Words of Her Own

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Language Form ◽  
Feminine Voice ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Feminine Ideals ◽  
Writing Community ◽  
Language Content

Drawing on a spectrum of genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels and travelogues, this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the emergence of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors as an ever-growing distinct category in nineteenth-century Bengal and the factors facilitating production and circulation of their creations. By exploring the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, religion, and culture in women-authored texts and by reading these within a specific milieu, the study opens up the possibility of re-configuring mainstream history-writing that often ignores women. Questioning essentialist conceptions of women’s writings, it contends that there exists no monolithic body of ‘women’s writings’ with a firmly gendered language, form, style, and content. It shows that there was nothing in the women’s writings that was based on a fundamentally feminine perspective of experiences with an inherent feminine voice. While describing the specifically female life world of domestic experiences, women authors might have made conscious divergences from male-projected stereotypes, but it is equally true that there are a number of issues on which men and women authors spoke in unison. The book argues for distinctions within each genre and across genres in language, content, and style amongst women authors. Even after women authors emerged as a writing community, the bhadralok critics often censured them for fear of their autonomous selfhood in print and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. Nevertheless, there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, thus creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

Concluding Note

2020 ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Ideals

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even after the emergence of a sizeable reading community catering to books authored by women, due to the spatial ‘respectability’ of the presses from which their books got published the reception of prohibited penmanship by women by the bhadralok society in ‘renascent’ Bengal was disappointing. Since some women flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, the bhadralok critics, in their reviews of book by women, often censured the authors if their autonomous selfhood in print became threatening and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. However, such sarcastic comments and caustic critique could not strip women authors of their creative foray in the literary world. By the turn of the century, they had begun creating a literary tradition of their own in Bengali.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
Language Form ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
Bengali Language

The ‘Introduction’ helps the readers situate Hindu and Brahmo women’s literary outpourings within the wider sociopolitical context of nineteenth-century Bengal. It locates the eager penmanship of Bengali women within the larger and growing milieu of print literature; the tension between formal and informal forms of Bengali language; and the statistical analysis of ‘books in print’. The startling fact of the price of woman-authored books being on par with male-authored ones is a revelation about the market for women-authored texts. Extant literature on women authors in the nineteenth century considers the major scholarly epitomes that have appeared in the last 50 years in Bangla and English on women’s writings in Bengal. The ‘Chapters’ Overview’ deals with autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels, and travelogues written by women writers to examine how their literary production varied in style, content, and language form within and across genres. It demonstates both divergences and convergences in literary creations amongst male and female writers.

On "Secondary Aesthetics, Without Isolation": Philosophical Origins of Mikhail Bakhtin's Theory of Form

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Dušan Radunović
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Judgment ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Intellectual Movements

This paper discusses the philosophical origins as well as the social context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of aesthetic form. Bakhtin’s critique of the Russian Formalist conception of form, which reaches its most elaborate form in his 1924 article “The Methodological Questions of Literary Aesthetics” (“K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva”), is methodologically rooted in various strands of neo-Kantian philosophy and aesthetics, most notably, in the works of Hermann Cohen and Broder Christiansen. It was from the neo-Kantian philosophical repertoire that Bakhtin derived his foundational argument that aesthetic activity represents a “secondary creation.” Art, according to Bakhtin, stands in contrast to the “primary creative acts” of cognition and ethical judgment, hence it encounters a “reality” that had already been articulated and ordered by cognitive and moral acts. In keeping with this principle, Bakhtin postulates that the aesthetic act is the reassessment of, rather than a direct intervention into, empirical reality. In this constellation, artistic form is seen as the quintessential achievement of aesthetic activity that incorporates, but is categorically irreducible to, cognitively and ethically inarticulate material. Having traced the philosophical origins of Bakhtin’s meditation on form in turn-of-the-century German neo-Kantianism, the paper finally aims to appraise Bakhtin’s inquiry into aesthetic form, especially his emphatic rebuttal of the Russian Formalist assertion of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, against the background of more general trends in the humanities, both European and Russian, toward the separation and specialization of disciplines. Bakhtin’s neo-Kantian unitary vision of arts and humanities, the paper concludes, was fundamentally in conflict with the modernizing tendency in arts and humanities, the offshoots of which he recognized, and thus fervently denied, in a number of contemporaneous artistic and intellectual movements and practices.

New Car, Same Principles: Using Language Development Theories to Drive the Design of Supportive Augmentative and Alternative Communication System Interfaces

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (12) ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Jamie B. Boster ◽  
Joann P. Benigno ◽  
John W. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Augmentative And Alternative Communication ◽  
Developmental Theory ◽  
Alternative Communication ◽  
Complex Communication Needs ◽  
Communication Devices ◽  
Development Of Language ◽  
Communication Needs ◽  
System Interfaces ◽  
Language Content

Innovations in technology have resulted in increased use of tablets, mobile devices, and applications as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems for children with complex communication needs (CCN). Although research has been conducted on the specific characteristics of AAC technologies, many interfaces remain replications of prior communication devices with little consideration of the features of newer platforms. A greater concern is that these interfaces may not be based on empirical evidence or derived from key developmental language theories. As such, these interfaces may place additional demands on children with CCN instead of supporting their development of language content, form, and use. The purpose of this paper is to discuss potential interface supports for AAC systems that capitalize on current technologies and draw upon key tenets of developmental theory.

Psychology and gender at the turn of the century.

2000 ◽  
Vol 55 (6) ◽  
pp. 613-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry L. Minton
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
And Gender
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