https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/679

This article examines the role of intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and the novel’s questioning of authorship, authenticity and identity. Relying on intertextual and postcolonial theories, the article lays bare how Smith’s novel questions the fixity and stability of selves and how she situates herself as an inherently intertextual author disrupted by others and potentially disruptive of (post)colonial ways of being and one that plays with notions of (in)authenticity and originality. For this purpose, the article pays attention to the novel’sintertextual links with the historical case of the Tichborne claimant and Jorge Luis Borges’s fictionalisation of it in the short story “Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,” included in the collection A Universal History of Infamy (1933). Moreover, the article focuses on the theorisation of infamy, understood as the disruption of hegemonic narratives brought about by marginal characters and discourses.

Identity, Dominance and Voice of the Marginal Characters in Contemporary Nepali Short Stories

Article and abstract in Nepali on full text.

The French of Italy Archiving Dossier Narrative

French-language texts and French-speaking leaders were present and influential on the Italian peninsula from the late thirteenth through the late fifteenth centuries. These two phenomena, although related linguistically, were traditionally examined separately according to disciplinary boundaries -- historians of Italy have seen French political actors as important yet marginal characters in the larger story of Italy, and literary scholars have examined French texts created and copied in Italy as, at best, developmental stepping-stones in the inevitable march towards the Italian vernacular, or at worst, linguistic curiosities. When the French of Italy (FOI) website was first launched in 2009, few scholars had seriously considered how French functioned outside of the medieval Kingdom of France. A closer look at the sources included on the FOI reveals that Italian authors at times used the French language to achieve their own political purposes, and French-speakers living or staying in Italy were meaningfully engaged in the creation and exchange of many of the French-language works found there. The French of Italy website, which appeared alongside the work already being done at Fordham University’s French of England project, expanding the vision of medieval French language work by creating a check list of sources, and aggregating much of the secondary sources associated with the question of French-language writing in Italy.

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo-American women writers use genre to negotiate hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Although US literary sentimentalism is often framed in national and transatlantic terms, this book argues that the mode was deeply transamerican. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs—tearful embraces, fainting heroines, angelic children—in transamerican US texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable is how texts not generally considered sentimental deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Caribbean and the US–Mexico borderlands. Throughout Transamerican Sentimentalism, marginal characters, momentary gestures, offhand remarks, and narrative commentaries serve to disrupt plots, potentially connecting characters across cultural, racial, national, and linguistic borders. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does dislocate familiar figures such as the coquette and the mulatta to produce other potential outcomes—including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Transamerican sentimentalism is a fleeting, mercurial, and marginal mode. Frequently overwhelmed by the violence pervading the hemisphere, it could be categorized as a failed venture. Yet it is also persistent; as it recurs throughout the nineteenth century, it opens into alternative African American, Native American, and Latinx avenues for navigating and comprehending US–Americas relations.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Dushu sheng and the Limits of Community in the Early Qing

This article explores the late imperial imagination of the nonhuman other by way of a curious creature that appears in the southern drama Dushu sheng. Midway through the play, set in the early years of the Yuan dynasty, the young literatus protagonist is abandoned on a remote island, where he is rescued by a renxiong, a fierce yet empathetic bear-like creature that takes him as its mate. Though short-lived, their union is one of several in the play in which marginal characters are brought into the (narrative and imperial) center through marriage: by the end of the play, the protagonist is wed to both the daughter of a boatman and the daughter of a Mongol official. But while this double marriage offers the possibility of a productive overcoming of the distinctions between scholar and merchant and between Chinese and barbarian, the tragic fate of the renxiong forecloses any possibility of overcoming that which divides man and beast. Rather, as the human community is expanded to include merchant and Mongol, the renxiong serves as the necessary limit, allowing the play to rescue these social and ethnic others from baseness and barbarity. At the same time, the exclusion of the renxiong from this new community is not untroubled; in resisting the genre's compulsive imposition of wholeness, Dushu sheng dramatizes the fractures and exclusions that made possible the restoration of order in the early Qing.

Body, Sexuality, and Passive Victimhood in the Post-1989 Reimagining of the Polish City of Wałbrzych

This article explores how the changes in commemorative culture in postcommunist Poland, namely, the loss of status of the traditional self-sacrificial martyr/hero at the expense of the passive victim, have produced new models for individual and collective identification based on vulnerability and suffering. Through the analysis of Pilgrim/Majewski’s surrealist plays The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych (2009) and The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek (2012), I examine the artistic transformations of two nearly forgotten city legends into victims of communist gender oppression and cultural icons of tolerance and inclusiveness for the purposes of reinventing the Lower Silesian Town of Wałbrzych’s postcollapse identity. I argue that Pilgrim/Majewski’s plays challenge the centering of Wałbrzych’s post-1989 identity discourse on the traumatic loss of the coal-mining industry by undermining hegemonic male heterosexuality’s exclusive claim on collective trauma and inscribing female and queer trauma into collective suffering. By heroizing two marginal characters with “socially inappropriate” sexual behavior, the playwright brings to the fore alternative subjectivities predicated on gender, sexuality, and the body, thus advocating for a more inclusive, polyvalent citizenship. More broadly, the author questions essentialist understandings of the self as a set of immutable core attributes (hinting at Wałbrzych’s clinging to its traditional identity as a coal-mining center) and promotes the social constructivist approach to identity as a fluid entity, a product of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.

Community

Analyzes the multiplication of autobiographical subjects in Rechy’s memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman) as well as in his fiction, an interactive CD-ROM he helped produce, and performance art inspired by Rechy. These texts revolve around queer communal spaces, prefiguring contemporary theoretical work by Samuel Delaney and Judith/Jack Halberstam. Though Rechy and his characters claim to be narcissists, a vast web of connections links them to a cacophonous network of people, streets, parks, bars, animals, deserts, dirt, and garbage. Landscapes and seemingly marginal characters take the foreground at points and blend with the life of the supposedly central male protagonist. These blended agencies, the author argues, depersonalize the self.

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

القارئ الضمني في "رسالة الغفران" لأبي العَلاء المعريّ / The Implied Reader in the Risalah al-Ghufran of Abu al-‘Ala al-Maʿarri

ملخص البحث: بدأت إسهامات آيزر في النظرية النقدية مع شروعه محاضراً في جامعة كونستانس عام 1970م، وقد اشتهر بعد مدة وجيزة بنظريته التجاوب الجمالي وتبعها بعد ذلك بمؤلفينِ آخرينِ هما: (القارئ الضمني)، و(فعل القراءة). يرى آيزر إنّ انتاج المعنى يكون نتيجة التفاعل بين النص والقارئ، ومن ثم قاده ذلك إلى ابتكار مفهوم عملي جديد لرؤيته هو القارئ الضمني، ويعرفه بأنه حالة نصية وعملية انتاج للمعنى على السواء، ومن ثم يسعى البحث إلى الكشف عن القارئ الضمني في رسالة الغفران بوصفه أحد أهم انجازات نظرية القراءة والتلقي. استهل البحث بمقدمة نظرية مكثفة اضاءت فيها تعريفات هذا المفهوم الاجرائي، تلتها محوران، كان الأوّل بعنوان: العلامات الناطقة للقارئ الضمني، وتشمل ثريا النص وتقنيات الإغراب ووجهة النظر الجوالة والديالوج. والثاني، بعنوان مناطق الفراغ والنفي في الخطاب الغفراني، ومن تقنياتها تقطيع السرد وفاعلية التصوير البياني والتناص الأجناسي وخرق المعيار الديني. توصل البحث إلى أنّ من آليات تحديد القصدية هي آليّة الراوي الكلي العلم في السرد بوساطة الإغراب اللغوي، وتكمن أهمية الاسترجاع في المبنى الحكائي لرسالة الغفران بكونها بنية أساسية من بنيات حضور القارئ الضمني، وأن المؤلف الضمني قد أسهم وبفاعلية في تشكيل القارئ الضمني عن طريق خطاباته لغوياً وأدبياً ودينياً واجتماعياً وسياسياً، وأن تحقيق القارئ الضمني كانت بآلية الشخصية الهامشية. الكلمات المفتاحية: القارئ الضمني- رسالة الغفران- أبي العلاء المعري- رسالة أبي العلاء- القارئ. Abstract: The contribution of Wolfgang Iser in theory of literature critic could be noted when he started lecturing in Constance University. He became famous after his esthetical response theory which was followed by another theory; the implied reader and the act of reader theories. Iser thought that the production of meaning is the result of interaction between the text and the reader, and this led him to propose a practical new concept that he termed as ‘the implied reader’ that he defined as textual situation and process of meaning production. This paper tries to uncover the aspect of ‘implied reader’ in the Ghufran Letter of al-Maʿarri which is regarded as the most significant aspect in the theory of reading and reception. The research starts with an introduction to shed lights on this aspect. The introduction is followed by two sections, the first one are the signs of manifestations of the implied reader aspect which includes the text title, defamiliarization techniques, the wondering view point and dialogues; while the second one is entitled the narrative gaps and negation in the text through the techniques such as narrative division, optimizing figurative descriptions, intertextuality through paronomasia and the breakaway rom religious norms. Among the conclusions of the study: among the tools to identify the intentionality of a text is the omniscient narrator whose narration is characterized by language defamiliarization. The importance of retrieval of the narrative structure lies in the forms of the structures that manifest the presence of the implied reader. The implied writer has contributed significantly to the construction of the implied reader through his linguistic, literary, religious, social and political expressions. The construction of the implied reader was through the mechanism of marginal characters. Keywords: Implied reader- Risalah Ghufran- Abu al-‘Ala al-Maʿarri- Letters of Abi ‘Ala- the reader. Abstrak: Sumbangan Wolfgang Iser dalam teori kiritkan sastera mula mendapat perhatian ketikan beliau mula menjadi pensyarah di Universiti Contstance. Beliau menjadi terkenal selepas teori tindak balas estetika yang dikemukannya disamping teori-teori pembaca tersirat and teori tindakan pembaca yang dipeloporinya. Iser melontarkan yang penjanaan makna adalah natijah kepada ineraksi di antara teks dan pembacanya. Ini telah mendorong beliau mengemukakan satu konsep praktikal yang dinamakan beliau sebagai ‘pembaca tersirat’ yang dieertikan beliau sebagai satu keadaan tekstual dan proses penghasilan makna. Artikel ini cuba untuk menyingkap aspek pembaca tersirat ini di dalam Risalah Ghufran karangan al-Maʿarri kerana aspek ini dianggap sebagai yang terpenting dalam teori pembacaan dan penerimaan makna. Kajian bermula dengan pengenalan untuk menjelaskan aspek ini. Ia disusuli oleh dua bahagian: pertama berkenaan tanda-tanda penampilan aspek pembaca tersirat yang merangkumi tajuk teks, teknik penggayaan bahasa luar biasa, perspektif tinjauan dan dialog. Bahagian kedua pula membicarakan tentang jurang naratif dan penafian dalam teks melalui teknik-teknik seperti pembahagian naratif, penggunaan optimum gambaran figuratif, ciri antara teks melalui paronomasia dan pengabaian norma keugamaan. Di antara dapatan kajian ialah: di antara instrumen untuk mengenalpasti aspek tujuan teks ialah pencerita serba tahu yang ungkapan bahasanya berciri keluarbiasaan bahasa. Kepentingan memahami struktur naratif dapat dilihat pada srtuktur-struktur yang berkisar tentang kehadiran pembaca tersirat. Penulis tersirat pula menyumbang terhadap pembentukan pembaca tersirat melalui ungkapan linguistik, saterawi, keugamaan, kemasyarakatan dan politiknya. Pembentukan pembaca tersirat juga adalah melalui pemahaman tentang watak-watak sampingan yang terdapat dalam teks. Kata kunci: Pembaca tersirat- Risalah Ghufran- Abu al-‘Ala al-Maʿarri- Risalah Abi ‘Ala- Pembaca.

Speaking with Earth and Sky: Oral Storytelling in the cinema of Craig and Damon Foster

The focus of this article is the documentaries of the Foster Brothers and in particular their bold experimentation with form. A brief historical overview of developments in South African documentary filmmaking from the late 1970s till the 21st century contextualises some of the important thematic concerns in the work of Craig and Damon Foster, namely marginal characters, the forced removal of people from their land, as well as the destruction of indigenous cultures. The directors are among very few South African film-makers, who use the African tradition of oral storytelling in their documentaries. In many ways the documentaries combine the social concerns of the progressive political documentaries of the 1980s with the oral aesthetics of film cultures elsewhere on this continent.