Entertainment and Irony: The Orlando Furioso from Modern to Postmodern

2019 ◽  
pp. 286-307
Author(s):  
Stefano Jossa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Small World ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
David Lodge ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Less popular than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso has however made an impact on Anglo-American fiction. Loved by Samuel Beckett, who called risolino ariostesco (Ariosto’s smile) the poetic strategy of his preferred artists, and C. S. Lewis, who famously claimed that his utmost happiness would be to be always sitting by a window overlooking the sea, reading Ariosto’s masterpiece, Orlando Furioso proves more and more influential in contemporary fiction when it comes to epic modes, narrative techniques, fantasy and sci-fi: taken as a source of inspiration by both well-educated and popular writers and filmmakers, such as, among many others, David Lodge in Small World, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Ariosto and Jim Jarmusch in Mystery Train, Orlando Furioso proves in tune with two keywords of our contemporary age, irony and entertainment. This essay will explore his legacy in twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction in order to assess its potential in our times.

Introduction

Abolitionism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Richard S. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Big Ideas ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Complex Movement

This brief survey of abolitionism focuses mostly on Anglo-American reformers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it also surveys Atlantic-wide movements that began with slave rebels in the 1500s and ended with Brazilian emancipation in the 1880s. The introduction explains that wherever it took shape, abolitionism was both a meditation and a movement: a meditation on “big ideas” about freedom and equality and a complex movement of people, organizations, and events designed to bring those ideas to fruition. Abolitionism was a social movement—an activist struggle akin to the twentieth-century civil rights movement—that focused on political and social agitation. Abolitionist ideas and actions reframed how people understood slavery, race, global freedom, and multicultural democracy.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

scholarly journals R. Jakobson as Mediator of Cultural Transfer between Linguistics and Literary Experiments

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-317
Author(s):  
Vladimir Feshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Russian Science ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
Parallel Processes ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Literary Experience ◽  
Special Language ◽  
Cultural Transfers

The article analyzes one of the forms of nomadism in the intellectual world, which is called cultural transfers. One of the directions in the study of cultural transfers is the migration of concepts and notions between scientific knowledge (in this case linguistic) and literary experience (mainly experimental). The article is devoted to one of such migration trajectory from the perspective of interdiscourse methodology. We discuss the works of one of the agents of cultural transfer in the field of linguistics – R. Jakobson. The task of the article is to draw a trajectory according to which the linguistic concepts of Jakobson intertwine with parallel processes in literary (mainly poetic) experiments. The analysis concludes that precisely in connection with close contexts and transfers between poetry and linguistics, the Russian science of language represented by Jakobson develops a view of literature as a special language and a special communicative system. This trend is not typical for the Anglo-American linguistic tradition of the twentieth century, the quintessence of which in the middle of the century was represented in the theories of N. Chomsky and his circle.

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