Rāṅgey Rāghav’s Literary Biographies, Loī kā tānā and Ratnā kī bāt, in the 1950s and the Debates on the Status of Indian Women and Dalits

The article proposes to investigate the political and ideological uses of Hindi literary biography, with focus on two texts by Rāṅgey Rāghav, Loī kā tānā (“Loi’s Warp’’) and Ratnā kī bāt (“Ratna’s Speech”), based on lives of Kabir and Tulsīdās respectively. The relevance of Rāghav’s biographies goes beyond the merely literary and derives from the ideological and political functions played by these texts in the period they were written. Viewed by Rāghav as complementary works with a didactic and ideological value, they move away from the ‘brahmanical’ interpretations of the early modern Hindi poets by scholars of the 1920s and 1930s. To understand Rāghav’s motives and strategies, one needs to examine the ideological and political context in which he recast values linked to the main figures of the early modern devotional (bhakti) literature. As the 1950s witnessed debates on the status of Indian women and Dalit communities, the same becoming crucial to Hindi literary sphere, special attention needs to be paid to the representation, in Rāghav’s biographies, of Loī and Ratnā—Kabīr’s and Tulsīdās’ wives respectively—who embody some of the politically and ideologically progressive slogans which Rāghav projected on to these poets. The present work, based on recent studies on literary biography (Benton 2005, 2011, Middlebrook 2006, Miller 2001), is also an attempt to investigate some of the intellectual and ideological aporias which seem to have affected Hindi literary progressivism since the first decades of the postcolonial period.

La exposición de arte visual novelada por Enrique Vila-Matas

The Art Exhibition as a Novel by Enrique Vila-Matas. I set out to analyze, using the New Rhetoric methods, the book entitled Cabinet d`amateur, an oblique novel published by the contemporary Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas in 2019, at the same time as the opening of an exhibition whose curator he was in the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Choosing the six visual art works, different in nature, concept, and aesthetics, from the collection of the “laCaixa” Foundation represents an occasion for the writer, led by curiosity, to investigate the works of art and to make a personal, purely subjective selection, on which he reflects in his heterogenic work as a genre: the catalogue of an exhibition, memoirs, essay (auto)biography, the skeleton of an oblique novel of the future. The selected works of art (I.G., the mysterious portrait of a woman by the painter Gerhard Richter; an installation, Petite, by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster; a videoclip, La lección respiratoria, belonging to the artist Dora García; Milonga, Carlos Pazos’s self-portrait; a detailed scenery, Une poignée de terre, by Miquel Barceló and a photography of Theban by Andreas Gursky, in an overlap of an aerial view with one detailed figure) are included in the text as a starting point for meditations and reflections upon the nature of the art in general, because the metaphor of the literary work, the novel of the future, is precisely the building of Rem Koolhass, the library in Seattle, in which different styles overlap and whose shapes are imprecise, undetermined, incongruent, disharmonic and lacking in logic. Literature, visual arts, music, and architecture are associated, and different figures are used to point out the aesthetic of the negative and the idea that form and content are interchangeable. Keywords: Enrique Vila-Matas, Cabinet d´amateur, an oblique novel, general-rhetoric analysis, the exhibition as a novel, literary biography

Addison and the Victorians

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Los mediadores literarios de los futuros maestros. Exploración de los relatos de vida literaria

This work is part of the research in the field of teaching literature and the profile of the reader and the belief system of teachers in initial training. Its objective is to delve into the literary biography of future teachers, paying special attention to who their literary mediators were, since, possibly, they end up acting as mediation models in their future tasks as teachers. To carry out this research we use an Author Recognition Test to establish the degree of familiarity of students with literature, and the literary life story of the 35 students of the dual degree in Infant and Primary Education at the University of Barcelona, that configure the sample. The results, which are constructed from a qualitative approach to literary life stories and the quantitative data from the Author Recognition Test, show a nuanced relationship between the degree of familiarity of students with literature and the type of literary mediator and literary experiences lived so far.

Daniil Kharms in His Father’s Diaries: Selected Passages

This publication presents selected passages from the diaries of Ivan Pavlovich Yuvachev (1860‒1940), which are directly related to his son, Daniil Kharms. These selections are presented in accordance with Vol. 9 of Yuvachev’s “Collected Diaries,” published by the “Galeev-Gallery” in 2020. They cover the diary entries made from October 7, 1922 through March 29, 1931. That volume of “Collected Diaries” reflects the beginning of Kharms’ literary activities and their gradual increase until his arrest in the “Case of the Children’s Literature Sector of the Gosizdat” on December 10, 1931. Yuvachev’s diaries depict Kharms at home in an everyday environment and demonstrate uneasy relationship with his father and the rest of the family. Yuvachev does not approve of his son’s creative pursuits, but sincerely worries about him and is constantly looking for the common ground. Therefore, his diary entries at least partially touch upon Kharms’ literary work, including the performances of the Collective of Real Art (OBERIU). Also, they mention his creative collaborators – Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Boris (Doyvber) Levin, Leonid Lipavsky, Samuil Marshak. The publication is accompanied by an introductory article and a necessary commentary, intended to reconstruct episodes of Kharms’ literary biography against the background of the Leningrad culture of the 1920s and early 1930s.

After-Lives

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

Early Russian Reception of James Hogg (1830s)

The early Russian reception of the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770—1835), known in his homeland as an interpreter of folk ballads and the author of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” (1824) — a complex work, which laid the foundation for the theme of multiple personality disorder in English literature is comprehended in the article for the first time. It has been suggested that the first Russian to hear about Hogg and his works was A. I. Turgenev, who visited W. Scott in Abbotsford in August 1828. The materials of the Russian periodicals of the 1830s (“Library for reading”, “Northern Bee”, “Telescope”, “Moscow Observer”), which reported facts about the life and work of Hogg, were comprehended. It is noted that the authors of a number of articles (most of them published without a signature and under kryptonyms) were significant critics and publicists of the era — O. I. Senkovsky, N. A. Polevoy, N. I. Nadezhdin. It was established that in the 1830s, fragments from Hogg’s memoir about the life of W. Scott in Abbotsford “The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834), as well as a fragment from the book “Noctes Ambrosianae” (1802—1835), attributed to Hogg, but in reality a collective work of J. Wilson, J. G. Lockhart, Hogg and W. Maginn were translated into Russian. The analysis of publications about Hogg in periodicals and in the fourteenth volume of the Encyclopedic Lexicon (1838) revealed inaccuracies in the presentation of biographical facts, the tendency of Russian publicists to uncritically perceive the subjective assessments of the Hogg-memoirist, largely due to his desire to emphasize his own literary significance. It is noted that, introducing Hogg as a follower of Burns and a friend of Scott, the authors of articles in Russian periodicals did not pay due attention to Hogg’s creative individuality, the originality of his creative heritage, as a result of which the late period of his literary biography (late 1810s — mid-1830s), associated with the creation of “The Confession of a Justified Sinner” and a number of other significant works, remained unnoticed against the background of early works associated with reliance on folk songs.