The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Visions in Exile. Inroads to a 'Counter-System' of Contemporary Chinese Literature

Abstract: The study addresses issues of national identity in contemporary Chinese literature by focusing on the tension between writers currently working either inside or outside the official literary system of the PRC. It searches out the imaginative boundaries to this system by reading the discourses that work to maintain it, next to those that try to transcend or overturn it. By following the historical construction of a 'national literature' in China in the early twentieth century, it is argued that the concept was conditioned by an idea of 'world literature' that went beyond the conventional theoretical bifurcation of 'Eastern' and 'Western' influences but nonetheless retained much of the symbolic stigmatisation associated with these images of differentiation. Beginning sometime in the 1930s, there can furthermore be seen the emergence of a group of 'international' Chinese writers, characterised by exile, translation, and from 1949, literary and political opposition to the system under construction on the mainland. The period from the early to late 1980s provides a watershed in the inauguration of the 'counter-system,' in that it witnessed, on the one hand, an unprecedented internationalisation of literature (and social space in general) at home, and on the other, a rising outpour of writers, moving physically abroad, and sometimes remaining for extended periods or settling down as exiles. The study records these physical and imaginary journeys as well as their various implications to the balance in contemporary global cultural politics.

Space and the memories of violence : landscapes of erasure, disappearance and exception

Abstract: List of Figures Notes on Contributors Preface Introduction: The Multi-Layered Memories of Space Pamela Colombo and Estela Schindel PART I: SPATIAL INSCRIPTIONS OF ANNIHILATION 1. Violent Erasures and Erasing Violence: Contesting Cambodia's Landscapes of Violence James A. Tyner 2. Polish landscapes of Memory at the Sites of Extermination: The Politics of Framing Zuzanna Dziuban 3. Spaces of Confrontation and Defeat: the Spatial Dispossession of the Revolution in Tucuman, Argentina Pamela Colombo 4. Subterranean Autopsies: Exhumations of Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain Francisco Ferrandiz PART II: THE REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENCE: SPATIAL STRATEGIES 5. Faces, Voices, and the Shadow of Catastrophe Jay Winter 6. Theatrical Cartography of a Space of Exception Juan Mayorga 7. The Cartographer. Warsaw, 1:400.000 By Juan Mayorga. In its first English translation by Sarah Maitland 8. 'All Limits Were Exceeded Over There': The Chronotope of Terror in Modern Warfare and Testimony Kirsten Mahlke 9. The Concentration Camp and the 'Unhomely Home': The Disappearance of Children in Post-Dicatorship Argentine Theatre Mariana Eva Perez PART III: HAUNTED SPACES, IRRUPTING MEMORIES 10. 'The Whole Country is a Monument': Framing Places of Terror in Postwar Germany Aleida Assmann 11. Haunted Houses, Horror Literature and the Space of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Literature Silvana Mandolessi 12. Counter-Movement, Space, and Politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey make the Enforced Disappearances Visible Meltem Ah?ska 13. An Orderly Landscape of Remnants: Notes for Reflecting on the Spatiality of the Disappeared Gabriel Gatti 14. A Boundless Grave: Memory and Abjection of the Rio de la Plata Estela Schindel PART IV: SPACES OF EXCEPTION, POWER AND RESISTANCE 15. Spatialities of Exception Pilar Calveiro 16. Imaginary Cities, Violence and Memory: A Literary Mapping Gudrun Rath 17. Occupied Squares and the Urban 'State of Exception': In, Against and Beyond the City of Enclaves Stavros Stavrides 18. 'Memory, that Powerful Political Force': An Interview with David Harvey

Indigo, or, Mapping the waters

Abstract: Inspired by "The Tempest", the novelist rewrites the drama of Ariel, Caliban and Sycorax in a Caribbean setting, exploring the colonial conflicts of an imaginary island and one family. The author's previous novel "The Lost Father" was Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction

Abstract: Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this atonce hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America. Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible. Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.