scholarly journals The Gay Novel and the Gay World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Davidson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Culture Theory ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Gay Community ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cost

In a recent review essay, J. Daniel Elam charts the emergence of “gay world literary fiction,” a subgenre of the category “world literature,” which over the last twenty years or so has become both a marketing strategy for publishers and a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities.”[i] While Elam’s essay is implicitly underpinned by the usual disciplinary understanding of world literature (fiction from potentially anywhere in the globe, translated into English, and studied comparatively), its focus is narrowed to the “gay world” within the planetary world—a putatively homogenous, transnational gay subculture enabled by digital connectivity and the flows of global capital. This new gay world is, according to Elam, characterized by atomization: “From Sofia to Shanghai, authors of gay fiction describe a collection of scattered and isolated individuals, needy but incurious.” The situation has emerged from the “curious paradox” that “visibility and acceptance” have “made life better” for many gay men “at the cost of community and identity.” “Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability” has occurred at the expense of older subcultural institutions like “the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and cruising areas,” rendering the gay community “a banally knowable object rather than the product of a passionately forged experience of self-making. In place of the urgent longings of 20th-century queer literature, one encounters a peculiar form of worldly, muted yearning. So-called gay world literature emerges from a global community that isn’t a community at all.”   [i] J. Daniel Elam, “The World of Gay Lit,” Public Books (16 October 2017). Web. Accessed 1 March, 2018. “Disciplinary rallying point”: Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 1. For a discussion of the interrelations between “world literature” as the marketization of cultural differences and as a field of scholarly enquiry, see Simon During, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 57–58.

Preventing carbon monoxide poisoning in the Hudson River Tunnel in 1921: recounting history

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Neil B. Hampson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Carbon Monoxide ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Medical Students ◽  
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning ◽  
Hudson River ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Passenger Vehicles ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cost

The New York Bridge and Tunnel Commission began planning for a tunnel beneath the lower Hudson river to connect Manhattan to New Jersey in 1919. At 8,300 feet, it would be the longest tunnel for passenger vehicles in the world. A team of engineers and physiologists at the Yale University Bureau of Mines Experiment Station was tasked with calculating the ventilation requirements that would provide safety from exposure to automobile exhaust carbon monoxide (CO) while balancing the cost of providing ventilation. As the level of ambient CO which was comfortably tolerated was not precisely defined, they performed human exposures breathing from 100 to 1,000 ppm CO, first on themselves and subsequently on Yale medical students. Their findings continue to provide a basis for carbon monoxide alarm requirements a century later.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

scholarly journals O krok do Nobla i krok po nim – recepcja twórczości Olgi Tokarczuk na Ukrainie

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
Olesia Nachlik
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The World

The paper distinguishes and analyses the interpretative dominants in the Ukrainian reception of Olga Tokarczuk’s work over the last twenty years or so. This reception comprises numerous interviews, public conversations, translations and their presentations, literary criticism and literary studies dissertations, revealing the specificity of the point of view Poland’s neighbouring culture has on works which are now part of the world literature canon.

scholarly journals Urban Gothic and the Sphinx Factor: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-135
Author(s):  
Zhang Tian
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Factor ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
City Culture

Saul Bellow, as a cerebral, analytical, and philosophical writer, unflinchingly describes the world and gives the readers tremendous thoughts about life and society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 for his human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow shows the readers a death-burdened, rotting, spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth. This insane world is full of droll mortality and morbid entertainments. The coexistence of rationality and bestiality in man is vividly displayed in this novel. In his Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, Professor Nie Zhenzhao formulated the theory of the Sphinx factor as composed of the human factor and the animal factor, and the combination of the two makes an integrated man. The animal factor in the novel is fully demonstrated in the black pickpocket’s bestiality, Mr. Sammler’s voyeurism, the Holocaust, killings and thefts. However, the human factor is not so salient as the animal factor in this novel. I argue that the tension between the two factors not only intensifies the conflicts but shows how the author perceives the world. Bellow shows a strong contempt for the world. A pessimistic and critical outlook is conveyed in Bellow’s understanding of cities, represented by Chicago and New York. Robbery, cheating, speculation, beauty, money and lust construct a corrupted panorama of industrial cities. This is one of the reasons why Bellow highlights the animal factor more than the human factor. He seeks to criticize the American city from different perspectives of city culture, including the corruption of the bureaucracy, vices in public transport, changes in the urban landscape, competition between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of money.

scholarly journals DISCOURSES THAT MATTER: WOLE SOYINKA’S THEATRE AS A FORM OF REPRESENTING AND READING THE WORLD

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Branca Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Critics

Abstract: Wole Soyinka is a most significant figure in contemporary world literature. From the perspectives of the politics of postcolonial writings, perhaps the ultimate challenge of the complexity of Soyinka’s works and career lies in the fact that the metanarratives that imaginatively and discursively underwrote the great liberation movements of the twentieth century do not feature in his works in their conventional and familiar configurations. Overarching all the struggles waged by these movements is the struggle for self-representation as the existential and expressive roots of human freedom.The best examples of this structure in Soyinka’s theatre are A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists and From Zia With Love. Soyinka’s critical essays also operate in a great variety of social and intellectual contexts and cover an extraordinary range of topics, including literary criticism and aesthetic theory, theatre and cultural history, political power and ideology, and, more recently religious extremism and nuclear pollution. One “form of attention” which has been influential in the reception of Soyinka’s works is that of professional critics, especially with regard to the institutionalisation of the academic study of Anglophone writings of the developing world in the second half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Gender-Based Price Discrimination: The Cost of Being a Woman

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doaa Salman Abdou
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Price Discrimination ◽  
Gender Wage Gap ◽  
Wage Gap ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
The Cost

The pink tax is an old phenomenon that has only gained global attention recently. The pink tax segregates women and often causes life-threatening consequences. This paper will analyze the effects of the pink tax through commodities being sold in the world-famous city of New York in the States. The NYC government is the only government that took action to undergo comprehensive research on such an important topic. In addition to that, the paper will also compare the pink tax while making notations on the gender wage gap to fully highlight the injustice women face today. To conclude this paper, policies and solutions will be recommended to try and abolish the pink tax trend.

scholarly journals Comparative Literature, World Literature and Ethical Literary Criticism. Literature’s “Infra-Other”

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-18
Author(s):  
Jüri Talvet
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
International Association ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
The World ◽  
Sociological Approaches

Relying on some of the ideas of Yuri M. Lotman on “semiosphere”, the dynamics and dialogue between “centres” and “peripheries”, as well as on my own ideas on cultural symbiosis expounded in my essay books A Call for Cultural Symbiosis. Meditations from U (Toronto, 2005) and Kümme kirja Montaigne’ile. “Ise ja “teine” (Ten Letters to Montaigne. ‘Self ” and ‘Other’, in Estonian: Tartu, 2014; in English, 2018) and inspired by the recent foundation in China of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, I will try to meditate on the interrelation of Comparative Literature, World Literature and Ethical Literary Criticism both in theory and in the practice of teaching and researching literature at universities and high schools. The main purpose is to look at the ways how a “self”-centred practice of literary research and teaching (formalistic as well as sociological approaches, restricting World Literature to the Western mainstream, or just dealing with one’s own national literature, avoiding its comparative contextualization) could be gradually replaced by a symbioticdialogical treatment of literature, capable of providing our activity with a firm and solid ethical dimension, something that would definitely strengthen the position of humanities in the world academia.

scholarly journals Locating the World in Metaphysical Poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Burney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
World Literature ◽  
North India ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Metaphysical Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Expression

Abstract Discussions on world literature often imagine literary presence, movement, and exchange in terms of location and prioritize those literary traditions that can be easily mapped. In many regards, classical ghazal poetry resists such interpretation. Nonetheless, a number of nineteenth-century writers working in Urdu and English reframed classical ghazal poetry according to notions of locale that were particularly underpinned by ideas of natural essence, or genius. This article puts two such receptions of the classical ghazal in conversation with one another: the naičral shāʿirī (natural poetry) movement in North India, and the portrayal of classical Persian poet Hafiz as a figure of national genius in the scholarship of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both these examples highlight the role that discourses of nature and natural expression played in nineteenth-century literary criticism, particularly with regard to conceptions of national culture. They also demonstrate how Persianate literary material that had long circulated in cosmopolitan ways could be vernacularized by rereading conventionalized tropes of mystical longing in terms of more worldly belonging.

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