Gender, Genre, and Literary Firsts

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-306
Author(s):  
Erin Twohig
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
Related Process

Abstract This article questions the conventional wisdom that Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad was the first Arabic-language novel written by an Algerian woman. Published more than a decade earlier, Zhor Wanisi’s novel Min yawmiyat mudarrisa hurra received less critical attention, despite representing an important contribution to Algerian literature and women’s life writing. Rather than accepting the “first” novel as an objective category, this article shows how the accolade has obscured works like Wanisi’s from Algerian literary history, reinforced gender and genre binaries, and subjected both authors to biased evaluation. The article draws on a corpus of book reviews, scholarly articles, and monographs to describe how Wanisi’s work was discounted as not a “true” novel, and the related process that brought Mosteghanemi to world fame. The trajectories of Wanisi and Mosteghanemi, placed side by side, suggest new avenues for our understanding of gender, literary genre, and the postcolonial dynamics of world literature.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

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.

On the sources of cosmopolitanism as an idea: The Russian and the European views

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
E. E. Dmitrieva
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
General Term ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Literary Environment

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature)   was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi    with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism,   the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

A Thousand and One Nights and the Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter examines the influence of Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights), the ingenious Arabic cycle of stories, on the development of the novel as a literary genre. It shows that the Nights helped shape the European novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter first explains how the French translation of the Nights and its popularity in Europe led to its incorporation in world literature, creating an enduring taste for “Orientalism” in many forms. It then considers how the Nights became integrated in modern Arabic literature and how Arabic novels inspired by it were used to criticize social conditions, dictatorial authority, and the lack of freedom of expression. It also discusses the Nights as a source of innovation for the trend of magical realism, as well as its role in the interaction between the Arab world and the West.

scholarly journals A Revival of Life Writing Genres in Language Pedagogy Settings: The Case of Diary Writing

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (2 (4)) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Elena Xeni
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Written Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Writing Genres

The article discusses a number of issues contributing to the efficient teaching of a foreign language. Studying Diary Writing as a unique literary genre (a text disclosing the self of the author) the author of the article believes it is very important that students should have diaries since such an assignment highly contributes to the improvement of a written language.

The Soviet Project of the 1930s to Found a “World Literature” and British Literary Internationalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-425
Author(s):  
Katerina Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Network ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Georg Lukács

Abstract A major lacuna in Pascale Casanova’s account of world literature in her World Republic of Letters is the Soviet venture into establishing a “world literature” (mirovaia literatura) to be centered not in Paris but in Moscow. This aim was most actively pursued between the wars, when many writers were implicated in its international network. This moment in literary history provides a missing link in the progression from the more elitist world literature as conceived by Goethe and others in the early nineteenth century to world literature in our postcolonialist present and era of globalization. This article outlines the networks that sought to foster such a world literature and the main aesthetic controversies within the movement. In particular, the article looks at the efforts of such official spokesmen as Andrei Zhdanov, Karl Radek, and Georg Lukács to proscribe “bourgeois” modernism. It takes members of the British Writers’ International and their associated journals the Left Review and New Writing as case studies in the interplay between Moscow as putative “metropole” and the “periphery.”

The Doxa of Reading

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 636-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Goldstone
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Sociology Of Literature ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Semantic Transformation

Reading Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees as a late-stage graduate student in 2008 was invigorating. Here was an approach to literary history free from the pieties of close reading, committed to empiricism, seeking to fulfill, with its “materialist conception of form,” the promise of the sociology of literature (92). And, at the time, it seemed natural that the way to follow the path laid out by Moretti in Graphs and in the essays he had published over the previous decade was to go to my computer, polish my rusty programming skills, and start making graphs. Yet reconsidering Moretti's Distant Reading now, one is struck by how nondigital the book is. In fact, the meaning of distant reading has undergone a rapid semantic transformation. In “Conjectures on World Literature,” originally published in 2000, Moretti introduces the phrase to describe “a patchwork of other people's research, without a single direct textual reading” (Distant Reading 48). Today, however, distant reading typically refers to computational studies of text. Introducing a 2016 cluster of essays called “Text Analysis at Scale,” Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein employ the term to speak of “using digital tools to ‘read’ large swaths of text” (Introduction); in his contribution to the cluster, Ted Underwood embraces “distant reading” as a name for applying machine-learning techniques to unstructured text. Discussions of distant reading have become discussions of computation with text, even if no section of Distant Reading features the elaborate computations found in the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets to which Moretti has contributed.

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