scholarly journals Afro-American Literature: The Analysis of Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Kustinah Kustinah ◽  
Sri Haryanti ◽  
Suhud Eko Yuwono ◽  
Umi Sholihah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara

It is said that Afro-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United states by writers of African descent. Today, Afro-American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature. In broad terms, Afro-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. This qualitative study analyzes a short story entitled Gorilla, My Lovewritten by a female Afro-American writer, Toni Cade Bambara. The analysis of the study aims at answering the three problem formulation: (1) states the literariness of the text (2) explains how the literariness of the text play as a means to symbolize a “broader” text (the universe) and (3) writes the proof of mental evidences taken from the text. In analyzing the short story, this study uses Sociology of Literature and Psychology of Literature. The two theories help readers understanding the theme of the short story by reading the explanation about how the narrator of the story set the plot. This study uses narrative as its approach since this is a literary study where a short story is analyzed through its narrative structure. The conclusion of the study provides the proof of its research benefits: giving information to readers about the following: (1) all about Afro-American literature plus its life-experience, family-values, etc. (2) how a literary work can connect its readers to their life and (3) an understanding that a reading-act strengthens the definition that a literary work is as a portrait of human experience. 

Teaching Literary Realism in Transnational America

2019 ◽  
pp. 605-620
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Cadle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Ethical Implications

This chapter contends that foregrounding transnational approaches in classrooms provides opportunities to advocate the value of studying literary realism to students, administrators, and the broader community. Literature’s capacity to enable recognition, whether it leads to greater self-awareness or the acknowledgment of others, makes it a powerful tool for social justice, inspiring social movements and filling the emotional needs of the disempowered. Centering the teaching of realism on such authors as Charles Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, and Sui Sin Far, who rendered the multicultural composition of the United States more legible, helps the academy’s increasingly diverse student body see themselves and one another in the long tradition of American literature. Assigning lesser-taught texts by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and other canonical authors demonstrates realism’s continued relevance, because these texts address the challenges of incorporating diversity into the body politic and the ethical implications of the United States’ global power.

Fighting the Fear: Everyday Terror in the American Short Story Collection after 9/11 A Study of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae-Lee Kruger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Story Collection

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge represent the emphatic force that can be created within a short story collection and each contain at their core what has become a fundamental aspect of American literature since September 2001: terror. In A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge, characters feel and attempt to cope with terror in their everyday lives. Both Egan and Strout contextualize individual terror against the broader national and cultural form felt by the United States after the events of 9/11. The presence of the void left by the Twin Towers is a potent symbol of terror within each collection, paralleling the characters’ experiences with that of post-9/11 America while highlighting the existence of everyday terror and providing a lens for character self-reflection. This essay focusses on two categories of terror that figure into both collections, terror of the unknown and terror of being alone, and how strategies employed by Egan’s and Strout’s characters to cope with this terror correspond to the American public response to the wider terror instilled by 9/11.

The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis León
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mexican American Literature ◽  
John Rechy

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.—Mircea EliadeThere are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.—Emile DurkheimWas that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?—John RechyThe past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

Currents in Dominican American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Kang ◽  
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
American Literature ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Civic Belonging ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Dominican American

Dominican American literature comprises the body of creative writing in various genres by US-based authors of Dominican ancestry. Here, “Dominican” refers to people who trace their origins by birth or descent to the Dominican Republic, not to the island of Dominica in the Anglophone West Indies. “Dominican American,” in turn, applies to writers born, raised, and/or socialized in the United States, who received their schooling in general and, in particular, their literary education in this country irrespective of the extent of their involvement in the life of their ancestral homeland. Writing by Dominicans in the United States has a long history. Its existence reaches back at least to the first half of the 19th century, shining forth meaningfully in the 1990s, and showing little sign of abatement in the early decades of the 21st century. While this article concerns itself primarily with Dominican American writing, it seeks to answer predictable questions regarding the rapport of this corpus with the literary production of Dominican Republic-based writers and Dominican authors who have settled in the United States largely as immigrants, using Spanish as their literary language. The article distinguishes Dominican American literature from the writings of people who, beginning in the 19th century, came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as travelers, adventurers, and individual settlers, having left home for political or economic reasons. They could be exiles escaping danger or immigrants seduced by the possibility of enhancing their lives in the proverbial “land of milk and honey.” They tended to regard their time in the United States as temporary and yearned for the change of fortune—political or economic—that would bring them back home. However, having had their return either thwarted or delayed, they would often build families or raise any offspring that came with them to the receiving society. Their children, US-born or brought to the land while young enough to be socialized as US citizens, became Dominican American by default. US-born children of foreign parents who have pursued writing as a vocation have been able to vie for recognition in the American literary mainstream. English speakers by virtue of their US upbringing, they would have their ears attuned to the rhythms of US literature writ large. Dominican American writers in the 21st century have shown their mettle, making themselves heard in the ethnically partitioned map of the country’s letters. As with other Caribbean-descended American writers, they typically inhabit their US citizenship with an awareness of the contested nature of their civic belonging. Family legacies, personal memories, and their own process of self-discovery keep them reminded of the effects of US foreign policy on the land of their forbears. As a result, their texts tend to reflect not only an ethnic American voice, but also a diasporic perspective.

When Pushkin's Blackness Was in Vogue: Rediscovering the Racialization of Russia's Preeminent Poet and His Descendants

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Korey Garibaldi ◽  
Emily Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Racially Ambiguous

This essay investigates interconnections between the novelist, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Aleksandr Pushkin and identifies the racial subtext of these associations. Several scholars have connected Pushkin and James. But none of this scholarship has speculated on whether it was the poet's African heritage that was at the root of hidden connections between these authors. Moreover, though most scholarship on Pushkin's reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, his African heritage was publicized much earlier. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic frequently discussed Pushkin's racial heritage as a canonical European writer of African descent. This essay recovers how Henry James used Pushkin's daughter, the morganatic Countess Merenberg, as a model for the racially ambiguous “morganatic” Baroness Münster in The Europeans (1878). A decade later, James seems to have invoked the Countess Merenberg once more in his rewriting of Pushkin's “The Queen of Spades” (1833) in The Aspern Papers (1888). While James publicly attributed Byron and Shelley as inspirations, the discourse surrounding the African heritage of Pushkin and his heirs helps explain why the novelist minimized and erased the racial lineage at the center of The Europeans and The Aspern Papers.

Comparative Funeral Practices

1969 ◽  
Vol os-16 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Vanderlyn R. Pine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Funeral Practices ◽  
Funeral Practice

By comparing funeral practices in Bali, Japan, Russia, England, and the United States, the author shows that funeral practices are designed to provide socially sanctioned solutions to deep psychological needs at the time of bereavement. Suggested universal features of funeral practice across cultures include the provision of social support for the bereaved, religious ritual, funeral expenditure, sanitary disposal of the body, visual confrontation, and the funeral procession, which is generally conceived as a family parade.

Political sophistication

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Παύλος Βασιλόπουλος
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
Political Sophistication

This dissertation is concerned with the concept of political sophistication, referring to the extent and organization of a person’s stored political cognition (Luskin 1987).Available empirical evidence on the levels of political sophistication in mass publics comes almost exclusively from the United States and point to two broad conclusions: First, systematic empirical research has demonstrated that political information in the mass public is particularly low (Converse 1964, Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Citizens lack basic knowledge over political affairs. Time and again empirical studies have systematically showed that citizens in the United States and elsewhere fall short of passing even the most rudimentary political knowledge tests. This finding that was first illustrated by the Michigan school in the early 1960s (Campbell et al. 1960) resulted in a wide pessimism over the meaning of public opinion and even of representative democracy (Inglehart 1985).The second broad conclusion is that the politically sophisticated and unsophisticated differ: Political sophisticates have the cognitive capacity to translate their deeper held political values and predispositions into consistent political attitudes (Zaller 1992). They are able to use their political knowledge in order to make informed vote choices in the sense that they accurately adjust their political positions to the parties’ platforms (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, Lau and Redlawsk 1997, 2006). What is more, they are more likely to participate in elections and other political activities and are less susceptible to political propaganda (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).However the idea that political sophistication matters for the quality of the public’s political decision-making has met strong theoretical and methodological criticism by the ‘low information rationality’ perspective (Popkin 1991, Lupia 1994,Graber 2001). This group of theories argues that politically inattentive citizens can form their political judgment on the basis of heuristics that allow them to make reasonable choices reflecting their predispositions and interests even though they lack political knowledge.The principal aims of this thesis are: a)to compare different measurement perspectives on political sophistication and assess their methodological potential especially in regard with comparative research on political knowledgeb)to explore the extent to which the pattern of ignorance that has been repeatedly highlighted in the American literature is an internal characteristic of political behavior stemming from the low expected utility of acquiring political information or it is subject to particular cultural and systemic characteristics. To this direction I use Greece as a case study by undertaking an analytical survey of political sophistication, one of the very few that have been conducted across the Atlantic.c)The third aim is to investigate the determinants of political sophistication and especially the potential of the mass media in political learning and in the context of the Greek political and media system.d)d) Finally this thesis addresses the unresolved question concerning the differences in quality of political decisions between the political sophisticated and unsophisticated layers of the public by evaluating the explanatory potential of two competing theories (political sophistication v. low information rationality) in the multi-party political environment of Greece

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