Race-ing the Russian Nineteenth Century

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-266
Author(s):  
Edyta M. Bojanowska
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Interactive Process ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
Methodological Reflection ◽  
Static Concept

The article offers a methodological reflection on the practical work of reading race in Russian literary texts, especially from the nineteenth century. It makes four key arguments. First, “racialization,” in the sense of an interactive process, is a more productive lens than an essentially static concept of race. Second, race is not only, and not always, a question of perception or meaning-making, but also ideology. Third, the concept of race typically engages notions of class, gender, and sexuality, an intersectionality that merits particular attention. Fourth, critiquing race can be productively furthered by paying attention to anxieties and insecurities that underlie racial hierarchies and biases, which can be revealed through readings against the grain. As we cast new light on Russia's engagement with race, it is essential that the culture of the Russian nineteen-century become part of this reappraisal.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

Critical Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This concluding chapter argues that the critical contexts of the literary texts dealt with in this volume cannot be so confined inside the period before 1950, not merely for writers whose works have maintained or increased their esteem, but also for the bulk of that work belonging to the large categories of colonial, Victorian, and even nationalist writing that exhibits the values and attitudes of empire. Much of the postcolonial criticism of colonial fiction treats it as symptomatic of imperial views on race, nature, gender, or progress rather than as literature Criticism in this volume means something distinct from that applied to nineteenth-century English literature or American modernist fiction where the specifically literary qualities and values of the writing remain central concerns of its criticism, even where the values and ideology of modernism, for example, have been sharply contested.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

scholarly journals Recursive Machine Translation

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Evans
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Translation Tools ◽  
Methodological Reflection

Machine translation tools such as Google Translate are at best seen as useful approximators, rather than offering any literary potential. In this experiment and short methodological reflection, I use Google Translate to recursively translate Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s celebrated WWI poem, ‘Grodek’, between German and English, until the two versions stabilise. I am attentive to places in which the poem and its renderings are simplified and/or literary value may be lost, but also places in which new or unexpected renderings emerge. This is a preliminary foray, but I propose that the method of recursive machine translation offers a new way to explore the translation of literary texts—a timely proposal, given the increasing applications of computer programmes and machine learning both within the humanities and throughout wider literary culture.

scholarly journals Honoré de Balzac: diálogos entre a escrita cotidiana e a literatura

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
M. Inês C. Arigoni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Journalistic Practice

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar alguns elementos de relação entre as esferas jornalística e literária presentes na produção de Honoré de Balzac. Reconhecidamente, havia, no século XIX, uma via de mão dupla entre esses domínios e seus contornos eram difusos; o que sugere indícios de intertextualidade nas escritas literária e não literária balzaquianas.The purpose of this article is to examine closely related elements between journalistic and literary texts by Honoré de Balzac and their relevance with regards to literary creation as well as journalistic practice. It is known, that in the nineteenth century, there were many shared influences between the journalistic and literary spheres and their boundaries were diffuse; which suggests evidence of intertextuality in Balzac’s writing, both literary and non-literary. 

scholarly journals Symbols and narratives of Europe: Three tropes

2021 ◽  
Vol 06 (02) ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Johan Fornas
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Introductory Remark ◽  
Critical Hermeneutics ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Interpretive Research ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Cultural Entity ◽  
Methodological Reflection

Throughout history, attempts have been made to identify Europe as a geographical, political, social, and cultural entity. Recent efforts to establish key symbols and narratives of Europe have focused on a set of central signifying elements, even if there is a wide and contradictory range of ways to define, structure, and interpret them. An introductory remark on the current debate on the need for renewed European self-reflection paves the way for some conceptual clarifications of my approach to concepts like culture, meaning, identity and mediation. A methodological reflection accompanies this on how to use semiotic tools in cultural studies based on critical hermeneutics. The concept of culture used here is based on the signifying practice of mediating meaning-making, linking imagination to communication in a triangular dynamic between texts, subjects, and contexts. Examples are given from two research projects on a broad and diverse range of European symbols and narratives, illustrating such interpretive research results. European identifications are crystallized and spun around three dominant tropes: supreme universality, resurrection from division, and communicative mobility. Their intricate tensions and interrelations attest to how deeply Europe remains a highly contested and dynamic meaning cluster.

Eastward Ho! Aspects of Eastern European Writing Translated into Irish

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Titley ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Central European ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Reading Material ◽  
Eastern European Countries

The article focuses on translations into Irish of literary texts by writers from several central and eastern European countries. The author adopts a historical approach by first drawing attention to the Irish language as a means of literary expression and a vehicle for the translation of classical texts in the Middle Ages. Irish came under sustained attack because of English rule from the seventeenth century onwards and was only spoken by the poor and the marginalized in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century the language experienced a revival. The latter process was intensified following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. In 1926, a project for literacy and provision of reading material in the Irish language was implemented, and a government publishing company known as An Gúm started producing books for the new Irish-reading public. Since the start of the project, the general tendency has been for books by western European writers to be translated into Irish. However, a significant number of texts by eastern and central European authors, ranging from classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov to novels and short stories by contemporary Russian and Slovenian authors, have also been published over the years.

AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF RHYTHMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN- LITERARY PROSAIC TEXT AS A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE TEXT AFFILIATION TO A LITERARY PERIOD

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (99) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
ELENA I. BOYCHUK ◽  
ELENA V. MISHENKINA
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Methods ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Prose Rhythm ◽  
Literary Period ◽  
Rhythmic Structures

The article analyses the rhythmic characteristics of Russian-language literary texts using the automated PRD (Prose Rhythm Detector) application. The authors consider the main approaches to the periodization of Russian literature of the XIX-XXI centuries in order to determine the affiliation of works to a particular epoch based on the specifics of the text rhythmic structures. The quantitative and statistical methods of the analysis are used.

Conclusion

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Russian Literary

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. Part of the purpose of this study has been to recover a sense of the range and scope of the work of just one of the writers generally thought to be part of the world of official Soviet literature. Berggol′ts is known first of all for her wartime poetry; that work deserves to be placed firmly in the context of her writing before and after the war. Its importance should not be denied, but it should not be seen as a sudden, unprecedented outburst of creativity. In its exploration of Berggol′ts's writing, this study has shown that life and art became tightly entangled in her poetry and prose; the poet's own conviction that the two should be intimately connected is demonstrated by her texts. Yet it would be wrong to lose sight of the fact that we have been dealing with literary texts which must be viewed in relation to other literary texts. While much of what Berggol′ts wrote displays its connection with events in her life and in the life of her society, her writing also reveals its awareness of how others wrote. Russian literary tradition and the poetry of her contemporaries helped to form Berggol′ts's work.

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