Bohaterowie historyczni w literaturze dla dzieci na przykładzie wybranych władców z dynastii Jagiellonów w twórczości Grażyny Bąkiewicz

The Midrashic Impulse

Not enough critical and creative work focuses on fat bodies and expansive fat presence in contemporary literature by Indigenous people. In the personal narrative “Desirability as Access: Navigating life at the intersection of fat, Black, dark and female” from The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, after sharing the joys and pains of her lived experiences, Nomonde Mxhalisa surmises: “You have to believe in your own magic; in your own wildness; in your own wanton wonderfulness” (2021, p. 209). Drawing on Mxhalisa’s first-person call for “magic, wildness and wanton wonderfulness,” this essay reads Indigenous fatness through personal narratives of fat, Indigenous expression regarding the textile banner “WHENUA” by Marama Salsano (Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Wairere). The essay then traces fatness and defiance in the poem “Fat Queer Colony” by Andrew Farrell (Wodi Wodi) and in the poem “Big Fat Brown Bitch 1” from the collection Big Fat Brown Bitch by Samoan writer Tusiata Avia, before contemplating human and beyond-human fat presence in the short story “Maggie Sue” by Chelsea Vowel (Métis). By bringing together contemporary Indigenous literature in different literary forms from across the world, this essay celebrates the “magic, wild, wanton wonderfulness” of expansive fatness, and simultaneously seeks to expand the waistline of critical and creative writing about fat Indigenous bodies in creative and literary studies.

The article reviews the image of a rural man in the Lithuanian literature and photography of the 20th century and contemporary times, explains how artistic images correlate with changes in the meaning and connotation of words designating a rural man. There is no doubt that the connotation of a person’s naming has one or another influence on his image in verbal and visual creation, and the paintings in turn support the different connotations of that naming.The village and a rural man have been depicted in Lithuanian literature since Kristijonas Donelaitis “Metai” (“Seasons”). The theme of rural aestheticization, making rural everyday life poetic, and the exaltation of the land and folk language comes from a romantic tradition. According to literary researchers, in the 19th century literature, the village was perceived as the only basis of Lithuanianness, and the rural man – as the equivalent of Lithuanianness. The village as a house of the spirit of the Lithuanian language is also raised in contemporary Lithuanian poetry and prose. It is no coincidence that the idea of Vaižgantas short story about the (in)ability to see and listen to the rich world of the rural human spirit “Akylasis būtų įspėjęs jame didžiulę inteligenciją, tik nebuvo kas įspėja” (A vigilant one would have noticed a great intelligence in it, only there was no one who could notice) can be seen in the novel by Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė “sielos šviesa, besismelkianti pro bukinantį skurdą ir nuovargį, – tokia menkutė, kad reikia mokytis ją atpažinti” (the light of the soul, seeping through the fading poverty and fatigue, is so small that one must learn to recognize it). In contemporary literature, quite a number of dark colours of the village and the rural man, sometimes obvious irony, ridicule are found. The texts of postmodern literature do not avoid depicting the village drastically, sarcastically, it is described by vulgar contemptuous neologisms (for example, “šūdkaimis” [shitty-village] by Aidas Jurašius). Thus, it can be stated that the depiction of the village and the rural man in contemporary Lithuanian literature corresponds to the diversifying connotation of the rural man in the current Lithuanian language and in the expression of other style texts.Rural photography in Lithuania has been for more than a hundred years; the rural photography of our country of the late 20th–early 21st century is also diverse. Some photographers, as typical of the Lithuanian photography tradition, refer more to the romanticization of rural man and rural life (e.g. Romualdas Rakauskas, Arūnas Baltėnas, Tadas Kazakevičius), others emphasize the diversity and polyphony of the village (brothers Mindaugas and Algimantas Černiauskai), and some photographers depict “the tired village”, the bottom of the village (Rimaldas Vikšraitis is especially prominent in this respect). The theme of saying farewell to agrarian culture, which has become entrenched in Lithuanian literature in the second half of the 20th century, is also being developed in photography (for example, a cycle “Tai, ko nebebus” (“What Will No Longer Be There”) by T. Kazakevičius). Photographers are resistant to spread of the negative, derogatory connotation of the rural man in the urban discourse, they rely on the cognition of the village, the feeling and reflection of its life, not on the stereotypes created by the urban culture.

This research is aimed at finding out the improving students’ ability in reading texts by using short story at the eight grade students of MTs. AL-Madani Pelulan The kind of the research is an experimental research. The population of this research is 54 students of the eight grade students of MTs. ALMadani Pelulan in which all of it as sample and divided into two groups that are XIIIA as experimental group and XIIIB as control group. The experimental group is taught by using short story as instrument and the control group is taught without short story or based on real object. The techniques of collecting data use multiple choise. The data collected were analyzed statistically by using t-test formula. The result of statistical analysis of t-test it was 3,13 which was higher than the critical value of t-table, it was 2,006 (0.05) and 1,675 (0.01). It means that t-test is higher than ttable in 0.05% of significance level and 52 of degree of freedom. Thus, it can concluded that the use of short story as media to improve students’ ability in reading text is enough interesting to apply in teaching reading texts. It means the alternative hypothesis (Ha) was accepted and the null hypothesis (Ho) was rejected.

Tamil society is considered to be one of the oldest societies. Various problems like caste and economic inequalities along with gender differences exist in this society. Among these, gender inequality serves as a subject of debate till date. In society, women are not treated equally. In areas such as education, employment and marriage, women are treated poorly as compared to men. This inequality appears in different manners at different stages in time. Contemporary literature is written to show antagonism to this inequality. Particularly, short stories play a vital role in delineating these differences. Short story writer S. Ramakrishnan has given centre stage to the day-to-day problems faced by women in his short stories. The female characters portrayed in his stories struggle to establish their equality in spite of the troubles life throws at them. From his collection of short stories named Avalathu Veedu, two stories Avalathu Veedu and Embaavai are taken as primary sources for this research article. This article analyses the psychology of two female characters, Agalya and Nanmathi, who represent the main characters of the selected short stories. The social change represented from their psychological characteristics is also discussed. The principles of psychological defence mechanism is used to analyse the characteristics of these female characters.

In this article I propose a close reading of Yūsuf Idrīs’ short story Abū ar-riǧāl . This text, published by the Egyptian author in 1988, addresses issues of homosexuality as opposed to the idea of masculinity prevailing in the social and political discourse of the Eighties in Egypt. Homosexuality is not a new subject in Arabic literature. It is in fact present in the literary production in the Arabic language since the Classical Age, and several homosexual characters can be noticed in modern and contemporary literature. The difference stands in presenting homosexuality without censorship or moral judgment, and above all masculinity is conceived by parameters, which are others in respect to those of the state discourse. When the short story was published, it passed almost unnoticed by the Arab reading public while scholars in the West did not discuss the issue at the core of it. Nowadays, when a lot of novels and short stories by Arab women and men writers propose the homosexual character anew, Abū ar-riǧāl testifies the presence of different point of views in the Arabic literature.

Beginning as a poet and a critic of poetry, I wrote my dissertation on William Carlos Williams. It was a great way to begin an academic career since Williams himself never stayed in the poetry lane. His novels were the sites of continuous experimentation (The Great American Novel, White Mule). So, too, were his “mixed form” texts: In the American Grain, Spring and All, Paterson, and the late long poems. Throughout his life, Williams was a true innovator of forms.His short stories were the paring down of speech as he heard it; they were instrumental in creating a new American story. In fact, Williams recognized how important what he had done in writing short fiction was. Invited to the University of Washington in the year following the first of his major strokes, he wrote his highly significant essay about the story as a form. Privileging American speech as he customarily did, Williams showed ways of collapsing the scaffolding of traditional fiction so that characters’ language became the heart of a work. He maintains in his 1949 essay “A Beginning on the Short Story” that “the principal feature of the short story is that it is short—and so must pack in what it has to say…. It seems to me a good medium for nailing down a single conviction. Emotionally.”He references Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and some Poe stories. But rather than discussing them, he jumps ahead with this warning: “You can’t ‘learn’ to write a short story—either from Du Maupassant or Henry James. All you can learn is what Du M. or H. J. did. Every writer must find his or her own form.” He continues, “it isn’t a snippet from the newspaper. It isn’t realism. It is, as in all forms of art, taking the materials of every day and using them to raise the consciousness of our lives to higher aesthetic and moral levels by the use of the art.” Williams spends some time discussing the writer’s mind and his or her imagination. The beginning of a work of fiction is not necessarily unique or even artistic. He says that the short story uses the same materials as newsprint, the same dregs…. What the newspaper uses on the lowest (sentimental) level, the short story had best elevate…. This should make apparent that a mere “thrilling” account of an occurrence from daily life, a transcription of a fact, is not of itself and for that reason a short story. You get the fact, it interests you for whatever reason, of that fact you make, using words, a story. In another segment of the essay, Williams emphasizes the contextual imagination: What sort of a short story must a Gogol have written or a Kipling in India—in their time? And so, practically speaking, what sort of short story must be written in the U.S. or the Northwest today? I use the word must, I don’t ask what you would care to do. Each man or woman is born facing a must. Who will drive it through or even see it? The one who will, will be at least justified and happy in his own eyes doing it…. In other words, to write a short story of parts one must know what he is writing about, see it, smell it—be compelled by it—and be writing what ordinarily one doesn’t want to hear. As Williams moved through his exploration of the short story form, he often used a Hemingway story as illustration: “Two-hearted River” and “Short Happy Life” are both mentioned. So is his apt description of the way Hemingway learned his craft: “Hemingway did at first sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They taught him a lot. And then he went out and capitalized on it—to at least her disgust, so they say. And she had written at least one magnificent short story. Pound not even one. But then again Hemingway’s not a bad poet and might have been a better one.”This paragraph of William Carlos Williams’s essay gave me my entry to reading Hemingway’s prose, particularly his stories. Starting with Hemingway’s shorter prose forms gave me insight into his craft that had sometimes been derogated as only simple. It was a great—and accurate—insight from Williams, a writer who had himself carved out a niche in the mixed-form pyramids of American modernist writing, from his 1923 Spring and All collection through his 1925 The Great American Novel, into the deceptively fragile stories that perplexed and antagonized so many critics: “The Girl with a Pimply Face,” “A Night in June,” “The Use of Force,” “Jean Beicke,” “Pink and Blue,” “Frankie,” “Verbal Transcription—6 a.m.,” “A Face of Stone,” “Old Doc Rivers,” and many others, filling three volumes of short fiction.As he lectured to the University of Washington students, Williams said, correctly, that “the short story is a wonderful medium for prose experimentation.” The heart of Williams’ understanding of writing the short story, however, was always emotionally based: he honed his art of writing during the Great Depression, when many of his patients were living in a poverty Americans had seldom seen. As he then admitted with his usual candor, I lived among these people. I knew them and saw the essential qualities (not stereotype), the courage, the humor (an accident), the deformity, the basic tragedy of their lives—and the importance of it. You can’t write about something unimportant to yourself. I was involved. That wasn’t all. I saw how they were maligned by their institutions of church and state—and “betters.” I saw how all that was acceptable to the ear about them maligned them. I saw how stereotype falsified them. Nobody was writing about them, anywhere, as they ought to be written about. There was no chance of writing anything acceptable, certainly not salable, about them.It was my duty to raise the level of consciousness, not to say discussion, of them to a higher level, a higher plane. Really to tell…. Until James Laughlin encouraged Williams to publish his stories in collections, they appeared in Leftist magazines and journals: the poor were not good copy for the slick magazines that paid well. Williams aimed to place his fiction in New Masses, American Caravan, New Republic and The Nation. The experimental poet and prose writer had joined the ranks of the Proletariat but he remembered the role the passion of intimate knowledge—the must—had to play for the real writer.I was one of the fortunate academics in the 1960s whose dissertation was published as a book. Wesleyan University Press brought out The Poems of William Carlos Williams and then, in 1970, that press published The Prose of William Carlos Williams. By that time I was so excited about prose that I claimed that Williams’ reputation would eventually be based not on his poems but rather on his stories and novels. That I was wrong only shows how contagious his excitement about the short story (and the novel) was. In another few years, I had learned much more about modernism and had published Hemingway and Faulkner: inventors/masters, drawing obviously from Williams’ placing Hemingway at the feet of Pound and Stein. In that book I began with both writers’ poetry and then moved into their prose, again claiming that the power of their oeuvre stemmed from short forms as they achieved perfection in the writing of them.The 1970s and the 1980s were wonderful decades for explication. Bill Stafford, who then edited the journal Modern Fiction Studies, and Maurice Beebe, who began Contemporary Literature once he had moved away from Purdue University, were hungry for criticism: they wanted to review every academic book that appeared from university presses. They wanted the thorough reading of whatever fiction they found interesting published in their respective journals. Encouraging was a weak word for their responses to writing that came in through the transom. Then George and Barbara Perkins began editing The Journal of Narrative Technique; Bernard Oldsey, College Literature; Jackson Bryer, Tom Inge, and Maurice Duke, Resources for American Literary Study; C. David Mead, The Centennial Review; James Nagel, Studies in American Fiction; Louis Rubin and Kimball King, The Southern Literary Journal; James Phelan, Narrative. There were Studies in Short Fiction and Modernist Studies. There was The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, The William Carlos Williams Review. As the study of American literature became rooted in author societies, a number of other publications appeared: Spring (the E. E. Cummings journal), the Djuna Barnes Review, the Philip Roth Review, the Norman Mailer Review, The Kay Boyle Journal, and The Edith Wharton Review.Supporting those separate journal publications was the over-arching annual compilation published by Duke University Press, American Literary Scholarship. Some years I wrote the essay on American Poetry at the turn into the twentieth century; later I wrote the essay on criticism on William Faulkner. Trained as we all had been on Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction and Understanding Poetry, we believed firmly in not only explicating the texts we loved but in keeping track of those explications.It was a time of making use of new printing and more accurate publishing techniques. It was also a time of building university and community library resources. Many universities were moving from a focus on undergraduate education to offering graduate programs: such change demanded more and more library resources. There were the St. James Press volumes that kept track of biography as well as criticism (The St. James Press Reference Guide to Short Fiction, as well as to Poetry). There were the Facts on File Reference Guides to Short Fiction as well as other categories. There was Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia of American Literature. There was The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The International Encyclopedia of Sexual Representation, The Readers’ Encyclopedia of American History. It was a period of processing information that had not existed previously or had not existed in such efficient form. Some of us, trained to become critics, instead opted to become bibliographers.Part of the appeal of that kind of sleuthing lay in the new technology of computers, with their amazing memory. Remember, scholars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s still wrote on typewriters, complete with the use of White-Out for corrections and sheets of carbon paper for making copies. (There was a different kind of White-Out to be used on the carbon copy.) Achieving a fair copy that could be sent to a prestigious journal editor was an irritating and painstaking task. Enclosing the required stamped self-addressed return envelope, should the submission not be accepted, was another debilitating stage in the process. With the computer, saving the submission was easy and safe. Decades later, when the internet changed our process of submission from using the postal service to clicking on “Send,” we barely remembered those early years of laborious typing.The mechanics were changing but those of us who revered Brooks and Warren still believed in the power of explication. Though it may sound sentimental to write this in 2021, we believed in the architecture of formalism, and we also believed it was our duty to share whatever insights we had as readers. Despite the new approaches to “reading literature” that were bombarding the American academy during the 1980s and 1990s, a number of us stayed true to “close reading” and its operating tool, explication. There had always existed a hint of the biographical in this methodology because if the critic had knowledge about an author’s psychology, or about his or her emotional state at the time of writing, we explicators often believed we could read a text more accurately. Hemingway’s physical wounding during World War I became an important component of readings of his war fiction; Melville’s sorrow over the death of his son underlay many of our explications of “Billy Budd”; Sylvia Plath’s anger at various men who professed to love her shaped our readings of not only her poem “Daddy” but also of The Bell Jar. This is not the place to discuss the flood of literary biography that has become fashionable during the twenty-first century, but many of us literary critics have repeatedly succumbed to writing it.Another element in the pervasiveness and thoroughness of explicating texts was the accessibility of manuscript collections and correspondence in archives throughout the United States and England. Some libraries had long held important archives: Yale University’s Beinecke Library was already a storehouse of American modernist treasures. So was the Alderman Library at The University of Virginia, the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, the Lockwood Library at Buffalo, an archive especially wealthy in manuscripts for American poems. The California campuses had long been collecting, and then The University of Texas at Austin developed the Harry Ransom Research Center with its myriad holdings.When the John F. Kennedy Library was finally finished at Harvard, the Hemingway Room and its various archives became a resource for the world of Hemingway scholarship. Then came acquisitions by smaller universities—University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Florida, and so on. A new sub-set of reading a text became thinking through the various versions of an essay, a story, a poem, a novel, not that such investigation was new, but rather that such attention paid to modernist writers was newly relevant.Part of the credibility of explication drew, I think, from this interest in reading all elements of the work as one process. Explication allowed a kind of wholeness, a way of reading from the inside out, a means of understanding why an author made this or that choice. We were hungry for information: we did not believe in separating the author from the work.Primarily, it seems to me, people with the Ph.D. degree in the Humanities during the mid-twentieth century were a comparatively modest group. Though we might aspire to publish essays, and perhaps even a book or two, we understood that we were primarily teachers. And what we were to be instructing our students in learning was the art or the efficiency of writing, perhaps even before instructing them in the art of reading. A less-than-lofty charge, teaching writing and reading, was shrouded in the chalk dust of diagramming sentences on black boards, of marking “Wrong” the simplest true-or-false questions about parts of speech, of making jokes with friends about students’ misreadings of a story like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” (It was the Age of Sputnik, Science degrees were considered superior to Humanities degrees: humanists had become the utility hitters of academic life.)In teaching one of our own favorite stories, however, thoroughly explicating it (to the surprise and even enjoyment of our best students—for every class had those, truly excellent students who gloried in writing and reading well), we learned to perform a close reading of a beloved story. Through attention to sometimes obscure detail, we could help our students learn about the architecture of the short fiction form. We could teach them how crucial a title could be, we could lead them to understand the missing detail, the never-spoken dialogue, the inexplicable rhythm of a lengthy description. We could expand their reading experience.Becoming performative was a result of the large classrooms that literature courses had come to inhabit during the 1960s. When I taught at Wayne State University, the lead Americanists there, Ralph Nash and Vern Wagner, had convinced administrators that large lecture courses did not work. Class sizes were reasonable, students were good, eager. But when I got to Michigan State, with its student body of over 40,000 students, one of my courses in my first year was held in the chemistry building. The room, which had running water at each seat, held 300 students. My department gave me two teaching assistants and a microphone. Though I created a seating chart for taking attendance, and alternated quiz and test formats, discussion was evanescent. Talking about a text, therefore, stayed the teacher’s job.Across campus in the English Department building, undergraduate classrooms held seventy students, rows of seven seats across and ten rows deep. There were no teaching assistants in these classrooms so learning students’ names was another of the teacher’s responsibilities; some discussion, however, was possible. The hook was some compelling question about the work: why this title? why that character? why this descriptor? In the fifty-three years I spent in literature classrooms, no thrill was greater than the explosion of a student’s imagination when he or she found an unexpected key to meaning, when a smile of discovery showed satisfaction, and the student was ready to become his or her own teacher.Since my retirement nearly a decade ago, I have missed teaching, but I have been enjoying writing once again, writing for myself instead of editing dissertations. Even as I began with the Wiley history of American literature from 1950 to the present, I have decided more often than not to write about authors from my beloved modernist and contemporary periods, and one of the books I’ve enjoyed writing the most has been Hemingway’s Wars: The Public and Private Battles. As I sat with files of notes from the Kennedy Hemingway archive, considering possible structures for this assessment of Hemingway’s fiction, I re-read the Finca Vigia edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. There it was, the way war (both actual and metaphoric) had perplexed his thinking, his personality, his life choices. Among the stories I found most compelling then was “Landscape with Figures.”Thinking about short stories helped me shape another 2017 book, John Steinbeck, A Literary Life. I had contracted this Steinbeck project earlier but had never come to its actual writing. Then I realized that Steinbeck was never a novelist; he was always, by nature and practice, a story writer. Sometimes that skill was employed in his journalism but even more often in the collections of stories that comprised his novellas (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday) as well as The Pastures of Heaven, The Long Village, The Red Pony, and The Wayward Bus. It seemed to me then that much of the disappointment over Steinbeck’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature had stemmed from readers’ thinking him inferior to the earlier American novelists who had won that acclaim: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. For all its sophistication, the American short story was never intended to rival the novel.To close, let me mention a few of the essays on American short stories I’d write now, had I energy enough and time. The world of the American short story is even richer in 2021 than it was a century ago.Henry Dumas, “Strike and Fade,” Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry DumasLauren Groff, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” FloridaHelena Maria Virmontes, “The Cariboo Café,” The MothsElizabeth Spencr, “Owl,” Th Southern WomanWilliam Faulkner, “Hair,” Collected Stories; Knight’s Gambit: Six Mystery StoriesTerry Tempest Williams, “IX,” When Women Were Birds

Foreign language teachers need to motivate their students to learn English. Literature can be a good means to achieve motivation in literature classes. There has recently been a revival of interest in literature as a practical, motivating and an effective resource available for language learning. Therefore, we can assume that literature and authentic literary materials, especially short stories can enhance students’ motivations. This study focuses on how students’ motivation can be lifted through the use of group discussion as class activities and contemporary literature as learning material. This study is a descriptive qualitative which used questionnaire as main instrument to find out how college students rate English Literature Course and how students can be motivated with certain group activities with certain learning material. The result of this study shows that students rated 82 out of 100 for English Literature Course using group discussion as class activity and contemporary literature as learning material. From this study, there is an obvious implication that college students may enjoy learning English Literature through the utilization of contemporary literature and group discussion. This study found that instead of reading short extracts presented in course books, or any classical short stories, contemporary literature were more suitable complete texts for students to become fluent and competent language users. By learning English through literature, the students’ knowledge and competence are enhanced not only through formal English lessons, but rather through informal cognitive ways, in where the students are invited to examine and analyze how human’s life are portrayed through vocabularies, grammatical structures, and sociocultural dimensions of language.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the representation of gender roles and stereotypes in contemporary literature. The analysis was conducted using secondary data from a variety of literary works published in the past decade. The study aimed to investigate how gender dynamics are portrayed and whether traditional gender roles and stereotypes are reinforced or challenged. Methodology: A comprehensive literature review was conducted to select appropriate works for analysis. A total of 30 novels and short stories were selected across different genres, including fiction, drama, and science fiction. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify common themes and patterns related to gender roles and stereotypes. Findings: The findings of the study revealed a complex depiction of gender roles in contemporary literature. While some works challenged traditional gender norms and portrayed more fluid, non-stereotypical characters, others reinforced traditional gender roles and stereotypes. Additionally, the study found that the portrayal of gender roles varied across genres, with science fiction and fantasy literature often presenting more progressive and diverse gender representations. The study also identified several common stereotypes associated with gender, such as the nurturing and caring nature of women and the dominance and aggressiveness of men. However, it is important to note that these stereotypes were not universally present, and many works depicted characters who deviated from these norms. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how gender roles and stereotypes are represented in contemporary literature. It reveals the complexity and diversity of gender dynamics portrayed in literary works, highlighting both the presence of traditional gender roles and stereotypes and the emergence of more fluid and non-stereotypical characters. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The findings suggest that literature has the potential to challenge and redefine gender norms and that the portrayal of gender roles varies across genres. This study provides insights for scholars, educators, and readers interested in understanding and discussing gender representation in literature and encourages further exploration of gender dynamics in contemporary literary works.

This paper analyzes four selected short stories in Javanese literature entitled “Durmogati” by Budianto, “Maju Tatu Mundur Ajur” (“Damned if One Does, Damned if One Doesn’t”) by Budiono, “Bojo” (“Wife”) and “Apik Meneng” (“It’s Better to be Silent”) by Harjono which were all published in 2018. In Indonesia, Javanese literature—together with other regional literatures—is a part of or complimentary to Indonesian literature but it has not received much attention at the national level, let alone at the international level. However, Javanese literature has not been less vocal than Indonesian literature. In this article, I will examine the socio-political engagements of the four short stories in Indonesian society. Using Phillips’ ethnographic approach and Foucault’s theory of power distribution, I will analyze how the four short stories are related to democracy, people’s power, equality, and corruption in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto as the president of Indonesia in 1998. The analysis shows that the four short stories have significant socio-political engagements in the present Indonesia. The authors of the four short stories discussed in this paper show courage to blatantly criticize those who are in power. As such, the discussion of this essay offers fresh insights about contemporary Javanese literature and its role in the socio-political situation of the country. In the end, this essay will show that these four short stories are not only a reflection of Javanese society in particular and that of Indonesia in general but also as expressions of their authors as key informants about their society, i.e., how they see and think about the society in which they live. Keywords Javanese literature; socio-political engagement; democracy; power; equality

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson Jessica Gildersleeve Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction. By Victoria Coulson. (Midcentury Modern Writers) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. x+226 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-4744-8049-9. Victoria Coulson's monograph is among the first in a new series from Edinburgh University Press. 'Midcentury Modern Writers', under the editorship of the prominent critic of modernism, Irish literature, and psychoanalysis, Maud Ellmann, is devoted to 'restoring undervalued writers, genres, and literary movements' (p. ix). A book, like the present study, devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bowen constitutes a welcome addition to such a project. A range of major publications on Bowen's work has emerged in recent years, including Ellmann's Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Nicola Darwood's A World of Lost Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), my own Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (New York: Brill, 2014), and Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things, edited by myself and Patricia Juliana Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Despite this, as well as the formation of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and its associated journal, the Elizabeth Bowen Review, Bowen still haunts the margins of canonical literature. Although psychoanalytic methods, often with a deconstructive, trauma-informed, or feminist slant, have informed a number of such recent studies, a sole focus on Bowen's work as 'psychoanalytic' may seem curious, given her interest in but apparent lack of explicit commentary on psychoanalysis. Indeed, the short story 'The Cat Jumps' (1934) may at first blush appear to be the only one of her works which directly uses the terms of psychoanalysis—and does so in a satirical manner, as its very modern characters engage in lively discussion about 'Kraffi-Ebing, Freud, Forel, Weiniger and the heterosexual volume of Havelock Ellis' (The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 366). In her private life, too, Bowen appeared to hold some disdain for modern psychology, such that although she visited a psychotherapist, her lover Charles Ritchie observed that the therapist exposed more of his own private feelings to her than she to him. Yet Coulson marks a critical intervention in this interpretation: [End Page 296] she points out that 'the satire of "The Cat Jumps" is directed not at the ideas represented by the volumes stocking the Wrights' library but at the spectacle of their complacent uptake by a social group motivated primarily by a tribal desire to instantiate its intellectual superiority' (p. 13). More importantly, however, she observes more subtle references in Bowen's fiction, non-fiction, and personal writing to psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism, neurosis, and complexes (pp. 13–14). Given such infiltration of these ideas within her work, as well as the clear impact of personal and historical trauma in her life, including her father's debilitating psychological breakdown and her mother's early death, not to mention two world wars, a study dedicated to psychoanalysis in Bowen, or indeed of Bowen as a '"theorist" of psychic life' (p. 11), therefore represents an important contribution to the field. Following Bowen's favoured tripartite narrative structure, across three sections Coulson maps out Bowen's psychoanalytic representation of 'Development', 'Sexuality', and 'Reproduction; or Legacy', ultimately arguing for a consistent and original advancement of her theorization of these concepts, such that 'there is operative in Bowen's writing a sophisticated implicit account or understanding of psychological development, of sexuality, and of the structure and function of gender identities' (p. 10), as well as how this 'psychodrama of individual development' functions 'in relation to contemporary world-historical events' (p. 17). To do so, Coulson examines a range of Bowen's extensive œuvre of novels and short stories—the fiction—but also makes use of her life writing and critical essays. Yet her psychoanalytic method is peculiarly unmoored: this makes for a more readable text, to be sure, but does leave the study's psychoanalysis methodologically free. Nevertheless, this is a welcome inclusion in the field of Bowen studies, and does much to gather together and reframe some of the disparate themes...

Basic reading is conducted to the first semester of English Language Education Study Program at Universitas Ekasakti Padang. There are several text which could be used to in teaching and learning process. One of them are short stories as the proper one for first semester students. By using short stories, the students could enhance their vocabularies and their undertanding in reading text. Besides, there is also moral value that they could get from the text. Throught those, classroom action research about the use of short stories for Basic Reading class were done for the students which the data were taken from tests, observations, interviews and documentation. Sample of the research were consist of 2 (two) classes of the students. as the result, mean score indicate there is an enhancement during the teaching and learning by using short stories. Using short stories in basic reading class is a very good way and also exciting.

This work is the result of a research performed in the Program for Post-Graduate Professional Master Degree in the Letters Course, in the Federal University of Uberlandia. The motivation for its elaboration came from the necessity of proposing new teaching methodologies turned to literary literacy, and the formation of young readers which may create opportunities for the students, through the subjective dimension in reading, a potential encounter with literature in the classroom. To do so, we traced a course which began with a bibliographic research which passed through official documents, such as BNCC; reflections regarding literary literacy, based on Soares (2001, 2003), Kleiman (1995), Cosson (2012, 2014), Paulino (2004, 2010), Paulino and Cosson (2009); considerations about the subjective dimension of the literary reading according to Barthes (2004), Iser (1996-9), Petit (2008, 2009, 2013), Jouve (2002, 2013); the relevance of the reading journals as expression of subjectivity by the student-reader based in Rouxel (2012a, 2012b, 2014), Souza (2020) and Machado, Lousada and Abreu-Tardelli (2007); the controversy regarding the literary writing in schools from the pondering of Rezende (2018), Andruetto (2012), Antunes (2015), Houdart-Mérot (2013) and Rouxel (2012a); and the conceptions about stories and short stories, under the perspective of literary genres, according to Cortázar (1974), Gotlib (1985), Piglia (2004) and Spalding (2012). However, upon dedicating ourselves to the development of a didactic approach, we were surprised by the pandemic caused by Sars-CoV-2, which suspended the present activities in the Brazilian schools. Given this event, the methodological intervention planned to happen in person with classes from the 8th grade from the Elementary II from a public school in the municipality of Uberlandia – MG, was reconfigured to be applied remotely. We included new perspectives brought by the virtual environment, such as the work with fanfics, considering the statements by Vargas (2015) and Chartier (1999), with the purpose of prioritizing the juvenile protagonism offered by the digital culture. Thus, we arrived to the intervention presented and described in this work, based by the action-research methodology by Thiollent (1986) and supported in Cosson (2012), Andruetto (2012), Bajour (2012), Rouxel (2012b, 2013c) and Pennac (1993). We chose workshops, which objects for aesthetic fruition were fictional stories and short stories which contemplated the reading of literary texts, the listening, speaking and writing – of reading journals, short stories and fanfics. We concluded, thus, that this research may contribute to a change in the scenario of literature classes in which the expression of subjectivity from the students-readers may be the focus and that, thus, through the reading experiences offered by dialogue with the read texts, they may, in an exercise about otherness, identification, and empathy, to better recognize and comprehend themselves, other people and the world around them.

The following study is one of the chapters of the doctoral thesis entitled Continuing writing the stereotypes of the Monarchy-literature and interculturalismin the contemporary Hungarian short story literature in Vojvodina. The study seeks the answer to the question of how the stereotypes of the Monarchy-literature are written and survive in the contemporary Hungarian short stories in Vojvodina. In the short stories various motives can be found that act as a stereotype. As such is the homeland, military, army, language and the railroad. The railroad, the army and the homeland appear in the short stories of all the three authors.The historical, retrospective narration is frequently extended by tale elements. It is necessary to treat the next concepts coherent: tale, fairy-tale, history, storytelling, narration.I consider important to examine together the sites and stories of the migrant authors’ short stories full of nostalgia. The micro stories I have examined represent a mosaic of the history. The study is in search of these contexts and also compares them.

Kaleem Khariji is a prominent figure of short stories in contemporary Urdu literature. He has evaded from the symbolical style and technique, which is a literary fashion amongst the contemporary Urdu short stories writers. The formation of his short stories is totally different from classical short story writers as well. He does not use symbols, but his characters are capable of symbolical depth. Ghatiya Aadmi—a book comprised of his short stories—has a philosophical and social background. The themes and subject matter of the stories in this book are derived from the social and political circumstances of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The researcher has critically analyzed the characters and subject matter in the short stories of Ghatiya Aadmi.