The collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilém Mathesius, the founder of Prague Linguistic Circle and the first Professor of English Language and Literature at Charles University. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives (Mathesius, Vančura and others) and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English Studies with respect to the Prague Structuralism, it will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic as well as modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interdisciplinary projects: humanist philology and structuralist semiology. Following Paul de Man, this link can be identified as the problem of rhetoric – its liminal position between grammar and logic, structure and meaning, and its concern with performativity and value of language. Reassessment of this problem appears crucial for understanding the dynamics of present transformation of philologies and structuralist methodologies which will be discussed in the concluding section. The other crucial methodological problem is that of the methodology of literary history. Although the representatives of the Prague English studies managed to overcome the rigidity of synchronic approaches their treatment of dynamic structures is still considerably indebted to traditional notions of function and value. The book is divided into two sections: the first attempts to reassess the significance of the legacy of Mathesius (in literary theory, history and theory of translation) and his followers (especially Zdeněk Vančura and Jaroslav Hornát), the second explores diverse contexts and implications of the Prague Structuralism, from political aspects of Russian formalist theories, via the aesthetics of the grotesque to structuralist psychoanalysis and recent textual genetics.

Analysing the reception of contemporary French philosophy in architecture over the last four decades, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy discusses the problematic nature of importing philosophical categories into architecture. Focusing particularly on the philosophical notion of the Baroque in Gilles Deleuze, this study examines traditional interpretations of the concept in contemporary architecture theory, throwing up specific problems such as the aestheticization of building theory and practice. Identifying these and other issues, Nadir Lahiji constructs a concept of the baroque in contrast to the contemporary understanding in architecture discourse. Challenging the contemporary dominance of the Neo-Baroque as a phenomenon related to postmodernism and late capitalism, he establishes the Baroque as a name for the paradoxical unity of 'kitsch' and 'high' art and argues that the digital turn has enhanced the return of the Baroque in contemporary culture and architectural practice that he brands a pseudo-event in the term 'neobaroque'. Lahiji's original critique expands on the misadventure of architecture with French Philosophy and explains why the category of the Baroque, if it is still useful to keep in architecture criticism, must be tied to the notion of Post-Rationalism. Within this latter notion, he draws on the work of Alain Badiou to theorize a new concept of the Baroque as Event. Alongside close readings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault related to the criticism of the Baroque and Modernity and discussions of the work of Frank Gehry, in particular, this study draws on Jacque Lacan's concept of the baroque and presents the first comprehensive treatment of the psychoanalytical theory of the Baroque in the work of Lacan.

The archaeologist, philologist, and Linguistics theoretician Nikolai Marr (1865-1934) has attracted increasing scholarly attention as a pivotal figure of late-tsarist and early Soviet cultural politics and as an early anticolonial theorist. He remains, however, an elusive thinker who is much written about but seldom read. This volume offers a representative selection of Marr’s writing from several stages of his life translated here for the first time into English. The selection of texts allows the reader to trace the key evolving and interconnected preoccupations that animate Marr’s vast oeuvre: his anti-nationalist valorization of the cultural and linguistic hybridity of the Caucasus, his denunciation of the imperialist complicity of Western European comparative linguistics, his anti-Darwinian emphasis on mixture and convergence in place of filial descent within the history of languages, and his unorthodox theories of linguistic origins in gesture rather than speech. Key Marrist terms such as ‘Japhetidology’, or the rejection of the prevalent theory of an Indo-European language family, are clarified. The volume contains original essays that contextualize Marr’s work within the history of linguistics, showing the indebtedness and applicability of his ideas to traditions that are frequently held to be unrelated to one another: Russian proto-structuralism, French deconstruction, and Indian subaltern thought. This book was originally published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Translation Studies is an exploration of the history of translation and interpreting studies (TIS) as a field of intellectual enquiry. The volume covers the evolution of thinking on translation, from the earliest discourses in Assyria, Egypt, Israel, China, India, Greece, and Rome, up to the early 20th century when TIS emerged as an identifiable academic field. The volume also traces the institutionalization of TIS and its key concepts from their beginnings in the 1920s in Ukraine up to their contemporary interdisciplinary manifestations. Written by leading international scholars, many of whom played a direct role in the events they describe, the chapters in this volume provide a comprehensive and in-depth account of the birth and consolidation of translation and interpreting studies as a thriving interdiscipline. With a focus on providing readers with the methodological and theoretical tools they need to conduct research, as well as background in the historiography of TIS, this handbook is an indispensable resource for all students and researchers of translation and interpreting studies.

Grotesque features have been among the chief characteristics of drama in English since the 1990s. This new book examines the varieties of the grotesque in the work of some of the most original playwrights of the last three decades (including Enda Walsh, Philip Ridley, Tim Crouch and Suzan-Lori Parks), focusing in particular on ethical and political issues that arise from the use of the grotesque.

By analyzing appropriations of literary modernism in video, experimental film, and installation art, this study investigates works of media art as agents of cultural memory. While research recognizes film and literature as media of memory, it often overlooks media art. Adaptation studies, art history, and hermeneutics help understand ‘appropriation’ in art in terms of a dialog between an artwork, a text, and their contexts. The Russian Formalist notion of estrangement, together with new concepts from literary, film, and media studies, offers a new perspective on ‘appropriation’ that illuminates the sensuous dimension of cultural memory . Media artworks make memory palpable: they address the collective body memory of their viewers, prompting them to reflect on the past and embody new ways of remembering. Five contextual close-readings analyze artworks by Janis Crystal Lipzin, William Kentridge, Mark Aerial Waller, Paweł Wojtasik, and Tom Kalin. They appropriate modernist texts by Gertrude Stein, Italo Svevo, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Guillaume Apollinaire, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This book will be of value to readers interested in cultural memory, sensory studies, literary modernism, adaptation studies, and art history.

In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will be of value to all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies