A Synthesis of Psychological Aspects with the Sociological Constrains in Arthur Miller Tragedies

This paper analyses the amalgam of psychological elements with the social realism where his characters are placed. The paper focuses on the inner conflicts of the characters and points out the literary devices that Miller uses to bring to life. Miller’s drama embodies the Freudian concept of human psychological nature and the father-son conflict which is present at his most successful works. These conflicts are evident in "The Crucible," "All My Sons," "The Death of a Commissioner," "View from the Bridge," "After the Fall," and "Descent from Mount Morgan.” In the plays where this conflict is not the primary conflict, it serves as a bases where other inner conflicts are grown.

Lithuanian Literature in Search of Historical Truth: Three Decades of Independence

The article focuses on the beginning of the Singing Revolution in Lithuanian culture and tries to identify the most significant dominant features in order to understand the entirety of the new changes in literature. In the face of political upheaval, such a dominant feature was the question of truth; however, the well-established poetry tradition – romantic, neo-romantic, modern neo-romantic, which coexisted with social realism in Soviet times, and experimental – did not raise such questions of truth but only reflected the nation’s collective expectations. The evolution of Lithuanian literature, which was highly fragmented during all the decades of the Soviet occupation, united the country through the expatriate poet Bernardas Brazdžionis while he was visiting Lithuania in the summer of 1989. Poetic texts predominated during the first demonstrations of Sąjūdis (the Reform Movement), but while trying to understand their position in the general Lithuanian culture and literature discourse, one needs to acknowledge the leading nature of poetry throughout the Soviet times: having its niche in the cultural system, poetry posed a large number of vexed questions, sought philosophical profundity, and was able to constantly address the deepest metaphysical questions even in strict censorship conditions. Lithuanian prose, which evaded the requirement by the doctrine of social realism to portray the world and characters engaged in class struggles, also found support in the poetry system and created a non-linear but coherent narrative where metaphors prevail. Lithuanian prose poetry became a sign of esthetic quality in independent Lithuania too, where the question of truth, which was important for achieving independence, found a way similar to that of poetry – through memoirs and essays to esthetics and little prose. At the beginning of independence, poetry, which had fed Lithuanian prose with its ideas, themes, conception of the world and esthetic solutions, also merged with memoirs and essays, thus being part of the discourse of telling the truth.

Poetry, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Cinema in Turkey’s 1960s

Using developments in poetry, music, and cinema as case studies, this article examines the relationship between left-wing politics and cultural production during the long 1960s in Turkey. Intellectual and artistic pursuits flourished alongside trade unionism, student activism, peasant organizing, guerrilla movements. This article explores the convergences between militants and artists, arguing for the centrality of culture in the social movements of the period. It focuses on three revealing debates: between the modernist İkinci Yeni poets and young socialist poets, between left-wing protest rockers and supporters of folk music, and between proponents of radical art film and those of cinematic “social realism”.

Preference, Passing and Fresh Perspectives: Text Selection by Secondary School English Teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and the national secondary school qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), afford teachers an enormous degree of autonomy over what they teach in their classrooms. This is in line with international trends in curriculum design which shape curricula around generic, open-ended learning outcomes rather than specific content. However, as of yet there is very little research either in New Zealand or internationally into the ways teachers make decisions about what to teach within an environment of great curricular freedom. Accordingly, this thesis investigates how high school English teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand make decisions about which written texts to teach within the context of current curriculum and assessment frameworks. It conducts this investigation from what will be called a modified social realist perspective. This theoretical perspective adapts the classic social realism promoted in the work of Michael Young and others, in order to develop a version of social realism which has explanatory power for humanities subjects, and subject English in particular. The thesis moves through three main sections: context, theory and findings. The first section details the context in which this study is located, with a focus on how the New Zealand Curriculum and NCEA are clear examples of what will be called the New Curriculum: a movement in curricular reform which advocates for the removal prescribed content and positions the teacher as a curriculum maker, rather than a curriculum implementer. This section also includes a literature review. The second section outlines the theoretical position of this thesis. It shows how classic social realism struggles to account for both the non-abstract and subjective nature of literary experience, and moves from this to advance a ‘modified social realism’ which incorporates these features of literary experience into its model. The methodology of the study is also included here. Finally, the third section outlines the study’s findings. It is shown that given the freedom to choose their own texts, teachers make decisions based on, in order of importance, students’ interests, the likelihood of a text succeeding in NCEA assessments, and whether the text will expose students to important perspectives and ideas. This thesis argues that such priorities are problematic, as, from a modified social realist perspective, focusing on student interests and assessment success can limit opportunities for students to be exposed to truly transformative literature. This thesis therefore ends by suggesting three potential reforms which would allow students to encounter such literature more frequently, including enhanced professional development, and a curriculum document with clearer guidelines around the types of texts that students should encounter.</p>

Preference, Passing and Fresh Perspectives: Text Selection by Secondary School English Teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and the national secondary school qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), afford teachers an enormous degree of autonomy over what they teach in their classrooms. This is in line with international trends in curriculum design which shape curricula around generic, open-ended learning outcomes rather than specific content. However, as of yet there is very little research either in New Zealand or internationally into the ways teachers make decisions about what to teach within an environment of great curricular freedom. Accordingly, this thesis investigates how high school English teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand make decisions about which written texts to teach within the context of current curriculum and assessment frameworks. It conducts this investigation from what will be called a modified social realist perspective. This theoretical perspective adapts the classic social realism promoted in the work of Michael Young and others, in order to develop a version of social realism which has explanatory power for humanities subjects, and subject English in particular. The thesis moves through three main sections: context, theory and findings. The first section details the context in which this study is located, with a focus on how the New Zealand Curriculum and NCEA are clear examples of what will be called the New Curriculum: a movement in curricular reform which advocates for the removal prescribed content and positions the teacher as a curriculum maker, rather than a curriculum implementer. This section also includes a literature review. The second section outlines the theoretical position of this thesis. It shows how classic social realism struggles to account for both the non-abstract and subjective nature of literary experience, and moves from this to advance a ‘modified social realism’ which incorporates these features of literary experience into its model. The methodology of the study is also included here. Finally, the third section outlines the study’s findings. It is shown that given the freedom to choose their own texts, teachers make decisions based on, in order of importance, students’ interests, the likelihood of a text succeeding in NCEA assessments, and whether the text will expose students to important perspectives and ideas. This thesis argues that such priorities are problematic, as, from a modified social realist perspective, focusing on student interests and assessment success can limit opportunities for students to be exposed to truly transformative literature. This thesis therefore ends by suggesting three potential reforms which would allow students to encounter such literature more frequently, including enhanced professional development, and a curriculum document with clearer guidelines around the types of texts that students should encounter.</p>

Not Yet Uhuru: Aspects of Social Realism in Vonani Bila’s Selected Poetry

This article analyses Vonani Bila’s selected poetry for its ability to produce an ‘air of reality’. The central argument of the article is that Bila embraces an aesthetic of realism, which essentially values unsparing, accurate and sordid representations of the psychological, social and material realities of postcolonial (and democratic) South Africa. Undergirded by the Marxist theory of Social Realism, the qualitative approach and descriptive design, this article purposively selected ten poems from some of the anthologies in which Bila published his poetry, namely; Magicstan Fires, Handsome Jita and Sweep of the Violin. Bila’s poetry can best be situated within the historical contexts that shape his texts, namely; the apartheid era, ideas about capitalism in newly democratic South Africa, the emergence of a vibrant immigrant community in South Africa and idealised notions of achieving equality and prosperity through education in South Africa. This article is mainly a critical analysis, and not a historical account of the apartheid era and democratic dispensation of South Africa. In the analysis, it was noted that Bila’s poetry generally manifests the literary categories of social and psychological realism, respectively. As a social realist, Bila explores the problems of economic inequality and captures the experience of both rural and urban life in a post- and neo-colonial context of South Africa. As a psychological realist, on the other extreme, Bila is concerned with delving beneath the surface of social life to probe the complex motivations and (un)conscious desires that shape his literary personae’s perceptions. The article concludes with the notion that, in his commitment to document the realities of everyday life in South Africa, both at social and psychological dimensions, Bila offers a penetrating insight into the repression, alienation, marginalisation, instabilities, and inequalities that structure post- and neo-colonial South Africa.

Dramaturgical, Theoretical, and Musical Associations between Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins and Alban Berg’s Operas

In the German-speaking countries during the morally uninhibited years of the Weimar Republic, the opposing cultural epochs of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit dominated the aesthetic landscape. Opera was a central proponent of both movements, as implemented by the Expressionist practitioners and those who favored the subsequent topical and objectifying Zeitoper that sought to move away from representations of psychological distortion to depict social realism that emphasized mechanical technology and lighter, popular narrative themes. Max Brand’s famous Zeitoper, Maschinist Hopkins, will be analyzed to illustrate how it bore fundamental trace elements back to Alban Berg’s Expressionist opera Wozzeck, and likewise, how Hopkins in turn influenced Berg’s second opera Lulu, to constitute a linear association of narrative, music, and theatrical design that simultaneously conformed to and defied the operatic models that all three operas are historically associated with. It will also be suggested that both composers were consequentially influenced by Richard Wagner, promoting vestiges of an even older lineage, which contributed to this association between the three operas at a time when Wagner was less applicable to the trends of innovation and progress.

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

In Modernist “School for Fools”: The Topics of Writing and Apprenticeship in German and Russian Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

The article suggests a comparative analysis of the modernist writing and apprenticeship topics in German and Russian fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Writing is considered to be calligraphy, a writer’s craft, the character’s existence as a scriptor, a form of escapism, a (neo)mythological ritual of destruction and renewal of language and the world. Apprenticeship is explored in its connection with rhetorical culture of imitation and forms of rebellion against it, be it rebellion against the bourgeois society (R. Walser, H. Hesse, T. Bernhard) or the Soviet school and Social Realism (S. Sokolov, M. Shishkin). The literary tradition serves here as an object of imitation and/or deconstruction. This ambivalent attitude takes the form of irony, buffoonery, foolishness, schizophrenia and is rather often represented in the doppelganger motif. The study uses cultural-historical, comparative, narratological methods, leitmotif analysis, etc. The authors identifies new typological links between German and Russian literature.