Finale

In “The Future City and The Female Marine,” I set Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography against The Female Marine, a pamphlet narrative written in three overlapping installments and published in nineteen different editions between 1815 and 1818 by Boston publisher Nathaniel Coverly. I contrast the Autobiography’s version of US urban space as a replicable franchise city to the transgressive city constructed in The Female Marine. The Female Marine’s protagonist, Lucy Brewer, seduced, abandoned, and working as a prostitute in Boston, disguises herself as a young male sailor to serve on the USS Constitution during the War of 1812. Easily read as political allegory for Boston’s shifting wartime loyalties, The Female Marine also marks a critical transition in US urban literature. Coverly rewrites the seduction tale to allow for female urban success, foreshadowing the racy female libertines of the 1840s sporting press. Virtually untouched by literary critics, The Female Marine is a remarkably rich text. Coverly quotes from and revises Charlotte, offers us a newly graphic version of the city’s geography that evokes the phantasmic cities of Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard, previews the rise of urban serials in the penny press, and delivers a more triumphant outcome than the equivocal endings of Kelroy or Ormond. As it picks up on earlier urban forms, The Female Marine operates as a fantastic, subversive, and funny precursor to the urban genre fiction that would become immensely popular in the second half of the century.

The Heavens and Hells of Scottish Literature: An Interview with Alasdair Gray

On the occasion of the publication of the Contemporary Scottish Urban Literature CJES Special Issue, this interview to Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, one of the last he gave, aims to celebrate Gray’s work and to emphasise his role as a crucial influence for the contemporary Scottish writers whose work features in this special issue. In a very personal manner, Gray strings together reflections on contemporary politics, discusses the role of the local and the national in his work and addresses questions on the construction of his male characters in a discourse which ultimately highlights the determining role of Gray’s socio-political and cultural environment plays his art. Moreover, Gray talks about the artists he was exposed to as a kid and the manner in which these were influential. Considering its wide scope, this interview may serve as a guide to better understand Gray’s work, the reasons why he merges fantasy and reality in his novels and short stories, and the socio-political breeding ground of his socialist and civic nationalist political agenda.

Argot as a Form of Protest in the Novels of Rashid Jaidani “Boumkœur” and “Viscéral”

В статье анализируются неконвенциональные языковые элементы в романах Рашида Джаидани “Boumcœur” и “Viscéral”. Писатель работает в направлении littérature beur и littérature urbaine («арабская литература» и «урбанистическая литература») — двух связанных между собой направлениях современной французской прозы. Анализ нестандартного вокабуляра проводится на основании алгоритма Э. М. Береговской с указанием частотности использования лексем и способов их семантизации. На основании этого анализа автор приходит к выводу, что нестандартный вокабуляр состоит из различных социолектов, арго, верлана, заимствований, которые в конечном итоге являются составными частями современного французского языка пригородов. В рассматриваемых в статье произведений Рашида Джаидани нестандартный вокабуляр представляет собой продукт жизненного опыта арготирующих персонажей и употребляется с разными целями — криптолалической, идентифицирующей, людической, поэтической. Автор выводит также формулу использования арго в творчестве Р. Джаидани — арго как форма протеста. The article analyzes unconventional linguistic elements in the novels of Rashid Jaidani “Boumcœur” and “Viscéral”. The writer works in the sphere of “littérature beur” and “littérature urbaine” (“Arabic literature” and “urban literature”) — two interrelated areas of contemporary French prose. Analysis of non-standard vocabulary is based on the algorithm of E. M. Beregovskaya indicating the frequency of use of lexemes and methods for their semantization. Based on this analysis, the author concludes that this vocabulary layer consists of various sociolects, argot, verlan, borrowings, which ultimately are integral parts of the contemporary French language of the suburbs. In the novels under discussion, the use of non-standard vocabulary is a product of the characters’ life experience and is used for various purposes — cryptolalic, identifying, ludic, poetic. Also, the author derives the following formula for using argot in the work of R. Jaidani: argot as a form of protest.

Post-Aural Story-Telling and the Iranian Flaneurs: A Benjaminian Reading of Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33

The city has fascinated the street wanderer as the contemplation of modern life. Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘flâneur,’ originally borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, could be taken as the true legacy of such fascination. There is always a sense of nostalgia being revealed through the flânerie of the city stroller passing through the metropolis, its shopping centers, and boulevards nourishing the mind of the bohemic storyteller with tales of post-aural experience and memory. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘flânerie’ in the streets of Paris to those of Tehran, the present paper attempts to explore Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33 in order to demonstrate the post-aural stories of the flaneurs in an Iranian milieu. This article focuses on the modern aspect of the Iranian contemporary society and explores the immediate consequences of modernity on the individual subjectivity of the characters represented in the novel. Considering Dadkhah’s novel as a product of the urban literature of a generation dealing with modernity of the arcades and other lures of the megapolis on the one hand and feeling of nostalgia for their past spirit on the other, the paper simultaneously reveals the close affinity between the subjectivity of the characters and Benjaminian tenets of flânerie and modern storytellers. The flaneurs represented in the novel, by rambling through and about the city of Tehran, are turning to be the storytellers who narrate their ‘post-aural’ experiences. In Yousef Abad, Street 33 the central characters are, as fully manifested in the paper, deeply engaged in the experiences of a modern sense of living while wandering to console their wistful longings despite the everyday challenges.