‘Literary Evenings’ at the Greek National Theatre, 1945–6: popular education and the literary canon

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 287-313
Author(s):  
Fiona Antonelaki
Keyword(s):  
Popular Education ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Political Rivalry ◽  
Post War ◽  
Directing Attention

This article recounts the little-known story of the ‘Literary Evenings’ (1945–6), a series of literary recitals staged at the Greek National Theatre and organized by members of the Generation of the 1930s. Set against the background of intense political rivalry that followed the Varkiza Agreement, the ‘Literary Evenings’ capture the post-war aspirations for the popularization of high culture. Drawing upon hitherto unexplored archival material, this article aims to offer a new, historically informed understanding of the Generation of the 1930s, while also directing attention to the aural consumption of literary texts as an unacknowledged force behind canon formation.

scholarly journals The Gulag of Poets: The Experience of Exile, Forced Labour Camps, and Wandering in the USSR in the Works of Polish-Yiddish Writers (1939–1949)

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ruta
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
Psychological Burden ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Times ◽  
Literary Output

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)

2018 ◽  
pp. 75-116
Author(s):  
Alison E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Helen Maria Williams ◽  
Literal Translation ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Scientific Task

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist Aimé Bonpland, the Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814-25), appeared as the seven-volume Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions (Longman, 1814-29). Her rather literal translation was as unpopular as Black’s was well liked by a British readership, but it enjoyed Humboldt’s approval. Previously overlooked archival material detailing the corrections he made to her translation illustrate the close collaborative nature of the undertaking, but also the stylistic freedoms Humboldt permitted her. Williams’s frequently creative (or downright ‘unfaithful’) translational choices favoured the idiom of the sublime in tropical descriptions, which, in their phrasing, also recalled lines from Milton, Thomson or Blake. Williams therefore allowed works from the British literary canon to echo through Humboldt’s prose, making it seem subtly familiar to Anglophone readers. This chapter concludes by focusing briefly on William MacGillivray’s Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1832), a successfully revised version of William’s Personal Narrative.

Au sujet d’une nouvelle histoire littéraire francophone transnationale

Revue Romane ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mickaëlle Cedergren
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Academic System ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
Literary System ◽  
Language Literature

Abstract This article considers the Francophone literary canon based on a transnational reception study. It focuses on the circulation of French language literature within the Swedish academic system during the last thirty years. A longitudinal empirical study of bachelor and doctoral dissertations in French between 1986 and 2016 allows the author to examine the dynamics of canon formation and renewal, as well as the role of universities in this process, particularly in regard to the creation of a canon of Francophone literary works. In response to recent scholarly anthologies which have debated the Francophone canon, this study is able to confirm the existence of Francophone classics. Finally, it is argued that further reception studies focusing on areas outwith the Francophone literary system will be of prime importance if the question of the Francophone canon is to be fully assessed beyond the immediate context of the Hexagone.

scholarly journals From a double margin: Anglophone translation of women's writing from Croatia and Serbia

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Sibelan Forrester
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article examines Anglophone translations of women's writing from Eastern Europe with particular focus on writers from Croatia and Serbia. After outlining the presences and absences of these women writers in Anglophone translations, it raises some questions about the significance of gender in literary canon formation and the emergence of literary works into a global context through translation.

scholarly journals Questioning the ‘of’ in Performance-as-translation: Multimedia as a Subtext in the 2003 Pécs Performance ‘of’ Hamlet

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Márta Minier
Keyword(s):  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Set Design ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Dramatic Text

This article explores a theatre performance (National Theatre Pécs, 2003, dir. Iván Hargitai) working with a 1999 Hungarian translation of Hamlet by educator, scholar, translator and poet Ádám Nádasdy as a structural transformation (Fischer-Lichte 1992) of the dramatic text for the stage. The performance is perceived as an intersemiotic translation but not as one emerging from a source-to-target one-way route. The study focuses on certain substructures such as the set design and the multimedial nature of the performance (as defined by Giesekam 2007), and by highlighting intertextual and hypertextual ways of accessing this performance-as-translation it questions the ‘of’ in the ‘performance of Hamlet (or insert other dramatic title)’ phrase. This experimentation with the terminology around performance-as-translation also facilitates the unveiling of a layer of the complex Hungarian Hamlet palimpsest, which, as a multi-layered cultural phenomenon, consists of much more than literary texts: its fabric includes theatre performance and other creative works.

scholarly journals The Sebald Case

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-175
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Fresán
Keyword(s):  
Modern Literature ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
End Point ◽  
Critical Machine

In this essay, the author offers a candid discussion of Sebald’s legacy and the flurry of criticism aimed at securing his place in the literary canon. It engages many of Sebald’s signature themes: memory, amnesia, silence, history, and trauma. The author acknowledges Sebald’s masterful blend of language, photography, and archival material, resulting in a uniquely hybrid narrative form falling somewhere between essay and fiction. The essay is critical of Sebald’s most dedicated admirers—not because of any perceived paucity in Sebald’s work, but rather the shortsightedness of the critical machine that is desperately trying to fossilize Sebald as the end point of modern literature.

scholarly journals The Mediatized Zlatan, Made by Sweden

2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristine Sarrimo
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Digital Network ◽  
National Icon

Abstract The present article analyses the mediatization of the brand and celebrity Zlatan Ibrahimović using the reception and marketing of the footballer’s life story and autobiography as its main case. It is shown that the construction of a myth such as Ibrahimović transcends the materiality of the book as well as geographical, vernacular and media boundaries, as it is constituted as content in a digital network that produces signification. This ‘Zlatan content’ is framed by national Swedish values and a traditional Western myth of individual masculine excellence. It is also marked by emotions, class and race, telling a tale about the marginalized emotive immigrant becoming both a national icon and part of an imaginary Western ghetto experience and global literary canon formation. It is argued that the performance of excitable speech acts is crucial in the mediatization and branding of mass market literature and celebrities such as Ibrahimović.

scholarly journals Censorship and Publication Control in Early Post-War Taiwan: Procedures and Practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Táňa Dluhošová
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Republican China ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Local Official ◽  
Post War

This article explores how state institutions and party organs of the Kuomintang used various means of exercising power and projecting authority in order to shape the literary scene and literary production in Taiwan during the early post-war period (1945–1949). Censorship is examined from two complementary perspectives. First, integrating the Taiwanese case into a broader political and social context, the presentation focuses on the legal framework of the publishing law of Republican China and on regulations propagated in local official bulletins. Second, the article analyses censorship as a practice and set of procedures. This second part is based on the archival files of Taiwan Historica, which holds official documents from both early post-war governments. The archival material unveils some of the motivations behind censorship practices, and helps us to understand chosen strategies to legitimise sociocultural norms.

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