German Pop-Feminism and Generational Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Feminist Discourse

Chapter 5 explores the specificities of pop-feminist discourse in the German context. First, the author examines the thematization of intergenerational discord in German pop-feminist non-fiction, focusing on the manner in which some volumes draw on the metaphor of generational caesura in order to discredit existing feminist protagonists and legitimize their own claims. She then analyses first-person pop-literary novels by Kerstin Grether, Antonia Baum, Helene Hegemann, Alina Bronsky, and Charlotte Roche. With the exception of Roche’s work, the novels foreground the importance of intersubjectivity in the processes of subjectification and agency, a finding that places them on a continuum with the literary fiction discussed in the preceding chapters.

British Pop-Feminism on the Literary Marketplace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Chick Lit

This chapter investigates post-chick-lit debates concerning the ‘democratization’ of fiction which collide with claims that the UK’s publishing industry inclines increasingly towards simplifying and sexualizing literary fiction written by women. Long-standing debates within feminist scholarship concerning the practices of reading first-person narratives written by women become compounded by the contemporary frameworks of market and genre within which those narratives are situated. Spiers examines three examples of pop-literary fiction by British writers Scarlett Thomas, Helen Walsh, and Gwendoline Riley, reading these against the corpus of British pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative written by journalists Polly Vernon, Caitlin Moran, Ellie Levenson, and Hadley Freeman, and academics Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune.

scholarly journals Book Review: 9/11 and the War on Terror: A Documentary and Reference Guide

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Military History ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Person ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Research Institute

In the nearly sixteen years since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, nearly 13,000 non-fiction books have been written about that day. Topics range from first-person accounts to memorials to collections of documents. A new addition to the crowded field is 9/11 and the War on Terror: A Documentary and Reference Guide. The author, Paul J. Springer, is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Professor of Comparative Military History at the Air Command and Staff College in Alabama. His work presents excerpts of declassified documents, chosen to illustrate the effects on and between terrorism and counterterrorism. The selected material is freely available elsewhere, but in this collection the author provides a useful chronology and a short analysis of both the impetus to create the document and its effects.

The Outside of the Inside: Blackness and the Remaking of Canadian Institutional Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-265
Author(s):  
Karina Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
First Person ◽  
Canadian Universities ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
Person Account ◽  
Teaching Learning

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

Reflections and Refractions: Arab American Women Writing and Written

Hawwa ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Serageldin
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Arab American ◽  
First Person ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Real ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Non Fiction

AbstractAt a time when the American popular imagination is dominated by fun-house refractions of Arabs and Muslims as the ultimate "other," it is critical that these images be counterbalanced by unmediated, first-person, authentic reflections of the real-life experiences of writers of Middle Eastern heritage. This is where fiction and narrative non-fiction occupy a privileged position, creating an intimate, expansive space for empathy and identification, and serving generality through specificity.

Pop-Feminist Narratives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
North America ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Feminist Discourse

Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.

scholarly journals O lugar da memória em Lygia Fagundes Telles

Navegações ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Miguel Sanches Neto
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Feminine Writing ◽  
Lygia Fagundes Telles

Ler os livros de não-ficção de escritores identificados com a literatura de ficção permite compreender melhor os mecanismos de criação literária e o estabelecimento de vozes autorais. Escritora central da literatura brasileira contemporânea, Lygia Fagundes Telles teve, nas últimas décadas, publicada em livro uma grande quantidade de textos dispersos que tratam, entre outrosassuntos, do papel da memória em narrativas de invenção. O presente artigo busca identificar, a partir destes títulos, uma teoria da memória ficcional para entender como se constituiu uma das escritas de expressão feminina mais importantes do país. Tais textos não são molduras de uma obra, mas alicerces de uma estética e de uma ética narrativa que deu visibilidade a todo um universo humano.********************************************************************Memory place in Lygia Fagundes TellesAbstract: Reading non-fiction books of authors identified with literary fiction allows us to better comprehend the mechanisms of literary creation and the establishment of authorial voices. Major writer in contemporary Brazilian literature, Lygia Fagundes Telles had, in the last decades, published in books a large amount of dispersed texts that talk, among other subjects, about the role of memory in inventiveness narratives. The present article seeks to identify,from those titles, a theory of fictional memory to undestand how one of the most important feminine expression writings in the country was formed. Such texts are not a work’s frame, but foundations of an esthetic and of an ethic narrative that gave visibility to a whole humane universe.Keywords: Feminine writing; Memory; Inventiveness

The Pop-Feminist Subject

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Spiers
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Social Determinism ◽  
Counter Model ◽  
Shifting Identities ◽  
The Ideal

Chapter 1 explores how pop-feminist accounts of subjectivity draw heavily upon poststructuralist understandings of identity as pluralistic and unstable. Many pop-feminists, however, retain the assumption that, underlying the playful performance of shifting identities, there remains a sovereign subject capable of mediating reflexively and autonomously over such performances. Spiers shows how this ‘sovereign’, yet ‘performative’ pop-feminist subject is profoundly linked to the ideal flexible, entrepreneurial self of neoliberalism. She then develops a counter model of subjectivity and agency based on an ethics of intersubjective relationality, reflecting on the role narrative plays within the theories of subjectification that seek to carve out a space for agency away from the binary of social determinism and prediscursive subjective sovereignty, a binary much pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative ultimately reverts to. This underpins Spiers’s claim that the literary fiction discussed generates a more probing exploration of selfhood and agency than the pop-feminist non-fiction and life narrative.

scholarly journals How is Fear Constructed? A Narrative Approach to Social Dread in Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-441
Author(s):  
Kairi Jets
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Visible Object ◽  
Horror Fiction ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Fear-inducing narratives can be divided into two subtypes of horror and dread. While horror stories concentrate on a concrete visible object such as a monster, in dread narratives the object of fear is abstract or absent altogether. Pure forms of either are rare and most narratives mix both types, usually with dominant in one or the other. An interesting subtype of dread narratives is the narrative of social dread, where the fear is social in nature. One of the few narratologists to study construction of fear in arts, Yvonne Leffler suggests a variety of narrative techniques often used in horror fiction. Adjusting Leffler’s list of techniques for tales of dread instead of horror helps analysing the nature and amount of dread present in a range of different narratives from light reading and literary fiction to non-fiction. A narrative approach helps to reveal how non-fiction texts use similar techniques, and sometimes more extensively than fictional texts. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is an excellent example of social dread in fiction, where societal failures are a big part of the fears induced, and the questions raised in the narrative are denied definite answers. Kanae Minato’s Confessions (2008) is closer to a thriller, because despite raising issues of societal failure, the work gives conclusive answers to all of the questions raised during the narrative. Although Haruki Murakami’s Underground (1997–98) is a nonfiction compiled from interviews of terror attack survivors, it nevertheless has the hallmarks of a social dread narrative, such as question-answer structure and abstractness of the source of fear. More importantly, Murakami’s work alternates between identifying and anticipatory readings, gives no definitive answers to the questions it poses, and the fear it conveys is social in nature.

scholarly journals The Craft of Short Story : A Critique of The Habit of Love

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 130-138
Author(s):  
Dr Madhu D Singh
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Person ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Indian Writing In English ◽  
Story Writing ◽  
Technical Innovations ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Right

Author of several  works  of  fiction and non fiction , Namita Gokhale is a well known name in the field of Indian Writing in English  not only  as  a writer but also as a publisher  and as a founder director of Jaipur Literature Festival . Her  short stories   published under the title  The Habit of Love  ( 2012)   are  remarkable for adding a new dimension to the  craft of short story writing. The Habit of Love  is a collection of thirteen short stories  encapsulating the  myriad  experiences of their female protagonists  who lay bare before the readers their inner world – their desires , passions, fear , anxiety,  happiness, anger ,  ennui and sadness – in kaleidoscopic lights.  Based mainly on the themes of love, lust and death , these stories are interwoven with the motifs of time, memory , dreams travels and mountains. The writer frequently shifts from present to past or vice versa , making  several technical innovations  like unexpected , abrupt endings; use of startling similes/ metaphors; choice of  queer , quirky titles for these short   stories. The use of the  technique of  first person narrative in many of these stories imparts more intimacy to them as if the narrator is engaged in a tete- a- tete with her readers. Gokhale  emphasizes the importance of  a convincing narrative voice  in making a short story effective. In response to a question as to which is the most critical part of a story: the storyline, the characters or the storytelling, she says, “Finding the right voice that convincingly tells the story, whether in first person or otherwise is the most crucial part.”( Recap: Twitter chat with Namita Gokhale,TNN,22 March 2018 )

scholarly journals The Holocaust Journal of Miksa Fenyő

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Maya J. Lo Bello
Keyword(s):  
Effective Means ◽  
First Person ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Literary Techniques

For readers today, first-person accounts provide one of the most effective means of gaining an intimate glimpse into the everyday lives of those experiencing historical events. Diary entries recorded during the Holocaust not only individualize the process of mass extermination, they also preserve the words of those bearing witness to horrendous crimes. Yet should these written records only be interpreted as works of non-fiction? What literary techniques might have been employed in creating these depictions? Other than the period in which they were written, what characteristics may diaries written during the Holocaust share? In an attempt to address a few issues posed by Holocaust journals and diaries, this paper examines Miksa Fenyő’s Holocaust journal, Az elsodort ország [‘A Country Adrift’] (1946), written while the author was in hiding from June 22, 1944 to January 19, 1945 in Budapest, Hungary.

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