Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and the Language of Class in Literary Scholarship

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Cassandra Falke
Keyword(s):  
Literary Scholarship

Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism & the Building of the Archive for New Poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunsong Kim
Keyword(s):  
San Diego ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Collection Development ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Archival Practice ◽  
Small Press ◽  
The University

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP’s stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, “experimental” poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP’s collection development priority. I interrogate two main points in this article: 1) How does whiteness—though visible and open—remain unquestioned as an archival practice? and 2) How are white archives financed and managed? Utilizing the ANP’s financial proposals, internal administrative correspondences, and its manuscript appraisals and collections, I argue that the ANP’s collection development priority is racialized, and this prioritization is institutionally processed by literary scholarship that linked innovation to whiteness. Until very recently, US Experimental and “avant-garde” poetry has been indexed to whiteness. The indexing of whiteness to experimentation, or the “new” can be witnessed in the ANP’s collection development priorities, appraisals, and acquisitions. I argue that the structure of the manuscripts acquired by the ANP reflect literary scholarship that theorized new poetry as being written solely by white poets and conclude by examining the absences in the Archive for New Poetry.

The historical perspective of contemporary literary scholarship

Neohelicon ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-111
Author(s):  
George Bisztray
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Literary Scholarship

Angus Fletcher’s Other Literary Darwinism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Joseph Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Negative Judgment ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Literary Darwinism ◽  
Patent Medicine

Abstract Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoah

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl Jeffrey Richards
Keyword(s):  
Central Theme ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Critical Writings

Within the enormous body of critical writings dedicated to literaryworks devoted to the Shoah, the possibility of its very representationand the problems arising in the potential deformation of memoryare frequent topics. In light of these issues, it might be helpful toexamine a well-known work of literary scholarship, Erich Auerbach’sMimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, writtenbetween May 1942 and April 1945, as a potentially overlookedexample of a highly sublimated allegorical meditation on the contemporarymurder of Europe’s Jews. Auerbach’s classic work, whichexplicitly takes literary representation as its central theme, seems touse carefully and subtly selected examples from western literature asfigures for current events.

“People Eat Their Dinner, Just Eat Their Dinner…”: Food Discourse in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Natalia Vysotska
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Food Products ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
New Drama ◽  
Three Sisters ◽  
Fernand Braudel

Abstract The essay sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the essay looks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss the alimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Fernand Braudel, Bernhard Waldenfels and others), moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by the anthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by a semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand food products and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumental in creating the illusion of “everydayness” vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize the spiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’s feminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinction between everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the two plays seen through the gastronomical lens of “eating together.” Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentary practices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

Didactic dimensions of intercultural literature

Proglas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mina Hubenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intercultural Competence ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Research Perspective ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Methodological Aspects ◽  
Relative Differences ◽  
Intercultural Literature

Intercultural literary studies in the field of literary scholarship represent a research perspective with a specific theoretical and methodological profile, which is based on two prerequisites: 1) cultural differences can be important in the study and perception of literature, and 2) literature and its reception can reveal these relative differences. In this way culture is interpreted as a category of differentiation, but also as a productive source of exchange, contact, dissemination and integration. Intercultural literary research focuses on specific issues concerning the creation and perception of the literary text, as well as the didactic and methodological aspects of acquiring intercultural competence through it. Literary texts lead, on one hand, to enrichment, curiosity and excitement in students, and, on the other, to the diversification of methodological techniques in foreign language teaching. Literary texts can motivate students and foster their personal development through new methods that not only encourage them to speak, but also inform them about the culturally specific point of view, through the content of the text.

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