Commentary: Economics and American Literary Studies in the New Gilded Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-817
Author(s):  
Clare Eby
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corporate Takeover ◽  
Historical Periods

AbstractThe marginalization of the humanities, while depressing, has at least provoked literary scholars into rethinking what they do and foregrounding the relevance of their research. The spike of interest in the economic humanities illustrates one path for making literary study more legible. To that end, several trends emerge in recent economic-themed literary scholarship. One trend of establishing the salience of humanistic scholarship proceeds by locating the origins of present concerns, such as the corporate takeover of democracy, in the past. While that approach is exciting and engaging, care must be taken not to flatten out differences between historical periods. A second salutary trend of making the humanities more intelligible develops interventionist and activist modes of scholarship—for instance, in the interest of making the economy more equitable, and by suggesting alternatives to current impasses. Through such approaches, the economic humanities can help demystify the epistemology of capitalism, the mental barrier determining what is and is not thinkable.

Marx and the mirage of change: Notes from South Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110478
Author(s):  
Sagie Narsiah
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Past ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Spatial Content

There is little doubt that the understanding of the dynamics of capitalism has been enriched by Geography. Moreover, geographers utilizing Marxist/Marxian lenses have provided valuable insights into the spatial content of the system. Over the past two decades or so, geographers in no small way have contributed to the demystification of capitalism/capitalist development in its neoliberal incarnation – change as mirage. Furthermore, poverty, inequality, unemployment and related social ills are directly linked to the system. Indeed, they are produced by the system. In this paper, the geographical evolution of the capitalist system in South Africa is examined. Critical thinkers, among them Marxists, influenced the theorization of the relationship(s) between capitalism, apartheid, class and race. In this paper, I focus on the spatial aspects, which in my view have been neglected. I reflect on various historical periods – the apartheid era and the post-apartheid era, in particular. What is apparent is that neoliberalism in South Africa has entered a phase which I label “accumulation by corrupt means”. The class basis of this strategy is examined. Critical (Marxist) geographers are shaped by the direct experiences of material conditions. I describe my experiences in this regard.

Ein preußischer Postbeamter oder ein postmoderner Provokateur?

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Katerina Kroucheva
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Rhetorical Construction ◽  
Specific Tension

Abstract This article concerns itself with Gérard Genette’s reception in Germanophone literary study. Through an analysis of the rhetorical substrate from which Genette’s terminology draws its specific tension, the article determines that Genette is not only an excessive systematist, but also and simultaneously an author who battles received attempts at order and who foregrounds doubts about the idea of order. In this way, he displays a kinship with such theorists as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The receptions of the rhetorical construction of Genette’s texts and of the particular strategies of structuralism to which that construction refers did not occur synchronously in French, American, Russian, and German literary studies. The article demonstrates that, while German literary theory occasionally discusses Genette’s positioning within the field, there remains a general absence of the recognition that practically all of his books display a definite proximity to deconstruction, and that this proximity plays a central role in Genette’s enire theoretical edifice. This text is, last but not least, a call to read literary-theoretical texts in their aesthetic contexts.

The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham A. Dampier
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Historical System

William Butler Yeats’ elucidation of A Vision’s historical system in “Dove or Swan” represents the historical present as the reconciliation of past moments. The Four Faculties define history as the perpetual co-existence of historical periods and allow for a vision of historical development that always reflects on the past in order to make sense of the present. This essay argues that the interaction of the Faculties on the “line of coterminous periods” can be understood in terms of Spengler’s morphology of history as analytically analogous. The past influences the present, and can be said to constrain it, but it is the Will’s ability to reconcile the strife between the Tinctures that allows for novelty in this grand system of deterministic continuity. Previous discussions of the Yeats-Spengler connection have overlooked the importance of the Faculties and the four interacting periods of history, which this article only begins to address.

A TEORIA DA MENTE ENTRE SEMÂNTICA E PRAGMÁTICA

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crisbelli Domingos ◽  
Sebastião Lourenço dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Adaptationist Program

In the past decade or so, a small but rapidly growing band of literary scholars, theorists, and critics has been working to integrate literary study with Darwinian social science. These scholars can be identified as the members of a distinct school in the sense that they share a certain broad set of basic ideas. They all take “the adapted mind” as an organizing principle, and their work is thus continuous with that of the “adaptationist program” in the social sciences. Adaptationist thinking is grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature (2004, p. 6).

Going Forward to the Past: The Future of Literary Studies in Australian Universities

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Patrick Buckridge
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Groups ◽  
Head Of School ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
To Come ◽  
Australian Universities

The imminent death of the study of past literature in Australian universities has been pronounced many times since the 1980s. It seems to have been taking several decades to die, but its time may finally be upon us. When I first joined Griffith Humanities in 1981, the then Head of School, David Saunders, told me that though he might wish it otherwise, the literature of the past wouldalwaysbe studied in universities — if only because there was so much of it and because, like Everest, it was simply ‘there’. I now think he may have been wrong. It is likely enough, in my view, that some — mainly older — peoplewillkeep reading, studying and discussing the literary tradition for a long time to come: in reading groups, U3A classes and the like. More about that later. But I doubt if anyone will be doing it in Australianuniversitiesfor very much longer.

Building Asian Canadian Literary Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Ty
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Statistics Canada

Asian Canadian Literary Studies is a relatively new field of study which began in the mid to late 1990s. Even though literature written by Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Canadians had been published in literary magazines and anthologies since the 1970s, the identification of a distinct body of works called “Asian Canadian literature,” as Donald Goellnicht has noted (in “A Long Labour”), began only when there was a sociopolitical movement focused on identity politics. The literature includes early experiences of Chinese in Gum San or “gold mountain”; Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War; South Asian Canadians diasporic writing from former British colonies like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Guyana, Tanzania, and Kenya; feminist experimental and genre writing; and writing from the post-1975 wave of first- and 1.5-generation immigrants and refugees. Early 21st-century works have moved from mainly autoethnographic stories to those that include larger sociocultural concerns, such as poverty, domestic violence, the environment, lesbian, queer, and transgender issues, and other intersectional systems of oppression that face Asian Canadians and other marginalized groups. Genres include memoirs, films, short stories, autobiographies, realist novels, science fiction, graphic novels, poetry, plays, and historical novels. In the past, without naming the field “Asian Canadians,” many critics have engaged with Asian Canadian literary texts. For example, articles and chapters about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan can be found in journals and books on Canadian, postcolonial, ethnic, and Asian American literature. South Asian Canadian literature also has strong links with postcolonial studies and institutions, such as the book publisher TSAR Publications, which began as the literary journal, The Toronto South Asian Review. In Canadian English usage, Asian usually refers to people from East and Southeast Asian while the term South Asian Canadian is a subgroup of Asian Canadian, according to Statistics Canada. In literary studies, it has only been in the past ten or fifteen years that the term “Asian Canadian” is used as a pan-ethnic term for all peoples who are originally from or have roots in Asia.

Humanistic and Renaissance Studies in Review

Traditio ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 451-462
Author(s):  
Sesto Prete
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Precise Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Scientific Approach

In the past few years, literary studies on Humanism and the Renaissance have commanded ever-increasing attention. The research displays, broadly, two marked trends: one segment, which stations itself in the ranks of scholars such as Burckhardt, Voigt, De Sanctis, Gaspary, and others, interprets the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the era; the other uncovers new texts or, keeping step with the modern scientific approach to the study of manuscripts, reedits in more precise form already known texts — this group is dominated by the name of Sabbadini. In the following pages, several books which have appeared in the last few years will be assessed with a view toward their contributions in both areas.

Biblical Studies 'after' Theory: Onwards Towards the Past Part One: After 'after Theory', and Other Apocalyptic Conceits

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Moore ◽  
Yvonne Sherwood
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Past

AbstractAt present, 'high theory', epitomized by poststructuralism, is in a perceived state of decline in literary studies. This three-part article explores the complex ramifications of the 'after theory' debate for biblical studies, a field that, for the most part, still seems to be in a 'before theory' phase. Our intent, however, is not to sell biblical scholars on Theory, finally, before the supply runs out. Our aim, rather, is diagnostic and analytic. We want to look at what has happened, what has failed to happen, and what might yet happen in biblical studies in relation to Theory, and reflect on what these various appropriations, adaptations and missed encounters reveal about the very different disciplinary spaces occupied by biblical studies and literary studies, and the very different disciplinary histories that have brought each of these spaces into being. Contending that Theory's most important contribution is the self-reflexive and metacritical moves it makes possible, our reflection on Theory's reception in biblical studies is intended to defamiliarise the peculiarities of our own disciplinary space. What follows is the first installment of this three-part article.

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