scholarly journals Embracing the Xenophone

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-525
Author(s):  
Kyle Shernuk
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Minimum Threshold ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
No Man's Land

Abstract By interrogating the borderlands of the discipline of Chinese literature, this article argues that Chinese literary studies should recognize non-Sinitic-language literatures that engage with issues of Chineseness as proper objects of study. Prevailing frameworks in Chinese and Sinophone literary studies range from an implicit aversion to non-Sinitic-language texts to their explicit exclusion. The consequence, however, is that texts that would otherwise be considered works of Chinese literature based on their content and/or combinations of other factors are condemned to a “literary no-man's land.” By removing the minimum threshold of language for consideration in the Chinese literary tradition and permitting texts that otherwise reflect or participate in the production of discourses of Chineseness—which the author theorizes as an embrace of the xenophone—the study of Chinese literature recuperates previously excluded expressions of Chineseness and begins writing a new branch of Chinese literary history. As case in point, the author analyzes the Spanish-language Chinese literature of Chinese Peruvian American writer Siu Kam Wen, specifically, his first collection of short stories, El tramo final (The Final Stretch). From offering new ideas of what it means to be Chinese to rewriting the history of China's red legacies, Siu's work represents a needed intervention in Chinese literary studies that would otherwise be excluded owing to its language of composition.

scholarly journals Perkembangan Teori Sastra (Suatu Pengantar)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felta Lafamane
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Nature

AbstractNormatively, literary studies are divided into several fields, namely literary theory, literary history, literary criticism, comparative literature and literary studies. Literary theory studies people's views of literature. Literary history seeks to compile and study literary works as part of the process of intellectual history in one society. The history of literary theory can be seen as part of philosophical thinking because the history of literary theory itself is the same as the history of human thought towards art or literary objects which emphasize the more practical nature of the translation of concepts. Literary theory itself can essentially be equated with the science of beauty or aesthetics. Science and theory are certainly one different thing. With such an assumption, writing the history of literary theory is the same as writing aesthetic history in the field of literary arts. However, the history of the theory needs to be known and understood so that there are no mistakes in thinking about these two things. Literary theory itself has various meanings along with the paradigm it carries. Literary theory is defined as a set of ideas and methods used to practice literary reading. Literary theory is also interpreted as a way or step to understand literature. The views in literary theory also experience changes along with the development of human thinking.Keyword: development, literary theory, history, literature

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

Zwischen Literaturgeschichte und Zeitgenossenschaft

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Henrike Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
German Research Foundation ◽  
German Research ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
History Of

Summary The article serves as an introduction to the thematic cluster of papers devoted to the work of Bulgarian poet and literary theoretician Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912), which present the outcomes of a workshop dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the poet at the Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University (Berlin 2016; supported by the German Research Foundation DFG). As Slaveykov, while a leading representative of Bulgarian modern literature, is not an established figure in comparative literary studies, the paper sketches briefly the biography of the author, or rather the “biographemes” out of which he constructs his self-representation. In summarizing the main findings of the cluster contributions, it outlines the ways in which Slaveykov and his work—as a phenomenon ‘untimely’ to his era—have been embedded into the narratives of Bulgarian literary history of the 20th and early 21st century, which reach from postmodernism and postcolonialism to new engagement, or to entangled histories.

Multiethnicity and Multilingualism in the Minor Literature of Manchukuo

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Yue Chen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Northeast China ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Local Complexity ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Relationship

Although claimed as a nation-state, with a government, a territory, and citizenry, Manchukuo (1932–1945) is a colony of the Empire of Japan, appropriated from Northeast China. As such, Manchukuo’s literary identity complicates the relationship between nationalism and literature, inviting us to rethink the history of Chinese literature in specific and East Asian literary history in general. This article tackles the thorny problem of Manchukuo literary formation by going through Shuimei Shih’s concept of sinophone and Chen Pingyuan’s notion of the multiethnic, only to conclude via a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of Kafka that Manchukuo’s corpus is best approached as a minor literature of its own. The very colonial and local complexity of Manchukuo’s minor literature lies in its multiethnicity and multilingualism. A close reading of Mei’niang, Yokoda Fumiko, and Arsenii Nesmelov, through their deterritorialized Chinese, Japanese, and Russian stories, demonstrates the range of indigenous and exiled writers in their diverse imagination of Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

Visibility and Invisibility of the Translator in H.A. Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Peina Zhuang ◽  
Yina Cao
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Foreign Literature ◽  
Foreign Culture ◽  
History Of

The writing of literary history, generally speaking, is a matter of selecting and organizing literary works according to aesthetic judgement and historical values. If one writes the literary history of a foreign culture, however, at least if one wants to include samples of literary works, one must contend with the issue of translation, not only in the sense of having to choose which source texts to translate but also in that of choosing among existing translations or of translating oneself. The dual role of a historian and a translator is a challenging and complicated balancing act, as proven in the case of H.A. Giles (1845–1935), whose 1901A History of Chinese Literature is the first Chinese literary history ever written in English. As one of the then leading sinologists in Europe, Giles had contributed tremendously to the dissemination of Chinese literature by way of smooth translations that appealed to his English readers, but which also formed an obstacle for the reader’s proper understanding of the history of Chinese literature. The evidence for this comes from his misguided take on the dual aspects of visibility and invisibility of the translator’s identity in writing about a foreign literature.

From Spatial Turn to GIS-Mapping of Literary Cultures

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Gis Mapping ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Systemic Analysis ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Structure Of Knowledge

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.

scholarly journals Love Fiction in China in the Second Decade of the 20 th Century: from Sentiments to Duck-Lovebirds and Butterflies

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Previous Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
History Of

The article analyzes the evolution of Chinese love fiction in the first years that followed the 1911 Xinhai revolution. The article focuses on literature representing “couples in love,” namely fiction about “duck-lovebirds and butterflies,” an invariant of the “love prose” genre. The authors of these works both continued the traditions of the previous literature and at the same time attempted at modernizing the genre. Chinese literary scholars have controversial opinions about this genre and its invariants. Controversies concern the literary movement to which these works should be attributed, and the place of the genre in the history of Chinese literature. The founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xin, gave a negative assessment of this genre. Modern critics agree that fiction about “duck-lovebirds and butterflies” has poor aesthetic merits yet they also argue that the authors “created an objective picture of reality, expressed different views and opinions.” By the 1920s, the vogue for writing novels and short stories in the style of “duck-lovebirds and butterflies” had waned. This genre however gained a new surge in popularity in the mid-1940s thanks to Zhang Eileen who modernized Chinese love fiction.

scholarly journals THE POSITION OF LOW MALAY SHORT STORIES IN THE HISTORY OF INDONESIAN LITERATURE

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Pujiharto Pujiharto ◽  
Sudibyo Sudibyo
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Cultural Orientation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diverse Cultures

This article tries to determine the factors causing the Low Malay short stories became unaccounted, especially those that were collected in Miss Koelit Koetjing (2005), in the constellation of the history of modern Indonesian literature. To answer these problems, this paper explores the criteria applied by the author of the history of Indonesian literature, comparing it with the Low Malay short stories, and relates them to their cultural historical context.The results showed the reason that Low Malay short stories collected in Miss Koelit Koetjing were not accounted, are caused by the following factors. First, most of the short stories still retain the traditional genres, such as hikayat (saga) and fairy tales, which show the strength of the cultural orientation of the past. Second, the authors of short stories are not natives; the author is not in the sense of the creator, the creator, but a storyteller, just to recount a story that has been there before. Third, short stories were published in newspapers and not in the book form. Fourth, the world of their stories came from diverse cultures and not from the world of the Indonesian archipelago. With a similar reality, it can be concluded that the short stories collected in Miss Koelit Koetjing, in the broad realm of Low Malay literature, is a literary tradition of its own in the constelation history of Indonesian literature.

scholarly journals The Early Stage of Buryat-Mongol Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 320-337
Author(s):  
Elizaveta E. Baldanmaksarova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Buddhist Culture

The article examines the genesis of Buryat literature, which is key to the modern literary studies of Buryatia. Its aim is to recreate the history of Buryat literature and place it in the cultural and philosophical context of the history of Mongolian ethnos. It is well known that the genesis of Buryat literature owes to the literary work as well as to the theoretical and literary research of the first Buryat scholars and writers from among the Buddhist clergy. The search, introduction, and study of literary works written by Buryat authors in the 18 th — early 20 th centuries is one of the relevant research tasks that opens new perspectives for modern Buryat literary criticism and for humanities in general. The emergence and development of Buryat literature is closely connected with the spread of Buddhist culture, the Buddhist vision of the world, therefore it should be studied in the context of Buddhist aesthetic thought. The article pays special attention to the literary history of Mongolians that, since the 13 th century, has been developing in the context of multilateral literary ties and contacts. It examines the following typical genres: travelogue, hagiographic, hymn poetry, subhashita, and poem.

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