Queer Trauma in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-65
Author(s):  
Nowell Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Short Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
American Gothic ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Queer Temporality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Awards

Abstract Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused on Kiernan’s reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan’s pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan’s fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan’s novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary form and its use of dream sequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe’s trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality.

de Morais Andrade, Mário Raul (1893–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Ann Wells
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mario De Andrade ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Relationship

Often called the pope of Brazilian Modernism, Mário de Andrade spearheaded several different phases of the movement, and is credited with introducing the term modernismo in Brazil. From pioneering the experimental first wave of Brazilian Modernism of 1922–26 to sombre reflections on national identity in the mid-1930s–1940s and moving among poetry, short fiction, essays, musicology, travel writing, and the novel Macunaíma (1928), his output is extraordinary in both its volume and its influence. Despite his shifting registers and genres, the major preoccupations of his works remain constant throughout his lengthy career: Brazilian national identity and fraught encounters between different cultures, ethnicities, and worldviews; linguistic experimentation, especially the relationship between writing and orality; and music.

‘Alleen vette prijzen doen ertoe’

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-54
Author(s):  
Petra Boudewijn
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Literary Prizes ◽  
Dynamic Relationships ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Awards

Abstract Literary prizes have become indispensable to the literary field and have developed into one of its most high-profiled phenomena. They promote competing forms of consecration; intersect in the dynamic relationships of actors and institutions; and contribute to defining the parameters of literature and literary culture. This article investigates the relationship between literary awards and literary criticism in the Netherlands from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, whilst drawing on field-theoretical approaches to literature. As literary critics consecrate some authors but not others, so they determine to a large extent which literary prizes matter and which do not. This article charts the rise of literary awards on the Dutch literary field, and the critical attention these prizes have received. It researches which prizes are consecrated (and why), and in which ways literary criticism has written about those awards over the course of years.

scholarly journals TOPOGRAPHPICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE NOVEL “THE CITY AND THE CITY” BY CHINA TOM MIEVILLE TOPOGRAPHPICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE NOVEL “THE CITY AND THE CITY” BY CHINA TOM MIEVILLE

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Daria Denisova
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Response ◽  
Specific Effect ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Mind's Eye

The paper focuses on the topography of “The City and the City” by China Tom Miéville and its relation to the novel’s generic and compositional structure. Starting with the findings of cognitive poetic studies regarding readers’ emotional response to the text and the mechanisms behind it, I demonstrate how the topography of the textual world adds to the effects of unease in Weird Fiction and in C. Miéville’s works. Using the example of the odd topography in “The City and the City”, I show its relevance as a compositional core of the novel, a tool to explore the psychology of the city dweller, and an experimental space for reviewing the notions of self-identity, personal freedom and the power of limitations. I argue that the specific effect of unease in Weird Fiction is partly due to the grotesque topography which the reader attempts (and often fails) to conjure up in his mind’s eye following the character’s exploration of the given space. The disorienting topography is new to both the reader and the character, and the tension builds as the two discover more and more unusual aspects of it. No stranger to this strategy, C. Miéville, however, takes a different approach in “The City and the City”. Structuring the novel around the strange topography of the city(-ies), Miéville forces the reader to deduce its weird laws and makeup from the life of its native. Thus, the relationship between the city and the citizen becomes the central mystery of the novel which I attempt to explore in my reading of it.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

Homosexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams: Demythologising the Imaginings and Universalising the Reality

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Black African ◽  
Sex Preference ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sex Orientation ◽  
The Right

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.

The role and relationship of mindreading and social attunement in HRI – position statements of interdisciplinary researchers. Workshop HRI'20

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio & Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.

Oleanolic Acid Derived from Plants: Synthesis and Pharmacological Properties of A-ring Modified Derivatives

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 1084-1101
Author(s):  
Tingjuan Wu ◽  
Xu Yao ◽  
Guan Wang ◽  
Xiaohe Liu ◽  
Hongfei Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Drug Design ◽  
Oleanolic Acid ◽  
Water Solubility ◽  
Future Application ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pharmacological Effects ◽  
Framework Structure ◽  
Design And Synthesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship

Background: Oleanolic Acid (OA) is a ubiquitous product of triterpenoid compounds. Due to its inexpensive availability, unique bioactivities, pharmacological effects and non-toxic properties, OA has attracted tremendous interest in the field of drug design and synthesis. Furthermore, many OA derivatives have been developed for ameliorating the poor water solubility and bioavailability. Objective: Over the past few decades, various modifications of the OA framework structure have led to the observation of enhancement in bioactivity. Herein, we focused on the synthesis and medicinal performance of OA derivatives modified on A-ring. Moreover, we clarified the relationship between structures and activities of OA derivatives with different functional groups in A-ring. The future application of OA in the field of drug design and development also was discussed and inferred. Conclusion: This review concluded the novel achievements that could add paramount information to the further study of OA-based drugs.

Gothic and Anti-Gothic, 1797–1820

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miles
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Novel

This chapter discusses the Gothic from 1797 to 1820. The Gothic reached its apogee in the late 1790s, when it secured a third share of the novel market, after which it withered. From 1797 onward, the Gothic seems inseparable from an anti-Gothic shadow that materialized in myriad forms, from ad hoc animadversions found in the reviews mocking the genre's formulaic character, to full-blown parodies. While the quantity of novels advertising themselves as products of the ‘terror-system’ declined during the first two decades of the century, the Gothic migrated downmarket, sustaining itself, post-1820, by embedding itself in other ‘genres’. Putting aside the tale, which the Gothic dominated, one quickly perceives that the Gothic is a variety of the novel—one of its subgenres best labelled ‘romance’. Moreover, one can best and most accurately represent the Gothic novel during the period as the proliferation of several schools, above all, of Radcliffe, Godwin, Lewis, and Schiller.

The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Franklin
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.

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