Narcoepics Unbound foregrounds the controversial yet mostly untheorized phenomenon of contemporary Latin American 'narcoepics.' Dealing with literary works and films whose characteristics are linked to illicit global exchange, informal labor, violence, 'bare life,' drug consumption, and ritualistic patterns of identity, it argues for a new theoretical approach to better understand these 'narratives of intoxication.' Foregrounding the art that has arisen from or seeks to describe drug culture, Herlinghaus' comparative study looks at writers such as Gutiérrez, J. J. Rodríguez, Reverte, films such as City of God, and the narratives surrounding cultural villains/heroes such as Pablo Escobar. Narcoepics shows that that in order to grasp the aesthetic and ethical core of these narratives it is pivotal, first, to develop an 'aesthetics of sobriety.'The aim is to establish a criteria for a new kind of literary studies, in which cultural hermeneutics plays as much a part as political philosophy, analysis of religion, and neurophysiological inquiry.

In our current world, questions of the transnational, location, land, and identity confront us with a particular insistence. The Grammar of Identity is a lively and wide-ranging study of twentieth-century fiction that examines how writers across nearly a hundred years have confronted these issues. Circumventing the divisions of conventional categories, the book examines writers from both the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern eras, putting together writers who might not normally inhabit the same critical space: Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Rhys, Anne Michaels, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. In this guise, the book itself becomes a journey of discovery, exploring the transnational not so much as a literal crossing of boundaries but as a way of being and seeing. In fictional terms this also means that it concerns a set of related forms: ways of approaching time and space; constructions of the self by way of combination and constellation; versions of navigation that at once have to do with the foundations of language as well as our pathways through the world. From Conrad's waterways of the earth, to Sebald's endless horizons of connection and accountability, to Gordimer's and Coetzee's meditations on the key sites of village, Empire, and desert, the book recovers the centrality of fiction to our understanding of the world. At the heart of it all is the grammar of identity, how we assemble and undertake our versions of self at the core of our forms of being and seeing.

Product Description: Metropole, Provinz und Welt bilden in der Literatur des deutschsprachigen Realismus ein mehrbezugliches Spannungsfeld. Der Band erkundethistorisch, systematisch, in Fallstudien und vergleichend, wie sich die Werke von Autoren wie Fontane, Raabe, Auerbach, Spielhagen u...read more

Product Description: For many, the advent of globalization brought with it an end to the way that the world had been viewed previous to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among the many endings the one that most concerns my book is the perceived foreclosure of any alternatives to the capitalistic ideology that structures globalization...read more

Product Description: The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city...read more

Product Description: Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era...read more

Product Description: An interdisciplinary collection of essays, Reworking Postcolonialism explores questions of work, precarity, migration, minority and indigenous rights in relation to contemporary globalization. It brings together political, economic and literary approaches to texts and events from across the postcolonial world...read more

Product Description: A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twenty-first-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work...read more

This study examines the impact of globalization on Germany's literary field. It investigates how German-language writers born between 1955 and 1975 respond to the pressures of globalizing factors, and how these influence notions of authorship. The literary marketplace, constructions of authorship, and fictional texts from the late 1990s through the first millennial decade are the issues in focus.