Transculturalism and Its Manifestation in the Poetics of Lyric Texts

Using the example of the work of the Soviet Russian poet Pavel Nikolaevich Vasilyev, the author shows the representation of transcultural aesthetics in a literary text created in Russian by a Russian author, formed in the conditions of the borderline coexistence of two cultures: Russian and Kazakh. His works can be classified as borderland literature, in which the combination of the Russianlanguage discourse and the paradigm of the steppe, nomadic culture generates a hybrid text with a peculiar artistic aesthetics and poetics, which can be traced at the external and internal deep levels. The I of the author with borderline thinking has a stable ethnic identity, while openly showing its bicultural affiliation, which is quite consistent with the thesis about the flexibility of the cultural identity of a transcultural poet or writer. At the external text level of works of art, transculturalism finds expression in themes, in exoticisms, in foreign language insertions. The transcultural essence of the authors consciousness generates hybrid texts containing symbiotic verbal images and techniques that demonstrate hybrid canons and symbols (symbols of wormwood, horse), incorporating elements of Kazakh and Russian cultural stereotypes and codes (stereotypical ideas about the Asian appearance of Kazakhs), which coexist without conflict in the artistic picture of the world of Vasilyev. As a result, a poetic picture of the world, unique in aesthetics, enriched with the paradigms of two different cultures, which is the property of the Russian cultural space, appears.

Re-creating the hybrid text: postcolonial Indian writings and the European scene

For a language with a wealth of great literature such as English, globaliza-tion has been a mixed blessing. The International English of Mc World is a poor descendant of the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. On the other hand, English literature has been tremendously enriched by writings from the former colonies of the British Empire, creating their own ‘norms’ of English – ‘a new English’, as Chinua Achebe famously put it, “still in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings ”. In the postcolonial literary scene, such ‘hybrid’ texts – or ‘métissés ’– are now a familiar feature, but a complicated one for translators working into other European languages. This essay concentrates on India, and looking at writings by Sethu (Pandavapuram in English translation) and Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things in English and in German translation), it investigates the striking features of hybrid source texts and the cultural and linguistic problems involved in re-creating them for a European target culture.

Genre mixing on WeChat: evidence from a movie review subscription account

Genre mixing and hybrid genre have been vital concepts in genre studies. With the increasing popularity of WeChat, a social media platform in China, a new type of hybrid genre comprised of media content and advertisements is emerging on WeChat subscription accounts. The present study collects 28 hybrid texts from a movie review subscription account in order to closely examine their communicative purposes and generic structure. It is found that instead of being fused into a monocentric entity, these hybrid texts are divided into movie review and advertisement parts, both functionally and structurally dichotomous. This expands and complements the existing understanding of concepts like hybrid genre and genre mixing. It also brings into focus the anti-monocentric nature of these concepts and questions the logocentric framework advocated in genre mixing studies.

Beyond geopoetics: For hybrid texts

This commentary responds to Eric Magrane’s welcome focus on the possibilities of ‘climate geopoetics’ as a way of accessing and thinking environmental crisis differently. It explores the problem of approaching the general through the particular and the affordances that poetry provides in making this leap. In addition, it questions the particular veneration of the poet and poem and, building on the experiments of both poets and academics, argues for the embrace of hybrid forms that transcends the poetry/non-poetry divide.

Journalism and the Black Short Story in English in Twentieth-Century South Africa: From R. R. R. Dhlomo to Miriam Tlali

In the present article I seek to discuss, following a diachronic approach, the close-knit relationship that can be found between journalistic discourse and the genre of the short story in Anglophone South African literature over a time span of fifty years, between the late Twenties and the Eighties. In particular, I intend to explore this genre negotiation by close reading selected short stories and/or newspaper articles by four non-white South African writers: R. R. R. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Miriam Tlali. The intersections between the two different genres and discourses in these hybrid texts can be identified at the level of both content and form. A close reading of selected short stories and/or articles may call for a revaluation of this “South African New Journalism” as a creative experimentation that challenges conventional generic categorisations.

Victorianism and Contemporary Literature

Victorianism refers to contemporary texts that cede time and space to Victorian ideologies, modes, plots, and problems. In its broadest and most contemporary definition, Victorianism describes any literary, filmic, or cultural text that signals contemporary investment in Victorian literature and culture. Such works can be loosely grouped into three categories: original plots set in the 19th century; retellings of canonical 19th-century texts; and “hybrid” texts—those that oscillate between contemporary and Victorian time frames, for instance, or those that create a new story peopled with characters from Victorian media and/or history, including narrativized stories of authors’ lives. There are persistent modes and themes across these forms, including the networking of science and technology with the human; the detective or mystery story; and the connection between the contemporary Victorian and the gothic mode. While in the 20th century the primary archive was largely white and male, the 21st century has seen the advent of a more intersectional archive and authorship. The topic is often consolidated under the term “neo-Victorian” but is also sometimes referred to as “Victoriana,” “strategic presentism,” and other designations. Specifically under the rubric of “neo-Victorian” the study is sometimes associated with postmodernism itself. Other critical interpretations hold that its organizing principle is neoliberalism and its social corollary, liberal individualism. Yet others connect the subject with cultural studies and its corollaries gender studies, queer studies, and—much more recently—postcolonial or imperial studies. Underlying all of these critical interventions is the notion that the primary affective/aesthetic register of neo-Victorian media is nostalgia and/or belatedness. Nevertheless, critical trends of the 2010s and onward theorize not the continuity but the simultaneity of the 19th and 21st centuries. This suggests exciting implications and directions in contemporary Victorianism, including responses to empire, examinations of global crises, and an expansion of the canon to include media not usually included in considerations of Victorianism.

Lamb, Coleridge, and the Poetics of Publication

This essay explores the poetics of Lamb's early letters to Coleridge. I argue for a sharp awareness, on Lamb's part, of the potentially negative effect publication can have on literary writing. Lamb resists this at the level of epistolary form, by entwining his sonnets with the letters into which he writes them. Where Lamb's poems, taken in themselves, remain modest performances, the letter-poem hybrid texts in which they participate are of significant critical interest. Among other things they establish a critique of Coleridge and his paying court to the literary marketplace. These insights, I go on to suggest, can also help us to understand both writers’ more mature work, notably the complex lyric-epistolary compound that is Coleridge's ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’.

Throwing the case open: The impossible subject of Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation

For John Forrester, the ‘case’, particularly in its psychoanalytic version, makes possible a science of the particular – knowledge open to the differences of individuals and situations. This article takes up that aspect of Forrester’s account that linked the psychoanalytic case with forms of autobiography – new narrations of that particular self. After Freud, many authors – literary and psychoanalytic – have taken up the challenge of narrating subjectivity in new forms, engaging a quasi-psychoanalytic framework (H. D., Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are examples). Focusing on Luisa Passerini’s text Autobiography of a Generation, which deals with the Italian experience of 1968, the article examines some of the features of such hybrid texts, and argues that psychoanalysis makes a contribution not just to the forms of self-investigation they pursue, but more significantly to the search for a radically new methodology of narration. Such models end up as ‘impossible’ cases, but in so doing they explore new interdisciplinary means for understanding the historical shaping of subjectivity.

Informar y contar comunicación y narración en la escritura periodística de Jorge Carrión

In recent years, due to the rise of cultural productions through different media, an increase in the number of journalistic publications of hybrid texts has been observed, which results from the fusion of the narrative and informative functions. The spaces traditionally devoted to different types of journalistic texts which – apart from those merely informative, may include cultural-related and opinion articles – make possible the appearance of articles which distinguish themselves trough entailing both characteristics. Therefore, this paper analyses two articles written by J. Carrion and published in the Spanish edition of The New York Times in 2018. The articles will be scrutinised in relation to the narrative and essayistic works of the author. We illustrate some characteristics of what is generally referred to as narrative journalism, as defined by Herrscher (2012) and Casals Carro (2005), among others. This will allow us to trace a profile of the author, journalist and writer which is linked to the social environment and of his work.