Imaginary ethnographies : literature, culture, and subjectivity / Gabriele Schwab.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Schwab, Gabriele.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.
• Literature.
• Literature and society.
• Social science literature.

Physical Description:

xv, 220 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2012]

Summary:

• 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", 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 Levi-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 examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism and 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 post human, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its imagining 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 and underscores the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life. Book jacket.

Contents:

• Part I Writing, Desire, and Transference
• 1 Another Writing Lesson: Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and the Chief of the Nambikwara 27
• 2 Traveling Literature, Traveling Theory: Imaginary Encounters Between East and West 45
• 3 Restriction and Mobility: Desire, Transference, and the Cultural Imaginary 61
• Part II Cannibals, Children, and Aliens
• 4 The Melancholic Cannibal: Juan José Saer's the Witness and Marianne Wiggins's John Dollar 79
• 5 War Children in a Global World: Richard Powers's Operation Wandering Soul 110
• 6 Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis 134
• Part III Coda
• Cosmographical Meditations on the Inhuman: Samuel Beckett's the Lost Ones 159.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

• 9780231159487
• 023115948X
• 9780231159494
• 0231159498
• 9780231530804
• 0231530803

OCLC:

793421808