Author: Simone Pinet File Type: pdf Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spains first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecia. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion. In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation. Her discussion sheds light on how clerics perceived themselves and on the connections between literature and these other activities. Drawing on an extensive collection of early cartographic materials, much of it rarely considered in conjunction with the romance, Pinet offers an original and insightful view of the mester de clerecia and the changing role of knowledge and the clergy in thirteenth-century Iberia. **

Author: Brooks E. Hefner File Type: epub From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernismone that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genresfrom Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierskaemployed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s. **

Author: Jacques Rancière File Type: pdf Composed in a series of scenes, AisthesisRancieres definitive statement on the aesthetictakes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and eventssome famous, others forgottento ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.ReviewJacques Rancieres Aisthesis transforms the field of aesthetic philosophy.Liberation French philosopher Jacques Ranciere is a refreshing read for anyone concerned with what art has to do with politics and society.Art Review In the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Ranciere shows a way out of the malaise.Liam Gillick Its clear that Jacques Ranciere is relighting the flame that was extinguished for manythat is why he serves as such a signal reference today.Thomas Hirschhorn Far from the grand narratives of modernism that claim the language of art progresses in the search for purity ... modernity breaks down the hierarchy between spheres of culture, disturbing the boundaries between art and life ... [Ranciere] analyzes a series of moments from this other history that could only be written in proliferating fragments ... this aesthetic regime conditions the forms of art and democracy in an era of the permanent emergence of new sovereign subjects.Le Monde Since The Division of the Sensible ... Ranciere has been reminding those who would separate the wheat from the chaff in contemporary creative practices that art only exists as an unstable boundary that must be continually crossed. In Aisthesis the philosopher develops his thinking, drawing fifteen scenes of a counter-history of artistic modernity.Le Magazine LitteraireAbout the AuthorJacques Ranciere is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator. Zakir Paul is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Princeton University. He most recently translated a collection of Blanchots political writings.

Author: Paul Finkelman File Type: pdf