Climate Lyricism

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.

They would have transitioned me: third conditional TERF grammar of trans childhood

Some of the most virulent public trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourse in the UK follows the grammatical form of the third conditional: if I had grown up now, I would have been persuaded to transition. This articulation of the hypothetical threat of a transition that did not happen but is imagined, in retrospect, to be not just possible but forcibly enacted plays an important role, both politically and psychically, in a contemporary political landscape that is threatening the livelihoods of trans children. Interrogating this discourse via an analysis of an open letter by J.K. Rowling, and a documentary by Stella O’Malley, this article asks: what might we learn about contemporary transphobia in the UK if we took seriously the grammar of TERF discourse animated by trans childhood? It argues that while the third conditional grammar of TERF discourse could articulate a politics of solidarity between cis and trans positionalities and politics, its potential for a shared political standpoint is routinely interrupted by the defence mechanisms that are oriented by the psychic life of the child. Interrogating these defence mechanisms at the level of the cultural, the article traces out paranoia (as reading practice and psychic state) as well as projection, as two main modes of TERF engagement with trans childhood. The article thus engages with the range of real and fantasmatic impossibilities that haunt the trans child both in the present and the past, and it contributes to the growing body of scholarship on trans childhoods. In doing so, it makes the case that public discourse on trans children should desist from hypothetical third conditional claims, and instead find ways of embracing trans childhoods unconditionally.

Olena Haleta, Joanna the Wife of Chuza by Lesya Ukrainka as a New Model of Communication in Modern Ukrainian Literature [Joanna, żona Chuzy Lesi Ukrainki jako nowy model komunikacji w modernistycznej literaturze ukraińskiej]re

This article examines the drama Joanna the Wife of Chuza (1909) by Lesya Ukrainka, who is one of the defining figures in the history of modern Ukrainian literature. This work is considered an example of creating a new communicative model, introducing the poetics of an open work in the Ukrainian literature and establishing a new relationship between writer and audience. The incompleteness of the central image of this work, and therefore of the corresponding behavioral model and worldview, leads to the absence of a plot ending which would be the final solution to the conflict. In this way, Ukrainka establishes a new reading practice, not limited to experiencing the ‘life world’ of the author’s work. As reference to the history of thetext shows, it corresponds to the author’s conscious instruction, with which the composition of the work agrees: the events take place in a special period of time, when the previous story has already ended and the new one has not yet begun (after the crucifixion of Christ, but not after the resurrection). At the same time, the spatial organization of the work emphasizes the position of readers, turning them from interested witnesses to active searchers. The example of Joanna is all the more telling because it undermines the hegemony of the novel in twentieth-century literature and draws attention to literary forms that correspond to a particular literary situation, especially that of ‘submerged population groups’ (Frank O’Connor). The change introduced by Lesya Ukrainka at the level of a separate work is also a change within the genre as a way of communicating between an author and a reader; it is also a change in the very notion of literature as a certain type of aesthetic experience and as a culturally established way of cognitive and rhetorical response to a certain type of situation.

Gravitation

Gravitation: Modes of Reading in the Anthropocene In this article, I suggest ‘gravitation’ as a new way of reading in and for the anthropocene, which is characterised by environmentally destructive ‘social acceleration’. This reading practice would imply two things: First, that representations of the natural environment take a primary position in relation to the characters in many genres, including those where nature so far has been read as a highly conventional construction. It also involves acknowledging that ultimately, characters are positioned by the physical environment in these genres, as characters, in one way or the other, can never exist unrelated to the environment that encompass and cut through them. These genres I suggest be called ‘gravitating genres’. Second, and in a similar fashion, I suggest the term ‘gravitating reading’ to denote reading of physical books, which in this context becomes a highly preferred medium. This term partly coincides with that of ‘deep reading’ suggested by Mangen, but in addition, it also recognizes the dependency of both the reader and the medium on the natural environment. Together, these two practices amount to, I suggest, nothing less than a mutually sustainable economy of reading.

Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric

This chapter charts developments in anatomy in the wake of the French Revolution, and shows how Romantic lyrics model a reading practice informed by anatomical medicine. Surgical tropes from the advances in morbid anatomy, for example, inform William Wordsworth’s most important poems. Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s mind” and the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth’s model of interpretation, the critic Francis Jeffrey and the poet John Keats developed a practice of dissective reading, an influential protocol that crossed between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. Dissective reading anticipates symptomatic close reading through a segmentation of surface and underlying structures, and invokes dismemberment as a tool for converting critical reading into authorial auto-exegesis. Examples drawn from Wordsworth and Keats reveal how Romantic lyrics offer up the poet’s own body as the subject of surgical (and critical) analysis, treating critical readings as diagnoses of the poets themselves.

Unreliable Semiology from Frankenstein to Freud

Examining how prose fiction and the case history share certain formal features, this chapter turns to the medical field of semiology to investigate how the Romantic-era case history models a diagnostic reading practice that extends from medicine to the novel. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a notable, even parodic, literary case history informed by conventional protocols of medical reporting, visible both in Romantic-era case histories, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the case histories of Sigmund Freud. The Romantic case history captures fundamental tensions between the physician’s scientific report and the patient’s autobiography, which compromise the physician’s ability to trace a semiotic relationship between external symptom and underlying condition. The case history proves to be a site of disciplinary quarrel between literature and medicine: not only does it anticipate many of the epistemological problems that attend our modern attempts to read “symptomatically” or “deeply,” it also interrogates the notions of authority, personhood, and normality that continue to sustain modern medical discourse and literary criticism. As the case history reveals the unreliability of the diagnostician’s production of narrative, it also shows the limitations of interpretation in the emergent medical and literary fields of semiology.

Connected Readers: Reading Practices and Communities across the British Empire, c. 1890-1930

<p>The thesis is a study of reading practices and communities across various sites of the British Empire between 1890-1930, a period marked by near universal literacy levels and affordable, mass print production. It draws on the extensive archive of Fred Barkas (1854-1932), an English-born New Zealand resident, whose reading and writing has left a uniquely rich record of reading practices over a forty-year period, and the records of other individual and group readers in Canada, Britain and Australia. As a social history of reading, the study explores how reading shaped personal relationships, fashioned individual and collective identities, and contributed to the processes of community formation, locally and across space. The remarkable depth of Barkas's records allows an examination of how a reader situated in a provincial centre on the outskirts of empire could be at the "centre" of a British reading world. Barkas's records are supplemented by library records, by the minute books and scrapbooks of the Canadian reader Margaret McMicking (1849-1944) and the Victoria Literary Society, B.C., and by the publications of the National and the Australasian Home Reading Union, active in the British Empire between 1889 and 1930. Like Barkas, McMicking and members of the Home Reading movement participated in a social world of reading that was simultaneously defined by local specifics and by imperial connections. The study considers reading within a variety of spaces, times and social environments. The discussion leads from an exploration of local reading networks in Timaru which connected in a number of spaces, to a particular place of reading: the Timaru Public Library. Reading, and writing about reading, was central to Fred Barkas‘s relationship with his daughter Mary. Mary lived in England for most of her adult life from 1913; the lengthy and detailed correspondence between Fred and Mary provides a basis for the exploration of reading in a family intimacy spanning space and time. Group reading cultures are discussed through Barkas's involvement with several reading and discussion groups in Timaru, and McMicking's membership in the Victoria Literary Society in British Columbia. These local reading groups were embedded in existing associational cultures and constituted important spaces for sociability within prevailing notions about class and gender. The empire-wide Home Reading movement addressed concerns about the right kind of reading, stressing in particular the importance of reading in circles. The Union extended the debate about reading to notions of citizenship of nation and empire, a responsibility especially emphasized during World War One. During the war, civilians in different sites across the empire used their reading for information as well as escape, and reading turned into a mechanism to cope with heightened anxiety. A diversity of reading practices is evident across these spaces and included reading that was variously entertaining, recreational, productive, instructive, informative, social and solitary. Connections to other readers influenced the choice of reading material and reading practice. Reading alone and silently, reading out loud at group meetings or with friends, taking notes, reflecting on reading in writing, re-reading texts, and discussing one's reading in writing or talk with others all contributed to reading cultures that were highly social. The thesis argues that in order to understand the place of reading in specific localities and in the wider British Empire in this period, we need to train our gaze simultaneously on the local and on the imperial, and move beneath and beyond national histories of reading. The readers in this study connected to places outside their local communities, and to a larger reading world not only through what they read but how they read. Recent scholarship on the new imperialism has emphasized the notion of the British Empire as a "web" – a set of networks facilitating the flow of people, goods and ideas across the empire. Print and other forms of the written word formed an important part of this movement and exchange. Reading material and suggestions for reading flowed back and forth, books were bought and shipped as commercial goods, were sent as gifts in private mail, or lent to other readers within existing networks. Across the lines of connections, discussion about reading flowed profusely in newspapers, journals, NHRU magazines and letters. This study offers insights into the ways in which reading and reading practices operated across the webs of empire.</p>

Connected Readers: Reading Practices and Communities across the British Empire, c. 1890-1930

<p>The thesis is a study of reading practices and communities across various sites of the British Empire between 1890-1930, a period marked by near universal literacy levels and affordable, mass print production. It draws on the extensive archive of Fred Barkas (1854-1932), an English-born New Zealand resident, whose reading and writing has left a uniquely rich record of reading practices over a forty-year period, and the records of other individual and group readers in Canada, Britain and Australia. As a social history of reading, the study explores how reading shaped personal relationships, fashioned individual and collective identities, and contributed to the processes of community formation, locally and across space. The remarkable depth of Barkas's records allows an examination of how a reader situated in a provincial centre on the outskirts of empire could be at the "centre" of a British reading world. Barkas's records are supplemented by library records, by the minute books and scrapbooks of the Canadian reader Margaret McMicking (1849-1944) and the Victoria Literary Society, B.C., and by the publications of the National and the Australasian Home Reading Union, active in the British Empire between 1889 and 1930. Like Barkas, McMicking and members of the Home Reading movement participated in a social world of reading that was simultaneously defined by local specifics and by imperial connections. The study considers reading within a variety of spaces, times and social environments. The discussion leads from an exploration of local reading networks in Timaru which connected in a number of spaces, to a particular place of reading: the Timaru Public Library. Reading, and writing about reading, was central to Fred Barkas‘s relationship with his daughter Mary. Mary lived in England for most of her adult life from 1913; the lengthy and detailed correspondence between Fred and Mary provides a basis for the exploration of reading in a family intimacy spanning space and time. Group reading cultures are discussed through Barkas's involvement with several reading and discussion groups in Timaru, and McMicking's membership in the Victoria Literary Society in British Columbia. These local reading groups were embedded in existing associational cultures and constituted important spaces for sociability within prevailing notions about class and gender. The empire-wide Home Reading movement addressed concerns about the right kind of reading, stressing in particular the importance of reading in circles. The Union extended the debate about reading to notions of citizenship of nation and empire, a responsibility especially emphasized during World War One. During the war, civilians in different sites across the empire used their reading for information as well as escape, and reading turned into a mechanism to cope with heightened anxiety. A diversity of reading practices is evident across these spaces and included reading that was variously entertaining, recreational, productive, instructive, informative, social and solitary. Connections to other readers influenced the choice of reading material and reading practice. Reading alone and silently, reading out loud at group meetings or with friends, taking notes, reflecting on reading in writing, re-reading texts, and discussing one's reading in writing or talk with others all contributed to reading cultures that were highly social. The thesis argues that in order to understand the place of reading in specific localities and in the wider British Empire in this period, we need to train our gaze simultaneously on the local and on the imperial, and move beneath and beyond national histories of reading. The readers in this study connected to places outside their local communities, and to a larger reading world not only through what they read but how they read. Recent scholarship on the new imperialism has emphasized the notion of the British Empire as a "web" – a set of networks facilitating the flow of people, goods and ideas across the empire. Print and other forms of the written word formed an important part of this movement and exchange. Reading material and suggestions for reading flowed back and forth, books were bought and shipped as commercial goods, were sent as gifts in private mail, or lent to other readers within existing networks. Across the lines of connections, discussion about reading flowed profusely in newspapers, journals, NHRU magazines and letters. This study offers insights into the ways in which reading and reading practices operated across the webs of empire.</p>

The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>