Speculation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Harman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

Speculation does not refer to anything like a unified school of literary criticism; nor is it one of the terms commonly employed by critics. Nonetheless, there have already been at least two important appeals to speculation in early 21st-century philosophical approaches to literature. One of them is speculative realism, including the variant of this school propounded by Quentin Meillassoux and known as speculative materialism. Another is Tom Eyers’s speculative formalism, as developed in his book of the same title. Whereas Meillassoux is concerned with the mathematizability of literary texts, Eyers is focused on moments of self-reflexive paradox.

Surface

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiamin Kwa
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Digital Stories ◽  
History Of Architecture

Thinking about surface and its historiography in the early 21st century is a way of thinking about ways of seeing in the world, and how people define themselves in relation to the things around them. From literary texts to the decorative arts, from graphic narratives to digital stories, and from film to the textile arts, the ways of reading those texts frequently raise questions about interactions with surfaces. Theories of surface have been engaged in many ways since their invocation by French theorists in the final decades of the twentieth century. They have a steady but by no means identical presence in the field of visual studies, history of architecture, and film studies; they have found an application in discussions of race and identity; they have enjoyed an early 21st century turn in the spotlight under the auspices of a broadly defined call for a “surface reading.” This critical move defines surface as worthy of scrutiny in its own right, rather than as something that needs to be “seen through,” and makes its most profound claims less by reactivating attention to reading surfaces, which arguably has been done all along, but by a shifting away from a model of interpretation that makes claims for authoritative symptomatic readings by an all-knowing interpreter.

scholarly journals Poetological dominants of historical memory in works of asian immigrant writers in Canada

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Nataliia Ovcharenko
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Michael Ondaatje ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Asian Immigrant ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Arts And Humanities

Poetological dominants of historical memory in works of asian immigrant writers in Canada The paper highlights the development of literature related to the historical memory concept of Canadian immigrants from Asian countries. It covers the period of the late 20th ― first decades of the 21st century. The complex of problems, analyzed and structured within the semantic field of the modern historical memory concept, is often applicable both to Canada and Ukraine. The research broadens the knowledge of Canadian literature introducing the names of researchers and writers new to Ukrainian literary studies. The paper overviews the interpretations of Canadian Asian immigrants’ dispositions within the paradigm of modern arts and humanities. The focus is on the issues of double identity, the coherence of ethnic and North American mentality. The researcher generalizes the poetical aspects of the works by Ying Chen, Kim Thui, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje. Attention has been paid to the definition of discursive parameters, which allow shaping the concept of historical memory in ‘mosaic’ Canadian society; the issues of identities; the main markers of Canadian historical strategies; and versatile patterns of literary texts. The participation of Canada in the global dialog, which involves its culture and literature, plays probably the most important role in the debate on Canadian polyethnic literature. Regional, national, and international features demand some combined definition. The research explicates modern historical memory strategies in the context of conventional territory with its specific spatial and temporal characteristics. The author demonstrates the main local views on peculiarities of the Canadian literary process of the 2nd half of the 20th ― early 21st century and analyzes literary texts. All the novels show profound connection between representatives of Canadian literature, who may seem essentially different but manifest temporal and subjective similarity. The paper lists the names of authors working within the ‘double vision’ formula suggested by N. Frye. This approach focuses on the elements of North American culture pertaining to Canadian multicultural world structure as well as traditional cultures of the writers’ ancestral homelands. The paper also considers the generation paradigm, structured on the basis of social and historical algorithms and psychological markers. The types of generational modes (Kim Thuy, Michael Ondaatje) in literature were combined through a common denominator ― canadianness ― based on a double identity.

scholarly journals In The Eye of the Beholder – Attitudes towards Visual Poetry in Latvian Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-435
Author(s):  
Mārtiņš Laizāns
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Visual Poetry ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The World

Visual poetry in Latvian literature is still an extraordinary phenomenon. In this case, by extraordinary is meant its scarce appearance among the corpus of Latvian literary texts – only very few examples of it exist in Latvian literature even in the 21st century, though it has gained a visible presence in other literatures of the world since at least the era of Modernist poetry, and experienced in most cases a turn of critical attitude towards it from disregard or denial to acceptance and consideration. At first evaluated only as a pastime on the margins of serious literature, since Apollinaire it has evolved into a serious genre of poetry and art of its own, and is no longer considered a childish game. Given this situation in contemporary criticism, it is quite a peculiar situation that Latvian literature and literary criticism still does not pay adequate attention to it, thus visual poetry has stayed an outsider genre up to this day. In this paper a concise historical account of Latvian visual poetry will be given and some examples of visual poetry from various decades of Latvian literature will be given, as well as quotations from Latvian literary critics and scholars regarding visual poetry will be provided, in order to illustrate the overall situation in Latvian visual poetry and the possible reasons why it is still being mostly neglected and disregarded both by poets/artists and critics, though there seems to be slight indications of a visual turn.

scholarly journals DOMESTIC WOMEN’S LITERATURE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21st CENTURY. AUTOFICTION – THEORETICAL PROVISIONS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10(78)) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Oksana Ozdemir
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
Gerard Genette

The article focuses on the fact that one of the most productive forms of self-identification and representation in domestic women’s prose of the late 20th – early 21st centuries is the literary form of autofiction, which attests the continuation of the traditions of autobiography in the domestic gyneprose to the new level. However, modern autogyneprose mostly positions its openness to the reader, starting from the level of the “external pact” with the recipient, who emerges from the book pages through the conclusion of external pacts with the reader at the level of preface, inner interviews, own photo of writers, etc., which are called to witness openness of the author, clearly outline her image, and to some extent to announce her intentions. That is, the active position of dialogue with the recipient can be traced. This position is also indicated by the creation by the writers of the image of the implicit reader by introducing an internal addressee, that is, an internal pact in the form of a dialogue with the reader throughout the story. The active interaction of the narrator with the reader in women’s prose of the early 21st century also enables the latter to come closer to understanding of their own image, since the heroine of autofiction becomes for the recipient those Others, in the background of whom their own self-identification takes place. However, when it comes to the literary comprehension of these constructs, it should be noted that there is no conception of their analysis in the literary criticism of gynecritical orientation. This is the reason for the practice of using for this purpose of the “masculine” theory of literary analysis of narrative, in particular, the theory of autobiographical pact by Philippe Lejeune and the theory of narrative by Gérard Genette. And yet another complexity of narratological analysis of a text from the point of view of its narrative organization is not only an innovative method of autogyneprose research, but also some innovation in the field of the study of the narrative organization of non-fiction texts in comparison with fiction texts (this applies to both domestic and foreign literary studies). In this regard, the study of the forms of ego-narrative objectification in the autofiction texts by O. Drachkovska, I. Karpa, Ye. Kononenko, S. Povalyaeva and I. Rozdobudko is very relevant.

Critique

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Blake
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Wide Range

From its emergence and early evolution in and through the writings of Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, critique established its parameters very early on as both porous and dynamic. Critique has always been, in this sense, mutable, directed, and both multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, and this very fluidity and flexibility of its processes are possibly among the central reasons for its continuous relevance even when it has been dismantled, rebuffed, and attacked for embodying traits, from gender bias to Eurocentrism to neuro-normativity, that seem to indicate the very opposite of that flexibility. Indeed, once it is examined closely as an apparatus, the mechanism of critique will invariably reveal itself as having always contained the tools for its own opposition and even the tools for its own destruction. Critique has in this way always implied both its generality as a form and autocritique as an essential part of its process. For the past two centuries this general, self-reflective, and self-dismantling quality has led to its constant reinvention and re-adaptation by a wide range of thinkers and writers and across a broad range of disciplines. In the case of literature and literary theory, its role can often best be grasped as that of a meta-discourse in which the nature and purpose of literary criticism is shadowed, reflected upon, and performed. From this perspective, from the 18th-century origins of critique in its gestation in the fields of theology and literary criticism to its formalization by Kant, the literary expression of critique has always been bound up with debates over the function of literary texts, their history, their production, their consumption, and their critical evaluation. In the early 21st century, having evolved from its beginnings through and alongside various forms of anticritique in the 20th century, critique now finds itself in an age that favors some variant or other of postcritique. It remains to be seen whether this tendency, which suggests its obsolescence and superseding, marks the end of critique as some would wish or merely its latest metamorphosis and diversification in response to the multivalent pressures of digital acceleration and ecological crisis. Whatever path or paths contemporary judgment on this question may follow, critique as the name of a series of techniques and operations guided by a desire for certain ends is likely to remain one of the most consistent ways of surveying any particular field of intellectual endeavor and the relations between adjacent or even divergent fields in terms of their commonalities and differences. As Kant and Voltaire understood so well of their own age, modernity is characterized in the first instance by its will to criticism and then by the systematic criticism of the conditions for that criticism. By the same token now in late or post- or neo-modernity, if contemporary conversations about literature and its pleasures, challenges, study, and criticism require an overview, then some version of critique or its legacy will undoubtedly still come into play.

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Svitlana Gruschko
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

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