scholarly journals Unfinished Revolutions

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 479-500
Author(s):  
Li Wen Jessica Tan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Social Mobilization ◽  
Nationalist Movements ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract This article examines Wei Beihua's modernist works, which have receded into the shadows of Sinophone Malayan (Mahua) literary history, in relation to Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar, to excavate a neglected route of transculturation at the height of Southeast Asia's nationalist movements during the 1950s. Unlike Anwar's modernist poems that thrive in Indonesia, Wei Beihua's works were considered outliers during a period when realist literature was deemed an effective tool for social mobilization in postwar Malaya. Nonetheless, it is critical for us to recognize that Wei Beihua did not reject realism or underestimate the role of literature in nation building. This article argues that Wei Beihua's idea of modernism is premised on an artist's affective and self-reflexive engagement with realism, which gives rise to a dialectical tension. The tension between his advocacy of an artist's individualism, which is inspired by Anwar, and the impetus of responding to nationalism manifests in his meta-fictional short stories that reflect on the varying motivations behind art creation. His works offer a productive perspective to reconsider the modernist artist's role during revolution and “the limits of realism” of revolutionary works when art was deemed integral to nation building in postwar Southeast Asia.

Nation Building and the Vietnam War

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER T. FISHER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The South ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
The Vietnam War

The literature on U.S. participation in the Vietnam War has recently undergone a quiet revolution due to use of the concept of nation building. Since the early 1950s nation building has been the subtext, if not the excuse, for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, but in the last ten years it has also become useful as a method of inquiry. This article contends that new insights regarding the signi�cance of ideologies and paradigms, particularly modernization theory, enabled the transformation. Understanding modernization theory as an ideology broke with the tradition among diplomatic historians that minimized the role of ideas in policy decisions. It also settled longstanding questions about the nature of paci�cation as either development or counterinsurgency: Counterinsurgency and development were simply different expressions of the same impulse for the United States and the South Vietnamese.

scholarly journals What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-251
Author(s):  
Preetha Mani
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractThis essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

Role of NGOs in Social Mobilization in the context of SGSY

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
pp. 209-211
Author(s):  
Dr.Veershetty C Tadalapur ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobilization

POLIVARIABILITY OF THE BASTARD MOTIF IN THE SHORT STORIES BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT: CHARACTER IN SEARCH OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Oksana Galchuk
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Guy De Maupassant ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Of It ◽  
Structural Methods

The theme of illegitimacy Guy de Maupassant evolved in his works this article perceives as one of the factors of the author’s concept of a person and the plane of intersection of the most typical motifs of his short stories. The study of the author’s concept of a person through the prism of polivariability of the motif of a bastard is relevant in today’s revision of traditional values, transformation of the usual social institutions and search for identities, etc. The purpose of the study is to give a definition to the existence specifics of the bastard motif in the Maupassant’s short stories by using historical and literary, comparative, structural methods of analysis as dominant. To do this, I analyze the content, variability and the role of this motive in the formation of the Maupassant’s concept of a person, the author’s innovations in its interpretation from the point of view of literary diachrony. Maupassant interprets the bastard motif in the social, psychological and metaphorical-symbolic sense. For the short stories with the presentation of this motif, I suggest the typology based on the role of it in the structure of the work and the ideological and thematic content: the short stories with a motif-fragment, the ones with the bastard’s leitmotif and the group where the bastard motif becomes a central theme. The Maupassant’s interpretation of the bastard motif combines the general tendencies of its existence in the world’s literary tradition and individual reading. The latter is the result of the author’s understanding of the relevant for the era issues: the transformation of the family model, the interest in the theory of heredity, the strengthening of atheistic sentiments, the growth of frustration in the system of traditional social and moral values etc. This study sets the ground for a prospective analysis of the evolution the bastard motif in the short-story collections of different years or a comparative study of the motif in short stories and novels by Maupassant.

Gender and Regulatory Regimes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Empathic Response ◽  
Regulatory Regimes ◽  
Gender Regulation

The fifth chapter continues the focus on regulatory regimes, now turning to gender and taking up ideology and socialization rather than coercion. This chapter first considers some short stories by Tagore. Specifically, it examines the role of humiliation in the inhibition of boys’ empathic response, especially sensitivity about attachment needs. From here, the chapter turns to Woolf’s Orlando. In this novel, Woolf presents a situationist account of gender regulation. Orlando’s apparently masculine or feminine behaviors are provoked by such seemingly trivial situations as the nature of his/her clothing. Woolf nuances the situationist account by showing that some forms of situated behavior, as well as thought and feeling, are likely to become habitual through repetition. In short, it is not differences in minds that produce differences in behaviors, which in turn create social situations. Rather, differences in social situations produce differences in behaviors, leading to differences in thoughts and feelings.

The Lattimore case

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Penrose
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Witch Hunt

Edith’s career and collaboration with Fritz Machlup at Johns Hopkins University flourished and she began work on the growth of the firm, and studied the Hercules Powder Company. As Cold War tensions increased during the 1950s she and Penrose became involved in the defence of their friend and colleague Owen Lattimore who was named as the top Soviet spy by Senator McCarthy. The chapter covers the persecution of Lattimore, his trials, the role of Judge Luther Youngdahl, and the operation of his defence fund. Other friends of E. F. Penrose became victims of the anti-communist ‘witch hunt’, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the USA, and determined he must leave. In 1953 Edith and Penrose testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. They were also investigated by the FBI. After five years the case against Lattimore was dropped. Edith’s father died and her brother Harvey was killed in an air accident.

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