scholarly journals "Stay on Your Path, Young Man"

Author(s):  
Paul Grimstad

Almost ten years ago I participated in the conference whose proceedings would become the volume Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism. Stanley sat directly in front of me and listened attentively to my talk, thrilling and scary, not to say awkward, reading out “Cavell writes...” and “Cavell says...” with the man right there. After the Q and A, someone, I don't remember who, brought me over and introduced us. Stanley shook my hand and with the other patted my shoulder and said, with a broad smile, “Stay on your path, young man.”

Author(s):  
Iryna Rusnak

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-422
Author(s):  
Judith Bosnak ◽  
Rick Honings

Abstract ‘Save our poor people from the vulcano poets’. The literary reception of the Krakatoa disaster of 1883 in the Netherlands and Indonesi On August 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatau in the Dutch East Indies erupted and collapsed, causing the deaths of tens of thousands, mainly as a result of devastating tsunamis. The Krakatau eruption was one of the first disasters to take place beyond the Dutch boundaries that received so much attention in the Netherlands. Because the Indies were a Dutch colony, a response of the motherland was rather logical. In many places, charity activities were organized to raise money for the victims. This article focuses on the Dutch and Indonesian literary reactions on the Krakatau disaster. For this purpose, two scholars work together: one specialized in Dutch Literary Studies and the other one in Indonesian Languages and Cultures. In the first part of the article several Dutch charity publications are analysed; the second part focuses on Indonesian sources (in Javanese and Malay). How and to what extend did the reactions in the Netherlands and Indonesia differ?


(an)ecdótica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Javier Caresani ◽  

Hand in hand with recent theoretical and empirical developments related to the notion of archive, the field of Spanish American Modernism Studies is currently undergoing a stage of profound transformation. The validity in Literary Studies of a “new” philology not only highlights problems in the editions of classical texts from the fin de siècle period, but also invites researchers to review the clichés associated with this movement. In this sense, the case of Rubén Darío (1867-1916), whose texts remain in a state of notable precariousness, is exemplary. This article comments and recovers two unknown chronicles published in El Orden, a local newspaper in the Argentine province of Tucumán, that were written by this author. Besides their evident documental value, these texts, which were conceived at the farewell to his residence in Buenos Aires in 1898, acquire relevance if they are connected to the concerns that Darío will cultivate on his imminent trip to Europe. On one hand, they can be read as yet another episode of Buenosairean “calibanism”; on the other hand, they can be understood as an anticipation of a critical perspective towards the mythification of the concept of progress in the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1900.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-139
Author(s):  
Hamid Tafazoli

Abstract My paper discusses the controversial relationship between literature and literary studies by using the example of the term ›migration literature‹. It demonstrates in the first part that ›migration literature‹ as a term in literary studies does not expose explications of rational reconstructions of a conceptual content in Harald Fricke’s and Klaus Weimar’s understanding. In its history (Adelson 1991; 2004), ›migration literature‹ goes back to a chain of different terms and definitions as Gastarbeiter- or Ausländerliteratur and reflects strategies of homogenization and exclusion. From the 1980s forward, those terms produce in cultural contexts a semantic field that propagates culture based on a definition of ex negativo (Tafazoli 2019). The first part of my paper describes an outline of influences of homogenization and reductionism on the discourses of migration in literary studies and explains in the second part an asymmetrical relationship between motive on the one hand and terminology on the other. The term ›migration literature‹ seems to dominate this relationship by determination of a source of ›accepted truths‹ related to the life and background – specifically to the place of birth and the origin – of the author (Bay 2017). By prioritization of criteria beyond narrative reality, literary studies led in the 1980s and 1990s discourses on migration on the sidelines of canon of German speaking literature (Weigel 1991; Wilpert 2001). With regard to terminological determination in order to produce interpretative sovereignty (Foucault 1994), my paper exemplifies in the second part that the term ›migration literature‹ collects selected and limited fields of social, historical and political knowledge in perspective adjustment and in order to classify literature beyond aesthetic criteria. By this means, inductive standards (Müller 2010a; 2010b) classify the literary object ›migration‹ ontologically and regardless of factuality of the author’s life on the one hand and fictionality of narrative text on the other. The ontological classification has been used, for example, in contexts that replace the figure of stranger (Fremder) by the figure of migrant and determines the latter as figuration of external space of culture. The replacement suggests a perspective rigidity in the cultural production of knowledge that flows into a terminological classification and claims with the term ›migration literature‹ sovereignty over culture. From this point of view, the author and his work should be located in the external space of canonized literature. The second part of my paper comes to the conclusion that the term ›migration literature‹ has been developed in politicized frames of external-textual ›accepted truths‹ and bases its stability on cultural essentialism and exclusion regardless of heterogenetic appearance (Bhatti 2015). With regard to theories of »literature on the move« (Ette 2001), my paper understands that migration has always formed a considerable part of literary production. Therefore, migration could be understood as a literary motive. This meaning would undermine an ontological understanding of culture. Narrative texts develop poetics of migration and create by figurations of migration a poly-perspectivity in which migration advances to a polysemantic motive. My paper discusses these thoughts in the context of cultural memory in the third part and understands varied and multifaceted constructions of cultural memory on all sides of cultural borders. This part confronts the asymmetrical relationship between motive and terminology with discussions on migration as narrative of cultural memory that belongs to cultural majority and minority equally, at the same time and in the same space. Based on this understanding, my paper argues that migration as a motive construct shapes and leads discourses of culture under the conditions of global re-formation. The shift of the perspective from conceptual classification to close-readings of literary constructions should lead us to considerations about the openness of the narrative in distinction to terminological unity and should also initiate a paradigm shift in locating migration in discourses of literary studies. The theoretical considerations will be exemplified in the fourth section by Mohammad Hossein Allafis Frankfurter Trilogie that is a collection of the novels Die Nächte am Main (1998), Die letzte Nacht mit Gabriela (2000) and Gabriela findet einen Stapel Papier (2012). The fourth part of my paper examines in Frankfurter Trilogie a reading that integrates migration as a motive into the discourse of cultural memory of global challenges. Using the example of the Trilogie, this part of my paper demonstrates that discussions on migration in the context of cultural memory could initiate a shift in the perspective of reception from conceptual homogenization to narrative openness. The shift of perspective shows that literature translates the questions of community into the aesthetic perception of the form of culture and civilization in which the community actually articulates and appears itself and shows also that reading of migration as a statement about one nation has lost its explanatory power. The last part of my paper resumes my thoughts and takes position in the current fields of research in literary studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Zhang Jiang

Ever since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a prevailing tendency of eliminating the author’s existence in his or her text, as well as the existence of his or her intention. The practice of negating the meaning of the author’s intention and thereby imposing arbitrary interpretations on the text to serve the critic’s own interpretive purpose, has led contemporary literary hermeneutics onto the wrong road of relativism and nihilism. It is sensible for us to identify an impact of scientism on such a hermeneutic tendency. However, no matter how we try to deny and dissolve the author’s intention, its being in the text is a hard fact that always determines the text’s quality and value and influences the readers’ understanding and interpretation. The author’s intention runs through the whole process of the text’s creation, displaying itself in all the plans and designs of the text, such as its language, structure and style. It is a false question to ask whether intention exists in literary creation, and the idea that the other person can be totally independent of the author’s intention to assert the meanings or significance of the text will finally lead us to nowhere but sheer subjective imagination. Any serious and responsible critic must research in depth to first bring out the author’s intention, and then bring out the text’s historical and social milieus. This is the foundational step towards fair and justified interpretation of the text. Since literary works are the objectification of the authors’ thoughts and mind power, we, whatever theories we are interested in, should give the author and his or her intention due respect. This is undoubtedly a scientific attitude toward literary studies.


Traditio ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 451-462
Author(s):  
Sesto Prete

In the past few years, literary studies on Humanism and the Renaissance have commanded ever-increasing attention. The research displays, broadly, two marked trends: one segment, which stations itself in the ranks of scholars such as Burckhardt, Voigt, De Sanctis, Gaspary, and others, interprets the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the era; the other uncovers new texts or, keeping step with the modern scientific approach to the study of manuscripts, reedits in more precise form already known texts — this group is dominated by the name of Sabbadini. In the following pages, several books which have appeared in the last few years will be assessed with a view toward their contributions in both areas.


Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (60) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Rafał Koschany

Screenplays are a paradoxical and ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand, a screenplay is a literary genre and its development attests to the process of its emancipation from the power of fi lm and fi lm theory. On the other hand, however, the screenplay read as the text „is becoming a movie” already during the act of reading. The screenplay – as a quasi-literary phenomenon – can be a useful and inspiring tool in fi lm interpretation, as it opens up a variety of methodological possibilities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Vincent Colapietro ◽  

Gestures are arguably the most pervasive, primordial, and generative of signs. This partly explains why the failure or refusal to gesture in certain ways, in certain circumstances, carries more weight than would seem otherwise comprehensible. Stanley Cavell attends to not only the importance of acknowledgment but also how our failures to acknowledge others amount to nothing less than an “annihilation of the other”. What account of gestures would begin to do justice to the power of such failures to wound humans so deeply? Of course, it is possible to argue that those who are wounded by such slights are hypersensitive. But, given the weight of our experience, this goes only a very short distance toward illuminating the phenomena under consideration. Drawing upon Peirce’s theory of signs, this paper offers a sketch of gestures of acknowledgment, paying close attention to why our failures or refusals to acknowledge others are so powerful.


Author(s):  
Sebastião Belfort Cerqueira

Stanley Cavell closes Contesting Tears with a chapter titled “Stella’s Taste: Reading Stella Dallas”, devoted to the 1937 movie, directed by King Vidor, which Cavell compares to the other movies he has studied in the book and finds “to be the most harrowing of the four melodramas to view again and again.” Cavell’s reading of this movie is organized against what he calls the generally “accepted view” of the film where there are two key interpretive moments: in one, Stella, the protagonist, on vacation with her teenage daughter, Laurel, at a fancy hotel, tries to impress Laurel’s new friends by dressing up and ends up making a fool of herself, in a spectacle of bad taste; Stella then finds out what people thought of her and realizes she has embarrassed Laurel, eventually deciding to drive her daughter away from her, towards her father (Stella’s now ex-husband); this takes us to the second key moment: the final scene, where Stella anonymously watches her daughter’s wedding from the sidewalk, through a window, and walks away, which is generally seen as confirming Stella’s sacrifice, representing the dissolution of motherhood — hence, of her identity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Casper Bruun Jensen

Early in his career, Bruno Latour’s limited readership consisted mainly of the research community in science and technology studies (STS) that he helped to inaugurate. Today the situation could hardly be more different. Latour is now subject to the “translations”—the processes by which ideas travel—that he has provided such powerful tools for analyzing. He has become a “mutable mobile”—eminently transportable but always changing as he goes—that in different contexts exists as a variety of conceptual characters or figurations. As the Latour network continues to see significant extensions and transformations, it offers an instructive case for understanding the potentials and dynamics of traveling texts and ideas—and of their relation to existing disciplinary formations—as ecologies of knowledge change. This article examines the reception and adaptation of Latour’s ideas in two quite different intellectual contexts: anthropology and literary studies. The proliferation of Latour figurations is shown to be a consequence of interactions between, on the one hand, existing disciplinary constellations of ideas, concerns, and practices, and, on the other hand, his own often ambiguous arguments on topics including theory and method, nonhuman agency and politics, and technical mediation.


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