Anonymity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Title Page ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Explicit Theory ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Knowledge In Practice ◽  
General Conditions

Anonymity is defined as the absence of the author’s name on a title page, or in any other paratext of a publication such as a preface or dedication or manuscript colophon; pseudonymity is included because it presents a false name to the reader while concealing the author’s name. A theory of anonymity establishes the general conditions of possibility for anonymous authorship, and thus has a different object than a literary history that describes the variable causes of anonymity: the decisions of authors, editors, or publishers, or the fact that the author was either originally unknown or has come to be unknown over time. In the most general sense, the conditions of anonymity are inherent in language itself, and especially so in writing; the writer is separated from the written. While writers have always exploited this knowledge in practice, the fullest theory of the anonymity of language was developed extensively by the linguists, critics, philosophers, and historians of culture associated with structuralism and poststructuralism in mid-twentieth century France. While the concerns of the problematic of enunciation—who is speaking, and from what place?—were central to this group of thinkers, and are indeed familiar under the headings of the critique of the cogito and the relation between writing and death, it is less widely recognized that an explicit theory of anonymity as a condition of speech and writing was constructed in the movement that can be traced economically from Benveniste to Barthes, and then to Derrida and Foucault.

Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Davies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Extended Study ◽  
Individual Woman ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Edward I

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

The Autonomy of Art and the Legitimization of Biofiction: An Aesthetic Turning Point in Twentieth-Century Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-369
Author(s):  
Michael Lackey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
William Styron ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
One Year ◽  
Century Literature

Abstract Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, and since the 1990s it has become one of the most dominant literary forms. This is surprising because many prominent scholars, critics, and writers have criticized and even condemned it. This essay hypothesizes that postmodern theories of truth and concomitant transformations in reader sensibilities partly account for the legitimization and now dominance of biofiction. The essay analyzes a 1968 literary debate among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, and Robert Penn Warren, which on the surface concerned the uses of history in literature. But because it happened just one year after the publication of Styron’s controversial novel about Nat Turner, the debate ended up focusing primarily on the nature and value of biofiction. By analyzing the discussion in relation to contemporary formulations about and theorizations of biofiction, this essay illustrates why the forum represents a turning point in literary history, resulting in the decline of a traditional type of literary symbol and the rise of a more anchored and empirical symbol—that is, the type of symbol found in biofiction.

Dante's New Life of the Book

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.

After-Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 585-598
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
Roman Poetry ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
Creative Life

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

Authority in Experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alireza Doostdar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
Cumulative Learning ◽  
Over Time

This chapter examines the place of personal experience in contemporary Iranian spirituality, What is known as “experience” is equivalent to the Persian word tajrobeh (Arabic tajriba). The sense of tajriba is linked as scientific experiment or methodical empirical observation to Spiritism. As a kind of experience associated with cumulative learning and mastery over time, a sense of tajrobeh comes close to the German concept of Erfahrung. This chapter first considers the concept of “heart” before discussing tajrobeh in terms of Erlebnis, experience that is more personal, immediate, intense, and perhaps ineffable than what Erfahrung implies. It then explores the views of Arezu Khanum on heart, Abdol-Karim Soroush on religiosity, and Mostafa Malekiyan on spirituality and religious experience. It also shows that in the twentieth century, the terms tajrobeh and Erlebnis converged in Iranian reformist formulations of “religious experience” inspired by modern European thinkers.

Crossing the Last Frontier: Transatlantic Movements of Asian Maritime Workers, c. 1900-1945

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Balachandran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Immigration Policies ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Migration Network ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Us Immigration

This essay explores the maritime migration network between Asia and America by way of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. It pays particular attention to the maritime activity of ‘lascar’ seamen, and the movement of labour between Britain, America, India, China, and Hong Kong. It examines the changes that underwent the network over time, the quantities of migrants and their intended destinations, and the period of upheaval caused by each World War. It also examines the racial, social, political, and cultural factors that shaped British and US immigration policies during the period. It concludes by stating that the US was undoubtedly a primary destination for Asian labourers, despite the well-broatcast perils relating to wages, racism, nationalism, and subjugation.

For an Eco-Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-68
Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Haitian Literature ◽  
Boat People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
Jenifer L. Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Over Time

The complexities of life for slaves with disabilities continued into the Civil War as some became “contraband.” With emancipation, the experiences of freedpeople with disabilities, including veterans, grew more obscure. The use of disability as a marker of inferiority, however, expanded in potent new ways by drawing on the ideology of ableism during Reconstruction to legitimize white dominance. Using the lens of intersectionality, it is clear how the antebellum era’s multitude of disabling narratives of race substantiated the racial order of society and established an enduring set of foundational myths, beliefs, and practices about race. Over time, overt analogies between blackness and disability gave way to more subtle suggestions of black inferiority and “damage imagery” that echoed well into the twentieth century.

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