Marc Shell

In Money, Language, and Thought, Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger. Close readings of works such as the medieval grail legends, The Merchant of Venice, Goethe's Faust, and Poe's "The Gold Bug" reveal how discourse has responded to the dissociation of symbol from thing characteristic of money, and how the development of increasingly symbolic currencies has involved changes in the meaning of meaning. Pursuing his investigations into the modern era, Shell points out significant internalization of economic form in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. He demonstrates how literature and philosophy have been driven to account self-critically for a "money of the mind" that pervades all discourse, and concludes the book with a discomforting thesis about the cultural and political limits of literature and philosophy in the modern world.

Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era

Money, Language, and Thought

In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Shell, who has himself struggled with stuttering all his life, plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Looking into the difficulties encountered by people who stutter--as do fifty million world-wide--Shell shows that stutterers share a kinship with many other speakers, both impeded and fluent. This book takes us back to a time when stuttering was believed to be 'diagnosis-induced, ' then on to the complex mix of physical and psychological causes that were later discovered. Ranging from cartoon characters like Porky Pig to cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, from Moses to Hamlet, Shell reveals how stuttering in literature plays a role in the formation of tone, narrative progression and character.--From publisher description.

Stutter

In this book, Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.

The Paralysis of Culture

Polio and Its Aftermath

Werner Sollors

American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.

A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations

The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature

Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English and American Literature and Languageirving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature Marc Shell

John Bale

Queen Elizabeth (England, I.)

Marguerite Miroir De L'Ame Pecheresse

As a girl of eleven, Elizabeth I translated into English a poem by Marguerite of Navarre on incest, spiritual and physical. Four years later her translation, tided "The Glass of the Sinful Soul," was published by the Protestant reformer John Bale. However ingenuous Elizabeth may have been at eleven, she surely realized the implications of the tract when she permitted new editions in 1568, 1582, and 1590. Its bearing on her own family and her precarious hold on the throne was all too obvious when dissenters accused both her father, Henry VIII, and her mother, Ann Boleyn, of adultery; when her father had sought to annul his first marriage on grounds of incest, when her mother was accused by Henry of incest, and when Elizabeth herself was deemed a bastard. Making Elizabeth's little-known work readily available to today's scholars, Elizabeth's Glass includes a photographic reproduction of Elizabeth's manuscript and a modern transcription, as well as John Bale's additions to his 1548 edition. In an erudite and penetrating introduction, Marc Shell investigates the complex political, familial, theological, and ecclesiastical forces that made Elizabeth acutely conscious of incest and made her translation an emblem of a controversy that stormed throughout Reformation Europe.

With "The Glass of the Sinful Soul" (1544) by Elizabeth I, and "Epistle Dedicatory" & "Conclusion" (1548) by John Bale

Elizabeth's Glass

Examines the many material, social, and symbolic connections among art, money, and religion throughout Western history, and investigates current matters of art collection, counterfeiting, and crises in the financial world, with the help of many illustrations. UP.

Art & Money

Why did coinage, tyranny, and philosophy develop in the same time and place? Marc Shell explores how both money and language give "worth" by providing a medium of exchange, how the development of money led to a revolution in philosophical thought and language, and how words transform mere commodities into symbols at once aesthetic and practical. Offering carefully documented interpretations of texts from Heraclitus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Ruskin, Shell demonstrates the kinship between literary and economic theory and production, introduces new methods of analyzing texts, and shows how literary and philosophical fictions can help us understand the world in which we live.

The Economy of Literature

Henry B and Anne M Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies Werner Sollors

"American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.".

Islandology is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare's Hamlet and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, Islandology shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.

Geography, Rhetoric, Politics

Islandology

If ever there was a polyglot place on the globe (other than the Tower of Babel), America between 1750 and 1850 was it. Here three continents—North America, Africa, and Europe—met and spoke not as one, but in Amerindian and African languages, in German and English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. How this prodigious multilingualism lost its voice in the making of the American canon and in everyday American linguistic practice is the problem American Babel approaches from a variety of angles. Looking at the first Arabic-language African-American slave narrative, at quirks of translation in Greek-American bilingual books, and at the strategies of Yiddish women poets and Welsh-American dramatists, contributors show how linguistic resistance opposes the imperative of linguistic assimilation. They address matters of literary authority in Irish Gaelic writing, Creole novels, and the multiple voices of the Zuni storyteller; and in essays on Haitian, Welsh, Spanish, and Chinese literatures, they trace the relationship between domestic nationalism and immigrant internationalism, between domestic citizenship and immigrant ethnicity.

Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni

American Babel

Examines the connections among national self-determination, kinship, politics, literature, and society

Marc Shell

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