American Writers Research Articles

Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)

ABSTRACT In the last three decades, numerous literary works have been published by women writers with origins in Italy’s former colonies in the Horn of Africa. These narratives have helped to create a belated form of postcolonial consciousness in Italy. Ethiopian American writer Maaza Mengiste adds to this body of work with her Booker longlisted novel, The Shadow King, which depicts the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935–41). This article analyses her text through the lens of intergenerational trauma theory. It applies Michael Rothberg’s notion of “complex implication”, referring to how an inheritance of victimhood may coexist with a position of implication, and Mihaela Mihai’s concept of “impure resistance”, which allows space for the ambivalence that may be implicit in resistance. It thus explores Mengiste’s portrayal of the enduring – and often unconscious – legacy of past trauma on the present and examines how subject positions such as “victim” and “perpetrator” fluctuate over generations.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BHAGAVADGITA ON AMERICAN LITERATURE

Present paper focuses on the study of American literary writers who have been influenced by the teachings of the Bhagvadgita. Wilkinss translation of theBhagvadgita gave a new direction of thinking to the literary writers in the world. Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost in American literature expressed their acquaintance with the Gita, the Upanishads and Oriental philosophy. These Transcendental writers interested in the concept of selfhood found in Hindu scriptures a well elaborated doctrine of self. Hindu scriptures tell us that the central core of ones self (antaratman) is identifiable with the cosmic whole (Brahma).

Argentine exiles in Spain: Translation as a practice of solidarity

s part of its solidarity activities with Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine exiles in Catalonia, the NGO Agermanament led by Father Josep Ribera and the Lliga dels Drets dels Pobles published a register of exiles organized according to their professional activity in the magazine Agermanamentin 1979. The categories included in the list were “visual artists, doctors/psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, musicians, actors and singers, publicists, jurists, architects, and photographers”. Translatorswere not included in the list, even thoughtheirprofessional status had been recognized by the UNESCO in 1976 and thousands of Latin American exiles who had fled dictatorships and arrived in Spain without refugee status were working as translators. Due to the toll on the publishing sector, heavily damaged by political and cultural repression, numerous exiled Latin American intellectuals and writers entered the Catalan publishing industryas translators, proofreaders, and editors. Thisarticle aims to shed light on the quantitative and qualitative importance of translation as a practice of solidarity within the publishing sector during the Spanish transition to democracy. I want to show that members of the Latin American diaspora contributed to the constitution of a transnational publishing space, which was possible thanks to the solidarity of local publishers and exiles who created a labor network through the commission of translations.

Towards the Politics of Difference: Mobility and Ethnic Identity in Richard Ford’s Bascombe Novels

Mobility holds profound ethnic, class, and cultural significance in the fiction of the contemporary American writer Richard Ford. Through an analysis of his representative works, including Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank with You, it becomes evident that Ford portrays the “negative mobility” of African Americans under spatial isolation, the transnational mobility of a Chinese immigrant, and the upward social mobility of both groups. In doing so, Ford illuminates disparities in mobility rights, routes, and friction among different ethnic groups, while also revealing shifts in their social status, values, and sense of identity. Furthermore, Ford reflects upon the social reality wherein ethnic minority groups encounter othering and marginalization upon integration into mainstream American society. This exposure lays bare the widespread systemic racial discrimination and deficiencies within the American political and economic system. Additionally, Ford’s depiction of upward social mobility among ethnic minorities underscores the effectiveness of the politics of difference as a means to resist authority and construct ethnic identity. Focusing on the mobility of ethnic minorities deepens our understanding of the survival dilemma and identity crisis faced by them.

THE INFLUENCE OF JAZZ AND BLUES ON AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

This research paper explores the profound influence of jazz and blues on African American literature, highlighting their role in shaping themes, narrative techniques, and cultural expressions. Jazz and blues, with origins rooted in African traditions and their evolution in the United States, serve as cultural symbols representing the resilience, creativity, and spirit of the African American community. The Harlem Renaissance marked a significant intersection of music and literature, with key figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison incorporating musical elements into their works to explore themes of identity, struggle, resilience, and community.Langston Hughes' poetry, notably "The Weary Blues," captures the rhythmic and emotional depth of blues, while Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, including "Their Eyes Were Watching God," integrate musical elements and African American folklore. Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" employs jazz influences to explore themes of identity and cultural expression. These works demonstrate how jazz and blues have shaped the narrative structures and thematic depth of African American literature.Contemporary African American writers continue this tradition, drawing on jazz and blues to enhance their storytelling. Toni Morrison’s "Jazz" and Jesmyn Ward’s "Sing, Unburied, Sing" exemplify the ongoing influence of these musical genres, using them to deals complex themes and preserve cultural narratives.The paper concludes that the interconnectedness of music and literature in African American culture is a testament to the community's rich artistic heritage. Jazz and blues are integral to the African American narrative, providing a soundtrack to the community’s experiences and enhancing the emotional and cultural depth of their literature. This relationship celebrates the past and inspires future generations, ensuring the enduring legacy of jazz and blues in African American literary tradition.

The phenomenon of film production: Literary and artistic projects of the XX-XXI centuries

Introduction: The phenomena of cinema production has attracted a lot of attention, especially when it comes to creative and literary endeavours that interpret it. It is essential to comprehend the creative processes and the function of the film producer in order to advance cultural practices.Objective: to express the phenomenon of producer’s activity in cinema on the basis of examples to literary and artistic projects of the XX-XXI centuries.Methods: The methods used in the study are the following: chronological, analytical, comparison, deduction, generalization, and abstraction.Results: As a result of this study, several problems were identified that are directly related to the process of contemporary culture creation. Firstly, the phenomenon of film production was revealed, and various examples of experiments by American writers of the 30s-70s of the XX century were given. It was them who managed to carry out a literary interpretation of the profession of film producer, as well as to ensure the development of the creative and search dialogue “film – television series”. The latter was revealed on the example of a television project The Offer, which is dedicated to the history of the creation of The Godfather. As a result, it has been established that this series has led to a fundamental change in the artistic understanding of the problem of film production.Conclusion: The conclusions drawn in this paper show that this project organically “fit” into the context of metamodernism and reflected its fundamental factors, namely: historioplasticity, craft turn, superhomogeneity, postirony, and quirky

XVIAmerican Literature: The Twentieth Century

Abstract This chapter has nine sections: 1. Poetry; 2. Fiction 1900–1945; 3. Fiction since 1945; 4. Genre Fiction; 5. Drama; 6. Comics; 7. African American Writing; 8. Native Writing; 9. Latino/a, Asian American, and General Ethnic Writing. Section 1 is by James Gifford; section 2 will resume next year; section 3 will resume next year; section 4 is by James Gifford; section 5 will resume next year; section 6(a) is by Anna Peppard; section 6(b) is by Orion Ussner Kidder; section 7 is by Adam Rudder; section 8 will resume next year; section 9 is by Antonio Velásquez. Very few titles were received for 2022 last year. This year includes more late arrivals than is typical.

The Image of Philosophy in Herman Melville’s Story Cock-A-Doodle-Do! or, the Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano

The work of the outstanding American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891) is widely acknowledged for its profound philosophical depth. It parallels various philosophical and religious traditions, works, figures, ideas, etc. However, the author’s philosophical position remains insufficiently researched. Among his works, one key in this regard is the short story “Cock-A-Doodle-Do! or, The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano” (1853). It offers Melville’s feedback on a few ideas of such representatives of American transcendentalism as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), with a particular focus on Thoreau’s analogy likening the purpose of philosophy to the crowing of a rooster. This story is almost completely unknown in Ukraine. Trying to reconstruct Melville’s view on Thoreau’s idea, the author recreates the context of creating “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!”, reviews available scholarly literature, and renders a technical translation of the narrative into Ukrainian. Throughout this process, the author provides commentary and clarifies its connection to ideas of Thoreau and Emerson, works by other authors, additional pieces by Melville, his biography, and related topics. The textual and intertextual analysis highlights the limitations of a common point of view whereby “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!” is only a piece of satire aimed exclusively at discrediting transcendentalism and the image of philosophy proposed by Thoreau. The author suggests that the story manifests Melville’s general attitude characteristic of his work overall and his philosophical method of philosophizing technique grounded in consistent skepticism towards any beliefs, convictions, and assertions, including those held by oneself. The systematic application of this method reveals universal ambivalence. Accordingly, Melville’s reflections on Thoreau’s idea of cockcrowing as a metaphor for philosophy reveal both critical and apologetic dimensions.

Brian K. Goodman, The nonconformists. American and Czech writers across the Iron Curtain

Brian K. Goodman, The nonconformists. American and Czech writers across the Iron Curtain

A Study of Robot Identity Writing in Isaac Asimov’s Fiction

Isaac Asimov, a famous contemporary American science fiction writer, constructs the identity of robots through describing entities and dialogues in his short story “The Last Question”. If we compare and analyze the author’s other short stories with conceptual metaphor theory and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, we will find that the author pushes the development of the storyline through the constructing the robot’s identity and the blurring of the boundaries, and from then on, maps the development of the relationship between man and machine and the course of its development. The purpose of this paper is to explore the special significance of the construction of robot identity and its contribution to the development of the narrative, as well as to analyze the expectations of the human-machine relationship embedded in the novel.

The Interplay Between Ethnic and National Identity of Immigrants in Samira Ahmed’s Internment

The post-9/11 has inspired a great deal of scholarship in the discipline of ethnic and cultural studies, and young adult fiction is no exception to this. Exploring the problems of identity, this article seeks to explain the interplay between an old ethnic and the newly acquired national identity in Internment, a political fiction by Indian American writer Samira Ahmed. Combining Homi K. Bhabha’s model of national identity with Stuart Hall’s model of cultural identity, this article argues that national identity is also shaped and affected by one’s ethnic identity, but prominent nation-states like the limitations of the US to nationality are germane to its racist policies, which in turn cause identity conflicts, especially in second-generation migrants who take themselves as both US nationals and Indian Muslims. In this way, the paper discusses the thematization of oppression of an ethnic minority by national politics questioning their social and political efficacy and their rejection into the mainstream culture. The nuanced understanding of the novel about identities allows us to conclude that the failure to integrate minor ethnicities into the mainstream is also expressed in real-world political decisions and has become a pertinent issue in Young Adult fiction.

Discourse of Alternative Identity in Nobel Prize Lectures of Latin American Writers

Discourse of Alternative Identity in Nobel Prize Lectures of Latin American Writers

V. Nabokov about his status of “an American writer” (based on interviews of the 1950s- 1970s)

Nabokov is known as one of the unique phenomena in 20th century world literary history not only because of the unconditional significance of his creative legacy, but also because everything he wrote belongs equally to the history of two national literatures, Russian and American. So, researchers’ discussions about which of the national-literary paradigms V. Nabokov belongs to a greater extent are completely justified. As for our study, its aim is to analyze V. Nabokov’s public statements concerning his personal perception of one of the sides of his creative self, namely the status of “an American writer”. The object of the study is V. Nabokov’s interviews given by him to various publications from the 1950s to the 1970s. The study is based on V. Nabokov’s interviews from the book “Nabokov about Nabokov and Other Things: Interviews, Reviews, Essays” compiled by N. Melnikov. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that until now Nabokov’s interviews have not been analyzed comprehensively for the presence of statements identifying him as “an American writer”. In the course of analyzing Nabokov’s public statements about his “American writer” status, we concluded that this Nabokov’s position was based on his pragmatic strategy of anticipating the audience’s expectations, when he demonstrated accuracy in his identifying formulations and formal “nostalgia” for his estranged second homeland called the United States.

Linguistic creativity of occasionalisms in Brandon Sanderson’s works

This paper investigates the linguistic creativity of authoral occasionalisms of American fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson on the material of his series of works “The Stormlight Archive”. The captivating phenomenon of occasionalisms is examined in the terms of linguistic creativity and measured according to the criteria we have derived. The study focuses on word formation, a linguistic tool that is the creative act of inventing new words. The art of word creation has long been a hallmark of human linguistic ingenuity, allowing us to create new concepts and give them appropriate denotations and connotations. As part of our study, we observe the way Brandon Sanderson, as a linguistic personality, gives semantics to the concepts and terms he has created, and “surrounds” them with pragmatics in the context of sentences and the overall narrative text. We hope to shed light on the understudied synergy between author and language/author and speech, thereby contributing to our understanding of how writers devote to the linguistic innovation, and shape the future of language itself. This research has implications not only for linguistics, but also for the development of understanding the potential of fiction to enrich speech, creative writing, and the evolution of language in our dynamic age.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s universal history in Black Folk Then and Now (1939)

Abstract While debates about ‘Eurocentric’ versus ‘Afrocentric’ theories of history have driven previous studies of Du Bois’s writings on ancient Africa, I read his account of African antiquity in Black Folk Then and Now in the context of the moral and educational projects articulated within both Greco-Roman and African American historiography. I pay special attention to conventional ancient views of history that Diodorus expresses in his Bibliotheke, which treats history as a source of morally instructive examples and ‘universal history’ as especially educational because it synthesizes different historical narratives: these concepts of history were broadly influential into the nineteenth century, including among African American writers. An ancient model of universal history allows Du Bois to tell the story of a distinct human community and nevertheless insist on the unity of peoples, a principle which is central to his philosophy of race and of human history writ large.

A Study on English-to-Chinese Translation Strategies of Country Driving from the Perspective of Newmark’s Translation

Country Driving is one of the China trilogy by American writer Peter Hessler. Based on what he saw and heard in his driving around mainland China, he presents with concise language and rich cultural connotations. Its simplified Chinese version was translated by the translator Li Xueshun. Since its publication, it has been well-received by the majority of readers, which proves its literary and documentary value. Country Driving is a typical non-fiction literature work. Based on Newmark’s theory, this paper will analyze the Chinese translation version of Country Driving under the guidance of communicative translation and semantic translation in terms of language structure, rhetoric, culture-loaded words, and special language forms. It is hoped that this paper will enrich the research on the translation of non-fiction Chinese translation literary works and provide some references for future translation practice of documentary literature from the perspective of Newmark’s translation theory.

Glotopolítica e crítica genética

From plurilingualism to the gesture of translation, this essay proposes a comprehensive reading of distinct glotopolitical crossings in literary writing. I revisit the works of writers whose practice is structured by a linguistic overlapping, as well as by the political consciousness of the colonial hierarchies to which they are subject. Through essays by Jacques Derrida and Sylvia Molloy, I foreground the compositional processes of Latin American writers Copi and Alejandra Pizarnik as unavoidable landmarks of this creative in-between. From the transit between languages, I draw axes capable of guiding a systematization of these glotopolitical dimensions in literary creation.

Gender Identity and Cultural Conflict in Chitra Banerjee’s Select Novels

Indian-born author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has a postcolonial diasporic identity. It has been noted that she is an Asian American writer of exceptional talent. She employs a variety of storytelling techniques while writing with a deep human insight. Her personas are portrayed with such realism that they leave the reader with a lasting impression. This paper looks at how a well-known male characters who show gender role reversal are portrayed in a few of Divakaruni's novels. The pieces under consideration for the analysis are Sister of My Heart and The Vine of Desire. Identity cannot be separated from religious, public, ethnic, and social setting of the reality. The unpredictability of author’s circumstances and assorted nature function in various places of the world. This causes the case of comprehensiveness of gender to an excess. Both the gender has wrestled with the subject of character, yet women’s quest for acknowledgment as a distinct has been confounded, as she begins to understand her capacities and failures. Divakaruni's works are set in a setting that alternates between India and America, and her fearless female characters come from all walks of life. Indian women in Divakaruni, who were torn between the two nations, struggle to define who they are and are entrapped by societal shifts. The novels Sister of My Heart and The Vine of Desire both address identity crises.

Changing: A Short Study on John Cheever’s “Swimmer”

American writer John Cheever’s “Swimmer” adopts a surreal or symbolic style that breaks away from the previous ideas and approaches of realism. The story’s hero Neddy Merrill embarks on an adventurous journey to swim home: an eight-mile journey that connects suburban swimming pools in his mind’s eye to form the magnificent Lucinda River, named for his wife. This paper examines the ever-changing natural scenes to explore the role of such scenes in portraying the characters and revealing the theme of the story. It also discusses the changing fates of the hero in two aspects-people’s changing attitudes towards Neddy and his own changing physical condition. The study considers the hero’s tragedy as a true portrayal of the loss and spiritual plight of the American middle class, which strengthens the sense of crisis and disillusionment in modern society, and expresses the author’s deep doubts about the lifestyle and thinking mode of the middle class, and his infinite worries about the future of the American middle class.

Short Study on Ecological Pictures in Walden

Walden is a literary masterpiece written by American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), which records his living alone in Walden Pond, far away from money-obsessed society, embracing the simple life of nature with his heart, and demonstrating the harmonious ecological beauty of Walden Pond. In this novel, Thoreau vividly shows the harmonious and interdependent relationship between man and nature through the ecological pictures of the delicious evening and red squirrel in the Walden Pond, and emphasizes the unique spiritual value given by nature to human beings. This paper attempts to use literature research and graphic marking ways to appreciate the harmonious atmosphere of delicious night in Walden Pond and the lively state of red squirrels in winter from the Angle of plot and animal description. By combining theory with practice, the conclusion of this paper is: human beings should overcome the limitations of anthropocentrism, protect animals, respect nature, and establish a “community of love” with nature, the concept of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature, or they will be punished by nature. In-depth exploration and interpretation of Walden Pond is of great significance for enhancing people’s awareness of ecological crisis, promoting ecological governance, helping people rationally view the relationship between man and nature, and respecting and protecting nature.