Imaginary Ethnographies - Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-231-15948-7
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 450 g

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture" one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge.

Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis to trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Lévi-Strauss's famous controversy over the indigenous Nambikwara, Schwab explores the vicissitudes of "traveling literature" through novels and films that fashion a cross-cultural imaginary. She also examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism, melancholia, the fate of disenfranchised children under the forces of globalization, and the intertwinement of property and personhood in the neoliberal imaginary. Schwab concludes with an exploration of discourses on the posthuman, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its depiction of a future lived under the conditions of minimal life. Drawing on a wide range of theories, Schwab engages the productive intersections between literary studies and anthropology, underscoring the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schwab, Gabriele

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnographie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Geisteswissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

IntroductionPart I: Writing1. Another Writing Lesson: Lévi-Strauss2. Traveling Literature3. Restriction and Mobility: DesirePart II: Cannibals4. The Melancholic Cannibal: Juan José Saer's The Witness and Marianne Wiggins's John Dollar5. War Children in a Global World: Richard Powers's Operation Wandering Soul6. Ethnographies of the Future: PersonhoodPart III: CodaCosmographical Meditations on the Inhuman: Samuel Beckett's The Lost OnesNotesBibliographyIndex

Leseproben

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Über Autor(innen)

Schwab, Gabriele
Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine, a faculty associate in the Department of Anthropology, and former director of the Critical Theory Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship and was a Research Fellow in Residence at the Australian National University, the Free University of Berlin, and Arizona State University. She is also affiliated with the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and practices as a psychoanalyst in Newport Beach. Her books in English include Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma; Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis; Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (coedited with William Maurer); The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language; Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction; and a special issue of Postcolonial Studies, coedited with John Cash, entitled The Cultural Unconscious and the Postcolonizing Process. Her work has been translated into eight languages.

Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and a faculty associate in the Department of Anthropology. She is also a trained psychoanalyst, and is affiliated with the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Her books in English include Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (coedited with Bill Maurer).