Search Results for story

... of the land occupied by empire as “terra nullius.” This essay retrieves Said's “Canaanite” reading of Michael Waltzer's Exodus and Revolution , in which the latter invokes, above all, the English Puritan revolution to demonstrate the emancipatory politics of the Old Testament story and reconstellates...

...: his father is in the hospital, and he struggles raising a fragile child, while his wife gets involved in feminist activism. Valera finds increasing relief in writing, encouraged by the words of a former high school teacher: “If we don't tell our stories, they will be told by those who speak...

... to bear on Ang Lee's intentions in making this film as well as on the differences of style and approach between Ang Lee and Eileen Chang, on whose original story the film is based. The essay pays particular attention to Ang Lee's diasporic background as a Chinese filmmaker from Taiwan with a cultural...

...Christian Thorne Eighteenth-century English poetry, epic in technique and idiom even when not epic in scale, has some unusual ways of telling stories on a multicontinental scale—stories, that is, that are not confined to localities nor even to nations. This is a feat that novels struggle...

... of two opposing systems of values and cultural production. One was dominant, while the other was repressed but survived in various forms and in uneven ways. The present essay is, in part, the story of that survival and eventual victory. I draw on printed material, extensive fieldwork, and personal...

... of the Circassian hero in Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Beglets” (“The Deserter”) and the Adygea writer Sultan Kazy-Girei’s short story “Dolina Azhitugai” (The Azhitugai Valley). I illustrate how Kazy-Girei’s story places itself in dialogue with the Russian Orientalist trope of the Circassian hero embodied...

... framing itself drew on postwar counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) that had enabled a shift from the figure of the allied partisan to the unconscionable terrorist. Terrorism as an object of knowledge thus fits within a longer story of Western military attempts—from late nineteenth-century colonialism...

...Brendan Moran In his writings on Franz Kafka, Benjamin develops a conception of study. The conception of study pertains to an exercise that Benjamin observes in some characters from Kafka’s novels and stories. Benjamin also suggests that this exercise of study is enacted by Kafka’s works themselves...

...Tamara Lea Spira This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late...

...” in the style of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées , or a theoretical treatise. By referring to Kafka’s notations as “thoughts before” they are tamed, North suggests that they must be distinguished from all literary forms and that their “real story” cannot be reduced to a specific genre or mode of representation, let...

...Leah Feldman This essay explores alternative forms of political solidarity through a poiesis of longing that connects the Soviet aligned “South” in Kyrgyzstan and nonaligned “South” in decolonizing Algeria through a reading of two love stories by the Kyrgyz author and diplomat Chingiz Aitmatov...

... of humanitarianism and their routinization beyond the “exceptional” conditions of disaster and displacement have exemplified the broader social transformations producing that crisis of emancipatory politics. At once ideationally and materially, the story of humanitarianisms in recent decades is a tale...

... without completing a “story” as such. That is, it can do so without trying to resolve historical disputes that have dogged the career of Indian modernity (e.g., how exactly can caste be squared with scientific and democratic tempers?). The image of a “shining” Hindu normative metropolitanism...

..., character, the novel versus the short story, and contemporary politics, but it was centered on the social and political capacity of the modern novel, the form's ability to reflect on or respond to its times, the novel's relationship to society, and the nature of politics in the current period, a period...

...Marc Nichanian “On the Archive III: The Secret” offers an extended commentary on Borges’s short story “The Ethnographer” and instigates a philosophical encounter between Borges and Derrida. As he carries on his fieldwork, Fred Murdock steals the “secret” of the Indian tribe he studies. He...

...Christian Thorne This essay poses the question, Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Is it possible to tell stories whose narrators travel from continent to continent? If yes, why are there so few of them? The essay proceeds in three acts: First, it assesses the accounts of world...

...’ attempts to write a human-interest story about a man who is able to defecate perfectly formed sculptures made of shit, “The Suffering Channel” satirizes the insularity and narcissism that plagues Americans, even those who, like the interns who work at Style , imagine themselves to be cosmopolitans. Wallace...

...Lindsay Waters In his recent book The Swerve , Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how the recovery of “On the Nature of Things,” by Lucretius, sparked the Renaissance and ultimately changed the direction of human thought. The focus of Greenblatt’s study is Lucretius’s atomism, an idea he claims...

... democracy brought not emancipation but the threat of catastrophe; and in Szabolcs Hajdu’s magical-realist film Bibliothèque Pascal (2010), which tells the story of a woman who returns from working in an elite brothel in the UK. What makes these texts apt reflections on the effects of the neoliberal order...