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1
Karasik-Updike, Olga B. "Contemporary Jewish Prose in the USA." Literature of the Americas, no. 10 (2021): 100–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-10-100-134.
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The essay presents an overview of Jewish American prose of the second half of the 20th — first two decades of the 21st century within the context of multicultural literature of the USA. The definition of Jewish literature remains a matter of debate. The author of the essay based on the opinions of critics concludes on the criterion for assigning a writer to Jewish literature. It is the artistic embodiment of the personal Jewish experience and identity in the works of literature, the view “from inside,” the perspective of collective memory and the connection to history and culture. Jewish literature today is one of the most developed ethnic segments of multicultural American literature. Writers under study are recognized throughout the world, their works have been translated into many languages, including Russian, they are known to readers and have already become the subject of study by literary scholars. Today, Jewish American literature is represented by two generations of writers. “Senior” generation includes the authors born in the 1920s–30s who began their literary careers in the 60s when there was a generational change in national literature. “Young” generation is represented by the writers who began their literary careers in the 2000s. On the example of the works of the most famous authors of both generations, the author of the essay talks about the factors determining the specific features of Jewish American prose and its characteristic themes, problems, and motives: the search for identity and roots, the representation and rethinking of the Holocaust, ethnic stereotypes, the image of the Jewish family, and the traditions of Jewish humor. The study of the works of modern Jewish writers in the United States allows us to draw conclusions about the display of border consciousness, national and ethnic identity, and collective memory in fiction.
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Frolova, Marina V. "Indonesian Horror Story by Intan Paramaditha." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies 12, no. 3 (2020): 368–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2020.304.
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Analysis and interpretation of the short stories by Indonesian female writer Intan Paramaditha (Intan Paramaditha, born in 1979) make it possible to understand that her writing occupies a special niche in the modern Indonesian literary paradigm. Paramaditha’s feminist texts are disguised as horror stories with settings in contemporary Indonesia. The article examines five short stories (“Spinner of Darkness” (Pemintal Kegelapan), “Vampire” (Vampir), “Polaroid’s Mystery” (Misteri Polaroid), “The Blind Woman without a Toe” (Perempuan Buta tanpa Ibu Jari), and “The Obsessive Twist” (Goyang Penasaran)). Using the intertextual method, it was possible to prove the gothic poetics of these literary works. The short stories contain the mosaic of folklore-mythological motives from the Malay Archipelago, Biblical and Quranic narratives, as well as European fairy tales and allusions to American horror fiction and horror films. Her prose is built upon some borrowed European literary forms for expression of authentic Indonesian content. The social themes are intertwined with feminist criticism that is presented as a Kitsch of the Indonesian mass culture. In “The Obsessive Twist” the main conflict is focused on the heated debates on sexuality, politics, violence, and religion. The feminist agenda of her prose is contrasted with the turn of contemporary Indonesia towards a Muslim patriarchal society. Paramaditha’s works represent a unique product of West-East-synthesis aimed not only at the Indonesian, but also the global audience.
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Coombs, Timothy. "Origin stories in CSR: genesis of CSR at British American Tobacco." Corporate Communications: An International Journal 22, no. 2 (2017): 178–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ccij-01-2016-0007.
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Purpose Graphic novels have a concept known as the origin story. The origin story is background information on how a hero or villain came into being. The purpose of this paper is to explore the origin story of corporate social responsibility at British American Tobacco (BAT). The CSR origin story is unpacked by examining corporate documents from BAT that discuss the initial development of the company’s CSR program. The BAT documents are part of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a searchable, digital archive developed and managed by the University of California, San Francisco. It contains 85,569,326 pages in 14,360,422 documents. The library was created as part of the tobacco company settlement of a major law suit in the USA. Design/methodology/approach For this case study, the authors searched the archive for documents from BAT that had the key words “corporate social responsibility.” The documents were then analyzed using qualitative content analysis to identify key themes related to BAT’s created of its CSR programs. Findings The two dominant themes were business case BAT made for CSR and the environmental factors that shaped CSR. The business case had sub-themes of the new operating environment and reinforcing employees. The environmental sub-themes were the importance of NGOS and the top issues to be addressed in CSR efforts. The themes helped to explain why BAT was engaging in CSR, the factors shaping the start of its CSR programs, and the issues it intended to address through CSR. Research limitations/implications The analysis is limited to one organization and does not include interviews to go with the archived documents. Practical implications The paper considers the implications of the analysis for theory and practice for internal CSR communication. Originality/value The documents provide a rare glimpse inside a corporate decision to begin a CSR program and how the managers “talked” about CSR. Instead of examining external CSR communication, it examines the early days of internal CSR communication at a specific firm. The yields of the document analysis provide insights into how BAT conceptualized CSR and communicated the rationale for creating a CSR program internally. Research has relied primarily upon speculation of corporate motives or corporate public discourse designed to frame their CSR efforts. The internal documents provide an unfiltered examination of the motives for a CSR program. This allows us to better understand why a CSR program was created including the motives, targets, and desired outcomes.
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Sevilla-Vallejo, Santiago. "The Search for Koinos Kosmos in Philip K. Dick’s Fiction." Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature 1, no. 3 (2020): 56–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.46809/jcsll.v1i3.28.
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As it has been previously studied, Philip K. Dick's work raises existential questions that do not have a clear answer, but theyinvite us to seek the truth. One of the essential themes in his writings is that our perception about reality is false (IdiosKosmos) In this sense, Philip K. Dick's statements and novels consider that human life is a constant struggle with obstacles.This paper analyses how his biography and readings led him to form a philosophical attitude that was essential in hiswritings. Then, the motives that distort the experience and the process of searching for the true reality are compared in threenovels. On the one hand, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik show different futuristic dystopias where humanvalues are endangered. On the other hand, VALIS is about the search of transcendence from a more realistic andautobiographical approach. The aim of this article is to reflect about the search of the koinos kosmos contained in these threenovels.
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Parker, Joshua. "Formal, geographic and cultural metalepsis: The fiction of Russell Banks." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 19, no. 3 (2010): 285–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947010370257.
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This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to encourage a reader’s support for specific political, cultural and social views, using examples of metalepsis that mirror and support thematic socio-political stances in Russell Banks’s fiction. Metalepsis (the crossing of a text’s narrative levels) and plot themes of geographic and cultural boundary crossings play together in Banks’s writing, which explores the permeability of divisions between African American and European American, the Caribbean and continental North America, male and female, and parent and child, consistently emphasizing issues surrounding national, cultural, gender and generational borders. Mirroring these more obvious sociological themes and arguments of his plots, Banks’s structural border crossings force us to consider the permeability of conceptual boundaries between author and reader, reader and character, and narrator and narratee. Banks examines these boundaries’ porosity — on both levels — by exploiting an increasingly common technique for shifting focalization in contemporary fiction — episodic use of second-person narration. This metaleptic technique, crossing the borders of narrative levels, not only reflects, but inherently supports Banks’s themes of geographic border crossings as a means of intercultural, interracial and interclass understanding.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
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The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Vorontsova, Galina N. "“Between Heaven and Earth”: A.N. Tolstoy’s Fiction of 1918–1919." Studia Litterarum 6, no. 2 (2021): 128–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2021-6-2-128-143.
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The article is based on the thesis that in the writer’s works it is always possible to trace the existence of periods marked by the emergence of new themes and motives. As a rule, this is due both to external circumstances and the artist’s reaction to them, his internal feeling of the need to change the paradigm of his further development. In the work of A.N. Tolstoy one of such periods was the era of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, in particular, the first revolutionary years, which are characterized by artistic experiments of the writer, allowing to talk about a definitely new vector of his searches. The article analyzes Tolstoy’s stories Mercy!, Peter’s Day, Count Cagliostro and Delirious in the context of the writer’s artistic searches of the 1918–1919. The writer’s work within the boundaries of small prosaic genres at that time allowed him, already in the second half of 1919, to come close to the creation of a full-scale canvas about the Russian Revolution, the novel The Road to Calvary.
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Dawsey, J. "The Literary Unity of Luke-Acts: Questions of Style – a Task for Literary Critics." New Testament Studies 35, no. 1 (1989): 48–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0028688500024498.
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Joseph Tyson's The Death of Jesus in Luke-Acts and Robert Tannehill's The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, published in 1986, are good examples of the interpretive wealth being mined by scholars who are adopting literary-critical methods for approaching the Lukan writings. What most distinguishes these critics' approaches from older, more familiar ones is the claim that the Bible's historical narratives are imaginative re-enactments of history – thus, in form, more akin to fiction than to theology, biography, or history. Robert Alter called the Biblical stories ‘historicized fiction’, meaning in our case that the author of Luke and Acts employed the artifices of fiction-writing, among others, supplying feeling and motives and creating speeches and dialogue for his characters. Professors Tyson and Tannehill, and other literary scholars like them, are helping us better discern how these techniques were used in Luke and Acts, thus opening new windows to the characters, the way that the author ascribes intentions to them, the plot, themes, nuances, points of view, uses of irony, and word-plays and associations in the writings.
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Ahmad, Mumtaz, Nighat Ahmad, and Amara Javed. "Environmental Performativity in Native American and Afro-American Womens Fiction: An Ecofeminist Critique of Erdrichs Tracks and Morrisons Beloved." Global Social Sciences Review VI, no. I (2021): 48–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/gssr.2021(vi-i).06.
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This article, evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the ecofeminist tenets upon the environmental fiction of Erdrich and Morrison, creates a new understanding of the preservation of the environment for engendering a more egalitarian relationship between humanity and nature. It presents the critique of the ways Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich engage with the environmental themes and motifs using the historical connections of their communities with nature as a reference point via eco-performative texts. The overall scheme of the article, therefore, denies the anthropocentric approach upheld by the Euro-American world towards the environment and glorifies the biocentric approach revered and celebrated by the Native American and AfroAmerican lifestyle, emphasizing that in the cosmic scheme of nature, not just humans but non-humans, nature and environment are equal partners. The study concludes that Morrison and Erdrich have stressed in their fiction the ecocritical recognition of the inevitable interdependence of man and nature. Their fiction asserts that considering environmental issues to be human issues can positively affect the human attitude towards nature/environment.
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Dwyer, Angelique K. "Simón." PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2019): 153–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v16i1-2.6662.
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This creative non-fiction piece written in Spanglish is called "Simón.” The overarching themes of this story are death, spirituality, animals and pets in a non-conventional American family raised in Mexico. The narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on Mexican American identity.
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Blatchford, M. F. "Cyber against punk: Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels as metamorphosed cyberpunk." Literator 15, no. 3 (1994): 55–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v15i3.677.
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Recent American science fiction (which commercially dominates world science fiction) incorporates two schools of thought, ‘cyberpunk' and ‘hard SF’. which may be read to embody, respectively, radical/liberal and patriotic/ conservative propaganda. This article, after attempting to define aspects of these schools, examines Queen of Angels by Greg Bear (who before producing that text had been a proponent of hard SF). This text is shown to have strong elements of cyberpunk (possibly, to judge by one critical review, appealing to a cyberpunk audience) but to have transformed and inverted the radical and liberal themes of cyberpunk into conservative themes. The text thus illuminates philosophical and technical differences between the schools. It is suggested that the imagery of cyberpunk, and perhaps that of science fiction in general, is liable to such reversals of ideological significance.
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Malykh, V. S. "TRANSFORMATION OF A FAIRY TALE IN «HYBRID» SCIENCE FICTION (BASED ON AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN PROSE OF THE XXth CENTURY)." Russian Journal of Multilingualism and Education 12 (December 25, 2020): 99–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2500-0748-2020-12-99-109.
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The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.
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Malykh, V. S. "TRANSFORMATION OF A FAIRY TALE IN «HYBRID» SCIENCE FICTION (BASED ON AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN PROSE OF THE XXth CENTURY)." Russian Journal of Multilingualism and Education 12 (December 25, 2020): 99–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2500-0748-2020-12-99-109.
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The article introduces and substantiates the concept of «hybrid» science fiction, which combines the elements of science fiction and horror fiction. In «hybrid» fiction, science fiction surroundings cannot rationalize the text, but, on the contrary, they are replaced by motives of supernatural horror. «Hybrid» science fiction, in contrast to «hard» science fiction , develops the idea of unknowability of the Universe. It is worth mentioning here, that «hard» science fiction has been described well enough, but there is a shortage of research work in relation to its «hybrid» version, so this research can be considered as pioneering. We use E. M. Neyolov’s typology that describes the connection between a fairy tale and «hard» science fiction. Basing on this typology, we analyse «hybrid» fiction, in which science fiction scenery was replaced by the anti-rational principle. The research methodology involves a combination of structural, typological and comparative methods. As a material for the study, we use the works of such Russian and American authors as D. Glukhovsky, S. Lukyanenko, G. R. R. Martin, S. King, C. McCarthy, H. P. Lovecraft and others. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the transformation of fairytale discourse in the works of these authors that leads to the genre transition from science fiction to horror fiction. The texts are being analysed from three points of view: system of characters, the structure of space and the direction of time. It is concluded that in «hybrid» science fiction the typological model of the fairy tale was distorted, reconsidered or destroyed, and it is the aberration of the fairytale motif that opens the gate for the genre transformation from «hard» science fiction to horror fiction. For example, the struggle of the superhero with the supervillain is traditional both for fairy tales and for science fiction, but it is replaced by psychologization of the hero and the extreme complication of the metaphysics of the Good and the Evil in «hybrid» science fiction . Besides that, the well-organized space of fairytale and science fiction as well as a close-cut separation of «ours» and «aliens», and also the mythologem of «threshold» are mixed in «hybrid» fiction and lose their symbolical unambiguity. Finally, science fiction and fairytale time in «hybrid» fiction ceases to exist and gives way to the tragic timelessness of chaos and nightmare. Thus, «hybrid» fiction destroys both the canons of «hard» science fiction and the constructs of the fairy tale genre.
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Bickford, John H. "The representations of LGBTQ themes and individuals in non-fiction young adult literature." Social Studies Research and Practice 12, no. 2 (2017): 182–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ssrp-05-2017-0021.
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Purpose Social justice themes permeate the social studies, history, civics, and current events curricula. The purpose of this paper is to examine how non-fiction trade books represented lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and issues. Design/methodology/approach Trade books published after 2000 and intended for middle grades (5-8) and high school (9-12) students were analyzed. Findings Findings included main characters’ demography, sexuality, and various ancillary elements, such as connection to LGBTQ community, interactions with non-LGBTQ individuals, the challenges and contested terrain that LGBTQ individuals must traverse, and a range of responses to these challenges. Publication date, intended audience, and subgenre of non-fiction – specifically, memoir, expository, and historical text – added nuance to findings. Viewed broadly, the books generally engaged in exceptionalism, a historical misrepresentation, of one singular character who was a gay or lesbian white American. Diverse sexualities, races, ethnicities, and contexts were largely absent. Complex resistance structures were frequent and detailed. Originality/value This research contributes to previous scholarship exploring LGBTQ-themed fiction for secondary students and close readings of secondary level non-fiction trade books.
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Van Hellemont, Elke, and James A. Densley. "Gang glocalization: How the global mediascape creates and shapes local gang realities." Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 15, no. 1 (2018): 169–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1741659018760107.
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This article introduces the concept of ‘gang glocalization’ to capture the processes by which global media myths and conventions create and shape local gang realities. The different stages of gang glocalization, and the motives to engage in this process, are examined by comparison of two empirical cases – Congolese gangs in Brussels and Afro-Caribbean gangs in London. This multi-sited ethnography finds that youth use fiction and imagination in order to create individual and collective gang identities. Police and political action against gangs is then informed by the same fiction and imagination, resulting in new gang realities based not on what is real. We find that mythmaking is an essential aspect of gangs – without the myth there is no gang – and that imagination is at the core of some of its most harmful activities, namely spectacular symbolic violence. This is an update on Thrasher’s (1927) old themes. The driving forces behind gang glocalization are emotions and desires tied to lived experiences of social and cultural exclusion. Implications for research and practice follow.
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Harris, Calvin E. "The Pan-African Movement and American Black Political Fiction, 1920s to 1950s: Themes of Alienation." Explorations in Ethnic Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 177–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ees.1995.18.2.177.
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Abdurrahmani, Tidita. "Eco-Criticism and Nature Writing .the Trails of the American Approaches." European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research 2, no. 1 (2014): 266. http://dx.doi.org/10.26417/ejser.v2i1.p266-278.
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Ecocritical attention has primarily focused on nineteenth– and twentieth-century British and American texts, predominantly non-fiction nature writing, and also nature-conscious fiction and poetry. The paper attempts to shed light to a series of puzzling but response-inciting questions regarding the American gendered approaches to nature, and the niche that Ecocriticism occupies in mainstream American Literature. The study is conceived as a merging of theoretical arguments and textual study. The theoretical part attempts to shed light on such issues as: Ecocritical traits and approaches; European vs. American approaches to nature; and Nature and Women's writing .The focus of the textual study are 10 American Nature Writing non-fiction classics and illustrated considerations of the main topics handled in these works. The study seeks to show that though ecocriticism is attempting to break new trails by going through the untrammeled nature-centered works, humans are failing to go within the unchartered depths of their spirit and consciousness. In terms of distinguishing in between the male gendered nature narrative and the female gendered nature narrative, the paper comes to the conclusion that there is a close connection between the systematic undervaluing of women's writing and the exploitation and abuse of the earth. While male nature writers mostly develop themes such as: the austerity of nature and the wish to explore and alter landscapes to suit the "human design"; the idea of hunting for a "trophy"; grandfather wisdom; wilderness and governmental institutions; earth as a religion, female-centered approaches to nature are marked by the occurrence of such themes as: moral –considerability of non-human beings; disapproval of economism; the bond to the land; anthropogenic destructive tendencies; nature/self consciousness. Nevertheless, although male writers fall into the snares of economism and exploring as a way of controlling, they still implicitly share women's consideration of the unbreakable bond to the earth and their awareness of the impactive immediacy to humankind.
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Roșcan, Nina. "Childhood Trauma in Maya Angelou’s Autobiographical Fiction – Abuse and Displacement." University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series 9, no. 1 (2020): 33–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.31178/ubr.9.1.4.
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The article discusses how trauma is represented in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical fiction, one of the most important themes in all her seven autobiographical novels and an African American feminist marginalized experience that speaks about the intensity and effects of women’s oppression. It explores how the novelist locates traumatic affects in the protagonist, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts. My purpose is to explore the different juxtapositions that the story offers between individual and collective experiences of
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Češčut, Romi. "Generation X in Slovenia(n)." Acta Neophilologica 43, no. 1-2 (2010): 93–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.43.1-2.93-105.
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Addressing themes of family, interpersonal relationships, historicity, jobs, religion, and apocalypse Generation X narrative includes works by young American writers in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century. The search for oneʹs identity in urban landscape is heavily influenced by mass media, pop culture and consumerism. Slovenian press and professional literature provided only scarce response to Generation X fiction which is also influenced by the ambiguity of the term Generation X and the essence of its culture and literature, which is also true for American literary criticism. The paper aims to explore the reception of novels by Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney and their analyses with emphasis on narrative, themes of consumerism and mass media, characters, and style of writing.
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Bubíková, Šárka. "Ethnicity and Social Critique in Tony Hilleman’s Crime Fiction." Prague Journal of English Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 141–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pjes-2016-0008.
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Abstract American mystery writer Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) achieved wide readership both within the United States and abroad, and, significantly, within the US both among white Americans and Native Americans. This article discusses Hillerman’s detective fiction firstly within the tradition of the genre and then focuses on particular themes and literary means the writer employs in order to disseminate knowledge about the Southwestern nations (tribes) among his readers using the framework of mystery (crime) fiction. Hillerman’s two literary detectives Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police, are analyzed and contrasted with female characters. Finally, the article analyzes the ways in which Hillerman makes the detectives’ intimate knowledge of the traditions, beliefs and rituals of the southwestern tribes and of the rough beauty of the landscape central to the novels’ plots, and how he presents cultural information.
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Maqbol, Rafa, Yasmin Obeid, Raya Allaham, Taqwa Zayton, and Ekrema Shehab. "Exile and Expatriation in Jabra’s (1974) “In the Deserts of Exile” and Wright’s (1951) “I Choose Exile”." Bulletin of Advanced English Studies 5, no. 1 (2020): 8–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.31559/baes2020.5.1.2.
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This study compares and stylistically analyzes the theme of exile in Jabra’s (1974) “In the Deserts of Exile” and Wright’s (1951) “I Choose Exile”. It aims to show the different representations of exile in a Palestinian and an American work through discussing four sub-themes present in both works. Among these are the motives of exile and the meaning of different places and colors that are perceived differently in accordance with each writer's setting; all these factors make exile involuntary for Jabra but voluntary for Wright. The study, also, employs Edward Said’s contrapuntal, postcolonial, and space and place theories.
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Armstrong, John. "Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction." Text Matters, no. 6 (November 23, 2016): 127–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2016-0008.
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In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that shatters the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes (disturbs, unsettles, undoes) the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death.
 Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters.
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Ni, Pi-hua. "It is More than a Bunch of Numbers: Trauma, Voicing and Identity in Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy." "Res Rhetorica" 7, no. 4 (2020): 98–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.29107/rr2020.4.7.
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This paper explores how Jennifer Chow’s The 228 Legacy (2013) recaptures the buried hi/stories of the 228 Massacre with a trauma narrative about Silk’s deep-kept secrets. It first delineates the evolution of trauma theory and trauma fiction highlighting the significance of articulating trauma and its relevance in healing, hi/storytelling and identity construction. This demarcation shall frame a critical lens to illustrate how Chow innovates distinct insulated narratives on the protagonists to mimic intergenerational ramifications of trauma in the Lu family, to represent their psychological healing and to express the association between silence-breaking, remembering and identity construction. This critical endeavor will also demonstrate that Silk’ story of survival promises the survival of hi/story. Thus, the novel proper not only portrays the traumatic impact, a nightmarish “legacy,” of 228 but also renders Silk’s trauma narrative as the “legacy” to connect with Taiwanese heritage and construct Taiwanese American identities. Given Chow’s innovative form and unique themes about trauma and Taiwanese American diaspora, the article situates her novel in the emerging Taiwanese American literature, Asian American literature, contemporary American diasporic literature and trauma fiction.
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Dickson, David. "From Lanzmann’s Circle of Flames to Bodies in Pain: Anglo-American Holocaust Fiction and Representations of the Gas Chamber." Genealogy 4, no. 3 (2020): 88. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4030088.
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This article discusses the apparent desire in Anglo-American Holocaust fiction to form a deeper connection to the horror of the Holocaust by recreating scenes of suffering in the gas chamber. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ and the concept of ‘feeling-with’ as outlined by Sonia Kruks, it discusses the motives underlying these representations and what an audience stands to learn from these bodily encounters with the Holocaust past. The article begins by discussing texts that explore the notions of temporal and emotional distance and the unreachability of the Holocaust dead, while also reflecting the corresponding impulse to reconnect with the murdered by physicalising them as bodies in pain. It then moves on to works that aim to make the experience of death in the gas chamber literally inhabitable for present-day nonwitnesses. In pursuing this argument, the article focuses on six representative texts: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998), Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006 and 2008, for the book and film respectively), In Paradise (2014) by Peter Matthiessen and Mick Jackson’s Denial (2016).
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Sokoloff, Naomi. "Introduction: American Jewish Writing Today." AJS Review 30, no. 2 (2006): 227–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009406000109.
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This is an exciting time for North American Jewish literature. In the past ten years, there has been an explosion of writing by new and established authors. In the field of fiction alone, the shelves have filled with titles by such fine talent as Pearl Abraham, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Myla Goldberg, Ehud Havatzelet, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joan Leegant, Tova Mirvis, Jon Papernick, Jonathan Rosen, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and many others, as well as new works by veteran writers such as Allegra Goodman, Thane Rosenbaum, and Steve Stern. Add to these names the preeminent Cynthia Ozick, and don’t forget Philip Roth, whose productivity continues unabated and whose latest novels include some of his strongest work ever. A variety of striking themes has come to the fore in this new wave of literary creativity. Notable trends include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a fascination with women’s lives and with questions of gender and sexual orientation; a concern with the experiences of the second and succeeding generations of the Holocaust; a nostalgia for and rediscovery of the old country; a consideration of new Americans in the 1980s and 1990s; and a rethinking of what it means to be a Jew in Israel and in the Diaspora.
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Osteen, Mark. "Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction, and: Contingent Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader (review)." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 4 (1991): 822–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.0856.
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Schuchalter, Jerry. "Harlot's ghost and the rise of the American-Jewish novel in the fiction of Norman Mailer." Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 14, no. 1 (1993): 58–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.30752/nj.69498.
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In Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a curious yet subtle change takes place in Mailer’s fiction, a change that in some way may be compared to a tentative return to his early artistic and emotional roots. Harlot’s Ghost may be many novels cohabiting the same book or a curious hybrid of novelistic forms or even a collection of text redolent of different authors and different historical time periods. Amid this narrative exuberance, one text particular emerges in a somewhat veiled form – the American-Jewish novel. Mailer regarded Hasidism as a source of mystical inspiration, an alternative to the rationalistic-positivistic worldview that was threatening to undermine the richness of American culture. In the case of the latter a new text exerts its influence in Mailer’s work, vestiges of the American-Jewish anti-hero that in itself had become an established cultural symbol and which had been almost exorcised from his work in favor of the American Adam myth. If the American Adam was the primary myth and motif in Mailer’s work, the schlemiel steals its way into his work, adding a new textual variety to an achievement which, while adventurous in its choice of literary forms, has tended to become perhaps fixated on certain themes and figures.
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Smith, Dina, Casey Stannar, and Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff. "Closet cosplay: Everyday expressions of science fiction and fantasy fandom among women." Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 7, no. 1 (2020): 29–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00004_1.
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Abstract Some American science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) female fans participate in Cosplay or costume play, the global practice of dressing in costume and performing fictional characters from popular culture. Cosplay is typically only socially sanctioned at conventions and other fan events, leaving fans searching for new ways to express their fandom in everyday life. Closet cosplay is one solution in which everyday clothing and accessories can be worn to express fandom. The motivations for wearing everyday fan fashion have been only briefly mentioned by other authors or studied within limited social contexts. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore SF&F female fans' participation in closet cosplay as it is worn in everyday contexts. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted using a social interactionist perspective, and Sarah Thornton's concept of subcultural capital and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital. Semi-structured, online interviews were conducted with sixteen participants who wore closet cosplay related to SF&F films and/or television series, which included Star Wars, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Disney films, Harry Potter and anime fandoms like Sailor Moon (1995‐2000). The interview data were analysed using NVivo qualitative analysis software and the constant comparison method. Two themes emerged from the data: the definition of closet cosplay and motivations for wearing closet cosplay. Through examining these themes, it was evident that female SF&F fans used closet cosplay to express a salient fan identity, which enabled them to simultaneously gain subcultural capital and feminized cultural capital.
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Silva, Reinaldo. "The Tastes from Portugal: Food as Remembrance in Portuguese American Literature." Ethnic Studies Review 31, no. 2 (2008): 126–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/esr.2008.31.2.126.
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Contemporary Portuguese American literature written by Thomas Braga (1943-), Frank Gaspar (1946-), and Katherine Vaz (1955-) share a profusion of topics - with ethnic food being, perhaps, the most representative one. What these writers have in common is that their roots can be traced to Portugal's Atlantic islands - the Azores - and not to continental Portugal. They are native Americans and write in English, though their characters and themes are Portuguese American. Some of them lived close to the former New England whaling and fishing centers of New Bedford and Nantucket, which Herman Melville has immortalized in Moby-Dick and in his short story, “The 'Gees,” in The Piazza Tales. These seaports were renowned worldwide and eventually attracted Azorean harpooners. The Azorean background of Thomas Braga and Frank Gaspar helps us to understand why fish and seafood feature so extensively in their writings instead of dishes containing meat as is the case in the fiction of Katherine Vaz.
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Ahmad, Huma, Rasib Mahmood, and Huma Saeed. "A Comparative Analysis of the Themes of ‘War’, ‘Love’, and ‘Illusion’ in Postmodern Age in A Farewell to Arms and Eye of the Needle." Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ) 4, no. 1 (2020): 140–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.47264/idea.lassij/4.1.13.
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The study attempts to explore and analyze the themes of 'love', 'war' and 'illusion' in the two novels written by two different authors. One is A Farewell to Arms (1929) written by Ernest Hemingway and the other is Eye of the Needle (2015) written by Ken Follet. Hemingway way and Follet both are American novelists who are known for their fondness for writing on the theme of war. Hemingway wrote many novels using the backdrop of the First World War whereas Ken Follet's Eye of the Needle is authored in the backdrop of the Second World War. Hemingway is one of the representative of modern age writers, whereas Ken Follet is one the writers of postmodern age. It has been observed that both writers while writing on the theme of war in the chosen novels involve, consciously or unconsciously, two sub-themes of 'love' and 'illusion' in their fiction. The research analyzes that what are the differences and the similarities between these writers’ approach towards the said themes. This paper aims at interpreting these themes in the context of postmodernists' scholarship while comparing and contrasting the treatment, which both writers have given to the themes of war, love, and illusion.
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McLeod, Ken. "Space oddities: aliens, futurism and meaning in popular music." Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): 337–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143003003222.
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Despite the rampant popularity of space, alien and futuristic imagery in popular culture, little scholarship has recognised the impact of such themes on popular music. This article explores the complex relationship between the numerous uses of space, alien and techno futuristic themes in popular music and the construction of various marginalised identities. Arranged roughly chronologically from early 1950s rock and roll to late 1990s techno, I discuss how many artists, such as Bill Haley, David Bowie and George Clinton, have used such imagery to promote various nonconformist ideologies and identities ranging from African-American empowerment to Gay and Lesbian agendas. This article also relates developments in scientific space research and popular science fiction culture to corresponding uses of space and alien imagery in various forms of popular music. In general, popular music's use of futuristic space and alien themes denotes a related neo-Gnostic withdrawal and alienation from traditionally dominant cultural structures in an attempt to unite us with a common ‘other’ that transcends divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality.
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Lam, Melissa. "Diasporic literature." Cultural China in Discursive Transformation 21, no. 2 (2011): 309–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/japc.21.2.08lam.
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Only since the 1960s has the Asian Diaspora been studied as a historical movement greatly impacting the United States — affecting not only socio-historical cultural trends and geographic ethnography, but also culturally redefining major areas of Western history and culture. This paper explores the reverse impact of the Asian America Diaspora on Mainland China or the Chinese Motherland. Mainland Chinese writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li have left China and today teach in major American universities and reside in America. However, the fiction of both authors explores themes and landscapes that remain immersed in Mainland Chinese culture, traditions and environment. Both authors explore the themes of “cultural collisions” between East and West, choosing to write in their adopted English language instead of their mother Putonghua tongue. Central to this paper is the idea that ethnicity and race are socially and historically constructed as well as contested, reclaimed and redefined
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Craig, Christy. "Reading identity: American and Irish Women’s book clubs, culture, and identity." Irish Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (2019): 128–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0791603519828664.
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This research examines the role of reading and book club attendance in the lives of Irish and American women’s fiction readers who actively participate in women’s book clubs utilizing mixed methodology, including ethnographic observation, participation in book club meetings, and in-depth narrative interviews. Women in Ireland and the United States used reading to develop a sense of self and to learn about the social world, as well as to construct their own identities, often in contrast to expected norms of feminine identity. Women in Ireland utilized reading and book clubs to develop knowledge and understanding; women in the United States were influenced to increase their status in order to potentially secure or retain a high-status romantic partner. At the same time, important key themes relating to social positionality and social networks, capital development, and the construction of identity were similar and central to women in both cultural environments. Reading was deeply entrenched in the identities of the women in this study and attending book clubs allowed them to continue engaging literature, construct identities, and gain knowledge about the world around them.
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Smith Júnior, Francisco Pereira, Heydejane da Silva e. Silva Nogueira, Silvia Helena Benchimol Barros, and Valdeci Batista de Melo Oliveira. "Amazon & USA: The in-between place of AdalcindaCamarão’s poetic identity." Research, Society and Development 10, no. 9 (2021): e11310917704. http://dx.doi.org/10.33448/rsd-v10i9.17704.
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The main objective of this paper is to investigate and report on the occurrence of foreignisms in the poems of AdalcindaCamarão, an Amazonian poet who lived for years in the United States. The research, in a wider sense, also seeks to reveal the possible motives underlying the author’s decision to write either mixing the two languages – Portuguese and English - or entirely in English. Other underlying purposes encompass the exploitation of the author's life and works aiming at identifying traces thatmight explain the blending of languages in her poems; discussing theories which approach cultural issues and seek to explain which phenomena are related to the events in her life at the in-between place [Braziland the United States]. The corpus of this study is constituted of a selectionof eight poems which deal with the themes of longing and homesickness, melancholy, love, religion, politics, history, and family. To carry out the research, the comparative method was used – a cognitive procedure that favors generalization or differentiation. As a conclusion, we emphasize that the poet gathered memories that, although dormant throughout her life, emerge, interrelate with the American life experience and manifest vividly in poems. The variety of themes approached in her poems and her personal experiencesin Brazil interlaced with those fromthe immersion into the American culture, reveal Adalcinda as a poet with a hybrid identity.
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Wrobel, David M. "Movement and Adjustment in Twentieth-Century Western Writing." Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 3 (2003): 393–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/phr.2003.72.3.393.
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Western American literature in the twentieth century has effectively mirrored life in the region. The West has for centuries seen more geographic movement, and accompanying cultural adjustment, than other American regions. These themes of movement and adjustment have dominated western writing. Literary historians' frameworks for categorizing and analyzing this writing have emphasized a tidy process of organic development in western writing, from "frontier fiction" to more mature "regional writing," or from frontier to regional to post-regional literature. Such models underestimate the degree to which movement and adjustment continued to shape western writing in the twentieth century and tend to separate literature produced by white Europeans from that of other cultural groups. This essay suggests that the more fluid movement and adjustment model can better illuminate the connections between ostensibly separate cultural literary streams.
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Bell, Erin. "Happy objects and cruel optimism in Carson McCullers’ story ‘Correspondence’." Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 9, no. 2 (2019): 117–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fict_00005_1.
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This article discusses American author Carson McCullers’ 1942 short story titled ‘Correspondence’, in order to consider how the unique form of the epistolary short story amplifies themes of alienation and absence. Drawing upon contemporary affect theory as well as a close reading of the story, I consider how the letters in the text can be understood as what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘happy objects’, as well as how the process of letter writing becomes exemplary of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism. Based on her own disappointment with letters and letter writing, McCullers’ short text problematizes the act of writing letters and demonstrates the complexities of epistolary short fiction.
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Łaszkiewicz, Weronika. "Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Reading Charles de Lint’s "Widdershins"." Acta Neophilologica 2, no. XXII (2020): 161–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/an.5593.
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The aim of this paper is to examine Charles de Lint’s novel Widdershins(2006), whose main theme is an interspecies war for the American land. The paper demonstrates how, by exploring the themes of Indigenous suffering, belief in species interconnectedness, reverence for the natural world, and approach to trauma, the novel participates in the deconstruction of colonial structures present in the concept of the Anthropocene. The paper also engages de Lint’s novel in a dialogue with the studies on the Anthropocene to prove that, by providing its readers with alternative modes of thinking, fantasy fiction can contribute to the cognitive change required to save our planet from human-wrought destruction.
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Intihar Klančar, Nataša. "Slovene reactions to William Faulkner's writing." Acta Neophilologica 41, no. 1-2 (2008): 13–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.41.1-2.13-23.
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The article deals with Slovene reactions to William Faulkner's writing: a lot of critical attention was given to the author twice, namely after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and after his death in 1962. The articles and reviews published in Slovene magazines and newspapers focused on themes, characterization, style and structure of his novels. Thus the Slovene reading public got the chance to get to know one of the greatest novelists of 20th century, his troubled, decaying, socially, racially, religiously and historically challenged American South and through it themselves and their attitude toward the world and its problems. Faulkner also had a strong influence on some of the Slovene writers of 1950s and 1960s: they adopted his themes and writing techniques, namely a cyclic structure of the novel and stream-of-consciousness technique, thus forging the new Slovene modernist fiction that started to emerge from the late 1960s onwards.
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Griffiths, Martin. "Broad horizons – SETI, SF and education." International Journal of Astrobiology 3, no. 2 (2004): 175–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1473550404002095.
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Science fiction (SF) is often perceived as a ‘fringe’ form of entertainment that excites the socially challenged. This misperception detracts from the critical, scientific and interpretive nature of the genre which can be directed into science teaching at school and university levels as an innovative way of exploring the cultural background, politics, leitmotif and themes of society, science and their operation. One example is the ‘alien’ theme in SF; it is perceptually one of the driving factors in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Such a topic can become an introduction to current technology, the motives and politics of science and the sociological implications inherent in a confrontation with the ideal of man's uniqueness in the cosmos. When applied to the SETI, SF engenders a constructive convergence in studies such as biological determinism, the evolution of life, communication, interstellar travel and methods of contact, thus enriching the consideration of possible life in the cosmos. Adopting elements of SF in lifelong learning therefore enables informed, imaginative reflection and debate that educates, trains and instructs, broadening the potential of students and their future roles by invoking an analysis of vital public, scientific and humanistic fields.Imagination lies at the basis of all discoveryOctavio Paz
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MORLEY, CATHERINE. "“How Do We Write about This?” The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel." Journal of American Studies 45, no. 4 (2011): 717–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875811000922.
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This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.
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Honey, Maureen. "Women and Art in the Fiction of Edith Wharton." Prospects 19 (October 1994): 419–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300005172.
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Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.
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Kurdiaev, Grigoriy Igorevich. "Synthesis of National and Transnational in A. Konchalovsky's American Movies." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 7, no. 2 (2015): 52–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik7252-60.
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In September 2014 Andrey Konchalovskiy's White Nights of Postman Alexey Tryapitsyn won Silver Lion for the Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. European critics and advanced public have regularly marked endowments of the Soviet and Russian film director. Throughout his career he has received numerous awards at prestigious European film festivals. There are Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary for the Romance for Lovers (1974), Grand Prix at Cannes for Sibiriada (1979), the main prizes of San Sebastian for Uncle Vanya (1971) and Homer and Eddie (1989). Meanwhile, Konchalovsky's success among American mass audience and critics has been much more modest, though Andrey Konchalovsky was the first in the early 1980s, since the time of the first wave of Russian 1910-20's emigration, who attempted to connect deeply national, Russian spirit with Hollywood production technology-oriented international strategy in his works. Being established in the Soviet Union as an esteemed author, Konchalovskiy decided to change the film industry to start over his career. Nowadays, in the context of the festival success in the European and Soviet/Russian cinema circles and the lack of attention in the United States, a question arises, if one can consider this attempt as successful one. In this article the author tries identify Russian national motives, which the filmmaker has introduced into Hollywood culture through his creative method, and those originally Hollywood themes and topics that have appeared for the first time in the works of the recognized Soviet director. Basing on Konchalovskys American works the author tries to elicit creative value in their national and transnational synthesis and expose the extent of their productivity and sensemaking.
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Moreno Redondo, Rosa María. "Animal Representation in Recent Anglophone Science Fiction: Uplifting and Anthropomorphism in Nnedi Okorafor’s "Lagoon" and Adam Roberts’s "Bête"." Oceánide 12 (February 9, 2020): 78–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.37668/oceanide.v12i.28.
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Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind’s lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor and Bête (2014) by British author Adam Roberts. This article examines, from ecocritical and human-animal studies (HAS) perspectives, the differencesand similarities in the exploration of the theme in both novels, which are often related to humankind’s willingness or refusal to regard the Other as equal.
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Therese, J. Monica, and Dr M. Amutha. "Chuck Palahniuk as a Versatile and Multifaceted Penman." Think India 22, no. 3 (2019): 912–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.26643/think-india.v22i3.8428.
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Chuck Palahniuk is the recent American novelist, journalist and essayist. He is known for his transgression fiction. Chuck Palahniuk’s ideas have been described as nihilistic but he has declined this identity and he labeling himself as a romantic writer. His books often focused on temporal end and also include some similar plot twists. His writings mainly focused on the struggles which we faced nowadays due to this growth of techno culture. Palahniuk’s concepts and themes are too strange to believe. He is the man of argument in which he argues the struggles between money and agony. There are some postmodern techniques and odd theories used by him. This article focused Palahniuk’s writing style, techniques, and as well as thematical study of his novels.
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VARVOGLI, ALIKI. "Radical Motherhood: Narcissism and Empathy in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document." Journal of American Studies 44, no. 4 (2010): 657–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875810001313.
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This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.
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Oliffe, John L., Christina S. E. Han, Murray Drummond, Estephanie Sta. Maria, Joan L. Bottorff, and Genevieve Creighton. "Men, Masculinities, and Murder-Suicide." American Journal of Men's Health 9, no. 6 (2014): 473–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1557988314551359.
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Murder-suicide (M-S) is a complex phenomenon that can involve a multifaceted set of interrelated biological and social factors. M-S is also sexed and gendered in that the perpetrators are most often male and their underpinning motives and actions link to masculinities in an array of diverse ways. With the overarching goal to describe connections between men, masculinities, and M-S, 296 newspaper articles describing 45 North American M-S cases were analyzed. The inductively derived findings revealed three themes: (a) domestic desperation, (b) workplace justice, and (c) school retaliation. Cases in the domestic desperation theme were characterized by the murder of a family member(s) and were often underpinned by men’s self-perceptions of failing to provide economic security. Workplace justice cases emerged from men’s grievances around paid-work, job insecurity, and perceptions of being bullied and/or marginalized by coworkers or supervisors. The school retaliation cases were strongly linked to “pay back” against individuals and/or society for the hardships endured by M-S perpetrators. Prevailing across the three themes was men’s loss of control in their lives, hopelessness, and marginalized masculine identities. Also evident were men’s alignments to hegemonic masculinities in reasserting one’s masculine self by protesting the perceived marginalization invoked on them. Overall, the findings give pause to consider the need for men-centered M-S prevention strategies to quell the catastrophic impacts of this long-standing but understudied men’s health issue.
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Wardle, Mary. "Fact and Fiction: The Contribution of Archives to the Study of Literary Translation." Vertimo studijos 12 (December 20, 2019): 165–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/vertstud.2019.11.
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This paper examines the role of traditional physical archives within Translation Studies research, investigating the contribution that such resources can add, providing information that otherwise would not be available in existing scholarly volumes, academic journals and digital material. The question is illustrated with the specific case of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and its first two translations into Italian, carried out respectively in 1936 by Cesare Giardini and 1950 by Fernanda Pivano. Both translations were published by Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing company, as part of two different series, I romanzi della palma and the later Medusa collection.Adopting a microhistory approach, the study of these translations, through the resource-rich archives of the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori in Milan, can shed light on a number of issues that the text alone cannot provide: documentation, including the other books published in the same series, highlights the target audience that Mondadori were seeking to address; the paratextual elements of the books themselves are revealing of the prominence (or otherwise) of American literature in general and Fitzgerald in particular within the Italian literary polysystem at the time of their publication; in the case of the first translation, readers’ reports on the novel indicate how the censors of the Fascist regime might receive the somewhat racy themes contained in the book, while, in the case of the 1950 translation, correspondence between the publisher, literary agents and the translator herself highlight the many issues surrounding the ultimate publication of the volume.
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Singh, Richa. "Book Review: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 10 (2020): 82–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i10.10804.
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Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a saga of the trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows of a Korean family spanning from 1910 to 1989. Lee is a Korean-American author whose work engages with themes of the diasporic Korean identity. Pachinko was published in 2017 to critical acclaim and it was in the running for the National Book Award for Fiction.
 Pachinko is a historical novel and its panoramic gaze encompasses twentieth century Korea giving us a terrifyingly real account of Korean society from the Japanese colonization of Korea to the Second World War. The Financial Times wrote in their review of the book: “We never feel history being spoon-fed to us; it is wholly absorbed into character and story, which is no mean feat for a novel covering almost a century of history.”
 It is the first novel about Korean history and culture written for English language readers.
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Urban, Hugh B. "The Occult Roots of Scientology?" Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 91–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.91.
Full textAbstract:
The Church of Scientology remains one of the most controversial and poorly understood new religious movements to emerge in the last century. And among the most controversial questions in the early history of the Church is L. Ron Hubbard's involvement in the ritual magic of Aleister Crowley and the possible role of occultism in the development of Scientology. While some critics argue that Crowley's magic lies at the very heart of Scientology, most scholars have dismissed any connection between the Church and occultism. This article examines all of the available historical material, ranging from Hubbard's personal writings, to correspondence between Crowley and his American students, to the first Scientology lectures of the 1950s. Crowley's occult ideas, I argue, do in fact represent one—but only one—element in the rich, eclectic bricolage that became the early Church of Scientology; but these occult elements are also mixed together with themes drawn from Eastern religions, science fiction, pop psychology, and Hubbard's own fertile imagination.
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Tanaseichuk, A. B., and O. Yu Osmukhina. "Problem of Periodization and Some Aspects of the Late Work of F. Bret Hart." Nauchnyi dialog, no. 2 (March 3, 2021): 244–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2021-2-244-258.
Full textAbstract:
The article is devoted to the discussion of the problem of periodization and the study of the features of the late stage of the work of the outstanding American prose writer Francis Bret Hart (1836—1902). The relevance of the article is due to the need to build a coherent and consistent history of the development of American literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an important part of which is the writer’s prose heritage. The authors comprehend Western (J. Stewart, G. Scharnhorst, A. Nissen and others) and domestic (A. V. Vaschenko, L. P. Grossman, P. E. Schegolev, A. I. Startsev, V. A. Libman, E. Yu. Rogonova, A. B. Tanaseichuk) studies on biography and various aspects of the prose writer. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in American studies a gap in the reception of F. Bret Hart's work was filled (the absence of clear criteria for periodization); the tradition of a disdainful attitude to the European period of his work, established in American literary criticism, is refuted, in particular, it is proved that in the stories and novels of the 1880s and 1890s Bret Hart boldly goes beyond the usual themes and images: the “Californian theme”, traditional for his early prose, takes on a new dimension — in the aspect of understanding national and gender psychology (“Maruga”); amorous and melodramatic collisions are combined with an appeal to science fiction (“The Secret of the Hacienda”).