GÉNERO Y ANTOLOGÍAS: LA REVISIÓN DEL CANON EN LA ERA DE LA CIBERCULTURA Y EL PROYECTO CIEN DE CIEN (2015-2016)

En este artículo se estudia la importancia que Internet ha tenido en los últimos años en la recepción de las poetas españolas contemporáneas. Para ello, se recurre tanto a la teoría literaria feminista y al ciberfeminismo como a algunas de las contribuciones clave en el estudio de los procesos de canonicidad, específicamente, a la sociología de Pierre Bourdieu y a la teoría de los polisistemas de Itamar Even-Zohar. Desde este marco teórico, se analiza la antología virtual Cien de cien de Elena Medel, una selección que permite repensar las relaciones entre autoridad, cánones y cibercultura en el siglo XXI. Abstract: This article aims to study the importance that the Internet has had in the reception of Spanish women poets in the last few years. For that purpose, feminist literary criticism and cyberfeminism will be used, as well as some of the key contributors to the study of canon, particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of polysystems. With this theoretical framework, attention will be paid to the digital anthology Cien de cien by Elena Medel, which enables us to rethink the relationship between authority, literary canons and cyberculture in the 21st Century.

Anthologizing Chinese Literature and Reinventing Literary Canons

In view of the importance of canon formation in the rewriting of Chinese literary history and the role of translation anthologies in constructing literary canons, this article examines the process of canonization represented in the anthologies of Renditions from 1973 to 2020. It observes the literary works that the Renditions’ anthologies attempt to build into canons and delves into the reasons behind the canon building. It concludes that the anthologies of Renditions challenge and subvert the literary canons established by the Chinese mainland, while trying to reconstruct and even popularize new canons from a Hong Kong perspective. Moreover, Renditions’ efforts to anthologize Chinese literature open up new possibilities for future canon formation and pave the way for a more comprehensive revision of Chinese literary history.

Le Ortique: un progetto collettivo e digitale per riscoprire le artiste dimenticate

Le Ortique or of the Deformed Canon is a collective and digital project that aims to give a second voice to forgotten female writers and artists of the 20th century. The project revolves around a blog where the eight founders, who are authors themselves as well as scholars, publish critical readings of works in poetry and prose, unpublished translations, interviews, podcasts, online and live events, musical interpretations and visual works. The aim of this article is to thoroughly present the project in its conceptual foundations, tangible outcomes and international connections, while highlighting its novelty in the context of other similar projects aiming at questioning and deconstructing literary canons.

Vulnerability and Resilience Embedded in Discourses: Literature, Media, and Actors’ Cultural Knowledge in German and Polish River Regions

The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse assumes that cultural knowledge—and thus cultural spaces—are generated and shared through discourse. Actors’ shared perceptions of vulnerability and practices to create resilience should be interrelated with knowledge provided by the relevant discourses of local and historical influence. However, these assumptions have not been thoroughly examined. This study compares river-related knowledge (concerning human–river relationships: ecocentric and anthropocentric perspectives) in the German and Polish literary canons, with knowledge provided in the relevant public media and the shared knowledge of local populations in flood-prone city districts along the Odra River. It concludes that actors’ river-related knowledge interrelates with the knowledge produced by national and regional discourses and that culturally shared ideas of vulnerability and resilience are discursively embedded.

How Useful is Bourdieu’s Notion of Cultural Capital for Describing Literary Markets?

Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and field, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, still provide systematic reference points for studies interested in literary cultures under market conditions. These concepts have found resonance in studies observing the changing organisation, structure, and social positions involved in the writing, reading, and circulation of literature. While both the conceptual clarity and the historical results Bourdieu achieved (in particular in his study The Rules of Art, originally published in 1992) have come under attack, both his key concepts and his multi-method approach function as a theoretical toolbox for present studies. The article discusses three studies (Childress 2017; English 2005; Guillory 1993) which make use of Bourdieu’s concept of capital in order to describe contemporary US publishing, the role of literary canons in higher education, and the status of literary awards. I argue that Bourdieu’s framework is productive in these cases when it is used in a heuristic way, when the idea of cultural and social capital is considered as processes and practices of valuation, and when it points to the political aspects of economies.

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

Introduction

This introduction asks how a modern Muslim identity came to be attached and formed via the idea of literature and canonicity. Attempting to remain close to Edward Said’s conception of secular criticism, it traces how the European ideal of literary canonicity becomes imbricated with that of religious identity in the Indian subcontinent over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Paying close attention to the history as well as contemporary debates on European orientalisms, it asks contemporary humanists from postcolonial states such as Pakistan, India, and Egypt to re-examine the histories of literary canons and their deep ties to religio-national identities.

Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

L’Asia orientale vista con gli occhi di viaggiatori italiani del secolo XVI

The Italian travellers to the East during the 16th century left us some important works that they elaborated after their return to their homeland, works whose declared motivation was not only to leave a tangible memory of their life experiences but also to offer the cultured public of Old Europe and people interested in those geographical areas for professional reasons, useful material for a better understanding of the world. These texts, produced in accordance with certain literary canons that were already relatively well defined, are often documents capable of testifying to travel experiences in the era of the great geographical explorations in the Far East after Vasco da Gama’s voyage.