Staging Melville

SLOW READING AS A METHOD FOR REVEALING IMPLICIT MEANINGS IN THE LITERARY WORK

Henry James and the Art of Teaching John Carlos Rowe As I write this essay, I am involved in the second year of our summer institute, “Bridging the Gaps: Critical Theory, American Literature, and American Culture,” which brings together teachers from Southern California high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities to the University of California, Irvine campus to do collaborative research. 1 This summer’s topic, “Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” was the result of work by a coordinating committee composed of representatives from these different segments of higher education. Sometime last fall, the coordinating committee selected the following four literary texts to focus our collaborative research during the summer: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), William Apess’ A Son of the Forest (1831) (and other shorter selections from this Pequot-American’s writings), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Each of the six members of the coordinating committee proposed a literary text, and we talked about its appropriateness for our summer institute and possible adoption as a classroom text in the several different kinds of higher education represented in the institute. My proposed text for the summer was Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), which I proposed because of its potential for raising questions about late nineteenth-century attitudes toward gender roles and sexual identities. As one of the few texts by James to deal centrally and explicitly with the conflict between the working, middle, and upper classes, it impressed me as an opportunity to teach Henry James to students without lapsing immediately into the stereotype of James as a difficult, modernist defender of bourgeois values. It was precisely these assumptions about Henry James that shaped my colleagues’ decision not to include In the Cage in the syllabus of our summer institute. The text was voted [End Page 213] down as “too difficult” for high school and community college students, too “restricted” in its “scope,” and insufficiently “relevant” to our announced focus on nineteenth-century race and gender. Let me begin first with the notorious problem of James’s difficulty. Of course, James’s writings require great concentration by the reader, careful attention to the dialectic of form and content, a special ear for shifts in tone, and a heightened awareness of how narrative perspective is often worked through multiple narratorial centers. For formalist critics, just such technical and stylistic difficulty was what established James as one of the preeminent modern writers and made him a “major author” in most post-World War II college and university curricula in literature. For my teachers in the 1960s, when formalist methods still held sway, James’s writings were virtual textbooks in the key aesthetic techniques and rhetorical devices used by “great” or “classic” literature. The primary emphasis on Jamesian technique has always impressed me as an odd, even perverse, strategy for teaching Henry James. It has been just this emphasis that has caused contemporary students and their teachers to think of Henry James as a difficult writer. In practical terms, this focus on aesthetic form is best suited to the specialized group of creative writing students who study literary texts to develop their own techniques, understand literary conventions, and otherwise reflect on literary craft. Graduate students and those preparing for graduate work in English and American literatures might also be reasonably expected to develop expertise in such aesthetic and technical areas of literature, even though such concerns should not be the primary areas of their training. Yet in too many graduate programs, just such an obsession with the rhetorical and stylistic techniques of literature, to the exclusion of other literary functions, remains central to the curriculum and professional training of graduate students. One reason for this is that despite the waning of the New Critical and formalist assumptions about literature, many graduate programs are still dominated by senior faculty trained in the critical age when formalism and modernism worked in complementary ways to justify themselves. In addition, many high school and community college teachers of literature studied literature in the formalist era and have, in many cases, not had opportunities to read any...

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas ExpansionMelville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America

This powerful book argues that White culture in America does not exist apart from Black culture. The revolution of the rights of man that established America collided long ago with the system of slavery, and we have been trying to re-establish a steady course for ourselves ever since. To Wake the Nations is urgent and rousing: we have integrated our buses, schools, and factories, but not the canon of American literature. That is the task Eric Sundquist has assumed in a book that ranges from politics to literature, from Uncle Remus to African-American spirituals. But the hallmark of this volume is a re-evaluation of the glory years of American literature - from 1830 to 1930 - that shows how White literature and Black literature form a single interwoven tradition. By examining African-America's contested relation to the intellectual and literary forms of white culture, Sundquist reconstructs the main lines of American literary tradition from the decades before the Civil War through the early 20th century. An opening discussion of Nat Turner's Confessions, recorded by a white man, Thomas Gray, establishes a paradigm for the complexity of meanings that Sundquist uncovers in American literary texts. Focusing on Frederick Douglass's autobiographical books, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Martin Delany's novel Blake; or the Huts of America, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Charles Chesnutt's fiction, and W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Sundquist considers each text against a rich background of history, law, literature, politics, religion, folklore, music and dance. These readings aim to lead to insights into components of the culture at large: slavery as it intersected with post-colonial revolutionary ideology; literary representations of the legal and political foundations of segregation; and the transformation of elements of African and ante-bellum folk consciousness into the public forms of American literature.

Настоящая статья представляет собой опыт медленного чтения, актуализированный необходимостью в «торопливую» эпоху замедлить темп восприятия художественного текста в целях увеличения информационного объема. Названная техника чтения обретает особую степень целесообразности при анализе древних фольклорных текстов, содержащих, как правило, множество архаизмов, мифологем, этнографизмов, не всегда понятных современному читателю. Цель статьи – доказать продуктивность «замедленного чтения» на материале карачаево-балкарской народной охотничьей поэмы «Бийнёгер». В работе использовано сочетание культурно-исторического, мифопоэтического, сравнительно-сопоставительного и герменевтического методов. Эффективным зарекомендовал себя и метод текстологических отводов, позволяющий в процессе анализа генеральной линии «отвлекаться» на побочные явления, связанные с уточнениями, прояснениями и интерпретациями контекстов, подтекстов и интертекстуальных параллелей. Работа написана с методологической опорой на труды Е.Б. Вирсаладзе, Г.Д. Гачева, М.А. Хабичева, М.Н. Эпштейна. Совокупность следующих тезисов можно считать итоговым результатом, полученным благодаря методу «медленного чтения»: 1) «Бийнёгер» является этноспецифической карачаево-балкарской народной охотничьей поэмой, в которой нашли отражение особенности горского, кавказского Космо-Психо-Логоса; 2) интертекстуальный анализ позволил обнаружить типологически сходные произведения в западно-европейском (английском), грузинском и киргизском фольклорных системах; 3) на примере повести Чингиза Айтматова «Прощай, Гульсары» отмечен факт плавного перехода фольклорного охотничьего сюжета в литературную стихию; 4) смысловой объем поэмы «Бийнёгер» увеличился благодаря интерпретации древних языческих и мусульманских антропонимов, топонимов, эвфемизмов («Джаратхан», «алтынлы», «собачья болезнь»). Практическая значимость статьи связана с актуализацией природоохранной проблематики в современном мире, повышением экологической культуры у подрастающего поколения. Статья может быть полезной при разработке вузовских спецкурсов по истории северокавказского фольклора, а также по сравнительно-сопоставительному анализу типологически сходных произведений в художественном[U1] арсенале разных народов мира. This article is an experience of slow reading, actualized by the need in the «hurried» era to slow down the pace of perception of a literary text in order to increase the information volume. The said reading technique acquires a special degree of appropriateness when analyzing ancient folklore texts, which, as a rule, contain many archaisms, mythologemes, ethnographisms, not always understandable to the modern reader. The purpose of the article is to prove the productivity of «slow reading» on the material of the Karachai-Balkar folk hunting poem “Bijnöger”. The work uses a combination of cultural-historical, mythopoetic, comparative-contrastive and hermeneutic methods. The method of textual digressions has also proven effective, allowing in the process of analyzing the general line to «distract» ourselves with side effects associated with clarifications, clarifications and interpretations of contexts, subtexts and intertextual parallels. The work is written with methodological support on the works of E.B. Virsaladze, G.D. Gachev, M.A. Khabichev, M.N. Epshtein. The following theses can be considered the final result obtained using the slow reading method: 1) “Bijnöger” is an ethnospecific Karachai-Balkar folk hunting poem that reflects the peculiarities of the mountain and Caucasian Cosmo-Psycho-Logos; 2) intertextual analysis revealed typologically similar works in the Western European (English), Georgian and Kyrgyz folklore systems; 3) the example of Chingiz Aitmatov's story «Farewell, Gulsary» notes the fact of a smooth transition of a folklore hunting plot into the literary element; 4) the semantic volume of the poem “Bijnöger” increased due to the interpretation of ancient pagan and Muslim anthroponyms, toponyms, and euphemisms («Dzharatkhan», «Altynly», «Dog disease»). The practical significance of the article is related to the actualization of environmental issues in the modern world, increasing the environmental culture of the younger generation. The article can be useful in developing university special courses on the history of North Caucasian folklore, as well as in comparative analysis of typologically similar works in the artistic arsenal of different peoples of the world.

Style is an important aspect of literature, and stylistic deviations are sometimes labeled foregrounded, since their manner of expression deviates from the stylistic default. Russian Formalists have claimed that foregrounding increases processing demands and therefore causes slower reading – an effect called retardation. We tested this claim experimentally by having participants read short literary stories while measuring their eye movements. Our results confirm that readers indeed read slower and make more regressions towards foregrounded passages as compared to passages that are not foregrounded. A closer look, however, reveals significant individual differences in sensitivity to foregrounding. Some readers in fact do not slow down at all when reading foregrounded passages. The slowing down effect for literariness was related to a slowing down effect for high perplexity (unexpected) words: those readers who slowed down more during literary passages also slowed down more during high perplexity words, even though no correlation between literariness and perplexity existed in the stories. We conclude that individual differences play a major role in processing of literary texts and argue for accounts of literary reading that focus on the interplay between reader and text.

Lingering and its decried equivalents, such as dawdling, idling, loafing, or lolling about, are both shunned and coveted in our culture where time is money and where there is never quite enough of either. Is lingering lazy? Is it childish? Boring? Do poets linger? (Is that why poetry is boring?) Is it therapeutic? Should we linger more? Less? What happens when we linger? Harold Schweizer here examines an experience of time that, though common, usually passes unnoticed. Drawing on a wide range of philosophic and literary texts and examples, On Lingering and Literature exemplifies in its style and accessible argumentation the new genre of post-criticism, and aims to reward anyone interested in slow reading, daydreaming, or resisting our culture of speed and consumption.

LANGUAGE. CULTURE. DISCOURSE.This research explores linguistic means of managing the reader's attention in Coetzee's novels with regard to slow reading method. The paper defines slow reading as a reading technique which aims not so much at construing various textual senses, as at probing those features of the literary text that slow down the process of its reading and comprehension, thus stimulating the reader's deep reflective inferences. It is found that one of the most striking aspects of Coetzee's works, on both formal and semantic levels, is their ludic stylistics, a heuristic artistic phenomenon that defines the ontology of the writer's novels and emerges in the literary text due to the unconventional combinations of various linguistic means. The latter, either individually or jointly, tend to create singular or multiple ludic effects. The hypothesis of the research stems from the assumption that the reading pace of Coetzee's fiction is slowed down by ludic stylistics, which engenders a detailed and deeply reflexive response by the reader. The methodology suggested is based on the cognitive theory of attention distribution with the method of the nodal points as the dominant one. The research results show that ludic stylistics, as a means of slowing down and hindering the act of reading, manifests itself through the ludic effects of structural and semantic accentuation and deaccentuation, instability, tension, ambivalence, indeterminacy, distortion, and lacunarity. Such ludic effects are viewed as the triggers that enable grabbing and maintaining the reader's attention. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to Cite: Izotova, N.; Vasko, R. (Ed.) (2022). The interplay of linguistic means managing the reader's attention: the slow reading method. Language. Culture. Discourse. Kharkiv: РС ТЕСHNOLOGY СЕNTЕR, 33-50. doi: http://doi.org/10.15587/978-617-7319-60-2.3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In recent times marked by the offensive and largescale advancement of computer technol-ogy numerous libraries, scientific and educational centers in the world are creating their own extensive databases of literary and bibliographic texts. Facing such databases the close reading method designed to work with specific texts would seem to lose its meaning. The Italian sociolo-gist and literary critic Franco Moretti became the main critic of the close reading. He presented his ideas in the book «Distant Reading». This book can be viewed as a program to update the methodology of studying world literature. Moretti believes that the world literature should be studied not by looking at the details, but by examining it from a long distance: studying hudreds and thousands of texts. He suggest to use the Digital Humanities (DH) methods, i.e. to ap-ply digital (computer) methods in the humanities. To show the reasons for the survival of certain types of texts, Moretti compares literary processes with biological ones and draws an anology between natural selection and reader selection. Moretti’s predecessor, who first used quantitative methods in literary studies and saw common ground between literary and biological processes, was the author of the fundamental monograph “Methodology of an exact study of literature” B. I. Yarkho (18891942).Moretti’s book “Distant Reading” shatters stereotypes of the bibliographic environment. It is directed no to the study of close (slow) reading, but to the study of the entire world docmentary flow. This approach opens the way to the use of quantitative methods in the study of world bibliography. A new research strategy “exact study of bibliography” will be formed as part of digital and automated text processing.

The paper analyzes musical and poetic texts adopted by folk singers based on Erzya-Mordovian material recorded in the villages of Altai Krai and Kemerovo Oblast from 2007 to 2017. The texts have been systematized in terms of three levels of their attribution: text form (oral, printed, media), text type (folklore, authors’), and text language (own, other). A consistent description is provided of the identified adaptation forms of oral, printed, and media texts to the oral song practice. The examination of the unique musical and poetic adaptations of borrowed texts by performers illuminates the creative strategies employed by oral storytellers relying on their own repertoire, genre, and style preferences. The analysis of oral traditional texts adapted to late-tradition musical styles reveals a process of restylization impacting poetic structure and contributing to genre transformation by realizing updated musical and stylistic potential. Authors’ revisions of printed folklore and literary texts, when examined in their adapted forms, show unique musical and poetic features rooted in Erzya-Mordovian folklore and the style of modern popular songs. The analysis of textual adaptations reveals identifiable adaptation models. Emphasis is placed on the significance of translation activity in the process of mastering the Russian-language segment of the media by ethnophores.

This article focuses on the role of literature in the school subject Swedish as a second language in upper-secondary school and the teachers’ views of course literary texts The aim is to illustrate and analyse the motivations behind teachers using fiction for reading and the texts they use. The empirical materials consist of tape-recorded interviews with seven teachers A thematic content analysis is used to find patterns and then themes to be applied in conjunction with the interpretation of the material. The results show that teachers find literature useful as it may provide knowledge of and various perspectives on life and society, even though second language pupils do not take part in the history of literature in their course. Furthermore, literature not only helps develop multilingual students’ knowledge of the Swedish language but also provides them with insights into Swedish culture. The selection of literature was found to be traditional and Western. The article argues that the two upper-secondary school subjects of Swedish should become one inclusive subject, in which the reading of various literary texts and the holding of meaningful literary discussions can enrich all students, regardless of background.

This book is located very firmly within the discipline of cognitive stylistics, which is a scientific approach to literature that combines a close or slow reading of literary texts (their semantic,...

This study explores the transformative potential of TikTok as a contemporary literary space that empowers students’ creative thinking within the context of Palestinian higher education. It focuses on a group of 76 students who enrolled in the Novel & Short Story course in the English Department at a Palestinian university during the second term in 2022. By employing a Piagetian theoretical framework and a quantitative research approach through the utilization of a web questionnaire, the research demonstrates how the power of TikTok can be harnessed to inspire and construct a vibrant literary community in Palestinian higher education. In this community, students are positioned as active heroes in their TikTok videos where their interactive practices increase intellectual discussions, productive in-class performance, and collaborative reflection. Famed in a positive light, the research findings show that a sustained communal engagement with novels and short stories via digital spaces not only cultivates effective modes of creative thinking among participants but also provides original and practical orientations of teaching and learning in the Palestinian academic community. The possible digital understanding of literary texts beyond the conventions of institutionalized pedagogy provokes a future where students become creative thinkers and contributors to the world of fiction.

This essay discusses the study and in-class performance of Beah Richards' work, "A Black Woman Speaks." It explores teaching "A Black Woman Speaks" in a three-fold way-as a literary text, a cultural text, and as a performance text-and it demonstrates that this combination of pedagogical approaches enhances students' understanding of the complexities of Richards' work. Discussing Richards' work within a historical and cultural context helps to create historical memory and to make visible the ways white and black womanhood have been dependent upon one another for definition throughout history. A performance of the work in class is vital because it places the students/spectators into a position where they must question their own subjectivity and agency. Also, Richards' text and a performance of it, work to enhance a "Pedagogy of Whiteness," an attempt to make whiteness visible as a race and to re-construct whiteness as a site for activism against racism.