Journal articles on the topic 'English literature English literature City and town life in literature'

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1

Waterston, Elizabeth. "Town and Country in John Galt: A Literary Perspective." Articles 14, no. 1 (2013): 16–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1017878ar.

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John Galt, town-planner and novelist, differed from contemporary writers such as William Wordsworth in his response to nature and to urban life. As agent for the Canada Company, he had the chance in 1827 to put some of his theories about town building into practice. Four years later, his novel Bogel Corbet presented a fictional version of that experiment in urbanism. All Galt's writings about the founding of a town emphasize community rituals and unity. His hope was that his settlement would move through an ascending order from village to town to garrison to city. The actual town of Guelph was of course unable to satisfy his ideal; in Bogle Corbet he adopts an ironic tone at the expense of the little town. But Bogle Corbet has another importance: in its random form as well as in its tone it emphasizes discontinuity. It foreshadows later treatments of small town life as well as has antecedents in English and Scottish literature. Since Galt's time, the ironic sequence sketch has proved a very appropriate literary genre for reflecting the disharmony of small Canadian towns.
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ΡΑΠΤΗΣ, ΚΩΣΤΑΣ. "ΑΣΤΙΚΕΣ ΤΑΞΕΙΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΤΙΚΟΤΗΤΑ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΥΡΩΠΗ, 1789-1914: ΠΡΟΣΑΝΑΤΟΛΙΣΜΟΙ ΤΗΣ ΣΥΓΧΡΟΝΗΣ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΑΣ". Μνήμων 20 (1 січня 1998): 211. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/mnimon.675.

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<p>Kostas Raptis, Middle classes and middle class culture in Europe, 1789-1914: approaches in modern historiography</p><p>The history of the european middle classes from the late 18th to theearly 20th century is a very wide topic and relates to economic, social,political, gender and culture history. This essay gives a brief overviewof the main subjects regarding it. It draws mainly on (pioneer) germanspeaking,but also on english and french literature. Following the currentdebate, it points to the different social and economic groups making upthe so called ((Bürgertum», to their common characteristics, as well astheir specific culture, the ((Bürgerlichkeit)).More specifically this paper is concerned with the followin subjects:— the composition of the «Bürgertum» and the features of its maingroups (professionals, bourgeois of money and bourgeois of knowledge)— the relevant terminology in german, french and english language— the comparison between upper middle class and nobility— the social position and role of the lowermiddle classes— the relation of the bourgeoisie to liberalism and nationalism— the study of the history of the middle classes in the specific contextof a town or a city (as an urban phenomenon)— the position and role of middle class women in a bourgeois society— the middle class family— the bourgeois way of life and culture in general</p>
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Schabert, Ina. "Trading and Translating: English Literature in Rouen, 1730–56." Translation and Literature 26, no. 3 (2017): 273–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2017.0301.

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In this period the city of Rouen is known for commercial activity and for certain literary connections, but its status as a centre of sorts for English-French translation has gone unrecognized. This paper explores the writers involved (some well known, some less familiar), the rationales for their translations (particularly from the poetry of Alexander Pope), and their relation on the one hand to the commercial life of Rouen, on the other to its Académie Royale, founded in 1744.
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Popova, Yelena. "Economic or financial substantiation for smart city solutions: a literature study." Economic Annals-ХХI 183, no. 5-6 (2020): 125–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.21003/ea.v183-12.

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The research is aimed to find the answer for the research question: Do the researchers demonstrate economic or financial substantiation for implementation of smart solutions for different dimensions of smart city? The goal of the research is to determine the publications presenting the economic or financial substantiations for smart solutions for smart city and to determine the type of the provided substantiation. It is very important, since Smart City is becoming our life step by step, though the components of it are introduced without any economic study, estimation and substantiation. This research is done to discover the areas where such substantiations exist, and to estimate the possibility of applying the methods, described in these studies, for smart solutions in smart city. The study considers the academic articles in English included in Scopus database and available online in full text. The primary selection comprised 927 publications for the period 1993-2020, and only 22 of them contained the comprehensive or close to comprehensive economic or financial analysis. This fact demonstrates the lack of economic and financial researches in the sphere of Smart City. The study allows the scholars to use the reviewed publications as providing the economic and financial basis for smart city; it also demonstrates the areas of smart city and smart solutions where specialists in economy can apply their competences.
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Silver, Carole G. "VICTORIANS LIVE: Images of Empire: Art and Artifacts in Cape Town, South Africa." Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (2006): 335–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150306211197.

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CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.
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Brooke, Stephen, and Louise Cameron. "Anarchy in the U.K.? Ideas of the City and the Fin de Siècle in Contemporary English Film and Literature." Albion 28, no. 4 (1996): 635–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4052032.

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“…before I die I must know my beloved London again: for me it is the centre of civilization—tolerant, intelligent and completely out of control now, I hear”—Hanif Kureishi, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)“D'you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Bri. The game is up!”—Mike Leigh, Naked (1993)In an essay published in 1969, Alastair Macintyre reflected upon the contradictory place of faith in the modern world, caught between absence and presence, absent because it is apparently no longer central to life, present because its structures still lie all around us. Macintyre suggests that it is at the moment when faith is lost that it becomes more easily, if trivially, incorporated into modern life: “[o]nly since the crisis of belief in the last century, however, has theism so emptied itself of any content that might affront us culturally that it has proved wholly assimilable.”From the contemporary perspective, one might make the same observation of the secular creed of “Englishness.” It has been suggested that the post-1945 crisis of confidence in the pillars of that mythic “Englishness”—imperial greatness, economic strength, a uniform national and racial identity—can be set against the relatively easy and successful assimilation of past notions into perceptions of the present, perceived, for instance, in the “heritage” industry, whether in tourism or in film. If, as Macintyre remarks of faith in the modern world, we are saddled with “an identity that we can now neither fully recover nor yet quite disown,” it might be argued that England enjoys or endures the same predicament with regard to its national identity.
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Heath, Malcolm. "Greek Literature." Greece and Rome 68, no. 1 (2021): 114–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383520000285.

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I begin with a warm welcome for Evangelos Alexiou's Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century bc, a ‘revised and slightly abbreviated’ version of the modern Greek edition published in 2016 (ix). Though the volume's title points to a primary focus on the fourth century, sufficient attention is given to the late fifth and early third centuries to provide context. As ‘rhetoric’ in the title indicates, the book's scope is not limited to oratory: Chapter 1 outlines the development of a rhetorical culture; Chapter 2 introduces theoretical debates about rhetoric (Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas); and Chapter 3 deals with rhetorical handbooks (Anaximenes, Aristotle, and the theoretical precepts embedded in Isocrates). Oratory comes to the fore in Chapter 4, which introduces the ‘canon’ of ten Attic orators: in keeping with the fourth-century focus, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias receive no more than sporadic attention; conversely, extra-canonical fourth-century orators (Apollodorus, the author of Against Neaera, Hegesippus, and Demades) receive limited coverage. The remaining chapters deal with the seven major canonical orators: Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Each chapter follows the same basic pattern: life, work, speeches, style, transmission of text and reception. Isocrates and Demosthenes have additional sections on research trends and on, respectively, Isocratean ideology and issues of authenticity in the Demosthenic corpus. In the case of Isaeus, there is a brief discussion of contract oratory; Lycurgus is introduced as ‘the relentless prosecutor’. Generous extracts from primary sources are provided, in Greek and in English translation; small-type sections signal a level of detail that some readers may wish to pass over. The footnotes provide extensive references to older as well as more recent scholarship. The thirty-page bibliography is organized by chapter (a helpful arrangement in a book of this kind, despite the resulting repetition); the footnotes supply some additional references. Bibliographical supplements to the original edition have been supplied ‘only in isolated cases’ (ix). In short, this volume is a thorough, well-conceived, and organized synthesis that will be recognized, without doubt, as a landmark contribution. There are, inevitably, potential points of contention. The volume's subtitle, ‘the elixir of democracy and individuality’, ties rhetoric more closely to democracy and to Athens than is warranted: the precarious balancing act which acknowledges that rhetoric ‘has never been divorced from human activity’ while insisting that ‘its vital political space was the democracy of city-states’ (ix–x) seems to me untenable. Alexiou acknowledges that ‘the gift of speaking well, natural eloquence, was considered a virtue already by Homer's era’ (ix), and that ‘the natural gift of speaking well was considered a virtue’ (1). But the repeated insistence on natural eloquence is perplexing. Phoenix, in the embassy scene in Iliad 9, makes it clear that his remit included the teaching of eloquence (Il. 9.442, διδασκέμεναι): Alexiou only quotes the following line, which he mistakenly assigns to Book 10. (The only other typo that I noticed was ‘Aritsotle’ [97]. I, too, have a tendency to mistype the Stagirite's name, though my own automatic transposition is, alas, embarrassingly scatological.) Alexiou provides examples of later Greek assessments of fourth-century orators, including (for example) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hermogenes, and the author of On Sublimity (the reluctance to commit to the ‘pseudo’ prefix is my, not Alexiou's, reservation). He observes cryptically that ‘we are aware of Didymus’ commentary’ (245); but the extensive late ancient scholia, which contain material from Menander's Demosthenic commentaries, disappointingly evoke no sign of awareness.
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Maltz, Diana. "LIVING BY DESIGN: C. R. ASHBEE'S GUILD OF HANDICRAFT AND TWO ENGLISH TOLSTOYAN COMMUNITIES, 1897–1907." Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 2 (2011): 409–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150311000064.

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Shortly before C. R. Ashbee transplanted a hundred and fifty Cockneys to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, in 1902 to form a utopian arts-and-crafts community, two other back-to-the-land settlements were also established, one located outside the market town of Stroud, a mere bicycle ride away from Ashbee and his guild. These Tolstoyan colonies – Purleigh, founded in 1896 in Essex, and Whiteway, founded in 1898 in the Cotswolds – fostered goals of fellowship and the simplification of life, as had been modeled by Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States and Edward Carpenter in Britain. Yet, whereas Ashbee was inspired by the model of William Morris and nostalgia for a pre-industrial England, English Tolstoyans looked not to craft, but to a less Aesthetic “bread labor” as a respite from modernity's corruption. Visiting Whiteway in 1904, Ashbee observed the Tolstoyans’ struggles to live off the land and commented, “they hold the other end of the stick we are ourselves shaping at Campden” (qtd. in MacCarthy 100). As his metaphor implied, both groups shared utopian aspirations, but Whiteway's settlers had sought the perfection of life from another vantage point and through other means. Ashbee regarded the austerity of their lives with distance and, as we will see, even with some distaste. Nevertheless, some features of the guildsmen's lifestyle at Chipping Campden mirrored those at Whiteway. This essay uses memoirs and fictions by C. R. Ashbee, his spouse, Janet Ashbee, and the Tolstoyans to disentangle the threads of “Aestheticism” and “simplification,” and to mark places of their conflation.
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A. E. Smatova, B. M. Tileuberdiyev, A. K. Meirbekov, and Turgay Han. "THE CONCEPT OF "PLANTS" IN KAZAKH AND ENGLISH TOPONYMIC SPACE." BULLETIN 1, no. 383 (2020): 140–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.32014/2020.2518-1467.17.

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The purpose of this paper is to present and exploit fundamental information, such as semantic meanings and geographical features, of phytotoponyms (a type of toponym that includes plant names) in Kazakhstan and the UK (United Kingdom). Toponymy data for this study were obtained from the place names database of Kazakhstan and the UK (United Kingdom). The results showed that the most common plant names recognisable in place names are common plants that have a close connection with daily life and positive morals in Kazakh and English culture and literature. The occurrence of plant names can reflect the characteristic plants of a city. The vegetation coverage rate where phytotoponyms are located is higher than that in non-phytotoponym areas. Altitude has a stronger correlation with the number of phytotoponyms than slope and vegetation coverage degree. The toponymic image of the world can be characterized from two sides as the relation to the ethnos (nation, nationality) and to the person (toponymic person, representative of the nation). A phytotoponym is also defined as a unit of vocabular relating to the area of spatial relationships and reflecting the location of a particular specified object.
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Kostova-Panayotova, Magdalena. "In a Free State (V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life)." Balkanistic Forum 29, no. 3 (2020): 57–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.37708/bf.swu.v29i3.2.

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This text’s title makes a reference both to Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s eponymous work and to the meaning contained in the English phrase “in a free state”, the latter being directly implicated in one of the difficult questions regarding this artists: where does Naipaul belong (1932 - 2018) – is he an English, an Indian or a Trinidadian author, or is he one to whom such categorizations do not apply because in the course of his life he came to embody the very idea of the artist’s being “in a free state”. However appealing it might be to assume the latter idea, his works as well as the many debates surrounding them actually question this freedom. Because the Trinidad born future Nobel laureate (the name of the city is evocative of the Holy Trinity), had at least three homes, even though his attitude to his “homelands” was a controversial one and even though he articulated his own identity controversially and not in one go. In his Nobel lecture Naipaul suggested that the credit for the Nobel Prize should go to England where his home was, and to India, where the home of his predecessors was, but he did not emphasize the significance of Trinidad where he had been born and had grown up.
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Váňa, Jan. "Theorizing the Social Through Literary Fiction: For a New Sociology of Literature." Cultural Sociology 14, no. 2 (2020): 180–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975520922469.

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When analyzing literary fiction, most cultural sociologists still accept the well-established boundaries between the literary and the sociological, thus leaving literature stripped of its aesthetic qualities. Instead, I propose a new approach that focuses on the process of meaning-making as it occurs within the interaction between the reader and the novel in a given socio-historical setting. This allows analysts to capture those aspects of understanding social experience which are usually ‘lost in translation’ between fictional and sociological genres. My major claims are that, first, when referring to social experience, both sociological and literary texts employ aesthetic devices to mediate understanding for the reader. Second, within the literary genre, the understanding of social experience relies much more on the emotional engagement of the reader through a reading process facilitated by these aesthetic devices. Third, to benefit methodologically and epistemologically from the lyrical understanding of social experience mediated by literature, cultural sociologists must be particularly sensitive to the subtlety and ambiguity of meanings mediated by the aesthetic. The methodological advantage gained is the analysis of deeper cultural meanings grounded in, yet also going beyond, an emotionally and existentially experienced social reality, which is intersubjectively shared and filtered by various groups of readers and cultural intermediaries. The epistemological advantage gained by overcoming the assumed inferiority of literature is that cultural sociological research unlocks a whole new area for understanding the meanings of social life, especially its non-discursive dimensions. The research model I propose for a new sociology of literature adopts the landscape of meaning concept developed by Isaac Reed in combination with the aesthetic structuralism of Czech linguist Jan Mukařovský. This model will be demonstrated through an interpretive analysis of the Czech novel Sestra (published in English as City Sister Silver) by Jáchym Topol.
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McCune, Pat. "David Underdown. Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. xii + 308 pp. $28.50." Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1993): 835–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3039036.

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Potočnik, Nataša. "Wendy Jones Nakanishi : an American resident in Japan, her life and work through the English language and literary creativity." Acta Neophilologica 45, no. 1-2 (2012): 63–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.45.1-2.63-85.

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Wendy Jones Nakanishi is a professor of English Language and Comparative Cultures at a small private college located in the south of Japan: Shikoku Gakuin University in Kagawa prefecture. It is a life far removed from her roots. She grew up in a tiny town in the northwestern corner of Indiana and spent her childhood holidays at her grandparentsʼ farm in the central part of the state. She received graduate degrees in Indiana, in England and in Scotland and she also spent a year in France and half a year in Holland. Nakanishi has published widely in America, Japan and Europe. Her academic research ranges from eighteenth-century English literature to the analysis of contemporary Japanese and British authors to sociological topics related to Japan. She was an Associate Member of the Ruskin Programme, based at LancasterUniversity in England, and currently belongs to the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan. She has published a considerable body of academic work - critical monographs, articles and book reviews - and, in recent years, has embarked on writing short stories and Žcreative non-fictionʼ pieces based on her experience of living in Japan for the past twenty-seven years as an American 'ex-patʼ, as a university professor, and as the wife of a Japanese farmer and the mother of three sons. Her stories have been published in various literary magazines in Japan and abroad and reflect her Žlife storyʼ asa foreigner residing in that country. In this article, I will focus on her 'creative non-fictionʼ stories.
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Dr. V.S. Bindhu, Rincy Philip,. "EXPLORING THE MYTHICAL INNER LIFE OF A BROKEN METROPOLIS: A COMPARISON OF GYAN PRAKASH’S MUMBAI FABLES AND JEET THAYIL’S NARCOPOLIS." Psychology and Education Journal 58, no. 1 (2021): 4476–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.17762/pae.v58i1.1537.

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Jeet Thayil is a versatile figure in Indian Literature whose contributions to world literature includes many poems, novels and music. His song collection include Gemini (1992), Apocalypso (1997), English (2004), These Errors Are Correct (2008). He also edited many books, which includes Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and 60 Indian Poets. He is famous for his first novel Narcopolis, which is set in Mumbai. This work is shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2012.Gyan Prakash is another important figure in modern historic India whose handouts lead India through a focus of wealth and secured life. He is also a professor of history and included as a member of subaltern studies. Prakash’s writings mainly focus on problems of post colonialism. His famous work is Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. This paper tries to find out the history of Mumbai Metropolis with the comparison study of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis and Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables. Both these works shows the hidden history of Mumbai with its both positive and negative structures.
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Brera, Matteo. "Primo Bartolini and the “Eye-talians” of Nashville: Becoming American in the Athens of the South." Quaderni d'italianistica 38, no. 1 (2018): 11–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/q.i..v38i1.31137.

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This essay describes how the Italians who settled in Nashville between the end of the nineteenth century and before the outburst of the First World War favoured first and foremost their occupational mobility thus prioritizing their integration in the economic fabric of a thriving city. Initially, they kept their cultural heritage alive but aimed to gain solid knowledge of the English language and American customs in order to apply for American citizenship as soon as possible, thus avoiding the severe discrimination endured by other Italian communities in southern states. Among the Italians of Nashville, Primo Bartolini stands out as a unique example of successful cultural and social hybridization and of the making of Italian American identity in Nashville and the South. Bartolini moved to Music City in 1908, after a short experience as a teacher in Indiana, and he was the first non-native of Tennessee to be drafted in 1917 to serve for his adoptive country during the First World War. A poet and a scholar, he wrote more than 300 poems on nostalgia, love, and patriotism. In these unpublished works, Bartolini shows how his identity progressively became Americanized: his writing style changed over time while still maintaining certain prosodic elements proper to his Italian culture and education. Bartolini’s experience, along with those of his compatriot who found their new home in Nashville, also confirms the integrating effect that the Great War had on Italians. Indeed, in the United States, a blend of old loyalties and the strong desire for acceptance and recognition drew the entire community into the public life of their adopted cities.
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Ahmed, Rehana. "“I’ll explain what I can”: A conversation with Avaes Mohammad." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53, no. 2 (2017): 223–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989416684184.

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Since the 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham and the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, British Muslims have been subjected to increased levels of suspicion and hostility. In particular, the spotlight has shone on working-class South Asian Muslim communities in the north of England, which have been accused of “self-segregation” and constructed as alienated from and posing a threat to “Britishness”. Racial divisions and tensions have been problematically blamed on the “failure” of multiculturalism; commentators from the left and right of the political spectrum have claimed multiculturalist practice and policies have encouraged too much diversity, thereby obstructing integration, while social factors such as poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, and “white flight” have been obscured or at best downplayed.1 As news stories of young British Muslim men joining extremist organizations at home or abroad continue to circulate, the communities’ male youth remain particularly susceptible to Islamophobic stereotyping and profiling. In this interview, performance poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad discusses the ways his work engages with this fraught political context. Our conversation begins by considering his experience of growing up in a racially divided northern English town in the 1980s and 1990s, before turning to the impact of the events of 2001 on his life and art. We discuss the role art can play in politics, and the part faith can play in art, before focusing on specific representations in his plays of young British Muslims held at Guantánamo Bay, divided working-class communities in the north of England, and young men — both Muslim and white — drawn to different kinds of extremism. Finally, we explore the racial and social exclusions of the creative arts, and the reception of Mohammad’s work.
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Hashim, Sattar J. "The Use of Code Switching: A Case of Iraqi Students in University of Karabuk." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 3, no. 5 (2020): 165–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2020.3.5.18.

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Code switching (CS) is considered as a widespread multifunctional phenomenon in bilinguals’ speech both formally and informally. CS is common among Arabic speakers because they usually use it when switching from English to Arabic in their utterances. Iraqi students are enlisted within this rule because they usually use English-Arabic CS. The current study aims at exploring the types of code-switching used in students’ daily life conversations in University of Karabuk and in dormitory setting and the reasons for using this code switching. These conversations are recorded and transcribed into written texts. Then, they are analysed by using Appel and Muysken’s (2005) classification of code-switching. Basing on the data input, the findings showed that the intra-sentential type is the most frequent type used in these conversations. Also, the findings showed that the reasons for code-switching were primarily either to convey a message or to express gratitude. These results were congruent with Poplack’s (1980) hypothesis. The study contributes noticeably to the knowledge body of literature as highlighting the use of code switching in the Turkish city of Karabuk.
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Reynolds, Jackie. "Stories of creative ageing." Working with Older People 19, no. 1 (2015): 33–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/wwop-11-2014-0035.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the benefits and issues relating to arts participation in later life. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on literature relating to older people's arts participation, and also includes discussion of the author's doctoral research into arts and ageing. The research was a qualitative study, influenced by narrative approaches and life-course perspectives. It involved interviews with 24 participants who have connections with a case-study town in the English Midlands. Findings – The paper focuses on the findings from six participants belonging to a male voice choir. The themes that are discussed include the importance of continuity; issues of identity; mutual support; impact of ill health and the sustainability of group activities. Research limitations/implications – This is a small-scale study, based in one case study town. Care should therefore be taken in generalising to different populations and areas. Potential for future research includes: other geographical locations, including larger urban areas. Specific focus on choir participation, or other art form. Involving people from a wider range of ethnic backgrounds. Social implications – This study adds to a growing body of evidence about the value of arts and culture to society. Originality/value – This study is original in adopting life-course perspectives to understand later life arts participation. It also offers original insights into the nature of arts-generated social capital and how this may be viewed within a wider context of resourceful ageing.
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Saefulloh, Asep. "READING INTEREST AND LITERATURE OF THE TEACHERS OF ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL IN TANGERANG CITY, BANTEN." Dialog 41, no. 1 (2018): 35–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.47655/dialog.v41i1.283.

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English
 This paper discusses reading materials on religious topics consumed by the teachers of Islamic Religious Subject (Pendidikan Agama Islam [PAI]) in Senior High School (Sekolah Menengah Atas [SMA]) in Tangerang City, Banten Province. The teachers seem not to take benefit from Religious books as enriching literatures for the teaching of Islamic education materials. To glean the data, the study used questionnaires and interviews. The respondents of the study were 28 teachers of PAI. The study found that there were mainly two titles of the religious literatures commonly used by the teachers: Fiqh Sunnah, by Sayyid Sabiq, was mentioned 10 times, and Fiqh Islam, by Sulaiman Rashid was mentioned seven times. The study disclosed the facts that the teachers have no sufficient literatures on the studies of Qur’an, Hadith, Aqidah, Morals, and History of Islamic Culture. These areas were only mentioned once at average. The issue of “reading interest,” may be “low” in the context of enriching the subject materials, but it was “quite high” when associated with religious knowledge enrichment for everyday life.
 Indonesia
 Tulisan ini membahas tema bahan bacaan keagamaan guru mata pelajaran Pendidikan Agama Islam (PAI) SMA di Kota Tangerang Banten. Buku bacaan keagamaan sebagai literatur pengayaan bagi para guru PAI SMA, khususnya di Kota Tangerang Banten tergolong masih sedikit dimanfaatkan. Metode pengumpulan data digunakan angket dan wawancara. Jumlah responden sebanyak 28 orang guru PAI. Dari data yang diperoleh diketahui bahwa buku bacaan keagamaan yang relatif sering disebutkan hanya dua judul, dan keduanya untuk materi pembahasan fikih, yaitu Fiqih Sunnah, karya Sayyid Sabiq, disebutkan 10 kali, dan Fiqih Islam, karya Sulaiman Rasyid disebutkan tujuh kali. Temuan lain adalah minimnya referensi untuk materi-materi Al-Qur’an, Hadis, Akidah, Akhlak, dan Sejarah Kebudayaan Islam (SKI), rata-rata hanya disebutkan satu kali. Persoalan “minat baca”, bisa jadi “minim” dalam konteks memperkaya wawasan untuk menambah materi pembahasan mata pelajaran PAI, tetapi “cukup tinggi” jika dikaitkan dengan penambahan pengetahuan agama untuk kehidupan sehari-hari.
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Coetser, J. L. "Multikulturele dramas? ’n Voorlopige ondersoek." Literator 18, no. 1 (1997): 65–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v18i1.530.

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Multicultural plays? A preliminary investigationThis article is a preliminary investigation of the possible presence of multiculturalism in an English and in two Afrikaans plays. According to Hauptfleisch and Steadman (1987:3) the workshop production of Cincinatti: Scenes from city life is an example of an English South African multicultural drama. The first part of the article is an attempt to isolate some of the properties that may show the presence of multiculturalism in a play. It is improbable that one would find many Afrikaans plays complying with these requirements. However, an interpretation of the silence of the antagonist in ’n Koffer in die kas (A suitcase in the wardrobe) by Jeanne Goosen points the way to an alternative, sociosemiotic interpretation of multiculturalism. In this regard Guiraud (1975:90-98) refers to sociosemiotic signs that relate to rituals, fashions, protocols and games. These codes are subsequently applied to Don Gxubane onner die Boere (Don Gxubane among the Afrikaners) by Charles Fourie. The greatest part of the article is in fact devoted to a discussion of Don Gxubane. Perhaps the most disturbing finding touches on closure: in the conclusions of Don Gxubane, Cincinatti and ’n Koffer in die kas the reconciliation o f opposites seems unattainable.
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21

Danieluk, Robert. "Maksymilian Ryłło SJ (1802-1848) and the Beginnings of the New Catholic Mission in Africa in Nineteenth Century." Annales Missiologici Posnanienses, no. 23 (January 5, 2019): 7–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/amp.2018.23.1.

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The Polish Jesuit Maksymilian Ryłło (1802-1848) participated in several missionary endeavors undertaken by the Church in nineteenth century and entrusted to the Society of Jesus. Besides his missions in Middle East in 1836-1837 and 1839-1841, he was also one of the protagonists of an exploratory trip to North East Africa started in 1847 from Egypt and directed south. Arrived to Khartum and established there for a few months, Ryłło died in that city, while a few years later other missionaries took over the work of evangelization started by him and his companions. The present article introduces this Jesuit and focuses on the “African chapter” of his life – all as an attempt of filling the historiographical gap consisting in the fact that the English literature about Ryłło is almost inexistent.
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22

Roychoudhary, Dr Mausumi. "‘Marriage: Freedom or Subjugation’: A Case Study of Paro’s Dreams by Namita Gokhale." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 5 (2020): 125. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i5.10589.

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The present paper searches to present a modest study of the novel of Namita Gokhale. It can be truly said that Namita Gokhale introduced herself to the world of English Literature through the novel Paro: dreams of passion and got recognition and appreciation as the best seller, as she realistically projected the elite class of Delhi. Her novel made her the talk of the town. It also aims at the exploration of the versatile personality of the author. Namita Gokhale is a world renowned Indian author and novelist known for her works in English language. She is a founder-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival along with the author, William Dalrymple, which started in 2006. Her writings often show a mixture of cultures expressed through the use of various languages. She has received numerous awards for her works. She is the author of several acclaimed novels like Paro - Dreams of Passion, Priya: In Incredible Indyaa, Gods, Graves and Grandmother, A Himalayan Love Story and Shakuntala: The Play of Memory. Her works of non-fiction include Mountain Echoes and The Book of Shiva. Her writings are unique and contributed a lot to Indian writing in English. The novel Paro: Dreams of Passion, created a stir by its frankness in the early 80s, and pioneered the sexually frank genre, which made her famous. It deals with the satire of Delhi’s upper class. Gokhale through her bold women characters talks about such society where woman is not free to lead her life in her own style. She depicts the double standard treatment for male and female, upper and lower class and the hypocrisy of the society. Therefore, Gokhale is known as woman activist and feminine writer. Her novel Paro: Dreams of Passion also deals with the same issues as it talks about the discriminations and identity crisis faced by women in society. She believes in frank narration of incidents and open heartedness. Particularly, the novel has portrayed the urge, necessity and consequences of freedom if not taken care. In a nutshell the novel is about women’s dream, emancipation and their struggle for existence.
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23

Sparks, Tabitha. "WORKING-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY IN MARGARET HARKNESS'SA CITY GIRL." Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 3 (2017): 615–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150317000092.

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One of the obvious strengthsof Margaret Harkness's 1887 novelA City Girlis its comprehensive visual record of London's East End. Harkness depicts Whitechapel's geography and public and residential spaces with an authority derived, as we know, from her voluntary residence in the Katharine Buildings, thinly disguised in the novel as the Charlotte Buildings. The Katherine Buildings were a block of apartments for working class tenants built by the East End Dwelling Company; Harkness lived in them for a few months in 1887 and was one of a wave of middle-class women who ventured into such residences, sometimes as employees (“lady rent collectors”) and sometimes, as with Harkness and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as writers determined to document in fictional or non-fictional form the conditions in which the poor lived. Harkness's first-hand experience and descriptive acuity has inspired some rich and productive scholarship onA City Girl, which in the form of two scholarly editions (one recent and one forthcoming) is the subject of a modest renaissance. From a literary perspective, most scholars have grappled with the novel's generic affiliation, describing it variously as a New Woman novel, a socialist novel, a sentimental novel, and an example of English naturalism. Some of these critics – principally John Goode and Rob Breton – combine a study of the novel's generic signs with historical attention to Socialism, one of Harkness's many ambivalent and abbreviated political and institutional affiliations in the 1880s and 90s; they use the literary lens of genre study to better understand the author's political consciousness in the context of late-Victorian reform politics. Pursuing another horizon of inquiry, I turn away from the novel's documentary evidence and generic and political loyalties to its elusive but revealing study of artistic representation. It is not the sociological or political milieu of Harkness's East End heroine, Nelly Ambrose, that interests me, but the link that Harkness establishes between Nelly's impoverished mind and her impoverished world, which I read principally through her unfamiliarity with narrative representation. Harkness sustains two discrete perspectives inA City Girl: Nelly experiences the world in episodic moments, and her inability to shape these moments into a purposeful or predictive sequence makes her effectively powerless to control the events that shape her life. Her distance from a narrative consciousness alerts us to the second perspective in the novel which might otherwise escape special notice: the narrative realism thatA City Girlparticipates in, that the experience of reading the novel activates, and that is self-consciously followed by Arthur Grant, Nelly's seducer. Arthur's class-based narrative advantage over Nelly enables him to write the story of their affair and control its outcome much in the way that the readers ofA City Girlhave worked to make sense of Nelly's detached and inexpressive character, and have often made their own determinations about the novel's ending. The medium of the novel's hostility to Nelly's particular kind of consciousness is a metaliterary reflection, then, of the subjugation by narrative disadvantage that we see play out in the story.
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Halchuk, Oksana. "“Apple Blossoms” and “The Apple Tree”: Two Perspectives Typological and Ideological Similarities in Short Stories by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and John Galsworthy." Respectus Philologicus, no. 38(43) (October 19, 2020): 150–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2020.38.43.64.

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The article provides comparative analysis of Apple Blossoms by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and The Apple Tree by John Galsworthy. Both authors explore human morality in a crisis of confrontation between sensuality and death, the beauty of life and the beauty of art. At the structural level, the works share an element of paratext, novelistic nature, polysemic images-landscapes, and methods of psychologization. Galsworthy engages the antinomy of the city – province, resorts to irony, and combines elements of impressionist writing with the traditions of realistic socio-psychological prose. In contrast, Kotsiubynsky systematically implements the impressionist fragmentary nature of the composition, symbolism of visual and auditory images, in-depth psychoanalysis, and the conventionality of the chronotope.
 The issues of short stories are diversified and aesthetic – as is distinct for modernist literature – implicitly in Kotsiubynsky’s work, and most explicitly through the connections with the Antiquity and English intertext in Galsworthy’s prose.
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25

Niles, Lisa. "MALTHUSIAN MENOPAUSE: AGING AND SEXUALITY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'SCRANFORD." Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 1 (2005): 293–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150305000859.

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IN AN EARLY VERSIONof Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford sketches, “The Last Generation of England” (1849), the narrator expresses a “wish…to put upon record some of the details of country town life,…for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing” (319). Before she begins her ethnographic preservation project, however, the narrator provides a disclaimer, suggesting the difficulty of categorizing the various aspects of what she is about to write: “As for classing the details with which I am acquainted under any heads, that will be impossible from their heterogeneous nature; I must write them down as they arise in my memory” (319). She then goes on to provide precisely what she claims is impossible–a categorical litany of the local inhabitants, beginning with the daughters of “very old” families who, “if unmarried, retired to live in–on their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there” (319). The reader is quickly taken through the town's social register, from “widows of the cadets of these same families,” to “professional men and their wives,” to a “grade lower…a class of single or widow ladies,” and on “[b]elow again,” to “the shopkeepers,” “the usual respectable and disrespectable poor,” and “a set of young men, [hanging about] ready for mischief and brutality” (319–20). Through her description, the narrator performs a double disavowal; heterogeneity prevents classification, but that very heterogeneity is itself what produces the need to classify. The rural society that serves as a precursor toCranford(1851–53) represents a diversity that must be categorized–its hierarchy organized according to its uniqueness of place. Rendered as particular, readily-identifiable positions within the eccentric space of provincial English society, Cranford's denizens are inscribed through the Victorian fascination with taxonomy–a fascination with the seemingly paradoxical possibilities of “classing the details.”
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26

Middleton, Sue. "Henri Lefebvre on education: Critique and pedagogy." Policy Futures in Education 15, no. 4 (2016): 410–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1478210316676001.

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The ‘spatial turn’ in education policy studies fuelled interest in Lefebvre’s work: initially, in his work Production of Space and, more recently, Rhythmanalysis and Right to the City. Yet, although in these texts Lefebvre critiques universities and schools and introduces original pedagogical concepts, their educational strands have attracted little attention. Lefebvre’s other works available in English have been largely overlooked in education literature. As France’s first Professor of Sociology, Lefebvre was passionately engaged with education: in particular, teaching, competing for government grants and leading student activism. Critiques of education are threaded through Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, his writings on architecture and anthologies. Lefebvre’s work, The Explosion, is surprisingly neglected. A critique of French universities, it analyses student protests across Paris in 1968 – events in which Lefebvre was a leading activist. In geography and philosophy there are burgeoning secondary literatures on Lefebvre. Laying groundwork for such a literature in education, I survey Lefebvre’s references to education in all the works available in English. Arguing that Lefebvre was an educational thinker in his own right, this paper sketches a ‘roadmap’ for educational readings of Lefebvre’s prolific and largely sociological writing. This paper falls into three parts. The first uncovers core Marxist and phenomenological foundations of Lefebvre’s critiques of universities and schools. Building on these, it introduces Lefebvre’s pedagogical concepts. The second part contextualises these in relation to ‘New’ (or ‘Progressive’) education movements at ‘critical moments’ of 20th-century history. It includes a case study of one such moment – the 1968 Parisian student uprising – then outlines Lefebvre’s summation of education in the late 20th century. The third part draws together four ‘Lefebvrian’ pedagogical principles and considers their relevance today. Educational readings of Lefebvre, I suggest, can help educationists identify ‘cracks or interstices’ in ‘technocratic rationality’, suggesting strategies for resisting contemporary neo-liberal regimes.
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27

Stauffer, Andrew M. "Robert Browning and “The King is Cold”: A New Poem." Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 465–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150300002515.

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By February of 1858, the American abolitionist community had at least twice been exposed to a poem — attributed to Robert Browning — entitled “The King is Cold.” It appeared in January in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published in New York City, and, one month later, it was reprinted in William Garrison's Boston paper, the Liberator. Yet aside from this brief record of publication, the poem has left no discernible traces, either before or since. The oddly one-sided (i.e., American) appearances of “The King is Cold” surely contributed to its being overlooked by generations of Browning scholars and editors, including such modern fugitive-hunters as Broughton, Honan, and Kelley. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, Browning scholarship has been reluctant to extend its efforts across the Atlantic. We still await an analysis of the poet's American transactions that would update the important research done by Louise Greer in the 1950s. For most of his life, Browning was much more popular in the United States than in England, and, as Greer puts it, “Browning must have known more Americans than any other English man of letters” (39). And, although their author never visited the United States, Browning's poems arrived by the 1840s, finding enthusiastic audiences that included such luminaries as Hawthorne, Lowell, Emerson, and Thomas Higginson. This Boston intellectual clique — transcendentalist, Unitarian, and abolitionist — recognized in Robert (and, more rapidly, in Elizabeth Barrett) the “brave translunary things that our first poets had” (Lowell qtd. in Greer 14). As the uncatalogued existence of “The King is Cold” suggests, the fruits of this special relationship remain incompletely gathered.
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28

Sas-Bojarska, Aleksandra. "Linear revitalization – problems and challenges. Discursive article." Urban Development Issues 53, no. 1 (2018): 5–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/udi-2017-0001.

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Summary The aim of the article, defined by the author as discursive, is to give the answer as to whether within ‘revitalization’ we should distinguish the notion of ‘linear revitalization’ – not yet defined in Polish and English-language literature. The author presents the thesis that we should do so by presenting the idea, its specific character and its role. This kind of action seems to have, in the author’s opinion, a positive influence on contemporary cities regarding the growing problems that result from fragmentation and lack of physical, social, economic and ecological connectivity. The general overview of revitalization provides the basis for proving the necessity of specific solutions relating to degraded linear structures. Linear revitalization, as presented, relates to different city structures which need renewal. It may become an important tool for sustainable city development and may improve the quality of life. Theoretical deliberations, presenting the reasons, needs, ideas, draft classifications, tasks and positive effects of linear revitalization have been supplemented by some case studies from Poland and abroad. The benefits to whole city structures of carrying out linear revitalization are presented. They justify the creation of a new definition and further research. The approach presented, being in the author’s opinion the beginning of the discussion, meets the need to look for effective new methods and tools within urban revitalization, solving the problems and fulfilling the new challenges of contemporary cities.
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IP, DAVID, CHI WAI LUI, and WING HONG CHUI. "Veiled entrapment: a study of social isolation of older Chinese migrants in Brisbane, Queensland." Ageing and Society 27, no. 5 (2007): 719–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x07006083.

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ABSTRACTThis paper presents the findings of a study of the support and service needs of older Chinese people in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, Australia. There were two specific objectives: to ascertain the problems encountered by older Chinese-Australians in their daily lives and social activities; and to develop policy and service development recommendations, with a view to mitigating their problems, meeting their unmet needs, improving their quality of life, and enhancing their participation in Australian society. The study used multiple methods, including a literature review, focus group meetings, and a community survey. The findings indicate that older Chinese people, and particularly women, experience significant restrictions in their activity patterns, social isolation and loneliness. Their lack of proficiency in the English language, and the difficulties they have in accessing language-support and interpretation services, limit their autonomous mobility and make them heavily dependent on their adult children, not least for transport. Their physical and psychological wellbeing is affected further by strained relations with their adult children, and these are compounded by financial concerns. The implications of the findings for welfare policy and practice are discussed at the end of the paper.
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30

Llewellyn-Smith, Michael. "A politician and his books: the Venizelos library in Chania." Historical Review/La Revue Historique 14 (April 27, 2018): 177. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/hr.16299.

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Eleftherios Venizelos loved books. He collected them, read them, andannotated them. With few exceptions, the most important being his translation of Thucydides into modern Greek, he did not write them. Books were an important part of his life, and he continued until the end to buy them. His collection of books is of historical and psychological interest. After his death in 1936, the books were transferred from his apartment in Paris and his wife’s house in Athens to the Venizelos family house in Halepa, near Chania in Crete. After many vicissitudes, especially during the German occupation of Crete, they came to rest in Chania Municipal Library, where they remain today. This paper explores Venizelos’ reading habits and preferences through this collection, showing that he used books both for professional information, for pleasure, and to improve his knowledge of foreign languages, in particular English. He was familiar with the great authors from Homer to Shakespeare; with philosophy from Aristotle to Bergson; with poetry, fiction, but especially with political thought, history and literature. It is good that the collection remains in the hands in the Municipal Library in the city where Venizelos lived and worked.
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31

Klimentyeva, Viktoriya, Dmitry Klimentyev, Svetlana Pashneva, Anna Umerenkova, and Dina Fedorova. "Impact of inclusive education on improving the quality of life of totally blind students." SHS Web of Conferences 98 (2021): 02013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20219802013.

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The desire of contemporary society to improve the quality of life through the organization of wider access to education for people with disabilities raises several issues concerning the conditions for organizing inclusive education. In the article based on theoretical analysis and practical experience in implementing five-year research and educational project in cooperation with the Moscow City University, the hypothesis is substantiated that using specially developed didactic materials, individual training of applicants according to an adapted curriculum, and adaptive teaching methods, it is possible to ensure successful foreign language training of a foreign language teacher for blind and visually impaired adults enrolled in the inclusive education in an undergraduate program. The purpose of the study is to find the possibilities of teaching a foreign language to totally blind adults studying in an inclusive educational environment of a higher educational institution with the subsequent successful implementation of their professional activities. The scientific novelty of the research is seen in the development and testing of a model of methodically substantiated professionally-focused educational trajectory of foreign language education for totally blind adults studying at the university. Using classical research methods, such as the study of scientific literature and accumulated methodological experience, trial training, observation, and questionnaires, the researchers came to conclusions about the feasibility and productivity of the proposed approach to teaching English to blind students in an inclusive environment, contributing to a more effective professional training of people with disabilities, improving their self-esteem, better adaptation to life, as well as professional and personal advancement of all participants in the educational process.
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32

Suarez Turriza, Tatiana De los Reyes. "Tropical Town and Other Poems (1918) de Salomón de la Selva: poemas panamericanos en tiempos de la Gran Guerra." Revista Valenciana, estudios de filosofía y letras, no. 22 (July 11, 2018): 101. http://dx.doi.org/10.15174/rv.v0i22.365.

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Tropical Town and Other Poems (1918) es el único poemario de Salomón de la Selva publicado en inglés, en el contexto de la Gran Guerra. Se le considera una obra de coyuntura entre dos culturas y tradiciones literarias. Este trabajo plantea la importancia de considerar su estudio en el ámbito de las letras hispánicas, entre otras razones, por su evidente relación con la tradición poética hispanoamericana. A partir del análisis crítico de los poemas, se evidencia la expresión de un discurso ideológico fundamentado en los ideales del panamericanismo, postura de implicaciones políticas que fue definitiva en la vida y obra del autor. Se analiza dicho discurso como una de las directrices temáticas que estructura y da unidad a la obra. Asimismo, se expone la calidad estética del poemario, a partir del análisis de algunos recursos poéticos.Tropical Town and Other Poems (1918) is the only collection of poems by Salomón de la Selva published in English, in the context of the Great War. It is considered a book that joins two cultures and two literary traditions. In this paper I underline the importance of studying De la Selva’s work inside of the Hispanic Literature because, among other reasons, it has an evident relationship with Hispanic American poetical tradition. Through the critical analysis of the poems, it is possible to perceive the expression of an ideological discourse based in the pan Americanism ideals—a doctrine that defined De la Selva’s work and life—. This paper studies such a discourse as one of the topics that structures and unites the author’s writing. At the same time, it analyses some of the poetical strategies, to show the aesthetic quality inherent to this collection of poems.
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33

Le Baillif, Anne-Marie. "Paris, « un lieu centre de tous les centres ». Est-ce toujours d’actualité ?" Interlitteraria 25, no. 2 (2020): 435–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2020.25.2.14.

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Paris, “The Centre of All Centres”. Is It Still the Case? In La République Mondiale des Lettres published in 1999 and 2008, Ms. Casanova wrote: “Paris is the Greenwich meridian for literature” for the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers and artists have come to the city in the past because it was extremely attractive for creative and economic reasons. But at the beginning of the 21st century, with the rise of the New Media for writing, publishing and diffusing, is it correct to say that Paris is still supreme? Is location more important than the time devoted to writing and reading?
 The claims on which Ms. Casanova builds her assertions are not supported by the facts of recent history and geography. She refers to “La belle santé économique et la liberté” in Paris but she forgot to mention why artists came from central Europe. It was just because the life was cheaper in Paris than in Berlin, as Walter Benjamin observed in 1926. She notes that Paris was the world centre for high fashion and that writers came together there to be inspired by the place and each other. But these things are no longer true: Paris is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Fashion in clothes is determined in many centres, with fashion weeks held in New York, Milan and China; aesthetics no longer depend on a single country. Literary creativity has spread across many continents and the internet and social media provide access to millions of people around the globe. Globalisation has unified the world, note Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sylvain Tesson, and brought the standardization of cultures.
 There is also the matter of the dominant language today. The French language has not changed since Ms. Casanova was doing her research, but French writers now dream of being translated into English to reach the largest audience around the world. Publishers also favour English to make the most profit because literature and art are now worldwide commodities. Writers and researchers use the Internet, which connects them with documents, libraries and people all over the world. Newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France provide literary reviews from around the world; for example, Histoire de la Traduction Littéraire en Europe Médiane, compiled by Antoine Chalvin, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Jean-Léon Muller and Katre Talviste, was written up in Cahiers Littéraires du Monde. What about the readership? If publishing and merchandizing are accelerating and globalizing because of how the Internet changes time and distance, the writer still has to follow the rhythm of the subject.
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34

Le Baillif, Anne-Marie. "Paris, « un lieu centre de tous les centres ». Est-ce toujours d’actualité ?" Interlitteraria 25, no. 2 (2020): 435–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2020.25.2.14.

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Paris, “The Centre of All Centres”. Is It Still the Case? In La République Mondiale des Lettres published in 1999 and 2008, Ms. Casanova wrote: “Paris is the Greenwich meridian for literature” for the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers and artists have come to the city in the past because it was extremely attractive for creative and economic reasons. But at the beginning of the 21st century, with the rise of the New Media for writing, publishing and diffusing, is it correct to say that Paris is still supreme? Is location more important than the time devoted to writing and reading?
 The claims on which Ms. Casanova builds her assertions are not supported by the facts of recent history and geography. She refers to “La belle santé économique et la liberté” in Paris but she forgot to mention why artists came from central Europe. It was just because the life was cheaper in Paris than in Berlin, as Walter Benjamin observed in 1926. She notes that Paris was the world centre for high fashion and that writers came together there to be inspired by the place and each other. But these things are no longer true: Paris is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Fashion in clothes is determined in many centres, with fashion weeks held in New York, Milan and China; aesthetics no longer depend on a single country. Literary creativity has spread across many continents and the internet and social media provide access to millions of people around the globe. Globalisation has unified the world, note Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sylvain Tesson, and brought the standardization of cultures.
 There is also the matter of the dominant language today. The French language has not changed since Ms. Casanova was doing her research, but French writers now dream of being translated into English to reach the largest audience around the world. Publishers also favour English to make the most profit because literature and art are now worldwide commodities. Writers and researchers use the Internet, which connects them with documents, libraries and people all over the world. Newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France provide literary reviews from around the world; for example, Histoire de la Traduction Littéraire en Europe Médiane, compiled by Antoine Chalvin, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Jean-Léon Muller and Katre Talviste, was written up in Cahiers Littéraires du Monde. What about the readership? If publishing and merchandizing are accelerating and globalizing because of how the Internet changes time and distance, the writer still has to follow the rhythm of the subject.
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35

Mazurczak, Urszula. "Panorama Konstantynopola w Liber chronicarum Hartmanna Schedla (1493). Miasto idealne – memoria chrześcijaństwa." Vox Patrum 70 (December 12, 2018): 499–525. http://dx.doi.org/10.31743/vp.3219.

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The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel com­prises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which pre­sent views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tra­dition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indica­ted the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninha­bited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian ci­ties. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medie­val city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduc­tion, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.
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Güllü, İsmail. "Göçmen edebiyatında din ve kimlik yansımaları -Fakir Baykurt’un Yarım Ekmek Romanında Din ve Gelenek-." Göç Dergisi 2, no. 1 (2015): 117–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.33182/gd.v2i1.541.

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Yarım aşırı aşan bir geçmişe sahip Almanya’ya göç olgusu beraberinde önemli bir edebi birikimi (Migrantenliteratur) de getirmiştir. Farklı adlandırmalar ile anılan bu edebi birikim, kendi içinde de farklı renkleri de barındıran bir özelliğe sahiptir. Edebi yazını besleyen en önemli kaynaklardan biri toplumdur. Yazarın içinde yaşadığı toplumsal yapı ve problemler üstü kapalı veya açık bir şekilde onun yazılarına yansımaktadır. Bu bağlamda araştırma, 50’li yaşlarında Almanya’ya giden ve ömrünün sonuna kadar orada yaşayan, birçok edebi ve düşünsel çalışması ile Türk edebiyatında önemli bir isim olan Fakir Baykurt’un “Koca Ren” ve Yüksek Fırınlar” adlı romanları ile birlikte Duisburg Üçlemesi’nin son kitabı olan “Yarım Ekmek” romanında ele aldığı konu ve roman kahramanları üzerinden din ve gelenek olgusu sosyolojik bir yaklaşımla ele alınmaktadır. Toplumcu-gerçekçi çizgide yer alan yazarın, uzun yıllar yaşadığı Türkiye’deki siyasi ve ideolojik geçmişi bu romanda kullandığı dil ve kurguladığı kahramanlarda kendini göstermektedir. Romanda Almanya’nın Duisburg şehrinde yaşayan Türklerin yeni kültürel ortamda yaşadıkları çatışma, kültürel şok, arada kalmışlık, iki kültürlülük temaları ön plandadır. Yazar romanda sadece Almanya’daki Türkleri ele almamakta, aynı zamanda Türkiye ile hatta başka ülkeler ile de ilişkilendirmeler yaparak bireysel ve toplumsal konuları ele almaktadır. Araştırmada, romanda yer alan dini ve geleneksel unsurlar sosyolojik olarak analiz edilmiştir. Genel anlamda bir göç romanı olma özelliği yanında Yarım Ekmek romanında dini, siyasi ve ideolojik birçok yorum ve tartışma söz konusudur. Romandaki bu veriler, inanç, ritüel, siyaset ve toplumsal boyutlarda kategorize edilerek ele alınmıştır. ENGLISH ABSTRACTReligion and identity reflections in literature of immigrant: Religion and Tradition in Fakir Baykurt’s novel Yarım EkmekThe immigration fact which has nearly half century in Germany have brought a significant literal accumulation (Migrantenliteratur) in its wake. This literal accumulation, which is named as several denominations, has a feature including different colours in itself. One of the most important source snourishing literature is society. Societal structure and problems that the writer lives inside, directly or indirectly reflect on his/her compositions. In this context, the matter of religion and tradition by way of the issue and fictious characters in the novel of Fakir Baykurt who went to Germany in her 50’s and lived in there till his death and who is a considerable name in Turkish literature with his several literal and intellectual workings; “Yarım Ekmek” which is the third novel of Duisburg Trilogy with “Koca Ren” and “Yüksek Fırınlar” are discussed sociologically in the study. The political and ideological past of the socialist realist lined writer in Turkey where he spent his life for a long time, manifest itself on the speech and fictious characters of novel. In the novel, themes of new Turks’ conflict, cultural shock, being in the middle, bi culturalism in their new cultural nature in Duisburg which is the city they live in. The writer not only deals with Turks in Germany but also personal and social subjects via comparing them to Turkey and even other countries. In the study, religious and traditional elements analyzed sociologically. Besides the speciality of being a migration novel in general, there are a lot of religious, political and ideological interpretations and discussions in the novel. These datum in the novel are examinated in the context of belief, ritual, politics and social categorisation.
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Senkāne, Olga. "NARRATIVES OF INSCRIPTIONS ON MEMORIAL PLATES OF JEWS, RUSSIANS, LATVIANS AND LATGALIANS: MEMORY CULTURE DISCOURSE." Via Latgalica, no. 3 (December 31, 2010): 102. http://dx.doi.org/10.17770/latg2010.3.1680.

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<p>Linguistic execution and narrative structure of the memorial plaques demonstrates not only ideology, axiology etc. of certain ages, culture of memory as such, but also trends in linguistic applications, with respect/without respect to the state language policy representing the respective historical stage (period of the first Latvian independent state, Soviet times, years of the third awakening and independence). The language/languages used in narratives of memorial plaques in the Rēzekne City, structure and content of the narratives depends on 1) location of the memorial plaque (cemetery, city sights, downtown or outskirts, etc.) 2) time period for installation of the memorial plaque (periods of independence/Soviet times), 3) national/religious affiliation of the dead/killed, 4) the pathos to be achieved (patriotic, heroic, philosophical, ritual, etc.).</p><p>Monolingual memorial plaques in Latvian or bilingual memorial plaques (in Latvian and Russian) constitute the largest quantity in Rēzekne. During the independence periods these are mostly devoted to: 1) politicians, public and culture figures, clergy (8), 2) Latvian/Latgalian freedom fighters, warriors (3), 3) victims of the Holocaust and the communist terror (3). During the Soviet period a special focus is on the World War II fighters against fascism and the victims of fascism, as well as some prominent cultural figures of socialist era – directors, specialists in literature, artists (11).</p><p>Memorial plaques installed before June 1940 are monolingual; plaques installed from WW II to 1989 are bilingual; plaques installed or renovated during the period when Latvia regained national independence are monolingual (in Latvian or Latgalian) or multilingual (in Russian, Latvian, English and German).</p><p>Inscriptions of the Soviet-era memorial plaques (predominantly in Russian and Latvian) are dominated by heroic pathos, which is based in the respective ideology; in inscriptions of the independence time a tone of patriotism and religious rituals is topical, as well as there is also considerable use of the language diversity (utilization of Latgalian and English). Jewish memorial plaques installed during recent years of independence to the Holocaust victims, usually are in 3-4 languages (in Latvian, Yiddish, Russian and English). Text of memorial plaques in multiple languages may be slightly different (choice of lexemes) while maintaining the overall low-key pathos.</p><p>The Jewish Holocaust memorial plaques are one of the few multilingual signs in Rēzekne. Order of inscriptions in 3 or 4 languages enables to reason about the hierarchy of languages during the Soviet era and the years of independence, at the beginning of 21st century. In trilingual signs of the Soviet-era plaques Latvian language is featured as the last one – after Yiddish and Russian, while the plaque installed in 2006 already represents different layout hierarchy indicating the prevailing role of Latvian as the official language where the victims’ mother tongue moves to the second position, but Russian in memorial plaques is still more important than English. Layout and stylistics of the narrative in this memorial plaque inscription is seemingly neutrally informative (where, when, who, did what), but contains moderate dramatic qualities, modest reminder of active participation of the locals in extermination of Jews. The inscription can represent the direction of narration in the memory culture of the Holocaust victims: inscriptions have a reminiscent, recapturing function (so the recipient needs preliminary knowledge), therefore they lack emotionality and the dramatic qualities, evaluative style resources, unlike the Jewish tombstone inscriptions.</p><p>Latgalian memorial plaques in Rēzekne are still rare, total number of them are five and they are falling mainly within the religious (Catholic identity) discourse, largely devoted to prominent Latgalian clergy, the clergy patrons, the victims of communist terror. These memorial plaques in terms of narrative expansion of the inscriptions are not focused on reminder or reconstruction as it is, for example, in the inscriptions on plaques of the Holocaust victims, and are performing another important function of narrative – creating memory (knowledge) for those who lack it, providing a ready-made, educational, observational, emotional assessment – this is a very important feature of the Latgalian memorial plaques. Inscription narratives show respect to an addressee without knowledge, therefore subtexts are not intended there.</p><p>National and territorial identity of Latgale in the historical and contemporary perspective is featured by the syncretism of cultures. Use of languages on the inscriptions of Rēzekne memorial plaques is indicative of the existence of multilingual environment the least respect for which is shown during the first Latvian independence (1818–1940) and also during the restoration of independence period, as most of the Soviet-era plaques renovated in 90ies of the 20th century and early 21st century now are monolingual (in Latvian), but at the time of installation (50–70ies of the 20th century) they have been mostly bilingual (in Latvian, in Russian) or made only in Russian. Today, after regaining independence, the Latvian prevails in the multilingual urban landscape, the Russian still is quite enduring (especially in the outskirts of town), Latgalian is gradually moving away from formal constraints, and revived, but the Jewish is irretrievably withering away. Unfortunately, culture of memories in format of Hebrew memorial plaques and tombstone inscriptions will soon be the only lingual evidence of the existence of this historically so important element of the regional identity.</p>
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BRODT, BÄRBEL, PAUL ELLIOTT, and BILL LUCKIN. "Review of periodical articles." Urban History 32, no. 1 (2005): 132–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0963926805002749.

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Few – if any - would deny that cartography is one of the most essential disciplines within the multi-layered scope of urban history. Elizabeth Baigent pays tribute to the possibilities and problems posed by maps in her ‘Fact or fiction? Town maps as aids and snares to the historian’, Archives: The J. of the British Records Association, 29, 110 (2004), 24–37. By looking at a map of Gloucester, compiled in 1455, and two late medieval Bristol maps (one by Robert Ricart, the other by William Smith), she outlines their usefulness as well as the problems that the modern urban historian faces. Although medieval maps can clearly help to identify ‘lost’ streets, and to elucidate the town's social geography, it is essential to consider the purpose for which any individual map was drawn, the context in which it was published (and re-published) and not least the skills of the cartographer concerned. Cartography may be an essential tool for the urban historian, but there are many other tools and topics, and this year's medieval urban periodical literature again reflects the wide scope of the subject. This is especially true for the German language periodicals which tend to relate to traditionally powerful concepts rather than to recent departures. This trend largely reflects the nature of those periodicals concerned for they are almost entirely devoted to strictly local, or at most regional concerns. They are naturally home to brief essays on mainly local matters, particularly the commemoration of anniversaries of urban charters (e.g., Paul Wietzorek, ‘Zum Titelbild: 100 Jahre Stadtwappen Zons – 1904–2004’, Der Niederrhein. Die Zeitschrift des Vereins Niederrhein, 71, 1 (2004), 2–5; Paul Wietzorek, ‘Zum Titelbild: 750 Jahre Stadtrechte Grieth 1254–2004’, ibid., 71, 2 (2004), 54–5; Paul Wietzorek, ‘Zum Titelbild: 650 Jahre Stadt Dahlen (Rheindalen) 1354–2004’, ibid., 71, 3 (2004), 114–15), overviews of town histories (e.g. Eberhard Lebender, ‘Die Weizackerstadt Pyritz. Ein Gang durch die Geschichte – von der Bronzezeit bis zur Zerstörung 1945’, Pommern. Zeitschrift für Kultur und Geschichte, 42, 2 (2004), 8–17) and recent archaeological excavations (e.g., Sven Spiong, ‘Archäologische Ausgrabung an der Paderborner Stadtmauer’, Die Warte, 65, 123 (2004), 23–6; Sven Spiong, ‘Den Stiftsherren auf der Spur: Archäologische Ausgrabung nördlich der Busdorfkirche in Paderborn’, ibid., 65, 124 (2004), 9–10). Anna Helena Schubert's ‘Archäologische Untersuchungen im Bereich der “Untersten Stadtmühle” in Olpe’, Heimatstimmen aus dem Kreis Olpe, 75, 3 (2004), 195–202, is another example of local archaeological case studies. Olpe received its urban charter in 1311; in the German context such an urban charter necessarily involved fortification. Schubert is concerned whether the ‘lower mill’ which was situated outside the first urban wall was erected at the same time or at a later date than this wall, yet has to admit that despite extensive archaeological excavation this question has to remain – at least for the time – unanswered. English articles on local excavations are too numerous to be dealt with adequately in this short review. Two examples may suffice: Robert Cowie's ‘The evidence from royal sites in Middle Anglo-Saxon London’, Medieval Archaeology, 48 (2004), 201–8, looks at the evidence for palaces c. 650 – c. 850 that emerged from recent archaeological investigations in the Cripplegate area of the City and at the Treasury in Whitehall. Mary Alexander, Natasha Dodnell and Christopher Evans have published ‘A Roman cemetery in Jesus Lane, Cambridge’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 93 (2004), 67–94. 32 corpses were unearthed (three of them decapitated), and modest grave goods were found. This cemetery seems to have served a suburban settlement within the lower Roman town. Pottery assemblage indicates industrial activity. The excavation added significantly to our knowledge of the layout and scale of Roman Cambridge. Cambridge clearly remained a significant centre during the fourth century and sustained an economic and commercial role.
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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 76, no. 1-2 (2002): 117–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002550.

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-James Sidbury, Peter Linebaugh ,The many-headed Hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 433 pp., Marcus Rediker (eds)-Ray A. Kea, Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic slave trade. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxi + 234 pp.-Johannes Postma, P.C. Emmer, De Nederlandse slavenhandel 1500-1850. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2000. 259 pp.-Karen Racine, Mimi Sheller, Democracy after slavery: Black publics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xv + 224 pp.-Clarence V.H. Maxwell, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume two: From the ending of slavery to the twenty-first century. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. xv + 562 pp., Gail Saunders (eds)-César J. Ayala, Guillermo A. Baralt, Buena Vista: Life and work on a Puerto Rican hacienda, 1833-1904. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xix + 183 pp.-Elizabeth Deloughrey, Thomas W. Krise, Caribbeana: An anthology of English literature of the West Indies 1657-1777. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii + 358 pp.-Vera M. Kutzinski, John Gilmore, The poetics of empire: A study of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764). London: Athlone Press, 2000. x + 342 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Adele S. Newson ,Winds of change: The transforming voices of Caribbean women writers and scholars. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. viii + 237 pp., Linda Strong-Leek (eds)-Sue N. Greene, Mary Condé ,Caribbean women writers: Fiction in English. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. x + 233 pp., Thorunn Lonsdale (eds)-Cynthia James, Simone A. James Alexander, Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. x + 214 pp.-Efraín Barradas, John Dimitri Perivolaris, Puerto Rican cultural identity and the work of Luis Rafael Sánchez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 203 pp.-Peter Redfield, Daniel Miller ,The internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000. ix + 217 pp., Don Slater (eds)-Deborah S. Rubin, Carla Freeman, High tech and high heels in the global economy: Women, work, and pink-collar identities in the Caribbean. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xiii + 334 pp.-John D. Galuska, Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the town and tell the people: Dancehall culture in Jamaica. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. xxviii + 298 pp.-Lise Waxer, Helen Myers, Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xxxii + 510 pp.-Lise Waxer, Peter Manuel, East Indian music in the West Indies: Tan-singing, chutney, and the making of Indo-Caribbean culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. xxv + 252 pp.-Reinaldo L. Román, María Teresa Vélez, Drumming for the Gods: The life and times of Felipe García Villamil, Santero, Palero, and Abakuá. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. xx + 210 pp.-James Houk, Kenneth Anthony Lum, Praising his name in the dance: Spirit possession in the spiritual Baptist faith and Orisha work in Trinidad, West Indies. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. xvi + 317 pp.-Raquel Romberg, Jean Muteba Rahier, Representations of Blackness and the performance of identities. Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999. xxvi + 264 pp.-Allison Blakely, Lulu Helder ,Sinterklaasje, kom maar binnen zonder knecht. Berchem, Belgium: EPO, 1998. 215 pp., Scotty Gravenberch (eds)-Karla Slocum, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Diaspora and visual culture: Representing Africans and Jews. London: Routledge, 2000. xiii + 263 pp.-Corey D.B. Walker, Paget Henry, Caliban's reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000. xiii + 304 pp.-Corey D.B. Walker, Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana existential thought. New York; Routledge, 2000. xiii +228 pp.-Alex Dupuy, Bob Shacochis, The immaculate invasion. New York: Viking, 1999. xix + 408 pp.-Alex Dupuy, John R. Ballard, Upholding democracy: The United States military campaign in Haiti, 1994-1997. Westport CT: Praeger, 1998. xviii + 263 pp.-Anthony Payne, Jerry Haar ,Canadian-Caribbean relations in transition: Trade, sustainable development and security. London: Macmillan, 1999. xxii + 255 pp., Anthony T. Bryan (eds)-Bonham C. Richardson, Sergio Díaz-Briquets ,Conquering nature: The environmental legacy of socialism in Cuba. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. xiii + 328 pp., Jorge Pérez-López (eds)-Neil L. Whitehead, Gérard Collomb ,Na'na Kali'na: Une histoire des Kali'na en Guyane. Petit Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge Editions, 2000. 145 pp., Félix Tiouka (eds)-Neil L. Whitehead, Upper Mazaruni Amerinidan District Council, Amerinidan Peoples Association of Guyana, Forest Peoples Programme, Indigenous peoples, land rights and mining in the Upper Mazaruni. Nijmegan, Netherlands: Global Law Association, 2000. 132 pp.-Salikoko S. Mufwene, Ronald F. Kephart, 'Broken English': The Creole language of Carriacou. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xvi + 203 pp.-Salikoko S. Mufwene, Velma Pollard, Dread talk: The language of Rastafari. Kingston: Canoe Press: Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Revised edition, 2000. xv + 117 pp.
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Pudłocki, Tomasz. "Polsko-amerykańskie ślady współpracy. Korespondencja Eileen i Floriana Znanieckich w zbiorach archiwalnych Fundacji Kościuszkowskiej w Nowym Jorku, część 1." Studia Historiae Scientiarum 19 (September 30, 2020): 443–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/2543702xshs.20.014.12570.

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Artykuł przedstawia część pierwszą korespondencji Eileen i Floriana Znanieckich, znajdującej się w Archiwum Fundacji Kościuszkowskiej w Nowym Jorku. Pokazuje ona wiele nieznanych wątków z życia Znanieckich, a zwłaszcza Floriana – jednego z najsłynniejszych polskich socjologów, profesora Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego, który wiele lat pracował w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki. Prezentowana edycja obejmuje listy ze Stefanem Piotrem Mierzwą, który w języku angielskim używał nazwiska Stephen Peter Mizwa, oraz z Edith Brahmall Cullis-Williams. Mierzwa był założycielem Fundacji Kościuszkowskiej, długoletnim dyrektorem wykonawczym fundacji, a w końcu jej prezesem. Dzięki swojej działalności na rzecz kulturalnego i naukowego zbliżenia Polski i Ameryki stał się jedną z najbardziej rozpoznawalnych postaci w życiu Polonii amerykańskiej w XX w. Cullis-Williams była założycielką i prezeską Polskiego Instytutu Sztuk Pięknych i Literatury w Nowym Jorku i znaną w środowisku amerykańskim polonofilką. W zasobach archiwalnych Fundacji Kościuszkowskiej przetrwały kopie listów Mierzwy pisanych do Znanieckich. Kopie listów Cullis-Williams nie zachowały się w tej kolekcji, ale choćby te, wysłane do niej przez Eileen, prezentowane w niniejszej edycji, doskonale uzupełniają obraz amerykańskich relacji i powiązań towarzyskich małżeństwa Znanieckich, jakie wyłania się z innych źródeł. Chronologicznie listy obejmują okres 1923–1940 i pokazują początki współpracy Znanieckiego z Fundacją Kościuszkowską, wnoszą trochę nowego światła do obecności Znanieckiego w Nowym Jorku w latach 1931–1933 oraz do pierwszych miesięcy pobytu poznańskiego socjologa w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki w 1940 r. Polish-American traces of cooperation. The correspondence of Eileen and Florian Znaniecki in the archival collections of the Kościuszko Foundation in New York, part 1 The article presents the first part of the correspondence of Eileen and Florian Znaniecki, which is located in the Archives of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. It shows many unknown threads from the life of Znaniecki family, especially Florian – one of the most outstanding Polish sociologist, a professor at the University of Poznań, who worked for many years in the United States of America. The presented edition includes letters with Stefan Piotr Mierzwa, who used the name Stephen Peter Mizwa in English, and Edith Brahmall Cullis-Williams. Mierzwa was the founder of the Kościuszko Foundation, a long-term executive director of the foundation, and finally its president. Thanks to his activities for the cultural and scientific rapprochement between Poland and America, he became, if not one of the most important figures in the life of American Polonia in the twentieth century, so certainly among the New York State Poles. Cullis-Williams was the founder and president of the Polish Institute of Arts and Literature in New York City and a well known American polonophile in the American environment. The archives of the Kościuszko Foundation have survived copies of Mierza’s letters written to Znaniecki. Copies of Cullis-Williams letters have not been preserved in this collection, but even those sent to her by Eileen, presented in this edition, perfectly complement the picture of American relationships and social relations of the Znaniecki marriage emerging from other sources. Chronologically, the letters cover the period 1923–1940 and show the beginnings of Znaniecki's cooperation with the Kosciuszko Foundation. What is more, the collection brings a little new light to Znaniecki’s presence in New York in 1931–1933 and the first months of the Poznań sociologist’s stay in the United States of America in 1940.
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Mykhailova, O. V. "Woman in art: a breath of beauty in the men’s world." Aspects of Historical Musicology 17, no. 17 (2019): 163–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-17.11.

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Background. А history of the development of the human community is at the same time a history of the relationship between men and women, their role in society, in formation of mindset, development of science, technology and art. A woman’s path to the recognition of her merits is a struggle for equality and inclusion in all sectors of public life. Originated with particular urgency in the twentieth century, this set of problems gave impetus to the study of the female phenomenon in the sociocultural space. In this context, the disclosure of the direct contribution of talented women to art and their influence on its development has become of special relevance. The purpose of the article is to summarize segmental of information that highlights the contribution of women to the treasury of world art, their creative and inspiring power. Analytical, historical-biographical and comparative studying methods were applied to reveal the gender relationships in art and the role of woman in them as well as in the sociocultural space in general. The results from this study present a panorama of gifted women from the world of art and music who paved the way for future generations. Among them are: A. Gentileschi (1593–1653), who was the first woman admitted to The Florence Academy of Art; M. Vigee Le Brun (1755–1842), who painted portraits of the French aristocracy and later became a confidant of Marie-Antoinette; B. Morisot (1841–1895), who was accepted by the impressionists in their circle and repeatedly exhibited her works in the Paris Salon; F. Caccini (1587–1640), who went down in history as an Italian composer, teacher, harpsichordist, author of ballets and music for court theater performances; J. Kinkel (1810–1858) – the first female choral director in Germany, who published books about musical education, composed songs on poems of famous poets, as well as on her own texts; F. Mendelssohn (1805–1847) – German singer, pianist and composer, author of cantatas, vocal miniatures of organ preludes, piano pieces; R. Clark (1886–1979) – British viola player and composer who created trio, quartets, compositions for solo instruments, songs on poems of English poets; L. Boulanger (1893–1918) became the first woman to receive Grand Prix de Rome; R. Tsekhlin (1926–2007) – German harpsichordist, composer and teacher who successfully combined the composition of symphonies, concerts, choral and vocal opuses, operas, ballets, music for theatrical productions and cinema with active performing and teaching activities, and many others. The article emphasise the contribution of women-composers, writers, poetesses to the treasury of world literature and art. Among the composers in this row is S. Gubaidulina (1931), who has about 30 prizes and awards. She wrote music for 17 films and her works are being performed by famous musicians around the world. The glory of Ukrainian music is L. Dychko (1939) – the author of operas, oratorios, cantatas, symphonies, choral concertos, ballets, piano works, romances, film music. The broad famous are the French writers: S.-G. Colette (1873–1954), to which the films were devoted, the performances based on her novels are going all over the world, her lyrics are being studied in the literature departments. She was the President of the Goncourt Academy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, a square in the center of Paris is named after her. Also, creativity by her compatriot, L. de Vilmorin (1902–1969), on whose poems С. Arrieu, G. Auric, F. Poulenc wrote vocal miniatures, is beloved and recognized as in France as and widely abroad. The article denotes a circle of women who combined the position of a selfsufficient creator and a muse for their companion. M. Verevkina (1860–1938) – a Russian artist, a representative of expressionism in painting, not only helped shape the aesthetic views of her husband A. Yavlensky, contributing to his art education, but for a long time “left the stage” for to not compete with him and help him develop his talent fully. Furthermore, she managed to anticipate many of the discoveries as for the use of light that are associated with the names of H. Matisse, A. Derain and other French fauvist. F. Kahlo (1907–1954), a Mexican artist, was a strict critic and supporter for her husband D. Rivera, led his business, was frequently depicted in his frescoes. C. Schumann (1819–1896) was a committed promoter of R. Schumann’s creativity. She performed his music even when he was not yet recognized by public. She included his compositions in the repertoire of her students after the composer lost his ability to play due to the illness of the hands. She herself performed his works, making R. Schumann famous across Europe. In addition, Clara took care of the welfare of the family – the main source of finance was income from her concerts. The article indicates the growing interest of the twentieth century composers to the poems of female poets. Among them M. Debord-Valmore (1786–1859) – a French poetess, about whom S. Zweig, P. Verlaine and L. Aragon wrote their essays, and her poems were set to music by C. Franck, G. Bizet and R. Ahn; R. Auslender (1901–1988) is a German poetess, a native of Ukraine (Chernovtsy city), author of more than 20 collections, her lyrics were used by an American woman-composer E. Alexander to write “Three Songs” and by German composer G. Grosse-Schware who wrote four pieces for the choir; I. Bachmann (1926–1973) – the winner of three major Austrian awards, author of the libretto for the ballet “Idiot” and opera “The Prince of Hombur”. The composer H. W. Henze, in turn, created music for the play “Cicadas” by I. Bachmann. On this basis, we conclude that women not only successfully engaged in painting, wrote poems and novels, composed music, opened «locked doors», destroyed established stereotypes but were a powerful source of inspiration. Combining the roles of the creator and muse, they helped men reach the greatest heights. Toward the twentieth century, the role of the fair sex representatives in the world of art increased and strengthened significantly, which led Western European culture to a new round of its evolution.
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Ewals, Leo. "Ary Scheffer, een Nederlandse Fransman." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 99, no. 4 (1985): 271–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501785x00134.

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AbstractAry Scheffer (1795-1858) is so generally included in the French School (Note 2)- unsurprisingly, since his career was confined almost entirely to Paris - that the fact that he was born and partly trained in the Netherlands is often overlooked. Yet throughout his life he kept in touch with Dutch colleagues and drew part of his inspiration from Dutch traditions. These Dutch aspects are the subject of this article. The Amsterdam City Academy, 1806-9 Ary Scheffer was enrolled at the Amsterdam Academy on 25 October 1806, his parents falsifying his date of birth in order to get him admitted at the age of eleven (fifteen was the oficial age) . He started in the third class and in order to qualify for the second he had to be one of the winners in the prize drawing contest. Candidates in this were required to submit six drawings made during the months January to March. Although no-one was supposed to enter until he had been at the Academy for four years, Ary Scheffer competed in both 1808 and 1809. Some of his signed drawings are preserved in Dordrecht. (Figs. 1-5 and 7), along with others not made for the contest. These last in particular are interesting not only because they reveal his first prowess, but also because they give some idea of the Academy practice of his day. Although the training at the Academy broadly followed the same lines as that customary in France, Italy and elsewhere (Note 4), our knowledge of its precise content is very patchy, since there was no set curriculum and no separate teachers for each subject. Two of Scheffer's drawings (Figs. 2 and 3) contain extensive notes, which amount to a more or less complete doctrine of proportion. It is not known who his teacher was or what sources were used, but the proportions do not agree with those in Van der Passe's handbook, which came into vogue in the 18th century, or with those of the canon of a Leonardo, Dürer or Lebrun. One gets the impression that what are given here are the exact measurements of a concrete example. Scheffer's drawings show him gradually mastering the rudiments of art. In earlier examples the hatching is sometimes too hasty (Fig. 4) or too rigidly parallel (Fig.5), while his knowledge of anatomy is still inadequate and his observation not careful enough. But right from the start he shows flair and as early as 1807 he made a clever drawing of a relatively complex group (Fig. 6) , while the difficult figure of Marsyas was already well captured in 1808 and clearly evinces his growing knowledge o f anatomy, proportion , foreshortening and the effects of light (Fig. 7). The same development can be observed in his portrait drawings. That of Gerardus Vrolik (1775-1859, Fig.8), a professor at the Atheneum Illustre (the future university) and Scheffer' s teacher, with whom he always kept in touch (Note 6), is still not entirely convincing, but a portrait of 1809, thought to be of his mother (Fig.9, Note 7), shows him working much more systematically. It is not known when he left the Academy, but from the summer of 1809 we find him in France, where he was to live with only a few breaks from 1811 to his death. The first paintings and the Amsterdam exhibitions of 1808 and 1810 Ary Scheffer's earliest known history painting, Hannibal Swearing to Avenge his Brother Hasdrubal's Death (Fig. 10) Notes 8-10) was shown at the first exhibition of living masters in Amsterdam in 1808. Although there was every reason for giving this subject a Neo-Classical treatment, the chiaroscuro, earthy colours and free brushwork show Scheffer opting for the old Dutch tradition rather than the modern French style. This was doubtless on the prompting of his parents,for a comment in a letter from his mother in 1810 (Note 12) indicates that she shared the reservations of the Dutch in general about French Neo-Classicism. (Note 11). As the work of a twelve to thirteen year old, the painting naturally leaves something to be desired: the composition is too crowded and unbalanced and the anatomy of the secondary figures rudimentary. In a watercolour Scheffer made of the same subject, probably in the 1820's, he introduced much more space between the figures (Fig. 11, Note 13). Two portraits are known from this early period. The first, of Johanna Maria Verbeek (Fig. 12, Note 14), was done when the two youngsters were aged twelve. It again shows all the characteristics of an early work, being schematic in its simplicity, with some rather awkward details and inadequate plasticity. On the other hand the hair and earrings are fluently rendered, the colours harmonious and the picture has an undeniable charm. At the second exhibition of works by living masters in 1810, Ary Scheffer showed a 'portrait of a painter' (Fig. 13), who was undoubtedly his uncle Arnoldus Lamme, who also had work in the exhibition as did Scheffer's recently deceased father Johan-Bernard and his mother Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme, an indication of the stimulating surroundings in which he grew up. The work attracted general attention (Note 16) and it does, indeed, show a remarkable amount of progress, the plasticity, effects of light, brushwork and colour all revealing skill and care in their execution. The simple, bourgeois character of the portrait not only fits in with the Dutch tradition which Scheffer had learned from both his parents in Amsterdam, but also has points in common with the recent developments in France, which he could have got to know during his spell in Lille from autumn 1809 onwards. A Dutchman in Paris Empire and Restoration, 1811-30 In Amsterdam Scheffer had also been laught by his mother, a miniature painter, and his father, a portrait and history painter (Note 17). After his father's death in June 1809, his mother, who not only had a great influence on his artistic career, but also gave his Calvinism and a great love of literature (Note 18), wanted him to finish his training in Paris. After getting the promise of a royal grant from Louis Napoleon for this (Note 19) and while waiting for it to materialize, she sent the boy to Lille to perfect his French as well as further his artistic training. In 1811 Scheffer settled in Paris without a royal grant or any hope of one. He may possibly have studied for a short time under Prudhon (Note 20) , but in the autumn of 1811 he was officially contracted as a pupil of Guérin, one of the leading artists of the school of David, under whom he mastered the formulas of NeD-Classicism, witness his Orpheus and Eurydice (Fïg.14), shown in the Salon of 1814. During his first ten years in Paris Scheffer also painted many genre pieces in order, so he said, to earn a living for himself and his mother. Guérin's prophecy that he would make a great career as a history painter (Note 21) soon came true, but not in the way Guérin thought it would, Scheffer participating in the revolution initiated by his friends and fellow-pupils, Géricault and Delacroix, which resulted in the rise of the Romantic Movement. It was not very difficult for him to break with Neo-Classicism, for with his Dutch background he felt no great affinity with it (Note 22). This development is ilustrated by his Gaston de Foix Dying on the Battlefield After his Victory at Ravenna, shown at the Salon of 1824, and The Women of Souli Throwing Themselves into the Abyss (Fig.15), shown at that of 1827-8. The last years of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Influence of Rembrandt and the Dutch masters In 1829, when he seemed to have become completely assimilated in France and had won wide renown, Scheffer took the remarkable step of returning to the Netherlands to study the methods of Rembrandt and other Dutch old masters (Note 23) . A new orientation in his work is already apparent in the Women of Souli, which is more harmonious and considered in colour than the Gaston dc Foix (Note 24). This is linked on the one hand to developments in France, where numbers of young painters had abandoned extreme Romanticism to find the 'juste milieu', and on the other to Scheffer's Dutch background. Dutch critics were just as wary of French Romanticism as they had been of Neo-Classicism, urging their own painters to revive the traditions of the Golden Age and praising the French painters of the 'juste milieu'. It is notable how many critics commented on the influence of Rembrandt on Scheffer's works, e.g. his Faust, Marguérite, Tempête and portrait of Talleyrand at the Salon of 1851 (Note 26). The last two of these date from 1828 and show that the reorientation and the interest in Rembrandt predate and were the reasons for the return to the Netherlands in 1829. In 1834 Gustave Planche called Le Larmoyeur (Fig. 16) a pastiche of Rembrandt and A. Barbier made a comparable comment on Le Roi de Thule in 1839 (Note 27). However, as Paul Mantz already noted in 1850 (Note 28), Scheffer certainly did not fully adopt Rembrandt's relief and mystic light. His approach was rather an eclectic one and he also often imbued his work with a characteristically 19th-century melancholy. He himself wrote after another visit to the Netherlands in 1849 that he felt he had touched a chord which others had not attempted (Note 29) . Contacts with Dutch artists and writers Scheffer's links with the Netherlands come out equally or even more strongly in the many contacts he maintained there. As early as 1811-12 Sminck-Pitloo visited him on his way to Rome (Note 30), to be followed in the 1820's by J.C. Schotel (Note 31), while after 1830 as his fame increased, so the contacts also became more numerous. He was sought after by and corresponded with various art dealers (Note 33) and also a large number of Dutch painters, who visited him in Paris or came to study under him (Note 32) Numerous poems were published on paintings by him from 1838 onwards, while Jan Wap and Alexander Ver Huell wrote at length about their visits to him (Note 34) and a 'Scheffer Album' was compiled in 1859. Thus he clearly played a significant role in the artistic life of the Netherlands. International orientation As the son of a Dutch mother and a German father, Scheffer had an international orientation right from the start. Contemporary critics and later writers have pointed out the influences from English portrait painting and German religious painting detectable in his work (Note 35). Extracts from various unpublished letters quoted here reveal how acutely aware he was of what was likely to go down well not only in the Netherlands, but also in a country like England, where he enjoyed great fame (Notes 36-9) . July Monarchy and Second Empire. The last decades While most French artists of his generation seemed to have found their definitive style under the July Monarchy, Scheffer continued to search for new forms of expression. In the 1830's, at the same time as he painted his Rembrandtesque works, he also produced his famous Francesca da Rimini (Fig. 17), which is closer to the 'juste milieu' in its dark colours and linear accents. In the 1840's he used a simple and mainly bright palette without any picturesque effects, e.g. in his SS. Augustine and Monica and The Sorrows of the Earth (Note 41), but even this was not his last word. In an incident that must have occurred around 1857 he cried out on coming across some of his earlier works that he had made a mistake since then and wasted his time (Note 42) and in his Calvin of 1858 (Fig. 18) he resumed his former soft chiaroscuro and warm tones. It is characteristic of him that in that same year he painted a last version of The Sorrows of the Earth in the light palette of the 1840's. Despite the difficulty involved in the precise assessment of influences on a painter with such a complex background, it is clear that even in his later period, when his work scored its greatest successes in France, England and Germany, Scheffer always had a strong bond with the Netherlands and that he not only contributed to the artistic life there, but always retained a feeling for the traditions of his first fatherland. Appendix An appendix is devoted to a study of the head of an old man in Dordrecht, which is catalogued as a copy of a 17th-century painting in the style of Rembrandt done by Ary Scheffer at the age of twelve (Fig.19, Note 43). This cannot be correct, as it is much better than the other works by the twelve-year-old painter. Moreover, no mention is made of it in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1859, where the Hannibal is given as his earliest work (Note 44). It was clearly unknown then, as it is not mentioned in any of the obituaries of 1858 and 1859 either. The earliest reference to it occurs in the list made bv Scheffer's daughter in 1897 of the works she was to bequeath to the Dordrecht museum. A clue to its identification may be a closely similar drawing by Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme (Fig. 20, Note 46), which is probably a copy after the head of the old man. She is known to have made copies after contemporary and 17th-century masters. The portrait might thus be attributable to Johan-Bernard Scheffer, for his wife often made copies of his works and he is known from sale catalogues to have painted various portraits of old men (Note 47, cf. Fig.21). Ary Scheffer also knew this. In 1839 his uncle Arnoldus Lamme wrote to him that he would look out for such a work at a sale (Note 48). It may be that he succeeded in finding one and that this portrait came into the possession of the Scheffer family in that way, but Johan-Bernard's work is too little known for us to be certain about this.
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Sheridan, Alison, Jane O'Sullivan, Josie Fisher, Kerry Dunne, and Wendy Beck. "Escaping from the City Means More than a Cheap House and a 10-Minute Commute." M/C Journal 22, no. 3 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1525.

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IntroductionWe five friends clinked glasses in our favourite wine and cocktail bar, and considered our next collaborative writing project. We had seen M/C Journal’s call for articles for a special issue on ‘regional’ and when one of us mentioned the television program, Escape from the City, we began our critique:“They haven’t featured Armidale yet, but wouldn’t it be great if they did?”“Really? I mean, some say any publicity is good publicity but the few early episodes I’ve viewed seem to give little or no screen time to the sorts of lifestyle features I most value in our town.”“Well, seeing as we all moved here from the city ages ago, let’s talk about what made us stay?”We had found our next project.A currently popular lifestyle television show (Escape from the City) on Australia’s national public service broadcaster, the ABC, highlights the limitations of popular cultural representations of life in a regional centre. The program is targeted at viewers interested in relocating to regional Australia. As Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly note, popular television is an important entry point into the construction of public knowledge as well as a launching point for viewers as they seek additional information (65). In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of ‘reality’, televisual texts offer a significant insight into our understandings and expectations of what is going on around us. Similar to the concerns raised by Esther Peeren and Irina Souch in their analysis of the popular TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (a version set in the Netherlands from 2004–present), we worry that these shows “prevent important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood” (37) by the viewers, and do a disservice to regional communities.For the purposes of this article, we interrogate the episodes of Escape from the City screened to date in terms of the impact they may have on promoting regional Australia and speculate on how satisfied (or otherwise) we would be should the producers direct their lens onto our regional community—Armidale, in northern NSW. We start with a brief précis of Escape from the City and then, applying an autoethnographic approach (Butz and Besio) focusing on our subjective experiences, we share our reflections on living in Armidale. We blend our academic knowledge and knowledge of everyday life (Klevan et al.) to argue there is greater cultural diversity, complexity, and value in being in the natural landscape in regional areas than is portrayed in these representations of country life that largely focus on cheaper real estate and a five-minute commute.We employ an autoethnographic approach because it emphasises the socially and politically constituted nature of knowledge claims and allows us to focus on our own lives as a way of understanding larger social phenomena. We recognise there is a vast literature on lifestyle programs and there are many different approaches scholars can take to these. Some focus on the intention of the program, for example “the promotion of neoliberal citizenship through home investment” (White 578), while others focus on the supposed effect on audiences (Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak). Here we only assert the effects on ourselves. We have chosen to blend our voices (Gilmore et al.) in developing our arguments, highlighting our single voices where our individual experiences are drawn on, as we argue for an alternative representation of regional life than currently portrayed in the regional ‘escapes’ of this mainstream lifestyle television program.Lifestyle TelevisionEscape from the City is one of the ‘lifestyle’ series listed on the ABC iview website under the category of ‘Regional Australia’. Promotional details describe Escape from the City as a lifestyle series of 56-minute episodes in which home seekers are guided through “the trials and tribulations of their life-changing decision to escape the city” (iview).Escape from the City is an example of format television, a term used to describe programs that retain the structure and style of those produced in another country but change the circumstances to suit the new cultural context. The original BBC format is entitled Escape to the Country and has been running since 2002. The reach of lifestyle television is extensive, with the number of programs growing rapidly since 2000, not just in the United Kingdom, but internationally (Hill; Collins). In Australia, they have completed, but not yet screened, 60 episodes of Escape from the City. However, with such popularity comes great potential to influence audiences and we argue this program warrants critical attention.Like House Hunters, the United States lifestyle television show (running since 1997), Escape from the City follows “a strict formula” (Loof 168). Each episode uses the same narrative format, beginning with an introduction to the team of experts, then introducing the prospective house buyers, briefly characterising their reasons for leaving the city and what they are looking for in their new life. After this, we are shown a map of the region and the program follows the ‘escapees’ as they view four pre-selected houses. As we leave each property, the cost and features are reiterated in the written template on the screen. We, the audience, wait in anticipation for their final decision.The focus of Escape from the City is the buying of the house: the program’s team of experts is there to help the potential ‘escapees’ find the real estate gem. Real estate value for money emerges as the primary concern, while the promise of finding a ‘life less ordinary’ as highlighted in the opening credits of the program each week, seems to fall by the wayside. Indeed, the representation of regional centres is not nuanced but limited by the emphasis placed on economics over the social and cultural.The intended move of the ‘escapees’ is invariably portrayed as motivated by disenchantment with city life. Clearly a bigger house and a smaller mortgage also has its hedonistic side. In her study of Western society represented in lifestyle shows, Lyn Thomas lists some of the negative aspects of city life as “high speed, work-dominated, consumerist” (680), along with pollution and other associated health risks. While these are mentioned in Escape from the City, Thomas’s list of the pleasures afforded by a simpler country life including space for human connection and spirituality, is not explored to any satisfying extent. Further, as a launching point for viewers in the city (Boyle and Kelly), we fear the singular focus on the price of real estate reinforces a sense of the rural as devoid of creative arts and cultural diversity with a focus on the productive, rather than the natural, landscape. Such a focus does not encourage a desire to find out more and undersells the richness of our (regional) lives.As Australian regional centres strive to circumvent or halt the negative impacts of the drift in population to the cities (Chan), lifestyle programs are important ‘make or break’ narratives, shaping the appeal and bolstering—or not—a decision to relocate. With their focus on cheaper real estate prices and the freeing up of the assets of the ‘escapees’ that a move to the country may entail, the representation is so focused on the economics that it is almost placeless. While the format includes a map of the regional location, there is little sense of being in the place. Such a limited representation does not do justice to the richness of regional lives as we have experienced them.Our TownLike so many regional centres, Armidale has much to offer and is seeking to grow (Armidale Regional Council). The challenges regional communities face in sustaining their communities is well captured in Gabriele Chan’s account of the city-country divide (Chan) and Armidale, with its population of about 25,000, is no exception. Escape from the City fails to emphasise cultural diversity and richness, yet this is what characterises our experience of our regional city. As long-term and satisfied residents of Armidale, who are keenly aware of the persuasive power of popular cultural representations (O’Sullivan and Sheridan; Sheridan and O’Sullivan), we are concerned about the trivialising or reductive manner in which regional Australia is portrayed.While we acknowledge there has not been an episode of Escape from the City featuring Armidale, if the characterisation of another, although larger, regional centre, Toowoomba, is anything to go by, our worst fears may be realised if our town is to feature in the future. Toowoomba is depicted as rural landscapes, ‘elegant’ buildings, a garden festival (the “Carnival of the Flowers”) and the town’s history as home of the Southern Cross windmill and the iconic lamington sponge. The episode features an old shearing shed and a stock whip demonstration, but makes no mention of the arts, or of the University that has been there since 1967. Summing up Toowoomba, the voiceover describes it as “an understated and peaceful place to live,” and provides “an attractive alternative” to city life, substantiated by a favourable comparison of median real estate prices.Below we share our individual responses to the question raised in our opening conversation about the limitations of Escape from the City: What have we come to value about our own town since escaping from city life?Jane: The aspects of life in Armidale I most enjoy are, at least in part, associated with or influenced by the fact that this is a centre for education and a ‘university town’. As such, there is access to an academic library and an excellent town library. The presence of the University of New England, along with independent and public schools, and TAFE, makes education a major employer, attracting a significant student population, and is a major factor in Armidale being one of the first towns in the roll-out of the NBN/high-speed broadband. University staff and students may also account for the thriving cafe culture, along with designer breweries/bars, art house cinema screenings, and a lively classical and popular music scene. Surely the presence of a university and associated spin-offs would deserve coverage in a prospective episode about Armidale.Alison: Having grown up in the city, and now having lived more than half my life in an inner-regional country town, I don’t feel I am missing out ‘culturally’ from this decision. Within our town, there is a vibrant arts community, with the regional gallery and two local galleries holding regular art exhibitions, theatre at a range of venues, and book launches at our lively local book store. And when my children were younger, there was no shortage of sporting events they could be involved with. Encountering friends and familiar faces regularly at these events adds to my sense of belonging to my community. The richness of this life does not make it to the television screen in episodes of Escape from the City.Kerry: I greatly value the Armidale community’s strong social conscience. There are many examples of successful programs to support diverse groups. Armidale Sanctuary and Humanitarian Settlement sponsored South Sudanese refugees for many years and is currently assisting Ezidi refugees. In addition to the core Sanctuary committee, many in the local community help families with developing English skills, negotiating daily life, such as reading and responding to school notes and medical questionnaires. The Backtrack program assists troubled Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. The program helps kids “to navigate their relationships, deal with personal trauma, take responsibility […] gain skills […] so they can eventually create a sustainable future for themselves.” The documentary film Backtrack Boys shows what can be achieved by individuals with the support of the community. Missing from Escape from the City is recognition of the indigenous experience and history in regional communities, unlike the BBC’s ‘original’ program in which medieval history and Vikings often get a ‘guernsey’. The 1838 Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people, led to the first prosecution and conviction of a European for killing Aboriginals. Members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community in Armidale are now active in acknowledging the past wrongs and beginning the process of reconciliation.Josie: About 10am on a recent Saturday morning I was walking from the car park to the shopping complex. Coming down the escalator and in the vestibule, there were about thirty people and it occurred to me that there were at least six nationalities represented, with some of the people wearing traditional dress. It also struck me that this is not unusual—we are a diverse community as a result of our history and being a ‘university city’. The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place was established in 1988 and is being extended in 2019. Diversity is apparent in cultural activities such as an international film festival held annually and many of the regular musical events and stalls at the farmers’ market increasingly reflect the cultural mix of our town. As a long-term resident, I appreciate the lifestyle here.Wendy: It is early morning and I am walking in a forest of tall trees, with just the sounds of cattle and black cockatoos. I travel along winding pathways with mossy boulders and creeks dry with drought. My dog barks at rabbits and ‘roos, and noses through the nooks and crannies of the hillside. In this public park on the outskirts of town, I can walk for two hours without seeing another person, or I can be part of a dog-walking pack. The light is grey and misty now, the ranges blue and dark green, but I feel peaceful and content. I came here from the city 30 years ago and hated it at first! But now I relish the way I can be at home in 10 minutes after starting the day in the midst of nature and feeling part of the landscape, not just a tourist—never a possibility in the city. I can watch the seasons and the animals as they come and go and be part of a community which is part of the landscape too. For me, the first verse of South of My Days, written by a ‘local’ describing our New England environment, captures this well:South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapplebranching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. (Wright 20)Whilst our autoethnographic reflections may not reach the heady heights of Judith Wright, they nevertheless reflect the experience of living in, not just escaping to the country. We are disappointed that the breadth of cultural activities and the sense of diversity and community that our stories evoke are absent from the representations of regional communities in Escape from the City.Kate Oakley and Jonathon Ward argue that ‘visions of the good life’, in particular cultural life in the regions, need to be supported by policy which encourages a sustainable prosperity characterised by both economic and cultural development. Escape from the City, however, dwells on the material aspects of consumption—good house prices and the possibility of a private enterprise—almost to the exclusion of any coverage of the creative cultural features.We recognise that the lifestyle genre requires simplification for viewers to digest. What we are challenging is the sense that emerges from the repetitive format week after week whereby differences between places are lost (White 580). Instead what is conveyed in Escape from the City is that regions are homogenous and monocultural. We would like to see more screen time devoted to the social and cultural aspects of the individual locations.ConclusionWe believe coverage of a far richer and more complex nature of rural life would provide a more ‘realistic’ preview of what could be ahead for the ‘escapees’ and perhaps swing the decision to relocate. Certainly, there is some evidence that viewers gain information from lifestyle programs (Hill 106). We are concerned that a lifestyle television program that purports to provide expert advice on the benefits and possible pitfalls of a possible move to the country should be as accurate and all-encompassing as possible within the constraints of the length of the program and the genre.So, returning to what may appear to have been a light-hearted exchange between us at our local bar, and given the above discussion, we argue that television is a powerful medium. We conclude that a popular lifestyle television program such as Escape from the City has an impact on a large viewing audience. For those city-based viewers watching, the message is that moving to the country is an economic ‘no brainer’, whereas the social and cultural dimensions of regional communities, which we posit have sustained our lives, are overlooked. Such texts influence viewers’ perceptions and expectations of what escaping to the country may entail. Escape from the City exploits regional towns as subject matter for a lifestyle program but does not significantly challenge stereotypical representations of country life or does not fully flesh out what escaping to the country may achieve.ReferencesArmidale Regional Council. Community Strategic Plan 2017–2027. Armidale: Armidale Regional Council, 2017.“Backtrack Boys.” Dir. Catherine Scott. Sydney: Umbrella Entertainment, 2018.Boyle, Raymond, and Lisa W. Kelly. “Television, Business Entertainment and Civic Culture.” Television and New Media 14.1 (2013): 62–70.Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3.5 (2009): 1660–74.Chan, Gabrielle. Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up. Australia: Vintage, 2018.Collins, Megan. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory: The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television. Routledge, 2018.Gilmore, Sarah, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin, and Alison Pullen. “Writing Differently.” Management Learning 50.1 (2019): 3–10.Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge, 2004.iview. “Escape from the City.” Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019.Klevan, Trude, Bengt Karlsson, Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, and Alec Grant. “‘Aha! ‘Take on Me’s’: Bridging the North Sea with Relational Autoethnography.” Qualitative Research Journal 18.4 (2018): 330–44.Loof, Travis. “A Narrative Criticism of Lifestyle Reality Programs.” Journal of Media Critiques 1.5 (2015): 167–78.O’Sullivan, Jane, and Alison Sheridan. “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill.” Gender, Work and Organization 12.4 (2005): 299–318.Oakley, Kate, and Jonathon Ward. “The Art of the Good Life: Culture and Sustainable Prosperity.” Cultural Trends 27.1 (2018): 4–17.Peeren, Esther, and Irina Souch. “Romance in the Cowshed: Challenging and Reaffirming the Rural Idyll in the Dutch Reality TV Show Farmer Wants a Wife.” Journal of Rural Studies 67.1 (2019): 37–45.Sheridan, Alison, and Jane O’Sullivan. “‘Fact’ and ‘Fiction’: Enlivening Health Care Education.” Journal of Health Orgnaization and Management 27.5 (2013): 561–76.Thomas, Lyn. “Alternative Realities: Downshifting Narratives in Contemporary Lifestyle Television.” Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 680–99.Tsay-Vogel, Mina, and K. Maja Krakowiak. “Exploring Viewers’ Responses to Nine Reality TV Subgenres.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6.4 (2017): 348–60.White, Mimi. “‘A House Divided’.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 575–91.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.
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Irwin, Hannah. "Not of This Earth: Jack the Ripper and the Development of Gothic Whitechapel." M/C Journal 17, no. 4 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.845.

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On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.
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De Vos, Gail. "News and Announcements." Deakin Review of Children's Literature 5, no. 2 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.20361/g2qk5x.

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Autumn is not only a gloriously colourful time of the year, it is a time when a plethora of children’s book related events and awards take place. Just see what is happening in the next few months:IBBY: “Silent Books: Final Destination Lampedusa” travelling exhibit In response to the international refugee crisis that began last year, the Italian arm of the International Board on Books for Young People has launched a travelling picture-book exhibit to support the first children’s library on the island of Lampedusa, Italy where many African and Middle Eastern refugees are landing. After stops in Italy, Mexico, and Austria, the exhibit is currently touring Canada. It premiered in Edmonton at the Stanley A. Milner Library in August. Next are three Vancouver locations: UBC Irving Barber Learning Centre (Oct. 1 to 23), Vancouver Public Library central branch (Oct. 8 to 18), and the Italian Cultural Centre (Oct. 10 to 22). Then the North York Central Library in Toronto from Nov. 2 to Dec 11. Recognizing Lampedusa island’s cultural diversity, the exhibit comprises exclusively wordless picture books from 23 countries, including three from Canada:“Hocus Pocus” by Sylvie Desrosiers & Rémy Simard’s (Kids Can Press), “Ben’s Big Dig” by Daniel Wakeman and Dirk van Stralen’s(Orca Book Publishers)“Ben’s Bunny Trouble” also by Wakeman and van Stralen (Orca Book Publishers). Other books are drawn from an honour list selected by a jury of experts from the 2015 Bologna Children’s Book Fair including Ajubel’s “Robinson Crusoe” (Spain), Ara Jo’s “The Rocket Boy”(Korea), and Madalena Matoso’s “Todos Fazemos Tudo” (Switzerland), among others. The full catalogue can be viewed online.TD Canadian Children’s Book Week.Next year’s TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will take place from May 7-14, 2016. Thirty Canadian children’s authors, illustrators and storytellers will be touring across Canada visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres. Visit the TD Book Week site (www.bookweek.ca) to find out who will be touring in your area and the types of readings and workshops they will be giving. If your school or library is interested in hosting a Book Week visitor, you can apply online starting in mid-October.Shakespeare Selfie CBC Books will once again be running the Shakespeare Selfie writing challenge in April 2016. Shakespeare took selfies all the time but instead of a camera, he used a quill. And instead of calling them "selfies," they were called "soliloquies."The challenge: Write a modern-day soliloquy or monologue by a Shakespearean character based on a prominent news, pop culture or current affairs event from the last year (April 2015-April 2016). It can be in iambic pentameter or modern syntax with a word count from 200 to 400 words. There are two age categories: Grades 7-9 and 10-12. Details at: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/10/the-2016-shakespeare-selfie-writing-challenge-for-students.html Awards:The winners of this year’s Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, celebrating Jewish literature and culture in Canada, have been announced. Amongst the nine awards is one for Youth Literature which was awarded to Suri Rosen for “Playing with Matches” (ECW Press). See all the award winners here: http://www.cjlawards.ca/.The Canadian Children's Book Centre administers several awards including the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. This year’s winners will be announced on November 18, 2015. http://www.bookcentre.ca/awardThe Fitzhenry Family Foundation has revealed the winners of its Lane Anderson Awards for the best Canadian science books published in the previous year. Selections are made based on a title’s pertinence to science in today’s world and the author’s ability to relate scientific issues to everyday life. Prolific Halifax kids’ science writer L.E. Carmichael was awarded the YA prize for “Fuzzy Forensics: DNA Fingerprinting Gets Wild” (Ashby-BP Publishing), about using forensic science to fight crimes against animals. Uxbridge, Ontario–based environmental journalist Stephen Leahy received the adult prize for “Your Water Footprint” (Firefly Books), which examines human usage of the valuable natural resource. http://laneandersonaward.ca/The Edmonton Public Library has named Sigmund Brouwer (author and Rock & Roll Literacy Show host) as the winner (by public vote) of Alberta Reader’s Choice Award. Sigmund’s “Thief of Glory” (WaterBrook Press) is about a young boy trying to take care of his family in the aftermath of the 1942 Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. The prize awards $10,000 to an Alberta-based author of a work of excellent fiction or narrative non-fiction. http://www.epl.ca/alberta-readers-choiceHarperCollins Canada, the Cooke Agency, and the University of British Columbia have announced the shortlist of the annual HarperCollins Publishers/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction awarded to students and alumni of UBC’s creative writing program, and offers the winner literary representation by the Cooke Agency and a publishing contract with HarperCollins Canada.“Between the Wind and Us” by Iranian-Canadian writer Nazanine Hozar, the story of a young abandoned girl set during the political unrest of 1953–1979 Iran.“Learning to Breathe” by B.C.-based Janice Lynn Mather, a young adult novel about a Caribbean teenager’s struggle to establish herself in a new city and home life.“At The Top of the Wall, Alight” by Sudbury, Ontario, author Natalie Morrill, which follows a Viennese Jew separated from his family during the Second World War. An early version of this novel was previously nominated for the award.Novelist and University of Guelph writing professor, Thomas King, and L.A.-based author, graphic novelist, and musician, Cecil Castellucci, have been named winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for excellence in Canadian literature of the fantastic. Castellucci won in the YA category for “Tin Star” (Roaring Brook/Raincoast), the first novel in a planned series about a teenager who struggles to survive parent-less in a space station where she is the only human, and which played scene to a brutal assault that haunts her memory. King won in the adult category for his novel “The Back of the Turtle” (HarperCollins Canada), for which he also received a Copper Cylinder Award from the Sunburst Society last week. The book follows a First Nations scientist who finds himself torn after he’s sent to clean up the ecological mess his company has left on the reserve his family grew up on.Be sure to save October 28th on your calendar for the GG book awards announcement. Of course, “GG” stands for Governor-General. The short lists can be viewed here:http://ggbooks.ca/books/. There are categories in both English and French for both children’s text and illustration books.Online ResourcesPodcast: Yegs and Bacon: Episode 22: the full audio from our recent Indigenous Representation in Popular Culture panel. In the audio, you’ll be hearing from (in order of first vocal appearance) Brandon, who introduces the panelists, James Leask, Richard Van Camp, Kelly Mellings, and Patti Laboucane-Benson. Recorded on Monday, September 28th, 2015. http://variantedmonton.com/category/yegs-and-bacon/European Picture Book Collection: The EPBC was designed to help pupils to find out more about their European neighbours through reading the visual narratives of carefully chosen picture books. Here you can find out about how the project began, the theoretical papers that have been presented on European children's literature, and how the materials were initially used in schools. http://www.ncrcl.ac.uk/epbc/EN/index.aspMore next time around,Yours in stories, Gail de VosGail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.
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Mudie, Ella. "Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition." M/C Journal 20, no. 2 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1219.

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IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.
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De Vos, Gail. "News and Announcements." Deakin Review of Children's Literature 5, no. 3 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.20361/g21300.

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AWARDSSome major international children’s literature awards have just been announced as I compile the news for this issue. Several of these have Canadian connections.2016 ALSC (Association for Library Service to Children) Book & Media Award WinnersJohn Newbery Medal"Last Stop on Market Street,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Christian Robinson and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC Newbery Honor Books"The War that Saved My Life," written by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and published by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC“Roller Girl,” written and illustrated by Victoria Jamieson and published by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC“Echo,” written by Pam Muñoz Ryan and published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.Randolph Caldecott Medal"Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear," illustrated by Sophie Blackall, written by Lindsay Mattick and published by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.Caldecott Honor Books"Trombone Shorty," illustrated by Bryan Collier, written by Troy Andrews and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS“Waiting,” illustrated and written by Kevin Henkes, published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers“Voice of Freedom Fannie Lou Hamer Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,” illustrated by Ekua Holmes, written by Carole Boston Weatherford and published by Candlewick Press“Last Stop on Market Street,” illustrated by Christian Robinson, written by Matt de le Peña and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA) LLC Laura Ingalls Wilder AwardJerry Pinkney -- His award-winning works include “The Lion and the Mouse,” recipient of the Caldecott Award in 2010. In addition, Pinkney has received five Caldecott Honor Awards, five Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, and four Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors. 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture AwardJacqueline Woodson will deliver the 2017 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir, “Brown Girl Dreaming.” Mildred L. Batchelder Award“The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy,” published by Enchanted Lion Books, written and illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna, and translated from the French by Claudia Zoe BedrickBatchelder Honor Books“Adam and Thomas,” published by Seven Stories Press, written by Aharon Appelfeld, iIllustrated by Philippe Dumas and translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green“Grandma Lives in a Perfume Village,” published by NorthSouth Books, an imprint of Nordsüd Verlag AG, written by Fang Suzhen, iIllustrated by Sonja Danowski and translated from the Chinese by Huang Xiumin“Written and Drawn by Henrietta,” published by TOON Books, an imprint of RAW Junior, LLC and written, illustrated, and translated from the Spanish by Liniers.Pura Belpre (Author) Award“Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir," written by Margarita Engle and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing DivisionBelpre (Author) Honor Books"The Smoking Mirror," written by David Bowles and published by IFWG Publishing, Inc."Mango, Abuela, and Me," written by Meg Medina, illustrated by Angela Dominguez and published by Candlewick PressPura Belpre (Illustrator) Award"The Drum Dream Girl," illustrated by Rafael López, written by Margarita Engle and published by Houghton Mifflin HarcourtBelpre (Illustrator) Honor Books"My Tata’s Remedies = Los remedios de mi tata,” iIllustrated by Antonio Castro L., written by Roni Capin Rivera-Ashford and published by Cinco Puntos Press“Mango, Abuela, and Me,” illustrated by Angela Dominguez, written by Meg Medina and published by Candlewick Press“Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras,” illustrated and written by Duncan Tonatiuh and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMSAndrew Carnegie Medal "That Is NOT a Good Idea," produced by Weston Woods Studios, Inc.Theodor Seuss Geisel Award"Don’t Throw It to Mo!" written by David A. Adler, illustrated by Sam Ricks and published by Penguin Young Readers, and imprint of Penguin Group (USA), LLCGeisel Honor Books "A Pig, a Fox, and a Box," written and illustrated by Jonathan Fenske and published by Penguin Young Readers, an Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC"Supertruck," written and illustrated by Stephen Savage and published by A Neal Porter Book published by Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership"Waiting," written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes and published by Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.Odyssey Award"The War that Saved My Life," produced by Listening Library, an imprint of the Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, written by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and narrated by Jayne EntwistleOdyssey Honor Audiobook"Echo," produced by Scholastic Audio / Paul R. Gagne, written by Pam Munoz Ryan and narrated by Mark Bramhall, David De Vries, MacLeod Andrews and Rebecca SolerRobert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal"Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras,” written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMSSibert Honor Books"Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans," written and illustrated by Don Brown and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt"The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club," by Phillip Hoose and published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers"Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March," written by Lynda Blackmon Lowery as told to Elspeth Leacock and Susan Buckley, illustrated by PJ Loughran and published by Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC"Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement," written by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Ekua Holmes and published by Candlewick PressCONFERENCES & EVENTSThis 2016 is shaping up to be a busy year for those of us involved with Canadian children’s literature. To tantalize your appetite (and encourage you to get involved) here are some highlights:January:Vancouver Children’s Literature Roundtable event: A Celebration of BC’s Award Children’s Authors and Illustrators with special guests Rachel Hartman and the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada 2015 Information Book Award winners Margriet Ruurs & Katherine Gibson, January 27, 2016, 7 – 9 pm. Creekside Community Centre, 1 Athletes Way, Vancouver. Free to members and students.April:Wordpower programs from the Young Alberta Book Society feature teams of Albertan children’s literary artists touring to schools in rural areas. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Cenovus Energy, schools unable to book artist visits due to prohibitive travel costs are able to participate.April 4-8: Wordpower South will send 8 artist teams to communities roughly between Drumheller and Medicine Hat. Artists include Karen Bass, Lorna Shultz-Nicholson, Bethany Ellis, Marty Chan, Mary Hays, Sigmund Brouwer, Carolyn Fisher, Natasha DeenApril 25-29: Wordpower North will have a team of 8 artists traveling among communities in north-eastern Alberta such as Fort MacKay, Conklin, Wabasca, Lac La Biche, Cold Lake, and Bonnyville. The artists include Kathy Jessup, Lois Donovan, Deborah Miller, David Poulsen, Gail de Vos, Karen Spafford-Fitz, Hazel Hutchins, Georgia Graham May: COMICS AND CONTEMPORARY LITERACY: May 2, 2016; 8:30am - 4:30pm at the Rozsa Centre, University of Calgary. This is a one day conference featuring presentations and a workshop by leading authors, scholars, and illustrators from the world of comics and graphic novels. This conference is the 5th in the annual 'Linguistic Diversity and Language Policy' series sponsored by the Chair, English as an Additional Language, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Tom Ricento is the current Chair-holder. The conference is free and lunch is provided. Seating is limited, so register early. The four presenters are:Jillian Tamaki, illustrator for This One Summer, and winner of the Governor General's Award for children's illustration.Richard van Camp, best-selling author of The Lesser Blessed and Three Feathers, and member of the Dogrib Nation.Dr. Nick Sousanis, post-doctoral scholar, teacher and creator of the philosophical comic Unflattening.Dr. Bart Beaty, University of Calgary professor, acclaimed comics scholar and author of Comics vs. Art TD Canadian Children’s Book Week 2016. In 2016, the Canadian Children's Book Centre celebrates 40 years of bringing great Canadian children's books to young readers across the country and the annual TD Canadian Children’s Book Week will be occurring this May across Canada. The theme this year is the celebration of these 40 years of great books written, illustrated and published in Canada as well as stories that have been told over the years. The 2016 tour of storytellers, authors and illustrators and their area of travel are as follows:Alberta: Bob Graham, storyteller; Kate Jaimet, authorBritish Columbia (Interior region) Lisa Dalrymple, author; (Lower Mainland region) Graham Ross, illustrator; (Vancouver Island region) Wesley King, author; (Northern region, Rebecca Bender, author & illustrator.Manitoba: Angela Misri, author; Allison Van Diepen, authorNew Brunswick: Mary Ann Lippiatt, storytellerNewfoundland: Maureen Fergus, authorLabrador: Sharon Jennings, authorNorthwest Territories: Geneviève Després, illustratorNova Scotia: Judith Graves, authorNunavut: Gabrielle Grimard, illustratorOntario: Karen Autio, author; Marty Chan, author; Danika Dinsmore, author; Kallie George, author; Doretta Groenendyk, author & illustrator; Alison Hughes, author; Margriet Ruurs, author.Prince Edward Island: Wallace Edwards, author & illustratorQuebec (English-language tour): LM Falcone, author; Simon Rose, author; Kean Soo, author & illustrator; Robin Stevenson, author; and Tiffany Stone, author/poet.Saskatchewan: (Saskatoon and northern area) Donna Dudinsky, storyteller; (Moose Jaw/Regina and southern area) Sarah Ellis, authorYukon: Vicki Grant, author-----Gail de Vos is an adjunct professor who teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, young adult literature, and comic books & graphic novels at the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta. She is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. Gail is also a professional storyteller who has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.
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Vinai, Maya. "“We live and love on a fissure”: an Interview with author Jerry Pinto." Writers in Conversation 6, no. 1 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.22356/wic.v6i1.38.

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Jerry Pinto is one of India’s most prominent names in literature; equally appropriated and applauded by staunch critics and connoisseurs. Apart from being an author, he has worked as a journalist and as a faculty member in his native city of Mumbai. Apart from his fiction, non-fiction, poems and memoir, he has written books for children and has put together some very well-received anthologies. Jerry Pinto’s works have won him a plethora of accolades. His first novel, Em and the Big Hoom (2012) was awarded India’s highest honour from the Academy of Letters, the Sahitya Akademi, for a novel in English; the Windham-Campbell Prize supervised by the Beinecke Library, Yale, USA; the Hindu ‘Lit for Life’ Award, and the Crossword Award for fiction. Helen: the Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb (2006) won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema. His translations from Marathi of Mallika Amar Sheikh’s autobiography I Want to Destroy Myself was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Fiction. Furthermore, his graphic novel in collaboration with Garima Gupta was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Children’s Fiction. His translation of the Dalit writer Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste won the Fiction Prize at the Bangalore Literary Festival in 2018 and his novel Murder in Mahim (2017) won the Valley of Words Prize, and was shortlisted for the Crossword Award for Fiction and the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image Prize.But there was a time when he feared rejection. In this interview Jerry Pinto touches on various issues, revealing the story of how he became a writer, a career option which wasn’t then recognised as a very reliable job prospect in India. He also discusses his social engagements and his connection with the city of his birth, Mumbai.
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49

Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress." M/C Journal 8, no. 2 (2005). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2345.

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 From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. 
 
 
 
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Stafford, Paul Edgerton. "The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s." M/C Journal 21, no. 5 (2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1471.

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Abstract:
IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. 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New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.
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