scholarly journals UDSIGELSE OG KULTURMØDER: Om sammenhængen mellem postkolonial litteratur og ansættelse af nydanskere

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Bojsen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Job Interview ◽  
Ahmadou Kourouma ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Communicative Processes

This article sets out to discuss how we may work with the notion of ‘cultural encounters’. Two examples are presented and discussed: One is drawn from the novel Monnè, outrages et défis (1990) by the prize-winning Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma. The other example refers to a job interview of an ethnic minority Dane in Denmark, published in a review by a Danish municipal administration (Århus Kommune) in 2003. The article brings a number of critical literary theories into dialogue in order to discuss two major points. First, the article shows how the chosen theoretical notions can help us to describe what happens in situations of communication where different, and possibly incommensurable, agents and contexts meet and interact in settings that are marked by conceptions of cultural differences. The theories used are Michel Foucault’s discursive formations, Emile Benveniste’s concept of enunciation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s reflexions of contrapuntal narratives, and Homi Bhabha’s theorisation of the anteriority of the sign as it occurs in a disjunctive temporality. Secondly, the article introduces a new interpretative method of how literary texts and critical literary theory may be used within anthropological studies. Instead of focusing on the notion of ‘identities’ and the ensuing conflicts between difference and sameness, this approach focuses on cultural articulations as dynamic communicative processes. In so doing, it situates itself within literary and anthropological theories of representation. Making a close reading of the chosen texts, the article shows that cultural encounters are never merely a question of ‘culture’. Cultural encounters become communicative scenarios where ideas, motives, intentions, and emotions are expressed, interpreted, and received by differently reacting agents.

Language Pangs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilit Ferber
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Philosophical Text ◽  
Origin Of Language ◽  
Pain Expression ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Language and pain are usually thought of as opposites, the one being about expression and communication, the other destructive, “beyond words,” and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness rather than an exclusive opposition. The book’s premise is that the experience of pain cannot be probed without consideration of its inherent relation to language, and vice versa: understanding the nature of language essentially depends on an account of its relationship with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. The book’s first chapter presents a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a close reading of Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), which was the first modern philosophical text to bring together language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, sympathy, and the role of hearing in the experience of pain. Chapter 4 is devoted to Heidegger’s seminar (1939) on Herder’s text about language, a relatively unknown seminar that raises important claims regarding pain, expression, and hearing. Chapter 5 focuses on Sophocles’ story of Philoctetes, important to Herder’s treatise, in terms of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing, also referring to more thinkers such as Cavell and Gide.

Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Fludernik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Waves

Literary theory in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by linguistics. The structuralist model that set the waves of literary theories in motion originated in Saussurean linguistics and its Jakobsonian elaborations. One could argue that until the 1980s all literary theory, and all linguistics for that matter, was based on an analysis of langue, or the system of language or literature or text, to the detriment of parole, the practices, contexts, and negotiations of speakers, writers, and readers. The structuralist model, with its theoretical expansion of close-reading practices, already entrenched in the wake of the New Criticism, generalized the frame of mind that was soon to become the bogeyman of poststructuralist and cultural studies attacks. The formula could be summarized as No history, no ethics, no themes, no aesthetics, and no context—period.

scholarly journals AT DRIKKE ÆBLETE: Om håndteringen af kulturforskelle i institutioner

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

The title of this article, “Drinking Apple Tea”, refers to the account of a social worker visiting the family of his drug-addicted client. While the visit proceeds in silence, the social worker finds his own frustration rising: “We just sit there and drink apple tea. What am I doing here?” This story points to the fact that cultural differences are difficult to manage within the institutions of the Danish welfare state, since they tend to fall outside the scope of established universal categorizations and norms that form the basis for institutional practices. On the basis of an understanding of cultural encounters that emphasize the creativity of human agency, as well as the institutional fixation of hegemonic norms, the article discusses specific encounters involving majority institutions and ethnic minorities in Denmark. The analysis focuses on the ways cultural differences are either suppressed or displaced as irrelevant factors, or emerge as catchall explanations for the behavior of ethnic minorities. This pattern is to a large extent attributable to the institutional norms and practices that implicitly limit diversity. In some cases, a universal view of human nature means that difference becomes deviance; whilst in others, a focus on cultural difference reduces diversity resulting in stereotypical generalizations of the Other. One way of distributing culture and difference in alternative ways could result from a heightened awareness of the institutional rationalities and practices among the employees.

Narratology and Post-Narratology

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-314 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Narrative Research ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Narrative Generation ◽  
Narrative Studies ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Research Narrative

This chapter describes the narratology or post-narratology that synthesizes and develops various narrative-related studies, including previous narrative research, narrative and narrative generation studies in the broad sense, and, of course, previous narratology and literary theories. This chapter studies various narrative studies in the broad sense and then studies and surveys narrative and narrative generation studies in a more narrow sense. Further, dependent on these backgrounds, the author surveys the fields of narratology and literary theories. On the other hand, as a cultural approach, this chapter refers especially to Japan's literature. In summary, dependent on the above topics, this chapter presents the concept of post-narratology, the expanded literary theory in the author's previous term.

Literary Intransigence: Between J. Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh

CounterText ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges Van Den Abbeele
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Inductive Approach ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Expanded Concept

Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh think literature from opposite but complementary points of view. Miller is the advocate of close reading and generally an inductive approach whereby specific interpretive problems in regard to specific literary texts critically revise broader theoretical assumptions and presuppositions. Ghosh, on the other hand, plays the consummate theorist, appropriating and critically developing various concepts in dialogue with a wide range of contemporary critical voices, then applying that revised/expanded concept to the analysis of specific works. Each models a different way to move between theory and interpretation, but both ground their thinking in the strangeness of literature, what Miller calls its ‘idiosyncrasy’ and Ghosh, based on his reinvigoration of the Hindi term, sahitya, its sacredness. This piece argues for the fundamental ‘foreignness’ of literature (and culture in general) as underwriting both approaches. Following upon Voloshinov, Benjamin, and others, I situate both theory and criticism of literature within the larger problem of translation as a crossing between languages that also brings the foreign into the native tongue, an irreducibility I call literary intransigence. As opposed to platitudes about ‘world’ literature, literary intransigence implies instead a vigorous reading of all literature as foreign.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Salsa’s Unruly Audition

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ren Ellis Neyra
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Music Festival

This essay shows how salsa stimulates unruly audition. It responds to that stimulation by performing multi-sensorial poetic listening with the excessive, tender, and queer audio-visual sabores [tastes], gestures, and details of two live performances by the musicians and singers contracted to Fania in the 1970s, one in Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in 1973 and the other in 1974 at Zaire ‘74 in Kinshasa, a music festival of Afro-Latinx, brown, and black sonic solidarity headlining the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle fight. A riot of audience ended the All-Stars’ set at the 1973 Bronx concert. Their insurgent pleasure compels us to think unruliness with salsa’s listeners, and re-imagine Latinx as a riotous movement of brown and black swerving aesthetic convergences. The essay enacts a deviant and sonically oriented close reading of Héctor Lavoe’s vocals in the song “Mi Gente” [My People], in part, for their attunement precisely to audience and playful dynamics with the band. In this song, Lavoe cries out to “anormales” [abnormals], a sign re-imagined here as an off-kilter feeling for salsa and a multi-sensorial opening for more errant ruptures.

Challenging Gender Hierarchies in Narratives of the Nation: Representations of Women in Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon and Hard Choice

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Hard Choice ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Do So

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.

The Qizilbāsh and their Shah: The Preservation of Royal Prerogative during the Early Reign of Shah Ṭahmāsp

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
GREGORY ALDOUS
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Historical Literature

Abstract Modern historians of Persia's Safavid period (1501–1722) have long assumed that there was an interregnum between the death of Shah Ismāʿīl I in 1524 and the date when his son Ṭahmāsp came of age and established direct control in the 1530s. This idea of an interregnum takes two forms in the historiography. According to one narrative, during this time the Qizilbāsh amirs were disloyal to the young Ṭahmāsp and tried to seize control of Persia for themselves. According to the other, there was a war of succession in which Qizilbāsh factions supported different sons of Ismāʿīl I. Both of these narratives co-exist in the contemporary historical literature even though they disagree. Based on a close reading of the early Safavid chronicles, this article demonstrates that both narratives are incorrect and there was no interregnum. The Qizilbāsh continued throughout Ṭahmāsp's minority to respect him and treat him as their leader. Unsurprisingly, given his youth and inexperience, he deferred matters of state to his amirs. Nevertheless, his amirs derived their legitimacy to rule from him, and when leadership passed from one amir to another, it did so only with Ṭahmāsp's approval. Moreover, there was no dispute over the succession during Ṭahmāsp's minority.

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