scholarly journals The language of wounds and scars in Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" : a case in trauma symptoms and the recovery process

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendáriz
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Recovery Process ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Trauma Symptoms ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Past ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Haitian American ◽  
To Come

This article examines the representation of a violent and traumatizing past in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004), a collection of short stories that depicts the effects of a torturer’s atrocious crimes on the lives of his victims and their descendants. The contribution argues that this work of fiction by the Haitian-American writer is structured upon the principle that traumatic experiences can only become intelligible – and, therefore, “representable” – by considering the severe psychical wounds and scars they leave on the victims. These scars habitually take the form of paranoia, nightmares, ghostly presences, schizophrenia, and “dead spots” that have a very difficult time finding their place in the protagonists’ consciousness and language. In spite of the fragmented and discontinuous character of these representations, the writer manages to unveil the kind of psychological and social dysfunctions that often surface when people have not fully accepted or assimilated aspects of the past that keep itching in their unconscious. However, despite the prevailingly bleak tone of the stories, Danticat still leaves some room for hope and recovery, as many of the victims find ways to come to terms with and overcome those individual and collective dysfunctions.

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Zones ◽  
To Come ◽  
Second World

What happens to the concept of wartime in the 1940s? For the Duration excavates British late modernism’s relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. Coloured by the trauma of past violence and dread of those to come, the Second World War and its defining military strategy, civilian aerial bombardment, upended straightforward understandings of past, present, and future. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes—time capsules, time zones, and ruins—the book contends that Second World Wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It scrutinizes a variety of cultural artefacts, from life-writings to short stories, from novels to film and painting, that formally registered the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book and its overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.

‘Come up to a place like this?’ The Problem with Seeking Sanctuary in the Rural in Mary Lavin's Short Stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228
Author(s):  
Deirdre Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Independent State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Irish Identity ◽  
To Come

Mary Lavin's stories subtly suggest that the rural idyll that De Valera dreamed of cannot materialise. The past plays heavy on the modernity promised, and through Lavin's ecocritical eye, it creeps in to each of her stories like the ‘powdery green lichen’ that covered the walls in the yard of Ella and Robert's home in ‘A Happy Death’. Her characters are not romantic outsiders but people trying to come to terms with, and move away from, the sentimentality and cliché of Irish identity. The negotiation that the characters undergo, and the influence of this pastoral trope on their lives, is manifested in Lavin's use of ecological signposts. Her stories act as a reminder of this failed rural promise and allow Lavin to make a critical statement on the promise of post-independence Ireland, and the reality of life. The environment becomes a dominating presence on the landscape, both urban and rural and on the characters that inhabit this newly independent state. This article will investigate Lavin's engagement with the rural in her short stories.

scholarly journals From the Chair

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Lynda Kellam
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
The Past ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
To Come

I hope you are all enjoying the warming weather (or at least making the best of it). By the time this issue is published, I imagine that I will have spent several days sitting on my porch or hanging out at a gorge. I can’t wait. I also hope by the time you are reading this that most, if not everyone, has been able to get vaccinated.During the past year, in addition to efforts to grow our membership, the leadership of GODORT has endeavored to retain a sense of community through a difficult time. Our Friday chats have been successful with a wide range of topics from government documents in the news to a discussion of the Mapping Prejudice Project. While we may not be able to sustain the pace of the chats indefinitely, I hope we can continue to come together informally in between conferences.

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

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.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

Screen Wonders of the Past: And to Come?

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Kenneth MacGowan
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

POLA NARASI PADA ANTOLOGI CERPEN TARIAN SALJU KARABAN

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Novi Diah Haryanti
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Past ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
Narrative Patterns

Abstract: This study aims to look at narrative patterns in the collection of short stories "Karaban Snow Dance" (TSK). From the fifteen short stories, the researchers took five main stories, namely the Karaban Snow Dance (Tarian Salju Karaban), The Fall of a Leaf (Gugurnya Sehelai Daun),  Canting Kinanti Song (Tembang Canting Kinanti), Jagoan Men Arrived (Lelaki Jagoan Tiba), and Origami Pigeon (Merpati Origami). Of the five short stories, environmental themes and honesty appear most often. The place setting depicted shows the environment that is close to the author or according to the author's origin. The main characters in the four short stories are children, only one short story Male Hero Tiban (Lelaki Jagoan Tiban/LJK) who uses adult takoh as the main character. The child leaders in LJK only appear in the past stories of the main characters. The five short stories do not show a picture of whole parents (father and mother). The warm relationship between mother and child appears clearly, in contrast to the father-child relationship that is almost negligent. The five short stories also represent how children become heroes for their family, friends, and environment.Abstrak: Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat pola narasi pada kumpulan cerpen Tarian Salju Karaban (TSK). Dari limabelas cerpen yang ada, peneliti mengambil lima cerpen utama yakni “Tarian Salju Karaban”, “Gugurnya Sehelai Daun”, “Tembang Canting Kinanti”, “Lelaki Jagoan Tiba”, dan “Merpati Origami”. Kelima cerpen menampilkan tema lingkungan dan kejujuran. Latar tempat yang digambarkan memperlihatkan lingkuangan yang dekat dengan penulis atau sesuai dengan asal usul penulis. Tokoh utama dalam keempat cerpen tersebut ialah anak-anak, hanya satu cerpen “Lelaki Jagoan Tiban” (LJK) yang menggunakan takoh dewasa sebagai tokoh utama. Tokoh anak dalam LJK hanya muncul dalam cerita masa lalu tokoh utama. Kelima cerpen tersebut tidak memperlihatkan gambaran orangtua utuh (ayah dan ibu). Relasi yang hangat antara ibu dan anak muncul dengan jelas, berbeda dengan relasi bapak-anak yang nyaris alpa. Kelima  cerpen tersebut juga merepresentasikan bagaimana anak-anak menjadi pahlawan bagi keluarga, sahabat, dan lingkungannya.  

Corporate Reorganization Law and Forces of Change

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Corporate Reorganization ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

This book is concerned with the way in which forces of change, from the fields of finance and non-financial corporates, cause participants in the corporate reorganization process to adapt the ways in which they mobilize corporate reorganization law. It argues that scholars, practitioners, judges, and the legislature must all take care to connect their conceptual frameworks to the specific adaptations which emerge from this process of change. It further argues that this need to connect theoretical and policy concepts with practical adaptations has posed particular challenges when US corporate reorganization law has been under examination in the decade since the financial crisis. At the same time, the book suggests that English scholars, practitioners, judges, and the legislature have been more successful, over the course of the past ten years, in choosing concepts to frame their analysis which are sensitive to the ways in which corporate reorganization law is currently used. Nonetheless, it suggests that new problems may be on the horizon for English corporate reorganization lawyers in adapting their conceptual framework in the decades to come.

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