Decentring Englishness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David James
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Formal Development

This chapter asks if there is something about the displacement of national identity that correlates with the formal development of the ‘English Novel’, even though that designation is now considered untenable, if not unusable. Reservations about tracing correlations, let alone compatibilities, between the persistence of Englishness and the prose of novelists whose job might be to decentre it, are so consolidated in literary studies that the cautions hardly need rehearsing. Yet the chapter considers how we might approach writers whose self-categorization defies criticism’s prevailing inhibitions. And even when we do spot such contradictions, the chapter considers whether we can arbitrate, textually or biographically, in discrepancies between ethnic and aesthetic realms. In doing so, this chapter explores the ‘fairy tale’ of Englishness and what it might mean for our historical understanding of contemporary fiction.

Degrees of Difference: Rethinking the Transnational Turn in Korean Literary Studies

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-657
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Hanscom
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Works

“Nothing,” Paul Jay writes in his recent work Global Matters: The transnational turn in literary studies, “has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism” (1). Certainly the shift toward a transnational model has been useful in mounting a critique of nation-based literary studies and in debunking the “natural” link among national identity, race, and language, challenging both the “hermeneutic preeminence of nations” and the “neutrality of comparison as a method” (Seigel 62–63). Combined with a postcolonial attentiveness to local or peripheral literary production and an expanded notion of agency, transnationalism works to designate “spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal” (Lionnet and Shih 5) and to diversify the authors and texts available to students of literature, broadening curricula and the scope of literary studies (Jay 22). Those studying and teaching non-Western literatures might well find value in the challenge to the nation as the unquestioned context for the production and interpretation of literary works and in the healthy skepticism toward a supposedly neutral comparative method.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHICAL AND GENOLOGICAL FEATURES OF ENGLISH POST-POSTOMODERNISTIC NOVEL: TYPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (16) ◽  
pp. 150-159
Author(s):  
Dmytro Drozdovskyi
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
World Outlook ◽  
Psychological Point ◽  
First Time

The philosophical parameters of English post-postmodernistic novel have been determined. The influence of non-literary factors on the features of the novelistic chronotope and the worldview of characters has been described. The genre nature of the post-modernistic novel has been outlined. For the first time in Ukrainian literary studies, an array of features that makes it possible to determine the affiliation of the novel to post-posmodernism has been proposed. The experience of Dutch theoretical school in understanding the metamodernistic art has been generalized and the theory of metamodernism has been supplemented. Characterized by the peculiarities of world perception, post-postmodernistic thinking, which at the same time unites such features as irony and sincerity, has been explored. Besides, the specificity of autistic thinking has been spotlighted, which makes it possible to visualize the nature of the post-postmodernistic world outlook grounded on the principles of science, the pursuit of objectivity and emotional sincerity. From the psychological point of view, the concept of the multifaceted reality as one that denotes the perception of the characters of the contemporary novel has been explained. The genre and narrative features of English novel of 2000-20100s have been determined by the influence of the results of astrophysical and biological discoveries that have an impact on the structure of the narrative and actualize the spectrum of philosophical problems inspired by the views of F. Nietzsche, the discourse of multiculturalism in the thematic field of contemporary English novel.

scholarly journals Romantyzm wciąż aktualny? Szkolny dialog z klasyką

2018 ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Antuszewicz
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Junior High School ◽  
Junior High ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
National Values

I argue for amazing values of the tradition of romanticism. I pay attention to connections between this tradition and the present. I write about necessary changes in reading romantic literature at school. In my point of view the most important is not to talk only about national values. It is really necessary in Poland. We must not continue to think that patriotism means only fighting with other people. Forming students’ national identity is one of the main duties at school but the romantic way of understanding patriotism has to be changed. It is very dangerous in our century. Many researchers also write about it. It is a very important problem of literary studies. I also present suggestions to work with Reduta Ordona in primary school and in junior high school. There are different ideas presented in methodical literature as well as my own suggestions.

France in Flux

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Industrial Sites ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Look ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The Impact

The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the 1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been drawn to articulate France’s contrasting spatial qualities, from infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports, to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves. In doing so, they explore how the country’s acute sense of national identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic terms. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through attention to the specificities of place and topography. Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory (and thereby, a national identity) through the figure of the hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of flight which render it increasingly unsettled.

scholarly journals ‘I don’t have a skull… Or bones’: Minor Characters in Disney Animation

Animation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Linn Lönroth
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Character Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Film Performance ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Animated Films ◽  
Aesthetic Style ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article explores the place of minor characters in Disney’s animated features. More specifically, it proposes that Disney’s minor characters mark an aesthetic rupture by breaking with the mode of hyperrealism that has come to be associated with the studio’s feature-length films. Drawing on character theory within literary studies and on research into animated film performance, the article suggests that the inherent ‘flatness’ of Disney’s minor characters and the ‘figurativeness’ of their performance styles contrasts with the characterizations and aesthetic style of the leading figures. The tendency of Disney’s minor characters to stretch and squash in an exaggerated fashion is also reminiscent of the flexible, plasmatic style of the studio’s early cartoons. In addition to exploring the aesthetic peculiarity of minor characters, this article also suggests that these figures play an important role in fleshing out the depicted fictional worlds of Disney’s movies. By drawing attention to alternative viewpoints and storylines, as well as to the broader narrative universe, minor characters add detail, nuance and complexity to the animated films in which they appear. Ultimately, this article proposes that these characters make the fairy-tale-like worlds of Disney animation more expansive and believable as fictional spaces.

scholarly journals Russia between the East and the West: Searching for Identity in a Transitional Era (Based on the Material of the Russian Literary Tale of the 2000s – 2010s)

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-106
Author(s):  
Polina Korolkova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
The West ◽  
National Question ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Modern Russian ◽  
Transitional Era

The essay focuses on the problem of national identity in the modern fairy tale for adult audience, on the example of texts by modern Russian writers (Alexander Kabakov, Andrey Stepanov, and Dmitry Glukhovsky). After analyzing what is common and what is different in the poetics of the fairy tales by the mentioned authors, as well as the strategies of portraying modern Russia in the transition period of Perestroika, I discuss the theme of the national identity in these texts and its meaning. The paper also highlights the properties of the contemporary fairy tale that addresses topical issues of the day. One of such properties is the national question, another one is the so-called “eternal question” concerning Russian civilization and its choice between the East and the West.

scholarly journals Matryoshka version of the Russian verlibre

Litera ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 64-92
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Ivanovich Veprev
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Characteristic Image ◽  
Probable Form ◽  
New Form ◽  
Semantic Differentiation

  Referring to the possibility and need for an experiment in literary studies, mentioned in the early XX century by the Soviet literary theoretician and poetry scholar Boris Yarkho, who paid particular attention to the transformation of the genre and the structure of expressive means as a whole, the author of this article analyzes the new form of the Russian verlibre (free verse), its varieties of the most probable form, attempting to determine its most characteristic typology, as well as to introduce into the concept of the matryoshka verlibre the two main forms, two of its fundamental metaphases and several subvarieties: 1. Verlibre in verlibres (verlibre in several verlibres); 2. Verlibre in verlibre  (several verlibra in one verlibre). The author also distinguishes two subvarieties that are formed from the verlibre in verlibre: 3. Veprlibr (large verlibre in several verlibres); 4. Aphoristic verlibre (verlibre in several aphorisms), and others. The main conclusion of the conducted analysis of the new form of the matryoshka verlibre consists in the fact that matryoshka verlibre is patterned by a catenate fairy tale and is attributed to the type of catenate fairy tale (cumulative fairy tale, recursive fairy tale, chainlike fairy tale). The verlibre, in which dialogues or actions are repeated and develop in a modified form according to the plotline, belongs to the matryoshka verlibre. The effect of these verlibres is based on the repeating narrative, characteristic image and action changing for one or another reason and reaching culmination. In this case, semantic differentiation of the text is viewed as a synthesis of both dimensions, where any component of the work is simultaneously motivated by the coherence of such element that it creates with other elements, as well as semantic union of the elements that are subject to destruction, and belong to different components of the entire work. A matryoshka doll serves as an example.  

scholarly journals The Science of Polish Verse (?). Rzecz o teorii notacji poetyckiej Sidneya Laniera w kontekście współczesnych kulturowych teorii literatury

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 486-503
Author(s):  
Martyna Ujma ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
English Novel ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Landscape ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Way

The article presents the theoretical-literary concept developed by Sidney Lanier in the second half of the 19th century in America. The author presents the assumptions of the theory of poetic notation, primary and secondary rhythm, and the links between literature and the social landscape described by the American in “The Science of English Verse” and “The English Novel”. The considerations are included in the framework of reflection on the way of shaping contemporary cultural literary studies.

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