Possible Alternatives to the Revival Literary History

Conceptualizing Literature Pedagogy: World, Global, and Cosmopolitan Orientations to Teaching Literature in English Suzanne Shen Li Choo While there is a wealth of research about literary history, literary genres, and the nature of the literary text, research on approaches to teaching literature that shape the interpretation and reception of the text is insufficient. My overarching aim in this study is to conceptualize literature pedagogy across the historical evolution of the field of literature in English. Underlying literature pedagogy are beliefs about the good of teaching literature. Consequently, the teaching of literature is a form of values education. In the late eighteenth century, the teaching of literature was used to propagate ideological values of the nation-state when the discipline of English literature was institutionalized in public education. From the early twentieth century onwards, various global-political and disciplinary movements led to a shift towards a post nation-state model of values education emphasizing education for world, global, and cosmopolitan values. One way to understand the different values underlying literature pedagogy is to examine beliefs about the good of teaching literature as these are manifested in concepts that demonstrate various orientations to teaching literature. Given that the formal institutionalization of English literature and its subsequent re-configurations, in the form of literature in English, were conditioned by the phenomenon of globalization, the study explores how approaches to teaching literature have responded to four waves of globalization from the late eighteenth to the twentyfirst century. Rather than focus on events, I employ a historical-paradigmatic analysis to analyze conceptual turns or moments in a historical period when particular concepts gain dominance. The advantage of this analysis is two-fold. First, it avoids examining history in terms of events so that more attention is paid to the history of ideas and second, paradigms disrupt the notion of a linear history which then allows for historical overlaps. In order to locate concepts that gain dominance, three domains are analyzed within each historical period – global waves, disciplinary movements, and philosophical contributions. The objectives of the study are driven by two research questions: (1) How do global waves, disciplinary movements, and philosophical contributions, from the late eighteenth century to the present, contribute to characterizing various beliefs about the good of teaching literature? (2) How do these beliefs orient approaches to teaching literature? The study argues that various global waves across history have facilitated the interrelation and dominance of key concepts that provide insights into beliefs about the good of teaching literature. From these concepts, four orientations emerge – nationalist-oriented, world-oriented, global-oriented, and cosmopolitanoriented approaches to teaching literature. These approaches serve to recognize a key role for the teaching literature in educating for values beyond the ideologies of the nation-state. The study has implications for literature teachers in the hopes that it would broaden their consciousness and repertoire of pedagogical approaches as well as equip them to be more purposeful in their applications of these to the classroom. More importantly, an understanding of these orientations would serve to develop a greater sense of ethical agency in teachers as they work towards cultivating a hospitable imagination in their students.

The demand for a human capital workforce based on knowledge has been rising in the 21st century. Given the low level of scientific literacy and the large gap between marginalized and mainstream students, the purpose of this study is to determine the impact of Learning Outside the Classroom (LOC) approach in cultivating scientific literacy among marginalized students in remote Sarawak, Malaysia. The LOC module was designed based on constructivist, contextual and behaviourist learning theories. This study employed quasi-experimental with pre-test post-test, non-equivalent control group research design. The treatment group experienced learning with the LOC module while the control group was taught using conventional methods. In the treatment group, teaching and learning (T&L) processes occurred outside the classroom using learning materials from their surroundings. Students are required to work together in groups to carry out investigative activities. Through this study, marginalized students are able to learn science in the context of the real world and realize the application of scientific concepts in their daily lives experiences. It is hypothesized that this approach will stimulate meaningful learning that will significantly lead towards increased level of scientific literacy skills among marginalized students and hence equipped them with necessary knowledge to face challenges in the 21st century.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Plot, the ―sequence of interrelated events‖ (Foster in Pickering and Hoeper 1981:14), is a building element of literary works. This literary element assists in text reading and interpretation processes because the element shows the sequences of interrelated events that help in understanding text development. In the processes of text reading and text interpretation, plot is commonly analyzed literarily with the specific concern only to the elemental sequences of a plot. The concern to the sequences makes the plot analysis as the description of a certain construction, a text structure. Actually, plot analysis could also be conducted linguistically by analyzing certain linguistic elements and the contribution of these linguistic elements to plot description, as discussed in stylistics. The appearances of the stylistic and structural methods require two analysis types: the linguistic and the literary analyses. The stylistic method covers the linguistic analyses of the lexical items and their semantic sense relations, and the structural method covers a literary discussion on the plot sequences of the three texts. The linguistic based and literary based analyses are interrelated each other by the description of the semantic sense relations of the chosen lexical items in order to describe the sequencing of the texts‘ plot. Based on the analysis, the three Doyle‘s detective short stories are built from similar plot sequences. Each sequence is also composed from some other similar features which are arranged in a similar chronology. In summary, three plot sequences –exposition, action and climax— are built from two main features, and the other two plot sequences –resolution and conclusion— are developed by three composing features. Exposition consists of the narrative of a pre undisturbed situation and the narrative of the crime. Action consists of the deducting efforts prior to the crime scene investigation and the described actions taken during the crime scene investigation. Climax is the revelation of the tools used in the murders and the murderers themselves. Resolution shows the crime solving by mentioning the relationship of the information in the introduction, particularly the second part, and the actions taken in the Action. Conclusion ends the stories by stating punishment for the guilty murderers, the reward for the victims or the falsely accused participants and the common conclusion for public consumption. Among the five, a close similarity is seen in three plot sequences: exposition, action and resolution. Their relation is proven by the similar lexical items used in the features of the three plot sequences. The similarity causes a linkage of logics of a detective story.

Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - PDC 04

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys Joe Sutliff Sanders (bio) Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and "The Boy Problem" in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Ken Parille. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2009. Boys at Home is an important exploration of discipline and masculinity as they were understood in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1885. Organized around "a series of arguments about five forms of pedagogy," it examines topics of clear importance to studies of both American culture and childhood: "play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading" (xiii). In just under 130 pages, Ken Parille presents a dense, pointed argument that attempts "to reconstruct and reinterpret the pedagogical culture surrounding boys" (xviii). Using readings of work by historical and literary figures including Horace Mann, Jacob Abbot, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Lydia Sigourney, Parille seeks to correct misconceptions that resonate across key theories of boys and their management. One of Parille's main concerns is avoiding—indeed, contradicting—the notion that boys can be explained as one great, undifferentiated mass. Here he speaks to a central fear in children's literature scholarship of contributing to cultural tendencies to theorize childhood through a disembodied subject known as "the child" rather than a heterogeneous subject known as "children." Parille's vigilance against broad assumptions about "the boy" is both obvious and necessary. His hope, as he says in his introduction, is that "Writings about boyhood discipline offer us an important way to complicate current critical narratives of gender, childhood, and literary history" (xiii). This goal is not always unequivocally achieved—the material Parille studies is frequently about boys in general, and it best positions his study to draw conclusions that are similarly about ideal rather than embodied children—but it is a hope to which Parille is consistently dedicated, and he uses a clever redundancy to add nuance to the clichés of his subject matter. By putting multiple, contemporaneous forms of pedagogy in dialogue with one another, Parille is able to point to contradictions between conceptions of "the boy," effectively forcing a more sophisticated image of boys than the writers of his subject material would themselves have recognized. As Parille puts it, "The picture of boyhood created by this [End Page 278] nexus of relationships offers us a detailed portrait of the pedagogical environment in which New England boyhood was constructed, and it gives us a multitude of perspectives ranging far beyond those of the few nineteenth-century literary figures who have monopolized critical discourses on 'the boy'" (xiv). His choice of material is therefore appropriate and even courageous, considering how very hot is the button he pushes when reading texts by writers who were invested in boyhood as a broad concept, not one full of contradictions. Similarly courageous is the book's dedication to speaking of topics central to Americanist discourse outside children's literature—such as nineteenth-century US social structures and the history of corporal punishment—in terms that emphasize rather than ignore gender. Such a strategy requires walking a narrow line. In such collections as Chapman and Hendler's Sentimental Men and Davidson and Hatcher's hyperbolically titled No More Separate Spheres!, Americanist editors and writers have criticized the tendency to consider sentimental and realist, domestic and public, feminine and masculine as completely discrete literary and social categories. The frequent result of such criticism is excellent scholarship that profitably reexamines the places where these categories blur, but other results have included poor scholarship that willfully ignores places where recognition of such categories might yield a more historically informed reading of literature. Parille, however, manages to tap into this current trend in Americanist scholarship without quite abdicating a reading that is aware of gender. He mentions on many occasions his interest in masculinity studies, and as a result his argument is not quite that gender should be ignored, but that insights gained through attention to one gender should be tested for usefulness when reading texts written for another. Thus he argues for a "threefold approach" in which he attempts to consider boys' fiction and girls' fiction by attending to "similarity, difference, or a combination of the two" (xxiii). He calls his study a "dual-gender...

Novel Groupings: The Order of Things* Edward H. Friedman Arizona State University ... no matter how intense the dramatic illusion, no matter how gripping the plot or believable the characterization, if we are to enter imaginatively into a work of fiction we must at all times feel that it is fiction, that a story is being told to us. The two parts of the equation — that it be like real life, and it not be real life — are absolutely indispensable. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Teller in the Tale As a late-bloomer in the field of genre, the novel has traditionally made rules by breaking rules. Without the precedence or precedents of other literary forms, the novel responded to a creative rather than a re-creative impetus. Those conventions that do exist occupy no sacrosanct space in the compositional process and may be as easily ignored or contradicted as respected. As a result, the concept of intertextuality—the presence and transformation of other texts in a given work — becomes problematic, for this "presence" may manifest itself as imitation, antithesis, or absence. Because form and meaning are open in the multiperspectivist universe of the novel, analysis and classification must attempt to illuminate a text or series of texts while recognizing both the multiple possibilities and the limitations of the critical enterprise. A comparative focus juxtaposes texts to offer individual and collective insights. Although criteria for selection are by no means absolute, the method is significant for a number of reasons. Critically speaking, new approaches may provide valuable new readings of texts; metacritically speaking, these approaches This paper is a review article of the following studies: William Riggan, Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 206p.; Arnold Weinstein, Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1981), 302p.; and Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 334p. 238ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW may foster polemics that will in turn lead to greater scrutiny of the texts. Recent studies by William Riggan, Arnold Weinstein, and Walter L. Reed explore the novel as process, as a reflection of a selfcreating and constantly changing dialectic. Riggan's Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns "intends to make a systematic investigation into the operation of unreliable narration . . . and to analyze in some detail one specific genus of the unreliable narrator: namely, the fictional autobiographer who recounts his own life, or a portion thereof, in his own voice and in a conscious act of writing" (p. 15). Rather than projecting a new theoretical model, the introductory section presents a summary of criticism on the unreliable first-person narrator. This is acceptable, in that the study will be an application of established models as opposed to the testing of a hypothesis. Unfortunately, however, Riggan's discussion of representative novels lacks the detail of the earlier studies on which he relies almost exclusively (Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, Bertil Romberg's Studies in the Narrative Technique ofthe First-Person Novel, and Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative) and ignores narrative theory of the last fifteen to twenty years. The elaboration of the four types of narrators does not, as promised in the introductory chapter, shed new light on the operation ofunreliable narration, nor does it really evolve into a system. Picaresque fiction is particularly notorious for drawing critics into a vicious circle ofinterpretation. Inclusion in or exclusion from the picaresque paradigm is often based on a set of guidelines derived from the reading and interpretation of texts. These guidelines then begin to operate as if they had preceded the texts, affecting literary status and stature and perhaps limiting critical perspective. One could question the self-defining premise that "only if the picaro himself handles the entire narrative load will the account be imbued with a unified and completely 'picaresque' point of view and thus be wholly 'picaresque' " (pp. 39-40) and challenge the authority of a borrowed definition of the picaro that ends: "Within the religious and didactic purposes of the picaresque novel, he serves as an example...

Arguing Over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation

Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism? A: If by “literary history” we refer to the traditional—and hence somewhat canonical—form of literary historiography as genre, i.e., the study of literature from an evolutionary, teleological, and ethnocentric standpoint, for which works authored between 1830 and 1945 serve as models (from, let’s say, Georg Gottfried Gervinus to Albert Thibaudet), then this form has undoubtedly been one of the most conservative in the entire history of modern literary criticism, considering the fact that it has almost entirely refused to alter its goals, methodology, and rhetoric for over a century. But I do not consider this to hold true for the literary histories published after the Second World War as well. On the contrary, following a “crisis” lasting for nearly half a century, during which all its theoretical building blocks have been scrutinized and questioned, literary history seems to have made a powerful comeback in the past decades, both as discipline and as genre. Moreover, I tend to believe that it currently represents the most innovative segment in literary studies—, that it is in any case more innovative than individual articles, or monographs, the main source of critical innovation in the second half of the 20th century. And this fact is quite understandable: the very skepticism that had plagued it for decades on end made it so that literary history became one of the most experimental genres within literary studies after the year 2000. Past the threshold of the new millennium, it tested not only its object of study (extending the very definition of “literature” and offering numerous alternatives to the insistent predilection for the “national”) and its methodology beyond every conceivable limit (going through all contemporary theories, frameworks, and analytical procedures, from computational criticism and intermedial studies to feminism and postcolonial studies), but also what seemed to be its core determinant: the factor of time (thereby replacing chronology with other ways of arranging its material, such as the geographic/ spatial one). Therefore, in the 21st century, literary history is nothing short of a revolutionary genre—and this seems to be the most convincing retort the old discipline could have made to her detractors.

How far can canon and language be sources of (dis)continuity in literary history? Continuity and discontinuity are concepts of such complexity that only philosophers can hope to make a successful attempt to define them in general terms. All I can offer is a tentative analysis of their significance for literary history. Since even such an investigation would ask for a lengthy treatment if conducted on an abstract level, I shall limit myself to reflections on how continuity and discontinuity are related to the concepts of canon and language. In the second half of my paper a personified abstraction called nation will also be introduced with the intention of making some remarks on the legitimacy of the terms national and world literature. The essay also raises the question of whether it is possible to write literary history in a postmodern world.

Itzulpen ikasketa soziologikoei jarraikiz, lan honetan aztergai da itzulpenaren ikuspegia literatur historiari buruzko lanetan. Hain zuzen ere, 1961-2016 bitarteko euskal literaturaren hamaika historiografiatan itzulpengintzak izandako errepresentazioari erreparatzen zaio: lehenbizi, azterketarako gakoak azaltzen dira; ondoren, historiografiak kokatzen dira eta itzulpenari buruzko diskurtsoa aztertzen da historiografiaz historiografia; eta, azkenik, ondorio gisa, diskurtso horien bilakabidearen deskripzioa egiten da.

Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism? A: It seems to me imperative to come to terms with the fact that literary histories are a product of modernity; they typically begin as national accounts of cultural uniqueness, more often presumed than real. Early in the 19th century there appear the first macroregional literary histories, e.g. that by Sismondi, who is today best remembered as an economist and a social thinker; he wrote a history in several volumes of what he called “the South of Europe,” essentially a panoramic (and mosaic) history of the literatures in the Romance languages (but not of Romanian literature). How do we move onwards from the strictures imposed by the birthmarks of modernity with its teleological rationale? I have written briefly on this in an article on the challenges literary history faces in the 21st century. Today, I would add the following: literary history has to navigate the new concerns of anthropocentrism and, more widely, of a post-humanist world; without this, it would struggle to perform a meaningful role beyond a cultural space confined and fuelled by national(ist) agendas.

This article aims to analyze the issue of democracy the delegated cooperative democracy as an alternative to the crisis of contemporary democratic policies. At first, the theoretical premises that guide the theoretical framework that underlies the liquid-cooperative democratic model are exposed: starting from the philosophical reflections of John Dewey and Axel Honneth. In a second point of view, from procedural deliberative democracy to liquid-cooperative democracy: How can we redirect power to citizens in the context of today's democracies? In the third point we present the idea that lies behind the "spirit" of net-cooperative democracy as a credible alternative to democracies in the 21st Century. We consider this credible democratic model that can "rally" power to citizens. Methodologically, the work is based on deconstruction and reconstruction, accompanied by the reading, analysis and interpretation of texts that deal with the subject under study. It is concluded that the time has come to institute a democratic policy that can 'redouble' power in the hands of citizens in order to participate equally in public life, thereby minimizing the great social, political and economic inequalities prevailing in the various States considered democratic in the world and in Mozambique in particular.

The article tries to present a possible literary-historical reconstruction of the histories of Bulgarian literature published in the 20th – 21th century. It traces how literary history is read and conceptualized through them in different sociocultural contexts. It marks the mechanisms through which literary history has built the canon of Bulgarian literature upholding its unique and unchangeable value. The study outlines the various ways in which sources from different periods sort and rearrange the authors of literature and their works chronologically or hierarchically in a complex historical megatext and how this megatext can reveal or forget, praise or deny some basic literary and aesthetics features. Attention is paid to the way they construct different models of national spiritual plot through their dialogue and polemics. This defines literary history not only as memory of the past and respect for the knowledge that is stored in documents and archive records, but also as individual authorial conceptions. In this sense, what is important in the creation of the literary-historical narrative is not only the aesthetic and sociopolitical context, but also the individuality of the author who creates both literature and history. Literary histories as a single author’s project or as a collective academic experience, presenting an attempt at a fundamental conceptualization of the processes in art or just fragmentary plots can be reminded of and read as objective or manipulated narratives about a national literature. They can be interpreted in a unique cultural context where many creative and existential plots meet, intersect, discuss and complement.