Kuwaiti Women Writers and Anglophone Choices: Charting New Territories

While there has been a plethora of work on Arab women writers, little attention has been paid to Kuwaiti women writers, especially those who write Anglophone literature. This research paper argues that the choice to write in English rather than Arabic leaves these writers in a problematic position. As a result of embracing the English language, rather than their mother tongue, they are left outside of the dominant literary circle and often marginalized. Through a literary analysis, this paper presents some of the texts written by contemporary Kuwaiti writers who have chosen to write in English, and have produced nuanced narratives of Kuwaiti women who find agency and self-expression through their fictional journeys. These journeys explore themes of agency, voice, and trauma. A significant contribution of the present paper lies in a thematic analysis of lesser-known Kuwaiti texts in order to excavate these marginalized voices. The findings suggest that by choosing to write in English, these writers face the dangers of being dismissed from the literary canon, just like their protagonists must contend with society’s discrimination and expectations.

The Contradictions of Masculinity: Desire, emotions and masculine identities of seven heterosexual Mexican men

<p>Studying men and masculinities in Mexico through feminist sociology is necessary to tackle gender inequalities. These inequalities can be as extreme as the institutional, sexual and physical violence that occur in disproportionate numbers, or as quotidian as the micro-machismos that go unnoticed as forms of everyday gender violence. It is paramount to understand masculinity as a system of domination and differentiation as well as a gender identity that is performed by bodies that feel, are affected and recognise themselves as masculine and as men. By doing so, the road towards equality will include a strong critique of how men have learned to pursue a certain form of masculinity. To question men’s relation with masculinity and their experience of recognising themselves as such, this thesis took a narrative approach to the analysis of video diaries, generated through an affective methodology with seven Mexican men about their sexual-affective heterosexual relationships. The methodological process involved a relationship of ethics, friendship and co-production. Each of the seven men recorded themselves talking about their relationships, their partners and themselves in a uniquely vulnerable, honest and reflexive manner. The video diaries were then turned into seven narratives that were organised discursively into topics of: Emotions, Desire and Identity. The analysis centred on affective practices, emotions, social mediations of desire and masculine identity as ongoing negotiations in a particular geopolitical context. The men in this study constantly situated themselves between the hegemonic discourse of masculinity in Mexico and alternatives closer to a feminist approach. This positioning showed how their practices and ideas, while still part of the hegemonic system, were also able to challenge it. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the value of an affective methodology for working with men to analyse masculinities. The men who participated in this research revealed their daily navigations between multiple forms of masculinities and the hegemonic system still embedded in them. Such everyday negotiations highlight the very real challenges to be overcome in the movement towards more equal, free and ethical relationships between women and men. Furthermore, by offering a situated study of how Mexican men negotiate their masculinity, this research contributes to broader Anglophone literature on masculinity, which tends to be rooted in the Anglo-American experience. While concerned with relatively privileged Mexican men, it shows how such men negotiate global stereotypes such as the macho, the provider, the lover or the rebel. Finally, this thesis reveals how masculinities are manifested, as gender identity, with specific practices, desires, emotions and ways of being in the world; and also as a symbolic-material system of hierarchical organisation of sexed bodies. Thus, analysis of sexual-affective heterosexual relationships, through a focus on masculinities, can bring to light the contradictions and conflicts of being a man situated in a privileged position within the sex-gender system, in a social context that is increasingly questioning the position and the system that maintains it.</p>

The Contradictions of Masculinity: Desire, emotions and masculine identities of seven heterosexual Mexican men

<p>Studying men and masculinities in Mexico through feminist sociology is necessary to tackle gender inequalities. These inequalities can be as extreme as the institutional, sexual and physical violence that occur in disproportionate numbers, or as quotidian as the micro-machismos that go unnoticed as forms of everyday gender violence. It is paramount to understand masculinity as a system of domination and differentiation as well as a gender identity that is performed by bodies that feel, are affected and recognise themselves as masculine and as men. By doing so, the road towards equality will include a strong critique of how men have learned to pursue a certain form of masculinity. To question men’s relation with masculinity and their experience of recognising themselves as such, this thesis took a narrative approach to the analysis of video diaries, generated through an affective methodology with seven Mexican men about their sexual-affective heterosexual relationships. The methodological process involved a relationship of ethics, friendship and co-production. Each of the seven men recorded themselves talking about their relationships, their partners and themselves in a uniquely vulnerable, honest and reflexive manner. The video diaries were then turned into seven narratives that were organised discursively into topics of: Emotions, Desire and Identity. The analysis centred on affective practices, emotions, social mediations of desire and masculine identity as ongoing negotiations in a particular geopolitical context. The men in this study constantly situated themselves between the hegemonic discourse of masculinity in Mexico and alternatives closer to a feminist approach. This positioning showed how their practices and ideas, while still part of the hegemonic system, were also able to challenge it. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the value of an affective methodology for working with men to analyse masculinities. The men who participated in this research revealed their daily navigations between multiple forms of masculinities and the hegemonic system still embedded in them. Such everyday negotiations highlight the very real challenges to be overcome in the movement towards more equal, free and ethical relationships between women and men. Furthermore, by offering a situated study of how Mexican men negotiate their masculinity, this research contributes to broader Anglophone literature on masculinity, which tends to be rooted in the Anglo-American experience. While concerned with relatively privileged Mexican men, it shows how such men negotiate global stereotypes such as the macho, the provider, the lover or the rebel. Finally, this thesis reveals how masculinities are manifested, as gender identity, with specific practices, desires, emotions and ways of being in the world; and also as a symbolic-material system of hierarchical organisation of sexed bodies. Thus, analysis of sexual-affective heterosexual relationships, through a focus on masculinities, can bring to light the contradictions and conflicts of being a man situated in a privileged position within the sex-gender system, in a social context that is increasingly questioning the position and the system that maintains it.</p>

Contesting Homogeneity: Stereotypes and Heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease

This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

Four decades of Brazilian and international research on street children

The last 40 years has yielded a vast body of literature on street children. In this article, we reflect on the knowledge accumulated by several generations of scholars and across two bodies of research. The article’s aim is twofold: 1) To conduct a meta-narrative review, mapping out the contours of Brazilian and Anglophone literature on street children since the 1980s until today. 2) To bridge these two bodies of literature through reflections on similarities and differences. In so doing, we identify some overall tendencies in which street children have been described, debated, and theorized and bridge the two bodies of literature that often remain separated.

World Literature in the World?

Criticized for being too Euro- and Americentric, world literature scholarship tends to center on the American implications of this shortcoming, with little discussion of world literature beyond these centers. This paper thus addresses the function of world literature beyond these centers, particularly in the lingua franca of global business: English. Drawing from my experience in the United Arab Emirates, I argue that because students in the region come from places with fraught colonial histories, migrant, Anglophone literature is critical in the world literature classroom because it allows them to see their own experiences articulated in the global literary vernacular. Using Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as an example, I show how its transnational scope addresses both the hegemonic, Euro-American gaze, but also the students’. Thus, Anglophone literature is not necessarily the extension of an imperialist project or a flattening of differences; rather, it becomes an articulation of them.

Buchbesprechungen

Angela Schrott/Christoph Strosetzki (Hgg.): Gelungene Gespräche als Praxis der Gemeinschaftsbildung. Literatur, Sprache und Gesellschaft (Historische Dialogforschung, Band 5), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020 (Sybille Große) Julia Weitbrecht/Maximilian Benz/Andreas Hammer/Elke Koch/Nina Nowakowski/Stephanie Seidl/Johannes Traulsen: Legendarisches Erzählen. Optionen und Modelle in Spätantike und Mittelalter (Philologische Studien und Quellen, Band 273), Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2019 (Beatrice von Lüpke) Anastasija Ropa/Timothy Dawson (eds.): The Horse in Premodern European Culture (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture LXX), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019 (Sonja Fielitz) Veronika Hassel: Das Werk Friedrichs von Hausen. Edition und Studien (Philologische Studien und Quellen, Band 269), Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2018 (Simone Leidinger) Norbert Kössinger/Claudia Wittig (Hgg.): Prodesse et delectare. Case Studies on Didactic Literature in the European Middle Ages/Fallstudien zur didaktischen Literatur des europäischen Mittelalters (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte, Band 11), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019 (Jan Stellmann) Eva Rothenberger: Ave praeclara maris stella. Poetische und liturgische Transformationen der Mariensequenz im deutschen Mittelalter (Liturgie und Volkssprache, Band 2), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019 (Anja Becker) Justin Vollmann (Hg./Üb.): Eberhard der Deutsche: Laborintus. Nach dem Text von Edmond Faral herausgegeben, Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2020 (Fritz Peter Knapp) Ann-Kathrin Deininger: Könige. Konzeptionen von Herrschaft im ›Prosalancelot‹ (Studien zu Macht und Herrschaft. Schriftenreihe des SFB 1167 »Macht und Herrschaft – Vormoderne Konfigurationen in transkultureller Perspektive«, Band 3), Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2019.(Christiane Witthöft) Britta Maria Wittchow: Erzählte mediale Prozesse. Medientheoretische Perspektiven auf den Reinfried von Braunschweig und den Apollonius von Tyrland (Trends in Medieval Philology, volume 37), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020 (Wolfgang Achnitz) Pia Claudia Doering: Praktiken des Rechts in Boccaccios Decameron. Die novellistische Analyse juristischer Erkenntniswege, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2020 (Moritz Rauchhaus) Arvind Thomas: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019 (Curtis Runstedler) Stefan Rosmer: Der Mönch von Salzburg und das lateinische Lied. Die geistlichen Lieder in stolligen Strophen und das einstimmige gottesdienstliche Lied im späten Mittelalter (Imagines medii aevi, Band 44), Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2019 (Britta Bußmann) Stefan Hannes Greil/Martin Przybilski (Hgg.): Nürnberger Fastnachtspiele des 15. Jahrhunderts von Hans Folz und aus seinem Umkreis. Edition und Kommentar, unter Mitarbeit von Theresia Biehl, Christoph Gerhardt und Mark Ritz, mit einem Beitrag von Nikolaus Ruge, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020 (Johannes Janota) Seraina Plotke/Stefan Seeber (Hgg.): Schwanksammlungen im frühneuzeitlichen Medienumbruch. Transformationen eines sequentiellen Erzählparadigmas (Beihefte zur Germanisch-Romanischen Monatsschrift, Band 96), Heidelberg: Winter 2019 (Hans Rudolf Velten) Nina Scheibel: Ambivalentes Erzählen – Ambivalenz erzählen. Studien zur Poetik des frühneuhochdeutschen Prosaromans. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020 (Nicolas Potysch) Achim Aurnhammer/Nicolas Detering: Deutsche Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit. Humanismus, Barock, Frühaufklärung (UTB 5024), Tübingen: Narr, 2019 (Sofia Derer) Anne Rolfes: Ein Zeitalter voller Narren: Locos und locura im Siglo de Oro (Spanische Forschungen, Reihe 2, Band 43), Münster: Aschendorff, 2019 (Marina Ortrud M. Hertrampf) Carmen Rivero: Humanismus, Utopie und Tragödie (Mimesis, Band 73), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020 (Michaela Peters) Ignacio Arellano (ed.)/Lope de Vega: Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2019 (Blandine Daguerre) Janina Niefer: Inspiration and Utmost Art. The Poetics of Early Modern English Psalm Translations (Religion und Literatur, Band 5), Münster: LIT Verlag, 2018. 466 S.; Florian Kubsch: Crossing Boundaries in Early Modern England. Translations of Thomas à Kempis’s De imita­tione Christi (1500–1700) (Religion und Literatur, Band 6), Münster: LIT Verlag, 2018. 296 S.; und: Carmen Dörge: The Notion of Turning in Metaphysical Poetry (Religion und Literatur, Band 7), Münster: LIT Verlag, 2018 (Christoph Ketterer) Lisa Hopkins: Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern Stage. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020 (Sarah Briest) Florian Lippert/Marcel Schmid: Self-Reflection in Literature (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, Band 202), Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2020(Lukas Müsel) Michael La Corte: Emblematik als Teil der profanen Innenraum­gestaltung deutscher Schlösser und Herrenhäuser. Vorkommen – Form – Funktion. Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2019 (Nicolas Potysch) Michael Dopffel: Empirical Form and Religious Function. Apparition Narratives of the Early English Enlightenment (Beiträge zur Englischen und Amerikanischen Literatur, volume 38), Leiden: Ferdinand Schöningh. 2020 (Catherine Belsey (†)) Graduiertenkolleg Literarische Form (Hg.): Dynamik der Form. Literarische Modellierung zwischen Formgebung und Formverlust. Unter Mitwirkung von Sona Lisa Arasteh-Roodsary, Gina Derhard, Jutta Gerber, Katharina Andrea Kalthoff, Thomas Kater, Simon Scharf, Kerstin Wilhelms. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019 (Eva Axer) Shinu Sara Ottenburger/Peter Trawny (Hgg.): Werner Hamacher: Studien zu Hölderlin. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020 (Michael Woll) Anna Danneck: »Mutterland der Civilisazion und der Freyheit«. Frankreichbilder im Werk Heinrich Heines (Epistemata. Würzburger Wissenschaftliche Schriften – Reihe Literaturwissenschaft, Band 919), Würzburg: Königshausen &amp; Neumann, 2020 (Walther Müller-Jentsch) Lisa Ebert: Ambiguity in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Paderborn: Brill, 2020. 274 pp.; and: Olga Springer: Ambiguity in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht Unipress, 2020 (Sophie Franklin) Nicolaas van der Toorn: Le Jeu de l’ambiguïté et du mot. Ambiguïté intentionnelle et jeu de mots chez Apollinaire, Prévert, Tournier et ­Beckett (Faux Titre, volume 435), Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2019 (Rolf Lohse) Albert C. Eibl: Der Waldgang des Abenteuerlichen Herzens. Zu Ernst Jüngers Ästhetik des Widerstands im Schatten des Hakenkreuzes (Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, Band 395), Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020 (Steffen Röhrs) Christiane Maria Binder: Bakhtin Revisited: Constructions of Iden­t­ity Through Time and Place in English and New English/Postcolonial Literature. Trier: WVT, 2020 (Rocco Coronato) Doerte Bischoff/Susanne Komfort-Hein (Hgg.): Handbuch Literatur &amp; Transnationalität. (Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie, Band 7), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019 (Max Graff) Martina Allen: GenReVisions. Genre Experimentation and World-Construction in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020 (Kai Wiegandt) Jian Liu: Eine Poetik der Fremdheit. Zur Verarbeitung von China-Motiven in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur im 21. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2020 (Arne Klawitter)

Hermeneutics and its New Tendencies: to the Question of Aesthetic Paradigm Change

Introduction. The work examines the main vector of development of contemporary literary and hermeneutics studies. The main aim is to show how the view of the text has changed and what are the important tools in the process of its interpretation.Methodology and sources. Firstly, various philosophical and literary approaches to texts are considered. One of the main ideas behind the research method is the comparison of the modernist, post-modernist and meta-modernist paradigm in the process of text interpretation. Another important aspect is the consideration of symptomatic and surface reading, as an important tool in the discussion of whether the text bears any meaning apart from the directly deducable and what is the most contemporary if not the best way of interpreting it. Most texts analyzed are literary examples, mainly taken from Anglophone literature.Results and discussion. The results of the research state a number of tendencies in the view of contemporary hermeneutics. Among the general conclusion of the shift from modernist to post-modern and meta-modern patterns in the narrative. Regarding the process of text interpretation what is stated is a general tendency to see the surface l evel of the text as bearing all the necessary and important meanings. The older and more conservative approach of bringing meaning into the text is also at work, depending on the traditions. Elimination of text interpretation (or denying it its original im portance) is also an important point of view, as it states that a literary text explains more than any supporting attempt of its explanation. Another important feature is a tendency of a modern literary text to adopt characteristics of poetry. The psychoanalytic view is competing with post-modernist or meta-modernist view.Conclusion. Metamodernist tendency, surface reading and attention to the literary text itself, and not its further explanation seems to be the core of a contemporary view of literary texts, their interpretation and, hense, meaning.

Reading Veganism

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 200 years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism’s relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the ‘human’, the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognize and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilizing existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And, finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principal contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism’s association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter provides a comprehensive summary of the preceding arguments, reflecting on the pervasive presence of the monstrous vegan trope across the past 200 years of Anglophone literature. The Conclusion asserts that the monstrous vegan is more than simply an interesting facet of literary history. The monstrous vegan offers a vital way of re-conceptualizing veganism in the present moment, a way of thinking through the complex coming together of utopianism and insufficiency that inhere in vegan modes of being in the world. The monstrous vegan provides an apt figuration for such complexities, as a composition of hybrid remains that resists fixed or stable meaning. It provides also a way of thinking about veganism through literature, and acknowledges the discursively constructed nature of ethical identities more broadly. The re-conceptualization of veganism through the monstrous is of urgent necessity in a world under threat from ecological collapse.