Wolfgang Iser

Patients’ evaluation of quality of care in general practice: What are the cultural and linguistic barriers?

As its title suggests, The Contemporary Novel provides comprehensive bibliographic information for the critical literature on contemporary novels in English. In this new edition, what was already an expansive work has been updated and further enlarged to include information not only on American and British novelists but also on writers in English from around the world. Although most references are for journals and books representing literary scholarship, the authors have also included information on other resources where they felt the materials would contribute a unique or unusually interesting perspective on the work. The result is a comprehensive reference work that provides researchers with a broad perspective on each novelist and his or her body of work. Arranged for fast, easy access to information, the book lists novelists alphabetically by name, and then lists the references to each novelist's work alphabetically by author name. Complete bibliographic information is included for each citation. Unmatched in scope and depth of coverage, The Contemporary Novel is an essential addition to every literary reference collection.

II WANT TO CONSIDER THE IDEA OF THE CULTURAL ENCOUNTER between English and other languages, languages of others, but at same time also to think about English as a language of cultural encounter, an idea which connects to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's argument that translation is the language of languages.1 Related to this are ways in which English literature has for some time been marked even in categories used to define it by other cultures: world literatures in English, anglophone, postcolonial, Commonwealth literature(s). All these ways of describing literatures in English written outside Britain have particular implications, but general assumption, as with 'English literature', is that they are written, or read, in English.A simple example of how this cashes out in practice would be Conference of Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). English is official language of Commonwealth, which hosts, in addition to ACLALS, organizations such as English Speaking Union, whose formation pre-dates Commonwealth itself. Any country that wishes to be a member of Commonwealth - even those members such as Mozambique, which have no historical links to British Empire - is required to accept rule that English language is means of Commonwealth communication. ACLALS conferences rarely infringe this rule: in my experience, even in India, all papers are given in English. It is noticeable, on other hand, that name of organization 'the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies' deliberately avoids specifying English as official language which ACLALS studies. I cannot find any information on any of many Commonwealth websites about how many languages are spoken in its fifty-three countries by its nearly two billion citizens, about thirty percent of world's population. However, website 'ethnologue' claims that there are 6,909 living languages in world, so with thirty percent of world's population, we might guess that on a proportional basis Commonwealth hosts around two thousand languages.2The Commonwealth Writer's Prize, by contrast, considers books in only one of them: i.e. books written in English, official language of Commonwealth. To get a prize, you have to write in English, to be a producer of 'English' literature in some sense. But what exactly, aspiring writers might ask, is English of English literature? In order to answer this question, I thought I would start at an obvious place, with a few examples of mainstream canonical English literature, drawn from writers I studied when I was 'reading', as they say, for my BA in 'English Language and Literature' at Oxford University - surely place, if anywhere, that represents heartland of English, of pure English English and English literature proper.My first example is a poem I was given to read in my very first term, on arrival in Oxford.Oft him anhaga are gebideoMetudes miltse beah be modceariggeond lagulade longe sceoldehreran mid hondum hrimcealde sa;,wadan wraxlastas: wyrd bio ful ara;d!Swa CW2CO eardstapa. . .3So here, it seems, is authentic English literature, straight from Oxford BA course on English Language and Literature. Perhaps someone should try submitting a book for Commonwealth Writer's Prize written in Anglo-Saxon. You might object, though, that claim by Anglo-Saxonists to call their object of study 'Old English' forms part of a particular, now historical ideology about origins of English in Anglo-Saxonism.4 So let us look at something more recent. I could cite some Chaucer, whose language resembles modern English a little more than poet of The Wanderer, but I thought John Donne might be fairer as a more comparatively recent canonical figure of English literature:Qvot dos haec Linguists perfetti Disticha feront,Tot cuerdos Statesmen, hic livre fara tunc. …

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

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English Supriya Nair The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English C. L. Innes Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ix +295 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-54101-5 paper. $24.99. The Cambridge Introductions series now has over twenty-five titles devoted largely to major authors and occasionally to literary periods, genres and fields. The books are designed primarily as an introduction for students but can also be useful to scholars and teachers looking for broad overviews, quick historical references, and general thematic connections for pedagogical purposes. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English by C. L. Innes provides convenient discussions of conventional postcolonial themes: cultural nationalism preceding and following independence, racial constructions, local and subaltern counternarratives, landscape, language (including orality, nation language and performance poetry), neocolonial failures, and so on. Genres include drama and poetry, usually neglected for the novel in the field, and another productive variation is the discussion of Irish texts and authors, particularly the influence of Irish plays and poetry on writers such as Derek Walcott. Innes ends by locating the empire back in the heart of London with a chapter on black British and other transnational writing. The book pays considerable attention to the renowned writers of a couple of generations and the most familiar terrain of the postcolonial—thus Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott; Nigeria, the anglophone Caribbean, Kenya, and India form an inevitable cluster. Other geographical territories and works, including those of women and indigenous writers, tend to be unevenly distributed. Innes admits in the preface the impossibility of including all the postcolonial countries and authors and pragmatically focuses for the most part on "just a few former colonies, chosen as examples of particular kinds of colonial and postcolonial structures and traditions" (viii). But the earlyhistory of the field in its comparatively more compact British Commonwealth literary heritage rather than its current unruly, intractable, and multiple incarnations influences the selections. The field's tendency to be dominated in later years by the theory is avoided, constructively highlighting the literary production; however, [End Page 199] the selection is not always balanced. While the chronological reading of the "postcolonial" may explain why the twentieth century is emphasized, the younger, more diverse, and emerging late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century contexts do not figure as much as the "golden greats" of the immediate post-independence period. The chapter on gender revolves around older women writers. Although writers such as Michelle Cliff, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Caryl Phillips, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith are mentioned, more recent issues in diaspora studies, gender and sexuality, or popular culture and the continuing genealogy of literary heritage not just from the Commonwealth era of the British empire but from within postcolonial literary and cultural traditions, for instance, are less visible in the book. This is not altogether to be regretted since I find my students not only unfamiliar with but also unwilling to read the older postindependence generation in favor of the younger writers. Such an introduction takes us back to the writers who were pioneers of the field and gave it international recognition, reshaping the field of English literature and transforming modern political and cultural views. But perhaps one can now speak, like of the early modern, of an early postcolonial literature. The book is a handy reference guide to this literature, concluding its analyses with brief sections on glossary, biography, and history compiled by Kaori Nagai and including a short bibliography. Supriya Nair Tulane University supriya@tulane.edu Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

DOLOUGHAN, FIONA J. English as Literature in Translation. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 179 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $89.99 e-book. Fiona J. Doloughan's new study is an examination of contemporary novels in English through the prism of translation. Taking her departure in the translational turn in Humanities, Steven G. Kellman's influential concept of literary translingualism, and English's role as lingua franca for non-native speakers worldwide, Doloughan sets out discover how writers who have found English as opposed having been born into it (e.g., Eva Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo) and bilingual writers or writers for whom non-standard variety of English is the starting point (Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, James Kelman) are changing the expression of literature in English. Doloughan's interest lies with what she coins as narratives of translation, that is, that thematize, narrativize and/or are structured around, questions of language, cultural identity and what it means translate oneself or one's culture (79). The main focus of the study is not primarily the way the examined writers are changing the English literary language of today's globalized world; rather, it is the thematic aspects that dominate--that is, how experiences of switching languages and/or moving through are expressed in the chosen works. It is an optimistic narrative Doloughan is writing. She wants to suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss, and translation of self and other as predominantly painful and traumatic experience, have given way greater sense of what is be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access different languages and cultures (1). She regards this development as correlating with more positive understanding of bi- and multilingualism in linguistic research as well as in society. While literary multilingualism undoubtedly is vehicle for renewing literary expression, question already extensively explored in literary scholarship (e.g., Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics 2004 and Hana Wirth-Nesher's Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature 2006, just mention couple of works), the narrative of from loss gain is problematic. Firstly, the chronology of the chosen works contradicts it. The most radical argument for linguistic and cultural hybridity as gain, not loss in the study, Anzaldiia's classic Borderlands/La Frontera 1987, is actually the oldest of the works, preceding Hoffman's story of language learning as the loss of another language in Lost in Translation (1989) by two years. It also precedes, by over decade, Ariel Dorfman's memoirs with their eroticization of language ties in terms of bigamy--itself an excellent illustration of the monolingualist conception of the mother tongue as a family romance described by Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue (2012). Secondly, the transformation of literature in English by writers with background in other languages is not new phenomenon. Multilingual modernists like Beckett. Conrad, and Nabokov that Doloughan briefly mentions (162) were not exceptions monolingualism; instead, translingualism, exile, and textual multilingualism are constitutional traits of European literary modernism (cf. Languages of Exile, eds. Englund & Olsson, 2013). …

Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She received a degree in English from St. Hugh's College in Oxford in 1928, but she chose not to pursue an academic career. Instead, she decided to attend the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she trained to be a nurse. With the outbreak of the Second World War, she was assigned to the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and briefly worked with Dunkirk evacuees. She went on to work in the Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward and was there until 1945. It was during her nurse's training that Renault met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion. This important lesbian relationship both resolved and posed many problems for Renault, not the least of which was how she was to write about issues at once intensely personal and socially challenging. In 1939, Renault published her first novel under a pseudonym in order to mask her identity. It was a time when she was struggling not only with her vocation (nursing and writing), but also with her sexual identity in the social and moral context of English life during the war. In 1948, Renault left England with Mullard for South Africa and never returned. It was in South Africa that she made the shift from her early contemporary novels of manners to the mature historical novels of Hellenic life. The classical settings allowed Renault to mask material too explosive to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an 'academic' freedom to write about subjects vital to her - among them war, peace, career, women's roles, female and male homosexuality, and bisexuality. Renault's reception complicates an understanding of her achievement, for she has a special status within the academic community, where she is both widely read and little written about. Her interest in sexuality and specifically in homosexuality and bisexuality, in fluid gender roles and identities, warrants a rereading and reevaluation of her work. Eloquently written and extensively researched, The Masks of Mary Renault will be of special value to anyone interested in women's studies or English literature.

Re-examining English and/in the Geography of (World) Literature

My dissertation examines the ways in which authors across the African continent represent ecological trauma in literature. By productively combining the concerns of ecocriticism with the ethical engagement of literary trauma theory, I arrive at a way of reading for ecological trauma while proposing key tenets of a green trauma theory. The corpus of literary texts I explore in this dissertation spans from 1950 to 2021 and includes canonical works such as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (2014 [1952]) and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (2014 [1976]), more contemporary novels such as Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2022), and works of Africanfuturism such as Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2020). Ultimately, my dissertation is an argument in favour of the ability of literary language to articulate ecological trauma – or the disruption of an ecological system due to anthropogenic change driven by extraction, exploitation or expansion – across histories, geographies and communities.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism

In order to build the conceptual basis for a convergence of cosmologies, the basic premise of this work is that the ability to conceive and represent a “view of reality” makes human interaction different from any other phenomenon that an observer may call “interaction.” The “substance” where a view of reality is formed is the experience of time and language in disciplined practice. Science and the modern worldview conceived as disciplined practice require human entities that regard themselves as either observers in science or as historical individuals in modern life. Nevertheless, in a disciplined search for knowledge—which can also be seen as a search for self-knowledge—an individual or an observer is already necessarily embodied and is herself already situated within a view of reality and cultural inheritance that she identifies with through her own particularly human interaction and experience of time and language. Currently, the modern view of legitimate knowledge construes reality as organized around the notions of a subject and an object that are separate from each other. “Objectivity” depends on the disciplined distance that a subject may take from her object of study. This analytical distance may be useful in the practice and understanding of science, but my contention is that, to take on board that the possibility of such separation is the only source of reality is analogous with assuming sacred or religious belief as absolute truth. Belief and legitimate reality are based on cosmological myths as well as on disciplined practice simultaneously.

Reviewed by: From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford Maya Zakrzewska-Pim (bio) From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940. By Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford’s From Colonial to Modern sheds light on the development [End Page 124] of colonial girlhoods between 1840 and 1940 in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The authors’ argument centers on the notion of “transnational girlhood,” which offers a more flexible and inclusive way than does “imperial girlhood” of talking about the contemporary models of girlhood offered to both British and colonial girls through literature and periodicals. This approach allows “narratives from different nations [to be] placed alongside one another and examined both for their distinct depictions of colonial conditions for girls and for their similarities” (11), rather than focusing exclusively on texts from Britain. The authors “propose a model of transnationalism in which the production, distribution, and consumption of girls’ texts is situated within the global processes of print culture and book history” (13). This research will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature, gender studies, and imperialism, as well as on Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand literature. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, outlining existing work on girlhood in the period, introducing the notion of “transnationalism,” and providing a summary of the following chapters, which are divided into three sections. The first, “Empire and Transnational Flows,” focuses on how a universalized model of girlhood emerged and what this model was. Section 2, “National and Transnational Dynamics,” examines the influence on this model of ideas about family, the environment, and race. Section 3, “Modernity and Transnational Femininities,” discusses how modern views on work, education, and the First World War affected notions of girlhood and literature for girls. In the first section, chapter 2, “Colonial Girls’ Print Culture,” examines “how, when, and where books from British, American, and colonial writers were referenced—particularly in advertisements, book reviews, and correspondence columns” (23) to illustrate how texts were distributed in Britain and its colonies, and between the colonies themselves. Chapter 3, “Girlhood in the British Empire,” compares the representations of girls in texts produced in Britain with those written and published in the colonies. It concludes that while colonial publications demonstrate anxieties about the colonial girl’s future in terms of her femininity and how this might affect her ability to fulfill necessary roles, both British and colonial texts represent characters who see themselves as simultaneously colonial and imperial. The second section opens with chapter 4, “The Colonial and Imperial Family,” which draws attention to the existence of two distinct plot types focused on family. Both involve (usually orphaned) girls moving either to or away from the imperial center. In doing so, they often form unconventional families, which allows family to function as a metaphor for colonialism itself. The colonial girls in these texts “operate much like paper dolls” (96), interchangeable with one another. Chapter 5, “Environment and the Natural World,” addresses the representation of girls’ relationships with the natural environments in the colonies, and how these attitudes changed between the late nineteenth [End Page 125] and early twentieth centuries. Early texts were written by English writers who had little or no familiarity with the landscapes of the colonies and presented them mostly as threatening and dangerous; however, the start of the twentieth century saw representations by writers who had grown up in the colonies and saw their surroundings as integral parts of their national identity, resulting in far more positive depictions. The final chapter of this section, “Race and Texts for Girls,” examines the incorporation—or lack thereof—of Indigenous girls into texts for girls. The transnational commonalities of colonial girls “are most evident in their treatment of white girls who act in quasi-maternal roles towards Indigenous girls, who are universally depicted as childlike, exemplifying the inferiority of non-white cultures” (143). The different colonial histories of each state contributed to these variations. Section 3...

The development of the human consciousness: The postmodern quest for GodThis article critically reflects upon ‘emerging Christians’ – those who have departed from a premodern (theistic) and modernist (secular) view of reality, and have rather embraced postmodernity in response to the cognitive dissonance they experience due to a clash of epistemological paradigms. The article discusses psychological theories on the development of human consciousness, and describes seven levels or stages of such development, namely the archaic, magical, mythological, rational, pluralistic, holistic and transpersonal levels. The article focuses on Ken Wilber’s integral psychological theory, better known as AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels and All Lines), which also covers the internal and external dimensions of human consciousness, including an integral view on the so-called ‘states of human consciousness’. In doing so, the article aims to contribute to that aspect of pastoral care that focuses on psychological theory.

In this book, Katherine M. Hockey explores the function of emotions in the New Testament by examining the role of emotions in 1 Peter. Moving beyond outdated, modern rationalistic views of emotions as irrational, bodily feelings, she presents a theoretically and historically informed cognitive approach to emotions in the New Testament. Informed by Greco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical views of emotions along with modern emotion theory, she shows how the author of 1 Peter uses the logic of each emotion to value and position objects within the audience's worldview, including the self and the other. She also demonstrates how, cumulatively, the emotions of joy, distress, fear, hope, and shame are deployed to build an alternative view of reality. This new view of reality aims to shape the believers' understanding of the structure of their world, encourages a reassessment of their personal goals, and ultimately seeks to affect their identity and behaviour.

E. F. J. Tucker. Intruder into Eden: Representations of the Common Lawyer in English Literature, 1350-1750. (Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture, 2.) Columbia: Camden House, 1984. 1 pl. + xiii + 141 pp. $28. - Volume 38 Issue 1