Allegories Of War

Explores the intersection of spirituality and violence in Old English poetry using contemporary approaches

The attacks to the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 brought serious consequences for the daily lives of Americans even to date. Although the literature on 9/11 and the resulted War on Terror abounds, less attention was paid to the daily effects of 9/11 in Western culture. To fill this gap, the present book, which is formed by different authored chapters, not only focuses on deciphering the nature and historical evolution of terrorism but also its consequences on the capitalist system. Starting from the premise that 9/11 is destroying the Western democracies from the inside, authors who have contributed to this editorial project shed light on the inconsistencies and ideological limitations of terrorism-research today. In this respect, the book infers the thesis that terrorism has affected one of the cultural touchstones of Western civilization: the sacred law of hospitality.The Islamophobia, the recent white supremacist manifestations, and the adoption of high technology to surveillance (or spy) the private life of citizens, without mentioning the tightening of border checks are clear signs that terrorism is gradually and partly isolating the US from the rest of the world. This book intends to discuss to what extent terrorism is mining democracy internally. We have invited authors from different countries and cultures to participate, some of them even non-English native speakers. This would be very well a limitation since speaking in a foreign language is almost difficult, but to my end, this is the tug of war of the book. Still further, an edited book contains interesting debates, which need to be properly organized by the editor, given the discrepancies among the authors ́ ideologies. For that, we have disposed from an introductory and concluding chapter to review the common-thread argumentation--chapter by chapter. Last but not least, each author not only gave a multicultural perspective on the problem but a particular diagnosis of how terrorism is discussed, imagined and internalized in different countries. These chapters interrogate further on the dominant discourse revolving around terrorism, Jihadism and 9/11. We hope this book helps to clearly expand the current understanding of terrorism and its effects in the Western culture.

Allegories of Violence demilitarizes the concept of war and asks what would happen if we understood war as discursive via late 20th Century novels of war.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Simultaneously a critique of Foucauldian governmentalist interpretations of neoliberalism and a historical materialist reading of contemporary South Asian fictions, Allegories of Neoliberalism is a probing analysis of literary representations of capitalism’s “forms of appearance.” This book offers critical discussions on the important works of Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, H. M. Naqvi, Mohsin Hamid, Nasreen Jahan, Samrat Upadhyay, and other writers from South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It also advances a re-reading of Karl Marx’s Capital through the themes and tropes of literature—one that looks into literary representations of commoditization, monetization, class exploitation, uneven spatial relationship, financialization, and ecological devastation through the lens of the German revolutionary’s critique of capitalism.

Allegories of America offers a bold idea of what, in terms of political theory, it means to be American. Beginning with the question What do we want from a theory of politics? Dolan explores the metaphysics of American-ness and stops along the way to reflect on John Winthrop, the Constitution, 1950s behavioralist social science, James Merrill, and William Burroughs. The pressing problem, in Dolan's view, is how to find a vocabulary for politics in the absence of European metaphysics. American political thinkers, he suggests, might respond by approaching their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of traditional absolutes would thus assume the status of a national mythology—America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition establishing the legitimacy of its founding. After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, Dolan reflects on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. He then takes on questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and other liberal political "behaviorists," as well as on cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. Additional discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. here Dolan considers two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures—William S. Burroughs and James Merrill—both of whom have a troubled relationship to politics but nonetheless register an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Alongside Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, Dolan assesses the attempt in Arendt's On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection.

Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.

A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic offers, for the first time, an original, timely examination of the pivotal role poetry plays in policy, power and political legitimacy in modern-day Iran. Through a compelling chronological and thematic framework, Shams presents fresh insights into the emerging lexicon of coercion and unrest in the modern Persian canon. Analysis of the lives and work of ten key poets traces the evolution of the Islamic Republic, from the 1979 Revolution, through to the Iran-Iraq War, the death of a leader and the rise of internal conflicts. Ancient forms jostle against didactic ideologies, exposing the complex relationship between poetry, patronage and literary production in authoritarian regimes, shedding light on a crucial area of discourse that has been hitherto overlooked.