scholarly journals A Japanese-American Sam Spade: The Metaphysical Detective in Death in Little Tokyo, by Dale Furutani

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Portilho
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Roman Noir ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
Little Tokyo ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Narrative Interpretation ◽  
American Author

AbstractThe aim of this essay is to discuss the legacy of the roman noir in contemporary detective fiction produced outside the hegemonic center of power, here represented by the novel Death in Little Tokyo (1996), written by Japanese-American author Dale Furutani. Starting from the concept of the metaphysical detective (Haycraft 76; Holquist 153-156), characterized by deep questioning about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality and the limits of knowledge, this article proposes a discussion about how these literary works, which at first sight represent a traditionally Anglo-American genre, constitute narratives that aim to rescue the memory, history and culture of marginalized communities. Typical of late modernity detective fiction, the metaphysical detective has none of the positivistic detective’s certainties, as he does not share in his Cartesian notion of totality, being presented instead as a successor of the hardboiled detective of the roman noir. In this article I intend to analyze the paths chosen by the author and discuss how his re-reading of the roman noir dialogues with the texts of hegemonic noire detective fiction, inscribing them in literary tradition and subverting them at the same time.

scholarly journals Postmodern Angst and Zen Buddhism in Ruth Ozeki‘s A Tale for the Time Being

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-72
Author(s):  
Mojca Kervel
Keyword(s):  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fractal Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
American Author ◽  
Systemic Violence ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Zen Buddhist

The article addresses issues concerning objective, or systemic, violence which legitimizes and conditions other forms of violence – psychological, economic, sexual, physical, etc. These issues are approached from the perspective of frustrations and traumas experienced by individuals as a consequence of the shift of the sociohistorical paradigm, which has so far been principally governed by the mechanisms and interests of global postindustrial capitalism. Through the analysis of the status of reality and subject in A Tale for the Time Being, a 2013 novel by Japanese-American author Ruth Ozeki, I first identify the violent and traumatic aspects of contemporary conditions as experienced by the protagonists in the novel. Then, Ozeki’s literary scenario for improving quotidian existence of individuals via internalization of Dogen’s Zen Buddhist principles is assessed from the perspective of the philosophical definitions of the categories of subject and reality in postmodernity, as well as in relation to the actual conditions in the global consumerist societies of the digital age. The article maintains that Ozeki’s solution of the protagonists’ existential crises is rather significant since the fundamental premises of Zen Buddhism correspond to the metaphysical structuring of postmodernity. The novel hence illuminates the productive facets of the fractal nature of postmodern individuals, as well as the role literature can play in their concretisation.

scholarly journals Postmodern Angst and Zen Buddhism in Ruth Ozeki‘s A Tale for the Time Being

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-72
Author(s):  
Mojca Krevel
Keyword(s):  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fractal Nature ◽  
The Status ◽  
American Author ◽  
Systemic Violence ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Zen Buddhist

The article addresses issues concerning objective, or systemic, violence which legitimizes and conditions other forms of violence – psychological, economic, sexual, physical, etc. These issues are approached from the perspective of frustrations and traumas experienced by individuals as a consequence of the shift of the sociohistorical paradigm, which has so far been principally governed by the mechanisms and interests of global postindustrial capitalism. Through the analysis of the status of reality and subject in A Tale for the Time Being, a 2013 novel by Japanese-American author Ruth Ozeki, I first identify the violent and traumatic aspects of contemporary conditions as experienced by the protagonists in the novel. Then, Ozeki’s literary scenario for improving quotidian existence of individuals via internalization of Dogen’s Zen Buddhist principles is assessed from the perspective of the philosophical definitions of the categories of subject and reality in postmodernity, as well as in relation to the actual conditions in the global consumerist societies of the digital age. The article maintains that Ozeki’s solution of the protagonists’ existential crises is rather significant since the fundamental premises of Zen Buddhism correspond to the metaphysical structuring of postmodernity. The novel hence illuminates the productive facets of the fractal nature of postmodern individuals, as well as the role literature can play in their concretisation.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

Pinocchio e l’evoluzione

Revue Romane ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Margareth Hagen
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Continuous Evolution ◽  
Narrative Interpretation ◽  
Theories Of Evolution ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Pedagogical Literature

The first chapters of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio were printed in 1881, the same year as the publication of the novel I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece of verismo. While every critical reader of Verga’s realism has pointed out his particular narrative interpretation of evolution, Collodi’s has novel very seldom been connected to the theories of evolution, even if Darwin’s ideas were highly present in the public debate in Florence during the last decades of the 19th century. The reasons for this silence are primarily to be found in the genre of Pinocchio, in the fact that it is children literature, and therefore primarily related to the narrative mechanisms of the fairy tales and pedagogical literature. Focusing on Pinocchio, the article discusses to which degree Darwinism can be traced in Collodi’s literature for children, and questions if the continuous metamorphoses of Pinocchio can be read also in connection with the naturalist conception of the literary characters as unstable, in continuous evolution, and not only as part of the mechanisms of fairy tales and mythological narratives.

scholarly journals At Play on the Borders of the Diegetic: Story Boundaries and Narrative Interpretation

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 591-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Common Element ◽  
Game Playing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Scene Construction ◽  
Narrative Interpretation

Working with young readers, aged 10 to 14, as they responded to narrative texts in a variety of media (Mackey, 2002), I observed a recurring phenomenon: In a variety of ways they repeatedly stepped in and out of the fictional universe of their different stories. Some examples will perhaps give the flavor of this experience: Two 14-year-old girls playing Starship Titanic alternate between lively engagement in the narrative world of the story and stepping outside the fiction to console themselves, “Oh well, if we die, we can just start again.” A 10-year-old girl speaks of alternating between the novel and the computer game of My Teacher is an Alien, using the novel as a source of game-playing repertoire. Two 10-year-old boys look at the DVD of the film Contact, learning how the special effects of an explosion scene were composed, and commenting on how their new awareness of scene construction would affect how they view the film in the future. As I recorded and analyzed numerous examples of such behaviors, I was struck by a common element of interpretive activity on the boundaries of the fictional universe. Sensitized to the topic, I began to notice, and then to collect, examples of contemporary texts that foster various forms of such border crossing, in and out of the diegesis, the framework of events as narrated in the text. This article explores how an awareness of this aspect of contemporary texts may enhance our understanding of interpretive processes and expand what happens in literature classes.

Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-259
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
The Face ◽  
Orhan Pamuk ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter addresses the carefully (self-)cultivated image of Orhan Pamuk as a worldly, cosmopolitan, and secular-liberal writer. This image, I argue, has come to define the aesthetics and politics, the ethos, of his novels in their worldly reception, and has functioned to undermine the nature and extent of his engagement with the local (especially his native city, Istanbul, and its Ottoman, Islamic heritage). I trace this argument through a sustained focus on The Black Book as this novel has been translated and read in Britain and the United States. Drawing on translation theory, I show that both English versions of the novel are unable to capture the logic and significance of Pamuk’s culturally-specific use of language, and have influenced its Anglo-American (mis)reading as a postmodernist work. In my counter-reading, I argue that anything but a postmodernist deconstruction of myths of national and religious identity, The Black Book in fact comprises an evocation of Istanbul’s Ottoman, Islamic heritage in the face of a Turkish secular modernity by which this heritage was historically repressed. I detail this argument through close attention to Pamuk’s treatment of Sufism and Hurufism. The Black Book, I conclude, inscribes what I call “cultural neo-Ottomanism” as form.

Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Mark A. Tabone
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
American Author ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Multidirectional Memory

This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues, a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a critical perspective that incorporates the imaginative recovery of (often silenced) history that Toni Morrison (1987) called “rememory,” along with what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls “multidirectional memory,” this article details Williams’s daring exploration of spaces of overlap between the histories of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Holocaust. The article demonstrates how the novel’s unconventional and controversial emplotment allows Williams to create a distinctive historical critique not only of slavery and the Holocaust but, more broadly, of otherization, racialized violence, and modernity itself, while making a number of historiographic interventions. These include inscribing a largely absent history of the experience of Black people affected by the Holocaust and the mapping of theretofore underacknowledged resonances between American and German ideologies and practices. Through its transnational, transcultural “multidirectionality,” the novel opens up a broad, structural critique of apartheid everywhere; however, this article also argues that the novel also offers models for liberatory communities of resistance. The article demonstrates how Williams accomplishes this through his novel’s allegorical and literal use of the blues.

Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, and the Asian American Subject

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Jean So
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
American Subject ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
American Author ◽  
Cultural Concept

This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of "natural democracy." It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novel The Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.––China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate the rise of the postwar Asian American subject.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document