Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonali Perera
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
Country Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

scholarly journals Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African Women ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
North African ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Oral Interpretation ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
As Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

scholarly journals SEMANTICS OF POEM IN «DIV TICS OF POEM IN «DIVANI LUGATI-T-TURK»

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Qosimjon SODIQOV ◽  
Govhar RAHMATOVA
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
Specific Expression ◽  
Artistic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Taste ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extensive Information ◽  
The Aesthetic

Lyric songs depict how rich is the aesthetic taste of the Turkic peoples and their special love for verbal art for a long period, and the fact that they possessed artistic resources capable of competing with the most agile peoples of their time. Moreover, these songs illustrate the artistic views of the Turks. Pure lyrical experiences, with their novelty, the richness of images, and unique pathos, have always engaged the reader. The poetry of the Turkic peoples is studied as a separate phenomenon in the history of world literature. Mahmud Kashgari’s Divani lugat at-Turk provides extensive information about the foundations of Turkish poetry and its scope. We can see the first paradigms of lyric poetry in the oral poetry of the Turkic peoples in the Divani lugat at-Turk. As a great linguist of his time and an advanced thinker – Kashgari proves each word with its specific expression or a piece of poetry. Each poem in his work is unique regarding its artistic value and semantics. We can see this, especially in these lyrical poems. Even simple episodes in lyrical songs demonstrate the ability of our ancestors to express thoughts beautifully. The lyrical passages in the Divani lugat at-Turk consist of the description of the mistress, the sad moments of the separation of beloved ones, and the poems addressed to his beloved one. The issue of fine art and its location is noteworthy in them. The devices used in them play an essential role as the initial version in the context of the literature of the Turkic peoples. The author cites some examples of such poetic art: tashbih, oxymoron, metaphor, tajnis, repetition, hyperbole (mubalaga), irsali masal, etc. These devices were actively reflected in all types of poetry of the later period. This article discusses the semantics of lyrical poems in the Divani lugat at-Turk and reveals their fine art.

scholarly journals Existential Sentences as a Characteristic Syntactic Feature of I. A. Bunin’s Poetic Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4 (202)) ◽  
pp. 256-272
Author(s):  
Olga A. Selemeneva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Traditional Structure ◽  
Lyrical Poetry ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Existential Sentences ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
Main Components

In this article, existential sentences are examined as a syntactic dominant of I. A. Bunin’s lyrical poetry. The interest in the originality of the syntax of Nobel laureate’s literary texts is due to the lack of research on this issue, linguists’ focus on the aesthetic salience of the vocabulary, its expressive properties and combination potential, as well as stylistic figures and tropes. Meanwhile, it is the writer’s selection of specific syntactic structures for the implementation of the idea, the representation of key ideas and concepts that reflect his personality and the peculiarities of his perception of the surrounding world. The author refers to Bunin’s poems from 1886–1917 and 1918–1953 published in Bunin’s collected works in 9 volumes. In the writer’s poetic oeuvre, existential sentences are regularly used. Despite the traditional structure that underlies them and is represented by three meanings (‘the object of being’, ‘being’, and ‘area of being’), the richness of the lexical content of each of the main components stands out. As a result, existential sentences become a universal form used to represent completely different situations in the author’s individual worldview: the existence of natural objects in space, meteorological phenomena, events, time periods, artifacts, etc.; physical states of the surrounding world; psychological states of the subject. Acting as a semantic core of a poetic text, existential sentences do not have a fixed place in it, and are used as a lyrical beginning, an interposed element, or an ending in its structure. In each position, their use is conceptually significant. It is established that the peculiarity of existential sentences in Bunin’s lyrical poetry is their syntactic unconditionality (attachment to three registers of speech, i.e. reproductive, informative, and generative) and polyfunctionality (performing the pictorial, characterising and concluding, and generalising functions).

«Poem Should Thrill»: on the Rough Sonnets of Neoclassic Poets in the Context of the Totalitarian Regime

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
I Vakulyk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
General Direction ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The World ◽  
Roman Poetry ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Roman Antiquity

Abstract. The works of Ukrainian neoclassicists as the representatives of the era of «Executed Renaissance», who left an invaluable heritage and made a tremendous contribution to the enrichment of not only Ukrainian but also world literature, have repeatedly become the subject of scholars’ research. The purpose of the study is to analyze the sonnet as a phenomenon that appeared in the first third of the last century: what caused its «rigidity» and «severity», as well as what is its poetic beauty. Materials and methods of research. This article is based on the analysis of archival materials, letters, memoirs, the press of the twenties («Chervonyi Shliakh», «Nova Hromada», etc.), published and unpublished editions of works by Ukrainian neoclassicists. The severity of life dictated its own rules, its own style and its own norms. Sonnets of Ukrainian neoclassicists were also rigit or «strict». Comparative-historical and descriptive methods are used in the work. Discussion. The representatives of the informal society «neoclassicism», which was formed in Ukraine in the 20s of the 20th century, professed an aesthetic concept of spiritual renewal of the writer’s consciousness and the nation in general, disciplined the cardiocentric element of the «executed Renaissance» generation of artists, combining the Dionysian tradition with the Apollonian culture. The aesthetic platform that united the neoclassicists was the love to the word, to the strict form, to the great heritage of the world literature. They realized the sonnet as a «strict style», as a «severe» form. Ukrainian neoclassicists set the task of creating a «great style of Ukrainian literature» based on Greco-Roman antiquity and European Parnassians; hence there is a cult of strict classical forms (sonnet, octave, Alexandrine verse, elegiac distich). When Ukrainian neoclassicists spoke, they did not declaim ideological and aesthetic manifestos. Ukrainian neoclassicists, in contrast to the Russian ones, were distinguished by greater creative conservatism: if the latter put Pushkin as a role model, the first were oriented towards Greco-Roman antiquity and French Parnassians (the first edition of Ukrainian neoclassicism was «The Anthology of Roman Poetry» by M. Zerov, 1920), strictly adhered to canonical classical forms. Conclusions. The genre canon of the sonnet implies conceptuality that must be realized through a certain compositional rhythm according to the universal scheme: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. Such scheme of the sonnet dramatic line development «tells» the poet the most general direction in the development of thought, mood, and contemplation. The sonnet allows to resolve contradictions. Consequently, it is a balance between the stable and the variable, a dialogue with yourself, with the world; this is the beauty of dramatic trembles of poetic content. Finally, this is a distinctive stylistic thinking which attracts primarily the poets of the rationalist mindset.

The Critical-Linguistic Critique of the Aesthetic Ideology in the Late Writing of Paul de Man

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Jeremy Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Ideology ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Relationship

The focus of this essay is Paul de Man's provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic in his late writings on philosophical aesthetics. I introduce de Man's critique of what he terms aesthetic ideology – a form of ideological communication – which he considers manifest in the aesthetics of Schiller in particular but also in more scrupulously critical philosophers. I begin the essay with Benjamin's well known observation that twentieth century fascisms aestheticized political practice as part of a defence of existing property relations. I introduce de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology as a way of developing or elaborating on what are relatively sketchy comments on the relationship aesthetics and politics in Benjamin's earlier essay.

Dental implants in aesthetic zone – cases report

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (47) ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
Adel Martínez ◽  
Ángel Yamith Sánchez ◽  
Samuel Urbano Del-Valle
Keyword(s):  
Bone Regeneration ◽  
Dental Implants ◽  
Dental Implant ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Dental Extraction ◽  
Insertion Torque ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Central Incisor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Preservation Technique

Placement of dental implants in the aesthetic zone needs to be planned to consider both atraumatic tooth extraction and the preservation of the socket. The authors presented two clinical cases of patients with indication of dental extraction of the upper central incisor which was planned to use a two-armed lever as atraumatic alveolar preservation technique and managed in two different ways. Case one referred to a traditional approach that included dental extraction, guided bone regeneration, and provisionalization, with a period of healing of 6 months to enable the bone regeneration. Subsequently, it was placed a dental implant TSV 3.7*13 mm (Zimmer Dental). Five months after of clinical and radiographic controls, the second phase was started with the rehabilitation. The second case was about a patient who required dental extractions of maxillary left central incisor due to a fracture of the crown with a poor prognosis, in which the dental extraction was planned to use a two-armed lever. After reclassifying the fresh socket, a dental implant TSV of 3.7 x 13 mm (Zimmer Dental) was placed with modified drilling technique, implant placement resulted in primary fixation with insertion torque level lower than 30 Ncm so the immediate load was not performed. Both patients received a ceramic crown with functional and esthetic results after 16 months of continuous checks and controls. It was concluded that the alveolar preservation in the aesthetic zone is a strategy that starts from the extraction technique. The authors recommend the two-armed lever as atraumatic alveolar preservation technique and different ways to place dental implants.

scholarly journals The Aesthetic Revival

1970 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lachlan MacDowall
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The Aesthetic

A review of Bether Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maison, Jaleh Mansoor and Seth McCormick (eds), Communities of Self: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke, 2009)

Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Opening Up

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Andres
Keyword(s):  
Second Phase ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Oil Paintings ◽  
Italian Poetry ◽  
Pre Raphaelites ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Artists

Dante Gabriel Rossetti—major founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, leader of the Aesthetic movement, a key influential figure on Victorian poetry and art—is widely recognized as the Victorian poet-painter genius who defied Victorian conventions in his life and work. Rossetti’s first book, The Early Italian Poets (1861), which includes Dante’s Vita Nuova, introduced medieval Italian poetry to English audiences; a decade later in 1874 his Dante and His Circle was primarily a revision of his early book concentrating on Dante. Beginning with watercolors, inspired by medieval literary works and paintings on religious subjects, Rossetti switched in the second phase of his career to sensuous Venetian-style oil paintings of voluptuous femme fatales distinguished by their long necks, luxuriant flowing hair, and rosebud mouths. Throughout his career, Rossetti often interwove literature and art by either seeking the inspiration of his sensuous women in literature or by composing sonnets as companion pieces to the paintings. In this respect, neither the verbal (often the spiritual or psychological) nor the visual or physical, may be interpreted in isolation; the picture poem must be experienced in its totality. Unlike William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti never exhibited, but he worked on private commissions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has attracted innumerable Victorian, modern, and postmodern works on his poetry and painting, ranging from interpretive, biographical, psychoanalytical to sociopolitical and cultural studies, to name but a few. It is just about impossible to subsume all these works under categories that this iconoclastic genius (who resisted any limitations imposed by his critics) would possibly approve. Scholars interested in Rossetti’s poetry and prose may have access to various Victorian editions and modern collections. Comprehensive and authoritative, as well as an invaluable resource for beginning and advanced scholars, the Rossetti Archive includes his poetry, prose, correspondence, and strikingly beautiful reproductions of his drawings, watercolors, illustrations, and paintings. Rossetti’s eccentric lifestyle has attracted numerous biographies. Gender, race, class, and politics in Rossetti’s works, poetical and painterly, are also subjects explored by postmodern scholars. Exhibits and catalogues of Rossetti’s paintings abound, ranging from those devoted to specific time periods or subjects in Rossetti’s art—such as literary topics, his double works of art, portraiture, aesthetic representations of beauty—to the connections of his art with other Pre-Raphaelites. The reciprocal influence on other contemporary poets and artists, in particular Pre-Raphaelite painters, the impact of his art on aesthetes, symbolists, and modern artists are also subjects of interpretive criticism and exhibits. Though Rossetti did not compose music, his poetry has inspired several popular musical compositions. His notorious lifestyle, on the other hand, has been the subject of works of fiction, television, theater and film, most of which have taken liberties with biographical information in attempts to make it even more sensational to postmodern audiences.

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