The Representation of Trauma in Modelvliegen by Marcel Möring

This paper attempts to compare the literary theory of Tsubouchi Shoyo(坪內逍遙), which was developed from the 'arts-the arts' examined throughout Wang Guowei's(王國維) literary theory, and Wang Guei's literary theory, which was established as the early modern Japanese literary theory. As Tsubouchi Shoyo's first statement, 'Novels are art(美術)' in 『Shosetsu Shinzui(小說神髓)』 opened the chapter of modern Japanese literary theory, this paper aims to explore Wang Guowei's literary theories in relation to the formation of modern literary theory in China. Therefore, in the case of the formation of Japanese modern art theory, Tsubouchi Shoyo's use of Western literary theory and logic in his own way within the magnetic field of pragmatic thought and literary dance theory that spread throughout Japanese society in the 1880s, while building a literary theory that incorporated the discourse of the Japanese art world at the time, was used as a guide to examine the formation of Chinese modern art theory and Wang Guowei's literary theory treatise. This was further utilized to examine the shifts in the theses that were common to their literary theories. In fact, the formation environment of Sino-Japanese modern literary theory was different in terms of its reception and paragraph situation according to the way the two countries experienced modern East Asia, but there are also similar points. It is also true that Wang Guowei's and Tsubouchi Shoyo's views and arguments on the literary arts developed in very different ways after they published their literary theory works and related papers, depending on their respective life trajectories and the circumstances of their respective countries. Nevertheless, neither Tsubouchi Shoyo nor Wang Guowei built a separate literary theory that completely excluded the dominant discourse in the academic and literary circles of their time. Rather, Wang Guowei, who studied a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics and natural sciences, could be said to have been more attuned to and thought about the axioms of modern China's time and built his literary theories in response to them.

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller

The aim at the core of this book is a synthesis of increasingly popular and culturally significant forms of digital literature on the one hand, and established literary and critical theory on the other: reading digital texts through the lens of canonical theory, but also reading this more traditional theory through the lens of digital texts and related media. In a field which has often regarded the digital as apart from traditional literature and theory, this book highlights continuities in order to analyse digital literature as part of a longer literary tradition. Using examples from social media to video games and works particularly by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, Digital Literature and Critical Theory contextualises digital forms among their analogue precursors and traces ongoing social developments which find expression in these cultural phenomena, including power dynamics between authors and readers, the individual in (post-)modernity, consumerism, and the potential for intersubjective exchange.

Deconstruction and the Transcultural Uncanny

REVIEWS Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2002. xxix + 275 pp. Paper: $19.95. This collection represents a much-needed effort to expand the boundaries ofecocriticism. Rosendale successfully collects thirteen essays that are not only well-written and informative, but that also deal with critical areas relatively unexplored by most works of ecocritical theory. Though several of the essays deal in part with the traditional ecocritical issues concerning the representation of nature and the human impact on the environment, they also examine a number of less studied areas. Collectively, these essays enrich scholarly discussion ofthe relationship between the natural world and literature, often in surprising ways. Beginning the call for an enrichment of ecocritical study, the essays of the first section highlight the need to rethink both the boundaries ofecocriticism and the texts that fall within those boundaries . The first section reexamines the relationship between literary history and nature writing, arguing that attention should be devoted to neglected critical theories and to texts that fall outside of traditional nature writing. As most nature-writing is non-fiction , several of these essays advocate ecocritical study of fictional texts. The first essay in the collection, Michael P. Branch's "Saving all the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism," argues that "a full understanding of the American land and its various literary representations will require that scholars of environmental literature dedicate themselves to the preservation and restoration of the many rare, corrupted, or otherwise 'endangered' texts" (3). Branch's essay opens a new area of ecocritical scholarship that justifiably groups "endangered" manuscripts with the other natural resources that occupy so much traditional ecocritical research. In another essay largely representative of those that form the first section of the book, "In Search of Left Ecology's Usable Past: The Jungle, Social Change, and the Class Character of Environmental Impairment," Rosendale contends that many important texts, especially those from the Left literary tradition, are ignored by ecocritics because of "a mistaken tendency among ecocritics to confuse the complex and necessary project of developing eco-conscious critical values with a simplistic rejection of 'interhuman' concerns like urban social life and class politics" (61). The second section, entitled "Expanding the Subject in 122Reviews Ecocriticism," promotes a more open definition of ecocriticism that incorporates conventional literary theories dealing with race, gender , and ethnicity. These essays advocate an ecocritical approach sensitive to both place and human identity. James Tarter's "Locating the Uranium Mine: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony" opens this section by calling for a dual critical approach to both self-identification and the natural world. Tartar argues "that Ceremony provides a model of a sophisticated, simultaneous attention to environmental and multiethnic issues that needs to come to the fore in contemporary ecocriticism" (98). Essays by Andrea Blair and Eleanor Hersey expand this ecocritical concept in terms of gender, while James D. Lilley and Louis H. Palmer, III explore what they argue is a permeable boundary between human identity and the environment. Lilley asks, "What is the nature of the body's interaction with the environment ? Do we reach out from our bodies and fashion our surroundings , or do they encroach upon, penetrate, and mold us? Are we shapers of, or shaped like, clay?" (149). Further expanding the relationship between ecocriticism and traditional theory, the essays of the final section address the sublime , arguing collectively that the philosophical concept ofthe sublime is capable of clarifying problems associated with natural representation. Rick Van Noy's essay, "Surveying the Sublime: Literary Cartographers and the Spirit of Place," meaningfully connects the human experience of place with scientific cartographic representation. Aaron Dunckel's '"Mount Blanc': Shelley's Sublime Allegory of the Real" also calls into question the relationship between sublimity and representation, arguing that literary representation is not simply an exercise in mimesis but also works to create that which is not present in nature. The last essay of the collection, James Kirwan's "Vicarious Edification : Radcliffe and the Sublime," argues that "the barrier that separates us from nature is one that cannot be crossed quite simply because there is nothing...

Literature is a quiet representation of artistic work, and literary theory works as the regulator that handles the way of the text. This paper introduces Reactive Defensive Oppression (RDO) as an original literary theory that redefines oppression as an emotional defence mechanism, rather than a stable exercise of hegemonic power. Where classical frameworks often read oppression through systems of patriarchy, race, and colonialism, RDO shifts its focus towards the psychological necessity behind those oppressive acts, especially those triggered by emotional instability, fear of dethronement, or emotional fragility. The theory argues that many oppressive characters do not act out of dominance, but from a deep internal panic, a desperate effort to protect perceived authority, relevance, or identity. RDO is organized into a triadic model: Passive RDO (emotional paralysis), Self-RDO (internalized oppression), and Ideological RDO (performative aggression rooted in insecurity). To demonstrate this framework across cross-cultural and gendered causes, this study conducts a comparative analysis of Mahesh Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, two texts that, despite geographical and cultural differences, reveal strikingly similar emotional patterns of oppression. The paper engages with Freud’s defence mechanisms, Foucault’s theory of power, and Spivak’s subaltern critique, but proposes RDO as a filling concept, bridging a gap where traditional theories often overlook emotionally unstable oppressors. By repositioning oppression as a reactive emotional praxis, RDO offers a new interpretive lens for studying trauma, gender, and power across diverse literary landscapes.

Gyeumjae Jotaeeok is one of the representative literary figures of Soron Faction in the late Joseon Dynasty and enjoyed excellent literary reputation in that era. Despite such reputation, however, there has not been a comprehensive study on the entire literary world of Jotaeeok, and his literary theory has not been discussed at all. This situation is thought to be due to the limitations of the data that he did not leave a writing his literary theory. However, if you look at the articles that evaluated Jotaeeok's literature or the articles that Jotaeeok evaluated other writers and works, you can get a glimpse of his literary theory. The evaluation of Jotaeeok's literature is that his work is based on writer's feelings and contents of writings rather than rhetoric or technical skill, and poetry and prose are natural, both expression and composition are appropriate, and in the creation of poetry, the design and utilization of poetical imagination and poetic word are natural, and proficient. He denied poetry full of technique by pursuing newness. This assessment is similar to the assessment that Jotaeeok made for other writers and works. In his evaluation of literary works and writer, Jotaeeok emphasized the authenticity of the author's emotion revealed in poetry and prose, so he focused on the contents of poetry and prose and the author's emotion contained in poetry and prose rather than formal and rhetorical aspects, and emphasized the learning and training for the creation of poetry and prose, and when the accumulated inside of the author was naturally revealed, the poetry and prose was considered to be excellent. He therefore considered that he did not have to try to use a lot of power, a strange or a poetic word full of technique. However, if Jotaeeok's literary theory is summarized like this, his literary theory does not deviate much from the universal literary theory of the period. If so, Jotaeeok's literary theory is not Jotaeeok's literary theory but rather a universal literary theory of the times. And Jotaeeok accepts such universal literary theory as much as possible and creates and criticizes the work. However, his literary theory is in the same position as the universal literary awareness of the period. But his literary theory and work's literary value are not lost just because he created and evaluated his works according to such literary theory. It is because it has the same perception as the universal perception of an era and it is not a legitimate evaluation to lower the person's perception and the value of the work he created because he created the work that most meets the perception.

Reviewed by: Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture Michael A. Chaney (bio) Woolfork, Lisa . Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Argumentatively compact yet refreshingly eclectic in its use of evidence, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture offers an original contribution to scholarship on the cultural legacies of slavery. As a whole, Woolfork's six chapters argue that representations of bodily responses to the trauma of slavery in African American popular culture reveal a type of knowledge, a corporeal knowledge of traumatic experience that runs counter to the elusive trauma of much literary theory on trauma. Rather than the predominantly psychic domain of Freudian trauma, which is available only through oblique reference, the texts investigated here propose a distinctly diasporic trauma that is imaginatively available to bodily experience. Through fictional and performative devices of time travel, contemporary black bodies return to the slave past in the novels, films, and tourist sites [End Page 578] that Woolfork cogently describes. As explained by the anecdotal refrain from the introduction, they "go there to know there." The value of Woolfork's study comes in the variety of texts that encode such time-traveling journeys back to the knowable "there" of slavery—Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Haile Gerima's film Sankofa (1993), Phyllis Perry's Stigmata (1989), the reformatory films Brother Future (1991) and The Quest for Freedom: The Harriet Tubman Story (1992), debates surrounding Colonial Williamsburg's 1994 slave auction, the ritual reenactment of the Middle Passage The Maafa Suite: A Healing Journey, and comedic representations of slavery in Chappelle's Show. If there is a weakness in Woolfork's selective staging of conventional notions of trauma, it is made up for by the book's rich description and insightful re-situating of such texts as bodily types of epistemology. The result is an expanded understanding of vernacular theories of memory and traumatic knowledge. The introduction does a fine job of articulating the scope and purpose of the book: to consider bodily epistemology—a "representational strategy that uses the body of a present-day protagonist to register the traumatic slave past" (2)—as a means to challenge the principle of latency in much trauma theory. Referencing the work of Cathy Caruth, Walter Benn Michaels, Claude Lanzmann, Michael Rothberg, and others, Woolfork makes the case that most theories of trauma are anti-representational. They posit an essentially elusive trauma that prefers psychic registration over physical or corporeal responses and an indirect rather than direct experience of the originary trauma. In Woolfork's view, a contrary theory underwrites such works as Butler's Kindred, one of the primary subject texts of chapter one, as the novel imagines the protagonist not allegorically engaging with the traumatic past as Freudian theory would have it, but directly engaging with the past and as a result critiquing the implicitly racist mind-body split espoused by current invocations of trauma in literary theory. Still, Woolfork's positioning of a heterogeneous array of contemporary trauma theory into the role of the straw-man (so unvarying that a whole paragraph from the introduction on this trend in trauma theory is repeated verbatim in the first chapter) may leave some readers disenchanted. Nevertheless, the force of Woolfork's argument centers less on bodily epistemology's difference from Freudian trauma than on the differences (often gendered) between one textual deployment of it and another. A comparative methodology, in fact, appears as an organizational strategy within each chapter. Thus, whereas Butler's novel produces not only a supernatural opportunity for the present-day Dana to experience slavery directly, but also an intellectual remove from the collapse of past and present in which Dana is able to contextualize her experience using knowledge derived from historical texts, Mona, the protagonist of Gerima's Sankofa, is forced to lose her pre-time travel consciousness, becoming the vessel of the actual slave whose consciousness overtakes her body. Characterizing this difference as dual approaches to empathy, Woolfork embarks in the second chapter to consider the novel Stigmata as a reconciliation of the two. According to Woolfork, the bodily referents and quilting aesthetics in Perry's novel "open up a space to rethink the antirepresentational...

Walter Benjamin wrote perhaps the most complex, most interesting essay on the process of translation under the title The Task of the Translator in 1923. This very complex work of literary and translation theory has been analysed and referred to by several literary scholars in the past almost 100 years, the Belgian–American literary scholar Paul de Man among them. The present research article makes an attempt to present a comparative analysis based on close reading of the texts between Benjamin’s original essay and Paul de Man’s commentary, figuring out the possible (and necessary) contradictions and ambiguities of the text, trying to find the answer to the question whether or not translation, at least in the successful sense of the word, exist at all. Deconstructionist way of reading literary and theoretical texts may give multiple answers to the questions about translation, and demonstrate the possibility and impossibility of translation at the same time. Keywords: literary translation, translation theory, literary theory, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, deconstruction, close reading.

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748613526);Through a series of short essays, Readings traces the consideration given to the act of close reading in literary criticism and theory over the last thirty years.Focusing on short passages from a number of critical works, including those by Barthes, Cixous, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan and J. Hillis Miller amongst others, the essays enact close readings of the trope of reading - its movements and performances in each of the passages in question - so as to offer a more detailed comprehension of the nature of reading, and the ways in which critical thinking has transformed our understanding of what it means to read.Readings addresses in a lively and engaging manner the varying rhythms and articulations made possible through the careful tracing of the process of critical reading which literary theory has made available.

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the method for analysing literary works. Literary Theory is an examination of a piece of literature which can be addressed to examine a single aspect of the work in its entirety By literary theory we assume not to the meaning of work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literary works can mean. Moreover creative writing focuses on writing from emotions and thoughts which tends to be expressive, imaginative, and literary. Any writing refers to individual expression as a social practice falls to this category. It is believed that creative writing cannot be formed as an acquaintance outside literary theory instead of one that is fashioned within. This paper looks at how creative writing and literary theory should be combined for producing fine-new literary works

This article sets out to examine the ways in which Indigenous trauma texts employ storytelling as discursive practice and convention to narrate the complex forces of collective and transgenerational traumata. This will be established through an analysis of Tina Makereti’s debut novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (2014). Examining trauma narratives within the limited analytic framework of traditional trauma theory remains unsatisfactory with regard to Indigenous texts that deal with the multiple-layered forms of collective and transgenerational trauma. Thus, while informed by literary trauma theory as well as postcolonial studies, my theoretical approach is first and foremost based on Indigenous theories and knowledges, which are crucial to better comprehend the representation and articulation of trauma in Indigenous narratives. Focus will be on examining the Indigenous tradition of storytelling as a narrative mode and convention for Indigenous trauma fiction. Irene Visser persuasively argues that ‘[t]he nuanced exploration and conceptualization of the function of indigenous belief systems in the engagement with trauma would constitute a further necessary development in the project of achieving a fully decolonized trauma theory’ (Visser 2015: 263). By engaging with Indigenous epistemologies with regard to storytelling in the analysis of Indigenous trauma narratives, this article aims to contribute to the discussion.

Traditional Sanskrit literary theory has always tried to distinguish kāvya,a term often translated as poetry, but actually subsuming all creative literature including prose romance, biography, and drama, from other linguistic expressions like treatises of knowledge systems (śāstra) and narratives (ākhyāna). Though the treatises related to the topic were written in Sanskrit, they addressed Prakrit poetry also, and Sanskrit drama was always multilingual. Literary theorists of India have speculated on a variety of topics related to the nature, aims, genre, and constituent elements of literature, the equipments necessary for a poet, various levels of meaning, and the nature of aesthetic response. In their attempt to distinguish kāvya from other linguistic expressions, they have also formulated various concepts like poetic figures, stylistic features, suggestiveness, aesthetic emotion, propriety, and the like that they deem to be exclusive to poetry. Indian theorists took into account both the creative and receptive aspects of literature and the notion of the ideal reader is inherent in the discussions of poetry. Literary theory also armed itself with the insights it received from philosophical systems in dealing with the problems related to verbal cognition and aesthetic experience. The Kāvyālaṅkāra of Bhāmaha (6th century), the Kāvyādarśa of Daṇḍin (7th century), the Kāvyālaṅkārasārasamgraha of Udbhaṭa (8th century), the Kāvyālaṅkāasūtravṛtti ofVāmana (8th century),the Kāvyālaṅkāra of Rudraṭa (9th century), the Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana (9th century), the Kāvyamīmāmsā of Rājaśekhara (10th century), Vakroktijīvita of Kuntaka (10th century), the Locana commentary on Dhvanyāloka and theAbhinavabhāratī commentary on Nāṭyaśāstra of Abhinavagupta (11th century), the Vyaktiviveka of Mahimabhaṭṭa (11th century), the Kāvyaprakāśa of Mammaṭa (11th century), the Sāhityadarpaṇa of Viśvanātha (14th century), the Sarasvatīkaṇṭābharaṇa and Śṛṅgāraprakāśa of Bhoja (11th century),the Citramīmāmsā of Appayya Dīkṣita (16th–17th century), and the Rasagaṅgādhara Jagannātha Paṇḍita (17th century) are some of the seminal works in Indian literary theory.