionist through 2011's Zone One. In his choice of literary forms, Whitehead attempts to revitalize the limiting formulas to which they have been reduced by first imitating and then violating the conventions of those genres and sub-genres. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, and/or malevolent aspects of American culture. Although only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race often takes a place of centrality in his works and, as such, serves as the prime example of how Whitehead asks his readers to revisit their assumptions about meanings and values. By jumbling the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, and the zombie apocalypse, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings of many of the long-lasting stories through which Americans have defined themselves. Some of the stories Whitehead focuses on are explicitly literary in nature, but he more frequently directs his attention toward the historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

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Pamela Chester & Sibelan Forrester

Engendering Slavic Literatures breaks new ground in its investigation of gender and feminist issues in Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian literary texts by both female and male writers. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches, film theory, and lesbian and gender theory, the authors interrogate the received notions of Western gender studies to see which can be usefully applied to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Slavic literary works. Motherhood and the relationships of mothers and daughters; the myths of selfhood that shape the autobiographies of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Lev Tolstoy; Polish Catholicism and sexuality; portrayals of landscape in verbal and visual art; and women writers' transgressive ventures into male bastions such as the love lyric and prose fiction are among the themes of this important and innovative volume.