Name: The Surplus of Culture
SKU: 1-4438-3213-8
Availability: InStock

The Surplus of Culture

Sense, Common-sense, Non-sense

Edited By: Ewa Borkowska, Tomasz Burzyński

£39.99

This volume presents the surplus of culture: the added value of irony, irrationality, and absurdity that subverts mainstream culture. It dwells at the risky intersection of untamed interpretation and tradition, where entrenched notions reveal their shattering nature.

This multifaceted volume presents the elusive surplus of culture in the spotlight of theory and academic practice. Despite its overtly economic implications, the concept alludes…

This multifaceted volume presents the elusive surplus of culture in the spotlight of theory and academic practice. Despite its overtly economic implications, the concept alludes to the added value of sense, common sense and nonsense which is represented as languages of irony, irrationality and absurdity potentially subverting traditional and mainstream “regimes” of culture. Consequently, the “moment of surplus” is inherent in critical interpretation in which supposedly well-entrenched notions suddenly reveal their implicitly shattering and subversive nature.

The surplus of culture dwells at the risky intersection of untamed interpretation and tradition. It is the space of the “third” in which literary canons are re-visited, language reveals its hidden political agendas, the Orient reclaims its own cognitive perspective and established structures of cognition are questioned in the tragic-comic gesture of insight. The volume is a must for scholars and researchers in the fields of cultural studies, literature and arts as well as literary theory.

Ewa Borkowska is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English at the University of Silesia, Poland. She has published on English and Polish poetry, European arts and music. She has lectured in the USA and the majority of European countries, where she has also participated in numerous conferences on literature, arts and world cultures. Apart from poetry and music, her interests are also in the history of visual arts. Her published works include Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Phenomenological Study of G. M. Hopkins’ Poetry, From Donne to Celan, 1990: Logo(theo)logical Patterns in Poetry (1995) and At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness) (Peter Lang, 2005) and a number of articles on Hopkins, Rilke, Celan, Heaney, and Polish poets as well.

Tomasz Burzyński received his PhD in 2009 from the University of Silesia, Poland. He works at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures where he teaches sociology of culture, media studies and the cultural aspects of politics and policymaking. His research interests include cultural studies and cultural theory, cultural theories of trust, and modernization theory as well as media studies.