‘The Secret Dotted Line’

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-218
Author(s):  
Sinéad Moynihan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Edna O'brien ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
Line P

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this chapter discusses narratives in which a thematic preoccupation with return also underwrites metafictional concerns with literary forebears, the Irish literary tradition and artistic exile. Exploring texts that span 1960 to 2008 and the work of prolific, exiled writers Brian Moore (1921-1999) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) as well as the much younger writer Denis Kehoe (b. 1978), this chapter configures ‘return’ in multiple senses: the literal returns of fictional characters to Ireland; return as ‘restoration’ (of occluded histories; of banned books); and return as an opportunity to engage with (literary) genealogies that do not conform to the gendered and heteronormative orthodoxies of the Irish literary tradition.

The “Imitation David”: Plagiarism, Collaboration, and the Making of a Gay Literary Tradition in David Leavitt's “The Term Paper Artist”

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1349-1363
Author(s):  
Kenneth Bleeth ◽  
Julie Rivkin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
Term Paper ◽  
Regenerative Power ◽  
Source Study ◽  
Gay Culture ◽  
Jack The Ripper

Charged with having plagiarized Stephen Spender's 1948 autobiography World within World in his 1993 novel While England Sleeps, David Leavitt responds through his novella “The Term Paper Artist” and his coedited anthology of gay writers Pages Passed from Hand to Hand by defending the place of copying and imitation in the transmission of gay culture. Echoing the preoccupation with mimicry in contemporary gay-lesbian cultural theory, Leavitt's novella fictionalizes his accused self and presents a parable of how literary inspiration, like desire, derives from inhabiting identities not one's own. “The Term Paper Artist” invites a detective game of source study that leads to figures as diverse as Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Jack the Ripper, as well as to less mentionable icons of contemporary popular culture, all of whom are used to authorize a version of gay writing and gay literary genealogy that finds generative and regenerative power in the copy.

The “Imitation David”: Plagiarism, Collaboration, and the Making of a Gay Literary Tradition in David Leavitt's “The Term Paper Artist”

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1349-1363
Author(s):  
Kenneth Bleeth ◽  
Julie Rivkin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
Term Paper ◽  
Regenerative Power ◽  
Source Study ◽  
Gay Culture ◽  
Jack The Ripper

Charged with having plagiarized Stephen Spender's 1948 autobiography World within World in his 1993 novel While England Sleeps, David Leavitt responds through his novella “The Term Paper Artist” and his coedited anthology of gay writers Pages Passed from Hand to Hand by defending the place of copying and imitation in the transmission of gay culture. Echoing the preoccupation with mimicry in contemporary gay-lesbian cultural theory, Leavitt's novella fictionalizes his accused self and presents a parable of how literary inspiration, like desire, derives from inhabiting identities not one's own. “The Term Paper Artist” invites a detective game of source study that leads to figures as diverse as Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Jack the Ripper, as well as to less mentionable icons of contemporary popular culture, all of whom are used to authorize a version of gay writing and gay literary genealogy that finds generative and regenerative power in the copy.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

The Pornographer and McGahern's Allusive Practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Present Value ◽  
The Past

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.

Reading Old Books

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mack
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Urban Deprivation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
International Character

In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. The book argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It then analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, the book illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.

Zygmunt Krasiński wobec sztuk pięknych / Zygmunt Krasiński and the Fine Arts

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Płaszczewska
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Individual Sensitivity ◽  
What Works ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Current ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Summary This is an attempt at examining Zygmunt Krasiński’s opinions and preferences with regard to the fine arts, a theme many critics believed to be missing from his writings. While putting things right, this article looks at the issues involved in his artistic choices, for example, what works or artists attracted his attention, in general, and to the point of him actually drawing on them in his own work or provoking him to some response (critical, approving, emotional, etc.). Furthermore, the article tries to explore the reasons and circumstances which may account for Krasiński’s interest in a given painting, print, or sculpture. It may have been the work’s theme as in the case of his ekphrasis of Ary Scheffer’s Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca and Paolo Di Rimini, where literary tradition provided the impulse, or the mode of its execution, or the personal ties with its author, or, finally, some other factors, like a current vogue or simply Krasiński’s individual sensitivity. The ultimate aim of all these inquiries is to outline Krasiński’s relationship with the arts (beaux arts) in the context of the aesthetic preferences of the epoch.

The Self-Referential Coda to Avot and the Egyptian-Israelite Literary Tradition of Wisdom

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-25
Author(s):  
Aaron Koller
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ben Sira

It has often been noted that Mishnah Avot is heir to aspects of the biblical tradition of Wisdom. A further element of this inheritance is studied here: the tradition of ending a Wisdom book with a selfreferential coda, commenting on the value of the text just completed. A philological study of the end of Avot opens this study, and the results of that study allow us to situate the coda to Avot in the context of other codas in the Mishnah, especially tractates Neziqin and Kelim. The paper then moves to situate the conclusion to Avot in the heritage of the conclusions of earlier Jewish books of Wisdom – Ben Sira, Qohelet, and Proverbs, as well as other biblical books that show the imprint of Wisdom, such as Hosea.

The Development of the Mental Representation of Numbers 0-10 in Elementary School Children

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anat Feldman ◽  
Michael Shmueli ◽  
Dror Dotan ◽  
Joseph Tzelgov ◽  
Andrea Berger
Keyword(s):  
Sixth Grade ◽  
Number Line ◽  
Number Representation ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Position Task ◽  
Sigmoidal Curve ◽  
Anchor Points ◽  
The Right ◽  
Line P ◽  
Best Fit

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the development of mental number line (MNL) representation examined using a number-to-position task. In the present study, we investigated the development of number representation on a 0-10 number line using a computerized version of the number-to-position task on a touchscreen, with restricted response time; 181 children from first through sixth grade were tested. We found that the pattern of estimated number position on the physical number line was best fit by the sigmoidal curve function–which was characterized by underestimation of small numbers and overestimation of large numbers–and that the breakpoint changed with age. Moreover, we found that significant developmental leaps in MNL representation occurred between the first and second grades and again between the second and third grades, which was reflected in the establishment of the right endpoint and the number 5 as anchor points, yielding a more accurate placement of other numbers along the number line.

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