scholarly journals Past, Present (and Future) of Studies of Literary Masculinities: A Case Study in Intersectionality

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Josep M. Armengol
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Masculinity Studies ◽  
White Masculinities

This article offers an overview of studies of literary masculinities. After tracing their origins and development within the broader field of masculinity studies, it continues by illustrating the present applications of masculinity studies to literary criticism, ranging from studies of female to “ethnic” (i.e., both white and non-white) masculinities in literature, among others. This article concludes by showing that, as in the case of masculinity studies in general, current studies of literary masculinities could and should continue to draw on critical insights from intersectionality, as illustrated by rereading Douglass’ autobiographical slave (1845). Narrative from the perspective of both masculinity and whiteness studies.

César Hautot – ein naturalistischer Ödipus? Guy de Maupassants Hautot père et fils auf der Schwelle zur Psychoanalyse

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-197
Author(s):  
Claudia Jacobi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Short Novel ◽  
Scientific Approach

Abstract Literary criticism has mentioned some affinities between Guy de Maupassant’s literary work and Freud’s psychoanalysis, without ever reflecting on Maupassant’s literary anticipation of the Oedipus complex. The latter is particularly evident in the short novel Hautot père et fils (1889), which has not received much attention to date. The article aims to illustrate some evident parallels between Maupassant’s literary representation of a father-son conflict and Freud’s scientific approach. In doing so, it does not intend to deliver a demonstration of the emergence of Freudian concepts from naturalistic fiction. It shall rather be considered as a literary case study, which illustrates the discourse-historical process of transformation from the physiological paradigm of naturalism to the psychological paradigm of the arising psychoanalysis.

scholarly journals The Dichotomy of Specialization: Is a Literature Teacher Necessarily a Language Teacher?

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-133
Author(s):  
Mariam Anana
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
English Language Teachers ◽  
Effective Teaching And Learning

This study investigates the dichotomy of specialization in Literature and English language. In many primary and secondary schools in Nigeria, many teachers who teach Literature are the same teachers who teach English Language. This is responsible for lack of ultimate successes in academic performance, foundational establishment and progressive developments in Literature and English language. Set against the backdrop of the inseparability and non-specialization in individual subjects in question, the study examines the need for a dichotomy of specialization in English Language and Literature with a view to reducing the rate of errors and students’ failures in both subjects. Adopting the simple randomisation, the researcher uses selected primary and secondary schools in Lagos State as the case study; the paper raises four questions and these are: Can English Language teachers effectively teach poetic devices? Are segmental phonemes easily taught by Literature teachers? Can English Language teachers proficiently teach oral literature, literary criticism and non-African literature? Can Literature teachers competently teach stress and intonation? This research uses a qualitative approach and adopts The Speech Act Theory as its theoretical framework. Questionnaire of fifteen (15) items was used for data collection and the simple percentage was applied for data analysis. The researcher discovered that: It is not possible for English Languageteachers to effectively teach poetic devices. Segmental phonemes cannot be easily taught by Literature teachers. Students would lag behind in areas where teachers are not proficient in the subjects they teach. Also, it is not possible for a teacher to place equal emphasis on both English Language and Literature in classrooms. The study therefore recommends the need for a dichotomy of specialization in the two subjects so as to ensure effective teaching and learning of these subjects.

Locating stylistics in the discipline of English studies: a case study analysis of A.E. Housman’s ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Andrew Goatly
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Case Study Analysis ◽  
And Linguistics

Abstract Literary stylistics, whose subject matter is literary language, straddles the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics, as Henry Widdowson pointed out 45 years ago. Since then, developments in discourse analysis and multimodal studies have had the potential to expand the map of the interactions between different disciplines. This case study performs a traditional stylistic analysis of the poem ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’ from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but also demonstrates the potential for a multimodal perspective on stylistics by relating it to a musical analysis of Vaughan-Williams’ setting of the poem. It begins with a linguistic analysis of phonology, graphology and punctuation, lexis, phrase structure, clause structure and clausal semantics. It proceeds to a discourse analysis of pragmatics and discourse structure. And it ends by relating the linguistic and discoursal analysis to the music through music criticism. By way of conclusion, it suggests that both linguistic analysis and appreciation of musical structure and mood are useful ways into Spitzer’s philological circle, by which linguistic analysis and musical appreciation can pave the way for literary appreciation.

Interpreters of the Literary Canon and Their Technical Instruments: The Case of Balzac Criticism

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 992-1010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grégoire Mallard
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Comedie Humaine ◽  
Epistemic Cultures

Drawing insights from the ethnographies in the natural sciences, which have focused on the role of technical instruments in laboratory practices, this article asks, “What role do technical instruments play in the humanities?” Editions of La Comédie humaine, written by Honoré de Balzac, are taken as a case study. Primarily based on ethnographic research with Balzac scholars, this article traces the evolution of Balzac's text from a unified and unadorned text in the 1930s, to a single annotated text in the critical edition of the 1970s, and to a searchable electronic format of different versions. The author shows that the different schools of interpretation in Balzac criticism (traditional, semioticians, socio-critics) constructed these diverse editing technologies to influence the evolution of literary theories. For instance, traditional scholars' theory of authorship entertains en elective affinity with the critical edition of La Comédie humaine. Sociocritics challenged its assumptions and constructed electronic editions to develop their own theories, particularly on the genesis and reception of Balzac's texts. By focusing on the epistemic cultures in which research practices are embedded, this case study complements purely institutionalist perspectives on knowledge-production in the academic field and highlights the presence of diverse epistemic cultures in literary criticism.

Studying Urban Space and Literary Representations Using GIS

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Alves ◽  
Ana Isabel Queiroz
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
City Center ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
The City

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.

Reconstructing the deconstructed - hypertext and literary education

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Ensslin
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Writing Classroom ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Case Study Report ◽  
The One ◽  
Educational Potential ◽  
Death Of The Author

In this article I endeavour to connect two major achievements of postmodernism which, at first glance, may appear incompatible: deconstruction in literature and literary criticism on the one hand and constructivism in educational theory and practice on the other. Subverting traditional literary values such as authorial integrity and power, linearity and logic of plot, consistency of character, the distance between the reader and printed text as well as, above all, the death of the author, poststructuralism has long been recognized as a rather embattled concept. This is due to its evasiveness and hence relative inapplicability to literary criticism and pedagogy. Venturing to overcome this dilemma, the article will investigate the implications of educational constructivism. The chief aim is to link some of its concepts with postmodern literature in such a way as to facilitate didactic methodology in the field of poststructuralist literature. Literary hypertext- the so-called incarnation of postmodern literary theory - will be used as a stereotypical example of poststructuralist evasiveness. The article proposes that literary hypertext has considerable educational potential. Not only does the genre invite subjectcentred pedagogy, which allows students to learn according to their own interests and prior knowledge, but, paradoxically, it also defies the unviability of poststructuralist literature by resurrecting the dead author in collectiveness. The proposal will be illustrated by a case study report, describing the implementation of literary hypertext in an undergraduate German creative writing classroom.

Cognitive Science and the History of Reading

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Elfenbein
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Landscape Model ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Reading Processes ◽  
History Of

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism. (AE)

scholarly journals Bad Machinery and the Economics of Free Comics: A Webcomic Case Study

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paddy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Comics Studies ◽  
The Uk

 John Allison is one of a small number of alternative cartoonists in the UK today earning a living from their cartooning. However, since he began his first webcomic, Bobbins, in 1998, he has given all of his comics content away for free online. This article presents John Allison’s comics, most notably his series Bad Machinery, as a case study of how to make free webcomics an economically viable labour, achieved by Allison’s use of webcomics as a springboard for other commercial activities such as illustration work and printed comics. Taking an interdisciplinary approach consistent with the wider field of Comics Studies, this article draws upon concepts from sociology, literary criticism and economics to provide a theoretical framework through which to understand webcomics as labour, and thus to understand through this reading the economics of free webcomics, with John Allison as the exemplary web cartoonist. 

scholarly journals Extremism and toxic masculinity: the man question re-posed

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 1251-1270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Pearson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Masculinity Studies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
Initial Question ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract It is more than 20 years since Marysia Zalewski and feminist scholars posed ‘the man question’ in International Relations, repositioning the gaze from female subjectivities to a problematization of the subjecthood of man. The field of masculinity studies has developed this initial question to a deep interrogation of the relationship between maleness and violence. Yet public and policy discourse often reduce the complexity of masculinities within extremism to issues of crisis and toxicity. Governments have prioritized the prevention of extremism, particularly violent Islamism, and in so doing have produced as ‘risk’ particular racialized and marginalized men. This article asks, what are the effects of the toxic masculinity discourse in understanding the British radical right? It argues that current understandings of extremism neglect the central aim of Zalewski's ‘man’ question to destabilize the field and deconstruct patriarchy. They instead position Islamophobia—which is institutionalized in state discourse—as the responsibility of particular ‘extreme’ and ‘toxic’ groups. In particular, the article outlines two ways in which ‘toxic masculinity’ is an inadequate concept to describe activism in the anti-Islam(ist) movement the English Defence League (EDL). First, the term ‘toxic masculinity’ occludes the continuities of EDL masculinities with wider patriarchal norms; second, it neglects the role of women as significant actors in the movement. Using an ethnographic and empathetic approach to this case-study, the article explores how Zalewski's theoretical position offers a route to analysis of the ways in which masculinities and patriarchy entwine in producing power and violence; and to a discussion of masculinities that need not equate manhood with threat.

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