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.

Singing Finnegans Wake: A Key to Samuel Barber’s “Nuvoletta”

Samuel’s Barber’s 1947 “Nuvoletta,” the only freestand-ing song of the composer’s maturity, derives its text from the most famously arcane novel in the literary canon, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Musicologist Pollack dissects the text in a literary analysis, but also showing how its vivid imagery and lyric resonance is treated in Barber’s musical setting, thus offering performers crucial preparation for its performance.

In the Footsteps of the Absent Father: The Protagonist as a Writing Subject in the Work of Ronit Matalon

The article addresses the literary development of the young female protagonist in Ronit Matalon’s early writing, and the character’s relationship with her absent father. Despite the prevalence of this theme, little research has been dedicated to the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work and its influence on the daughter’s decision to become a writer. The article examines this theme in Matalon’s young adult novel, A Story that Begins with a Snake’s Funeral (1989). My main argument here is that the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work is central to the construction of the daughter’s ’decision to write‘, and points to the issue of inter-generational accountability, in which the daughter is entitled to an inheritance from her father despite her critical view of him. As I will show in my reading of the novel, the fictional representation of this relationship bears an autobiographical imprint, particularly in light of Matalon’s choice to quote her father, Felix Matalon, and to lend his voice to the father figure in her writing. As part of the exploration of this theme, which consists of both fictional and autobiographical aspects, I suggest that the heroine’s efforts to place her absent father in the context of her life and to cope with his absence through her writing point to Matalon’s own efforts to deal with her father’s legacy by writing about him and giving him a place in the Israeli literary canon, while maintaining a critical attitude towards him.

“Essa Dama Bate Bué” e o cânone literário angolano

Essa Dama Bate Bué and the Angolan Literary Canon. A relevant topic for the history of literature, the literary canon has been widely questioned and the Angolan literary canon is no exception, being constantly susceptible to changes. The current paper aims at challenging the Angolan literary canon and defending the necessity of including the novel Essa Dama Bate Bué by Yara Monteiro. Published in 2018, it represents an example of silenced literature about women and guerrilla movements during the war for national independence, the subsequent civil war, and the post-conflict period. The book problematizes the presence of women in national wars, the countless roles they played, but also their integration in the post-colonial society, giving insights into a topic largely ignored in Angolan literature. Keywords: Angola, Angolan women, canon, Yara Monteiro, guerrilla movements

O lugar da literatura monástica feminina no cânone Barroco português

Women’s Monastic Writing within the Portuguese Baroque Canon. This article aims to approach Portuguese female monastic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of its relationship with the Baroque literary canon. Shaped at the border that separates voice and silence, the visible and the spiritual universe, the cult of moderation and the desire to assert, this literature outlined a new type of discourse, which hinted at the intense conflict between suppression and authority, which, in turn, gave rise to a permanent dialogue between the feminine ethos, the controversial character of the Baroque and the always oscillating essence of the canon. We will show, that, during the last centuries, the works of some famous female writers, such as Sóror Maria do Céu, Sóror Violante do Céu and Sóror Madalena da Glória, or of other female authors who remained in the shadows, have been differently and unequally absorbed by literary critics and historians and by great anthologists. Their writings have not ceased to be represented as preferential places of dispute, of the uninterrupted dialogue between silence and affirmation, between center and margin, which generally regulates the literary canon. Keywords: monastic, literature, feminine, canon, Baroque

Quintilian on Memory and Delivery

This chapter discusses Quintilian’s account of delivery and memory, especially (though not solely) with regard to his extended treatment of them in Book 11. With delivery, it surveys such issues as his discussion of the appropriate gesture and voice to be adopted by the orator, and the pragmatics of delivering a speech before a Roman audience. It discusses Quintilian’s heavily gendered and class-based account of appropriate delivery, where the orator has to adopt manners appropriate for a high-status male and eschew the contrary; it also considers the uneasy relationship between high-status oratory and low-status acting. It focuses above all on the highly textualized account of performance in Quintilian, where delivery is closely linked to an assumed written text, and argues that this is the consequence of Quintilian’s classicism, where oratory is associated with an established literary canon on a par with other literary genres. With memory, it briefly discusses his mnemotechnics, but argues that Quintilian is pulled between two incompatible desires: the classicism which leads him to want to associate memorization with fidelity to a written text, but also the pragmatism which requires a large measure of spontaneity and improvisation, which may be hindered if the orator has prepared a memorized text in advance.

‘Ordre et beauté’

The British composer Jonathan Harvey is generally associated with Eastern sacred texts rather than the secular Western literary canon. However, evidence from works composed over several decades suggests that Charles Baudelaire was a significant if subterranean influence upon his music. This article considers these works in detail. ‘L’Horloge’ [‘The Clock’] (1963) is a remarkable interpretation of Baudelaire’s text which reveals in it parallels with Harvey’s own contemporary preoccupations with the nature of musical time. Correspondances (1975) is a sequence of settings from Les Fleurs du mal and interludes and ‘fragments’ for piano which may be arranged in numerous orders at the discretion of the performers. Finally, the instrumental works Hidden Voice (1996) and Hidden Voice II (1999) demonstrate that the poet’s ideas remained an inspiration to Harvey well into his compositional maturity. Particularly striking is the variety and originality of these musical responses. Baudelaire’s real significance for Harvey was perhaps as an exemplar of aesthetic ideals - of ‘order and beauty’ - rather than merely as a source of musically suggestive images and phrases.

Traditions of Translation in Hebrew Literature

The centrality of translation in the history of Hebrew literature cannot be overstated. Scholars of Hebrew translation history often attribute the fact that Hebrew writers have steadily relied on translation for enriching and sustaining the Hebrew literary canon to Hebrew’s long-standing existence in a state of diglossia or multiglossia: a condition in which a community habitually uses two or more languages or several forms of the same language for different purposes. Jewish communities from antiquity to the present have generally used Hebrew alongside other tongues, even after Hebrew’s reinvention as a modern vernacular, its so-called revival, in the 20th century. It is possible that Hebrew served as a vernacular in antiquity, but sufficient proof of this possibility has never surfaced. Nevertheless, in late-19th-century Eastern Europe, Jewish thinkers and lexicographers began promoting the idea of resuscitating Hebrew. They often articulated this goal through the metaphor and practice of translation, borrowing from European cultures the notion that every modern nation is defined by a shared vernacular, while also translating into Hebrew a cornucopia of texts—scientific, poetic, journalistic, and philosophical. This enabled those late-19th- and early-20th-century Jewish thinkers to enrich, expand, and test the limits of Hebrew in a modern context. If the modern Hebrew literary canon includes the Hebrew Bible, as many Hebrew writers and scholars believe, then it consists of the most frequently translated and widely circulated text in the world. Yet Biblical Hebrew differs from later formations of the language, and traditions of biblical translation in and outside the Jewish world call for separate bibliographies. The following bibliography focuses on central theoretical questions relating to traditions of translation in Hebrew literature, foregrounding the intensifying debates on Hebrew’s spiritual and national status from the 19th century onward. Translation has often served as a unique arena for such debates, acting as a vehicle for transforming Hebrew literature from within, while allowing for its venturing out. It has frequently allowed its practitioners to define the imaginary boundaries of Hebrew literature and delineate the contours of Hebrew culture as primarily Jewish-national.

The Image of the Trickster in the Novel by Vladimir Makanin The Underground, or the Hero of Our Time

The article is devoted to the study of the image of the trickster – one of the key ones in modern Russian culture and literature. The article analyzes the specifics of the functioning and attribution of the trickster figure in V. Makanin‘s novel The Underground, or the Hero of Our Time (1998). This is a soliloquium novel. It is shown how the appearance of the trickster hero, who is aware of his connection with the myth, helps to solve the tragic issues facing the consciousness of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. The life – affirming, vital potential of the image of the main character of the novel – Petrovich is considered, the inherent possibilities, means of awareness and representation of the tragic are revealed. The paper examines the intertextual field of the character’s image, including the archetypes of “naked man”, “little man”, “extra man” and “underground man”, who made up the canon of Russian classics. The reinterpretation of archetypes is the realization of the author’s attempt, his hero, to “push” Russia into the next century, free from the dictates of the literary canon, opening up the prospect of finding one’s own Word as a self-determination of an individual in the new century.