scholarly journals Centennial reflections on Steinbeck's reputation in Slovenia

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Danica Čerče
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
New Information ◽  
Sense Of Justice

Since the late 1920s and his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), there has been little consensus about John Steinbeck's work, and he has often been praised or dismissed for the wrong reasons. In the wake of the novels with the sweeping reach and social consciousness of In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and despite the prodigious and startlingly diverse output of his career, Steinbeck was generally regarded as one of America's foremost engaged artists. However, the truth is that be was as much a postmodernist and a modernist, as a traditional proletarian writer. And though be made a significant contribution to the perception of the problems of his time by writing with empathy, clarity and a strong sense of justice about the downtrodden, the exploited, and the defenseless, which contributed to his immense public success, Steinbeck's novels lose none of their richness and power when removed from their historical context. With the human dilemmas on many levels of personal, philosophical, and socio-economic existence, and their deep humanistic, philosophical and ecological message, conveyed through numerous Biblical, Arthurian, and literary allusions, his works are as relevant today as they were when they were written.Appropriate enough, and given that this year marks the centennial of John Steinbeck's birth, celebrated with a year-long series of events taking place throughout the United States and paying tribute to the winner of the 0. Henry Short Story Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature by examining his legacy in American literature, film, theatre and journalism, and providing new information about the enduring value of his writing, this paper aims to capture the writer's reputation in Slovenia. The plan is to briefly analyse the most illustrative examples of Steinbeck criticism accompanying Slovene publications of his works; then to loosen the hold of deeply entrenched positions of Slovene reviewers, and to highlight the importance of considering Steinbeck's texts from new, insightful and politically unbiased perspectives of contemporary critical engagement. And last but not least, this discussion might hopefully induce Slovene publishers to new printings and translations of Steinbeck's works.

Fighting the Fear: Everyday Terror in the American Short Story Collection after 9/11 A Study of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae-Lee Kruger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Story Collection

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge represent the emphatic force that can be created within a short story collection and each contain at their core what has become a fundamental aspect of American literature since September 2001: terror. In A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge, characters feel and attempt to cope with terror in their everyday lives. Both Egan and Strout contextualize individual terror against the broader national and cultural form felt by the United States after the events of 9/11. The presence of the void left by the Twin Towers is a potent symbol of terror within each collection, paralleling the characters’ experiences with that of post-9/11 America while highlighting the existence of everyday terror and providing a lens for character self-reflection. This essay focusses on two categories of terror that figure into both collections, terror of the unknown and terror of being alone, and how strategies employed by Egan’s and Strout’s characters to cope with this terror correspond to the American public response to the wider terror instilled by 9/11.

scholarly journals Sexual Politics of the Gaze and Objectification of the (Immigrant) Woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moussa Pourya Asl ◽  
Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah ◽  
Md. Salleh Yaapar
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Immigrant Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
American Society

Gayatri Spivak’s repeated accusations against the hyphenated Americans of colluding in their own exploitation is noteworthy in the context of diasporic writers’ portrayal of immigrant women within the prevailing discourse of anti-Communism in the United States. The woman in South Asian American writings is often portrayed as still stuck in the traditional prescribed gender roles imposed by patriarchal society. This essay explores Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary engagement with the contemporary racialization and gendering of a collective subject described as the Indian diaspora in her Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Specifically, it focuses on the two stories of “Sexy” and “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” to analyse the manner dynamics of the gaze operate between the male and female characters. The numerous acts of looking that take place in these stories fall naturally into two major categories: the psychoanalytic look of voyeurism and the historicist gaze of surveillance. Through a rapprochement between the two seemingly different fields of the socius and the psychic, the study concludes that the material and ideological specificities of the stories that formulate a particular group of women as powerless, passive, alien and monstrous are rooted in the contradictory cultural and moral imperatives of the contemporary American society.

Okinawa in American Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Rabson
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Battle Of Okinawa ◽  
The U.S

The several works of American literature set in Okinawa or about Okinawans include travel narratives, war diaries, memoirs, biography, fiction, and drama. Perhaps the earliest, Francis L. Hawks’s 1856 Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, is an account of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy of 1853–1854 when he forced his demands on leaders of what was then the Ryukyu Kingdom, allowing Americans to land, travel, and trade there. Hawks also provides informative and colorful descriptions of the local residents, architecture, and natural environment. A century later, Okinawa commanded all of America’s attention in the spring of 1945 during the last and worst battle of the Pacific War. Two Okinawan immigrants to the United States published autobiographical accounts in English of mid-20th-century Okinawa, including the battle and its aftermath. Masako Shinjo Robbins’s My Story: A Schoolgirl in the Battle of Okinawa (2014) describes life in prewar, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa from the perspective of a daughter in an impoverished family. Sold as a child by her father to a brothel in the 1930s, she barely survives the battle after being trapped in a cave collapsed by shelling. Jo Nobuko Martin’s novel A Princess Lily of the Ryukyus (1984) depicts the horrifying ordeal of the Princess Lily Student Corps of high school girls, the author among them, and their teachers, who were drafted as combat medics during the Battle of Okinawa. Writing from the American side of the battle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernie Pyle accompanied U.S. forces as a war correspondent. His account in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950) begins with American battleships’ shelling of Okinawa and ends the day he was killed by a Japanese sniper on the offshore island of Iejima. Over more than 12,500 Americans died in the Battle of Okinawa which took the lives of approximately 94,000 Japanese soldiers and 160,000 Okinawan civilians, between one-quarter and one-third of the prefecture’s population at the time. The widespread devastation left most residents homeless, destitute, or both. During the months that followed, the American military placed thousands in refugee camps, sometimes for more than a year, supplying food, shelter (mostly tents), and medical treatment for the wounded and ill. U.S. occupation personnel supervised the distribution of relief aid and the construction of homes and public buildings, but they were also tasked with bringing “democracy” to Okinawa, which many Americans considered feudalistic. The contradiction between American espousals of democracy and policies imposed top-down under U.S. military rule soon became obvious to Okinawans, and to at least some American military personnel. One of them, Vern Sneider, published a satirical novel, The Teahouse of the August Moon, in 1951. Later adapted into two plays and a film, it is probably the best-known work of American literature set in Okinawa. Lucky Come Hawaii (1965) by Jon Shirota depicts the experience of Okinawans in Hawaii, focusing on the strained relations among resident ethnic groups following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the first novel by an Asian American writer to become a bestseller and one of several works portraying the lives of Okinawan immigrants including three plays by Shirota and an autobiography by Hana Yamagawa. Victory in the Pacific War brought Okinawa under American military occupation for the next twenty-seven years, 1945–1972. Forcibly seizing private farmlands, the U.S. government constructed a vast complex of bases to support hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Sarah Bird’s novel The Yokota Officers Club (2001) depicts the bases’ effects on Okinawans and Americans living in close proximity yet in separate worlds during the U.S. occupation. Today, more than four decades after Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty, a grossly disproportionate 74 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan remains in this small island prefecture with 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area. Bird’s Above the East China Sea (2015) juxtaposes the ordeals of an American military dependent living on base in present-day Okinawa who contemplates suicide after her soldier sister dies in Afghanistan with a student medic in the 1945 battle ordered to kill herself to avoid capture by the Americans. Drawing on extensive research in Okinawan culture, Bird evokes Okinawan religious beliefs and observances relating to death and the afterlife to frame her narrative and inform her readers.

scholarly journals Afro-American Literature: The Analysis of Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Kustinah Kustinah ◽  
Sri Haryanti ◽  
Suhud Eko Yuwono ◽  
Umi Sholihah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara

It is said that Afro-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United states by writers of African descent. Today, Afro-American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature. In broad terms, Afro-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. This qualitative study analyzes a short story entitled Gorilla, My Lovewritten by a female Afro-American writer, Toni Cade Bambara. The analysis of the study aims at answering the three problem formulation: (1) states the literariness of the text (2) explains how the literariness of the text play as a means to symbolize a “broader” text (the universe) and (3) writes the proof of mental evidences taken from the text. In analyzing the short story, this study uses Sociology of Literature and Psychology of Literature. The two theories help readers understanding the theme of the short story by reading the explanation about how the narrator of the story set the plot. This study uses narrative as its approach since this is a literary study where a short story is analyzed through its narrative structure. The conclusion of the study provides the proof of its research benefits: giving information to readers about the following: (1) all about Afro-American literature plus its life-experience, family-values, etc. (2) how a literary work can connect its readers to their life and (3) an understanding that a reading-act strengthens the definition that a literary work is as a portrait of human experience. 

Liberating Afghan Women

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Afghan Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
Policy Priority

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.

RAILROAD INVESTING AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING INFORMATION IN 1880s AMERICA

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel E. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Accounting Information ◽  
The United States ◽  
Financial Accounting ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
New Information ◽  
Other Information ◽  
Comprehensive Search ◽  
The Wall Street Journal

This study has a two-fold purpose. First, it seeks to determine the importance of financial accounting information to railroad investors (and speculators) in 1880s America. Second, a further goal is to ascertain what financial accounting information was readily available for use by these investors. Based on a comprehensive search of books of the era, the 1880s were a time of expanding advice for railroad securities holders that required the use of financial accounting information. Furthermore, new information sources arose to help service investors' needs. Statistics by Goodsell and The Wall Street Journal were two such sources. This article reviews these publications along with the ongoing Commercial and Financial Chronicle and Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States. Each of these sources helped railroad investors to follow contemporary advice of gathering financial accounting and other information when investing.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art World ◽  
Dance History ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Global Art ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The introduction presents the core historiographical problem that Making BalletAmerican aims to correct: the idea that George Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography represents the first successful manifestation of an “American” ballet. While this idea is pervasive in dance history, little scholarly attention has been paid to its construction. The introduction brings to light an alternative, more complex historical context for American neoclassical ballet than has been previously considered. It places Lincoln Kirstein’s 1933 trip to Paris, famous for bringing Balanchine to the United States, within a transnational and interdisciplinary backdrop of modernism, during a time when the global art world was shifting significantly in response to the international rise of fascism. This context reverberates throughout to the book’s examination of American ballet as a form that was embedded in and responsive to a changing set of social, cultural, and political conditions over the period covered, 1933–1963.

Maternalist and Community Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Ian Breckenridge-Jackson ◽  
Julisa McCoy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Politics ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Help Groups

This chapter explores the history of maternalist mobilization and women’s community politics in the United States. It argues that both “maternalism” and “community” have proved to be highly flexible mobilizing frames for women. Building on the insights of intersectionality theory, the authors suggest that women’s maternal and community politics is shaped by their social locations within multiple, intersecting relations of domination and subordination, as well as their political ideologies and historical context. The chapter begins by discussing the politically contradictory history of maternalist mobilization within the United States from the Progressive era to the present. It then explores other forms of women’s community politics, focusing on women’s community volunteerism, self-help groups, and community organizing. It discusses how these frames have been used both to build alliances among women and to divide or exclude women based on perceived differences and social inequalities based on race, nativity, class, or sexual orientation.

Campaigns and Elections in a Changing Media Landscape

2019 ◽  
pp. 403-426
Author(s):  
Michael X. Delli Carpini ◽  
Bruce A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Media ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Campaigns And Elections ◽  
The Media

The media landscape of countries across the globe is changing in profound ways that are of relevance to the study and practice of political campaigns and elections. This chapter uses the concept of media regimes to put these changes in historical context and describe the major drivers that lead to a regime’s formation, institutionalization, and dissolution. It then turns to a more detailed examination of the causes and qualities of what is arguably a new media regime that has formed in the United States; the extent to which this phenomenon has or is occurring (albeit in different ways) elsewhere; and how the conduct of campaigns and elections are changing as a result. The chapter concludes with thoughts on the implications of the changing media landscape for the study and practice of campaigns and elections specifically, and democratic politics more generally.

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