"If the postmodernist ethical onslaught has led to the demise of literature by exposing its political agenda, if all literature is compromised by its entanglement with power, why does literature’s subterranean voice still seduce us into reading? Why do the madness and the scandal of transgressive literature, its power to force us to begin anew, its evil, escape the gaze of contemporary literary criticism? Why do we dare not reject ethics and the ethical approach to literature? If the primary task of literary criticism is to correct others’ ethical missteps, should we not begin by confronting the seductiveness of ethics, our desire for ethics, the pleasure we take in being ethical? And what is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? What would be the ethical consequences of an erasure of history from literary criticism? In a series of essays on the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, Hosea Hirata visits the primal force of the scandalous in an effort to repeat (in the Kierkegaardian sense) the originary scene that initiates the obscure yet insistent poetry that is literature and to confront the questions raised."

In Discourses of Desire, Linda S. Kauffman looks at a neglected genre—the love letters written by literary heroines. Tracing the development of the genre from Ovid to the twentieth-century novel, Kauffman explores through provocative and incisive readings the important implications of these amatory discourses for an understanding of fictive representation in general. Among the texts Kauffman treats are Ovid's Heroides, Heloise's letters to Abelard, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Todorov, Genette, Barthes, Bakhtin, Lacan, and Derrida, Kauffman demonstrates how the codes of love shape intertextual dialogues among these works, in which each innovation in the genre is simultaneously a response to and a departure from the one preceding it. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the unsettling questions that the genre's shared thematic preoccupations and formal characteristics pose for concepts of gender, authorship, genre, and mimesis. Drawing on poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism to extend the boundaries of feminist theory, Kauffman makes a significant contribution to contemporary critical discussions of writing and gender, mimesis and narrative discourse, and poetics and politics. Her book, broad in its scope and far-reaching in its implications, will be valuable reading for anyone interested in feminist criticism, literary theory, and literary history.

On its face, The Art of World-Making focuses on honouring the career of Nicholas Greenwood Onuf and his contributions to the study of international relations; of equal importance, however, while using Onuf’s work as their touchstone, the contributions to this volume range widely across IR theory, making important interventions in some of the most important topics in the field today. The volume considers the place of Constructivism and Republicanism in the field of international relations, and the contestation that accompanies the question of their place in the field, asking: • What explains the dominance of some forms of Constructivism and the relative lack of influence of other forms? • What can rule-oriented Constructivism, the focus here, provide our field that other forms of Constructivism have been unable to? • Into what new and productive directions can Constructivism be taken? • What are its gaps and what are the resources to remedy those gaps? • What can Republicanism tell us about ongoing issues in international law, global governance, liberalism, and crisis? Drawing together essays from some of the leading scholars in the field, space is given after each chapter for a detailed and highly personal response piece to each contribution, written by Onuf. This unique volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of international relations.

This book offers an inquiry into the ways in which entertainment discourse extends beyond entertainment and its initial humorous function due to its political and ideological underpinnings. Rather than considering entertainment discourse as “just for fun”, this book justifies the importance of taking it seriously. Humorous features in entertainment discourses can trivialize some stereotypical moments, and, in doing so, encourage viewers to downplay the seriousness of the events they are watching. In other words, these stereotypical images are camouflaged and mitigated by the inclusion of humorous elements and imaginative images, which can lead the audience to perceive them as natural scenes that do not deserve criticism. Embedding banalities within entertainment discourses remains an effective strategy that drives the audience to laugh, meaning that they fail to detect the embedded ideologies regarding different cultures and identities. This confirms the fact that “small talk” can often become “big talk”.

Yet decreasing numbers of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century readers are familiar with the novel, due to many factors including its length (six volumes), subject matter (preaching), and a legacy of critical evaluation as a narrative lacking plot and psychological depth."--BOOK JACKET.

These original papers provide a guide and analysis to one of the most controversial writers of the present day. They examine Baudrillard's work in relation to consumption, politics, feminism, culture, theory and postmodernism.

In today's rapidly changing educational and business climate, organizational transformation has become a key area of development for many different and varied environments, both commercial and academic. This book addresses issues related to developing Decision Support Systems (DSS) which are sensitive and adaptable to different contexts and evolving technical and work environments. In addition to addressing the various cultural/social, organizational/individual, task/technology contexts of DSS, the book also anchors these discussions in a practical context, drawing on case studies to illustrate the theoretical dimensions stressed. This book includes the following issues: Frameworks for understanding the contexts and environments of decision support; Cases and issues in decision support and organizational transformation in context; An inter-disciplinary analysis of DSS, covering a wide variety of situations; and Real-world applications of DSS . It contains selected papers presented and discussed at the International Conference on Context-Sensitive Decision Support Systems, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Bled, Slovenia in July 1998. The book will prove invaluable to anyone working in information and decision support systems development, management, implementation and evaluation, as well as to researchers/practitioners in organizational analysis and development, management and business administration, sociology and psychology of organizations, human relations and human factors management.

This popular text provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The readings are drawn from a diverse selection of thinkers both historical and contemporary.

In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography - a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women's roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman - Camilla Faa Gonzaga's 1622 memoir - as her beginning point, citing it as a central "pre-text". Parati then examines the autobiographies of Enif Robert, Fausta Cialente, Rita Levi Montalcini, and Luisa Passerini. Through her discussion of these women's writings, she demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.