Genre Categories Research Articles

Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction ed. by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak

Reviewed by: Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction ed. by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak Alexandra Effe (bio) Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, editors Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, vi + 298 pp. ISBN 978-3319554136, $119.99 hardcover. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak's edited collection Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction explores texts that contest, highlight, or blur the distinction between the modes of fiction and auto/biography, in so doing departing from traditional genre conventions and conceptions of subjectivity, identity (both personal and collective), and truth. The book brings together lifewriting scholars and practicing biographers, who engage with innovative lifewriting texts from the UK, Italy, Austria, and Spain. The aim of the collection is to trace how writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have extended the parameters of auto/biography. [End Page 381] The introduction offers a theoretical foundation by sketching how the distinction between factual and fictional narration has been conceptualized in auto/biography theory and narratology. Julia Novak draws attention to the fact that experimental life writing frequently challenges distinctions between factual and fictional narration, and genre categories based on such a division. Novak also helpfully describes the different levels on which experiments in life writing take place: the subject of auto/biography (experiments with who or what is the focus of the auto/ biographical account); generic composites (combination of auto/biographical and fictional material, merging, for instance, auto/biography and classical tragedy or magic realism); style (experimental use of syntax or tense, for instance); structure (nonlinear narration, multiple perspectives, frame narratives); intertextuality and metalepsis (crossings between real world and fictional world or between the auto/ biographical text and an author's other works); play with names and pronouns (challenges to conceptions of wholeness and unity of identity, subverting the autobiographical pact as defined by Philippe Lejeune); and media (multimodal narratives or experiments in terms of layout and typography). The book is organized into four sections. The first part, "(Dis)Solving the Self: Methods and Modes," includes three essays that offer insights into narratives constituting or inspired by the respective authors' personal memories, but complicated through experimental narrative strategies. Max Saunders discusses Ford Maddox Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance as an example of "postmodernism within modernism" (53), Andy Wimbush analyzes B. S. Johnson's Trawl as indebted to Samuel Beckett, and Eveline Kilian gives an account of Christine Brooke-Rose's autobiographical works Remake and Life, End of in relation to her fiction and the nouveau roman. The second section, entitled "Genre B(l)ending: Self, Family, and the Nation," describes a selection of auto/biographical narratives experimental in their treatment of identity as collective and relational. The section begins with Pietra Palazzolo's analysis of Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road and Fiere, in which we find a layered, relational, and dialogic notion of self. Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir reads Jordi Soler's trilogy La guerra perdida as an account of the author's personal and family history, as an exploration of cultural and national identity, and as an account of the Spanish Civil War. In the third chapter in this section, Vanessa Hannesschläger situates Austrian author Peter Handke's stage text Storm Still (Immer noch Sturm) in the context of Carinthian Slovene resistance during World War II. She describes how Handke uses biographies of members of his own family and fictionalizes them in ascribing to them experiences of resistance fighters, thus creating a text at the boundaries of biography, historiography, and fiction. The collection then turns to texts innovative in their use of different media. The chapters in the third section—"Intermedial Experiments in Life-Writing"—explore texts that draw on photography and film. Antonio Lunardi elucidates how photography is integrated into Lalla Romano's Romanzo di figure by focusing on the relation between image and text in different editions from 1975, 1986, and 1997. María Alhambra Díaz gives an account of filmic references to The Three Caballeros in Dark Back of Time (Negra espalda del tiempo) by Javier Marías. She shows that the [End Page 382] author's experiments with mediality...

Folklorism of the Contemporary Youth’s Creative Work

Since the second half of the 20th century, there has been an increased interest in traditional forms of culture, which is probably associated with an increase in the national self-awareness of the peoples of the Russian Federation. Based on this, the authors considered the features of the use of the folklore heritage of Russian creative youth. The authors have studied the creative works of 24 young writers aged from 25 to 35. In particular, they have studied the types of folklorism in their creative works, provided the general estimate of the productivity and significance of the youth’s experience of using the folkloric heritage in the modern literary process and generally in culture. The paper is defining the phenomena of the youth culture in the early decades of the 21st century (fiction, CG). The authors have made a conclusion on the diversity of the youth’s creative works’ connection with the folkloric samples: the construction of the social-ethnographic reality, the field of the characters’ identity, a new ‘cosmos’, creation of the individual universes as well as the literary version of folkloric fairytale on their basis. We have also noted the tendency towards the use of the Russian folkloric characters with the purpose of giving them some universal traits of the characters of the popular computer games. The authors found that the fabulous texts are used by young authors in both the genre category and one of the ways to create on their basis new texts, various types of aesthetic experiments and games.

The Theoretical Background for the Chinese Composers Piano Music Genre Peculiarities Research

The Theoretical Background for the Chinese Composers Piano Music Genre Peculiarities Research

GOTHIC NOVEL AS A TIMELESS GENRE CATEGORY

The purpose of this research is to study the artistic and compositional peculiarities of the English Gothic novel as a genre category. The object of the study is the English artistic novel in its development, from the time of its origin (second half of the XVIII century) to the present day. The artistic features of the Gothic novel genre in the English literature make the subject. As a result of the study, specific features of English Gothic novels have been revealed and described using the novels by H. Walpole («The Castle of Otranto») and D. Coates («The Haunting of Gillespie House»). The term «romance» is used to refer to the genuine Gothic novel in theoretical works on literature since «romance» is associated with the medieval fantasy novel. We have found out that romances by H. Walpole «The Castle of Otranto» and D. Coates «The Haunting of Gillespie House», written in the XVIII century and XXI century respectively, have many common features, including the means of creating images, atmosphere, description of the interior and exterior and their plot lines. The novels of the classical and modern epoch share an unusual chronotope, victory over the evil forces, proximity to death and the other world, and a happy ending. Thus, Gothic literature, despite the strong impression of horror, manifests humanism, which helps readers believe in themselves and feel the harmony of the world.

A Multidimensional Analysis of Pakistani Legal English

The present study aims to investigate linguistic variation among genres of Pakistani Legal English by applying multidimensional analysis. In a legal context, language performs different functions. This results in a variety of textual categories on the basis of purpose of communication and linguistic properties. In order to recognize the linguistic properties of any individual genre, a comparative study of genre categories is essential. The study has been conducted on the sample of eight Pakistani Legal genres based on around two million words. Data have been analyzed by applying Biber’s (1988) model of Multidimensional analysis. Findings reveal variation in linguistic patterns. All categories have been found significantly different along each dimension. It indicates that legal language is not a homogeneous phenomenon. It has a variety of linguistic features associated with different legal genres, so it must be viewed in terms of goal, purpose, audience and context (variable which affect the language choice).

“Students Make History Every Day Just by Sitting on These Steps”: Performative Spaces and Re-Genring in the South

Students’ call for decolonising the curriculum has triggered deep reflection about what we teach and how we teach it, but equally, about the role of pedagogic spaces in recognising students as agents in their learning. This paper is situated within the field of academic literacies, where students’ engagement with texts is seen as being context-specific, and involving assertions of agency to various degrees. The added dimension here is the embedding of digital literacies, defined as a set of customised online practices, into a writing-intensive, first year, foundational course at a South African university, to favour the acquisition of academic literacies. The analysis of different spaces becomes crucial in grasping how innovative forms teaching and learning may take place. In his trialectics of space, Lefebvre distinguishes between perceived, conceived and lived spaces. Butler would refer to lived spaces as “performative” ones, “congealing” into form through iterative use. Online learning spaces may well turn into performative spaces as students inhabit them, interact with online resources and explore their spatial boundaries. I perform a discourse analysis of students’ textual practices on the online and physical spaces, to explore how students reproduce or subvert genre categories through processes of “re-genring.” Furthermore, I share the extent to which such pedagogic spaces become performative, the power dynamics that emerge, and their effects on our traditional conception of teaching and learning in higher education.

Folk Poetics Seen through the Genre Categories in the Table of Contents: Dynamic Analysis Using the Corpus

Folk Poetics Seen through the Genre Categories in the Table of Contents: Dynamic Analysis Using the Corpus

The Writings: Psalms

The WritingsPsalms Christopher T. Begg, Fred W. Guyette, William J. Urbrock, Thomas Hieke, and John Thomas Willis 1208. [Psalms; Job] Bernd Janowski, "Das erschöpfte Selbst. Zur Semantik der Depression in den Psalmen und im Ijobbuch," Das hörende Herz, 77-123 [see #1516]. J.'s essay surveys the terminology used in reference to the various manifestations of depression (abnormal postures and movements, loss of appetite, sleep disorders, speechlessness, etc.) in the MT of Psalms and Job (as well as in ANE incantation and exorcistic texts), with particular attention to Psalms 38, 55–56, 102, and Job 7:4. "Depression" in the OT, as J. emphasizes, is a state that encompasses all aspects of a person's being and relationships and is generated by wide variety of factors, both internal and external to the person. The individual lament—in which most of the references studied by J. occur—via the sufferer's complaint about his afflicted condition and appeal for God's intervention—constitutes, as he further points out, an important biblical strategy for coping with depression and moving beyond it.—C.T.B. 1209. [Psalms] Egbert Ballhorn, "The Psalter as a Book: Genre as Key to Its Theology," Psalter as Witness, 155-69 [see #1528]. In his essay, B. moves beyond traditional categories of genre (e.g., lament, praise, thanksgiving) to ask whether the Psalter as a book represents a genre unto itself and, if so, what are the implications of this for constructing the theology of the Psalter. After an introduction, the essay unfolds under the following overarching headings: The Different Genres within the Psalter and the Problem of the Compositional Form of the Psalter; Psalm 1; Psalm 2; Psalm 3 (Royal and Individual Reading); and The Book of Psalms as a Composition. He concludes: "Reading the Book of Psalms step by step, readers discover where this composition is leading them. A sequential reading of the Psalter exposes readers not only to the content of the psalms, but, even more, to speech acts, literary ways of reflection, doctrine, lore and wisdom and self-expression. The overture of the Psalter initiates three different reading strategies: psalms as doctrine (Psalm 1), psalms as prophecy (Psalm 2), and psalms as prayer (Psalm 3). For those who read attentively, the Book of Psalms reveals its own genre step by step and helps readers to develop an idea of the genre of the composition as a whole. Most importantly, the Book of Psalms does not open as a prayer book, but rather as a book of instruction, a book of wisdom. In so doing, it intimates the character of the entire collection. In its own way, the Psalter teaches torah, albeit torah that ends in prayer. In its final shape, the Psalter is constructed to mirror and "contain" the whole Bible in a nutshell, in its content and even in its literary forms. It is significant that biblical books contain more than one genre, in fact consist of various genres. To provide a sense for the complex structure of revelation, more than one genre is necessary. In the Torah, e.g., we have as its core genres narrated history and law, which, in their combination, undergird the construction of the whole complex. In the same way, the Psalter uses a whole variety of genres and speech acts to articulate its message. Complexity is part of its theology." [Adapted from author's conclusion, pp. 168-69—C.T.B.] 1210. [Psalms] Johannes Bremer, "The Theology of the Poor in the Psalter," Psalter as Witness, 101-16 [see #1528]. B. tracks the language and image of the "poor" throughout the Psalter and concludes that shifts in the "theology of the poor" tradition over the course of the collection can be [End Page 414] explained on the basis of the Psalter's literary development. In his discussion of the topic, B. makes use of both synchronic and diachronic approaches. [Adapted and expanded from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1211. [Psalms] Megan Daffern, "The Psalms: Places for Remembering," Holy Places, 79-84 [see #1510]. I suggest that it is possible that the landscapes described within the Psalms are...

The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry

Reviewed by: The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry Ronald B. Neal Tommy J. Curry. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2017. 298 pp. $34.95. Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood is a groundbreaking work that argues for a new field of intellectual labor: black male studies. In this work, Curry argues from the standpoint of history, sociology, and philosophy that a comprehensive research program focusing on black men and boys is needed. Such a program is called for in light of a persistent condition of death, social and mortal, that plagues black men and boys in the United States. The Man-Not represents a departure from standard race, class, and gender theory where black men and boys are rendered criminal, predatory, savage, and evil. In The Man-Not, such theory is insufficient in conceptualizing and addressing the precarious existence of black males in the U. S. In articulating this deviation from standard race, class, and gender theory and forwarding the theoretical lens and logic behind such an endeavor, Curry states the following: Man-Not (ness) is a term used to express the specific genre category of the Black male. Genre differs from gender by this distance Black males share with Western man a priori, and, by consequence, patriarchy. . . . The Man-Not is a theoretical formulation that attempts to capture the reality of Black maleness in an anti-Black world. . . . The Man-Not is the denial not only of Black manhood but also of the possibility to be anything but animal, the savage beast, outside of the civilizational accounts of gender. (6-7) The Man-Not engages black males as objects of child abuse, neglect, rape, incarceration, unemployment, and death. Concerned primarily with trauma and vulnerability with respect to the black male existence in the U. S., The Man-Not seeks to overcome the historical, methodological, institutional, and ideological obstacles with which a [End Page 246] study of this sort must contend. The Man-Not addresses an entrenched prohibitive morality in academia, particularly among humanities scholars, that limits inquiry into black men and boys to a certain criminal and predatory terrain. With staggering research and effective argumentation, The Man-Not implicates academia as an ally in black male trauma and death and charges that contemporary academics participate in a long intellectual history—over more than a century—that offers fodder and justification for the policing, containment, and punishment of black males. Overall, how black men and boys are imagined in academia is an extension of how they are perceived, policed, and contained as bogeymen in American society. In each chapter, Curry effectively delineates how black men and boys have been rendered as mythological creatures and pathogens in the American imaginary. As such, accounts of black males from nineteenth-century ethnology, to early twentieth-century social science, to proponents of eugenics to government-funded public health initiatives, to the writings of gender theorists, have obscured black males' lived realities. In light of such misrepresentation, popular accounts of black manhood, from the antebellum period to Jim Crow and the civil rights/Black Power eras to the present, are questioned and reassessed. In this rethinking of black men and boys, Curry breaks new ground on subject matter not covered in previous scholarship. Their sodomization in American history, the connections between poverty and intimate partner violence, and the condition of black male death as a bioethical problem are among the underexamined areas taken up in The Man-Not. The book's overarching achievement is that it goes beyond standard accounts and offers a mode of inquiry that is empirical and theoretical, and insists upon new methods for engaging the condition of black maleness. Curry's work extends upon his already substantial documentation of a peculiar racial chauvinism regarding the study and interpretation of black men and boys in the United States from previously published articles and book chapters. Starting from the earliest accounts of black men studied by social scientists like Lawrence Gary, Robert Staples, and Clyde Franklin, Curry expands upon the idea that black...

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World

Attempts on the ‘life’ of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s Use of the City Portrait Genre

This article examines the changing practice of urban portraiture in reference to a selection of postmillennial texts written by Ivan Vladislavić. These generically diverse texts trace and reflect on transformations sweeping Johannesburg after the fall of Apartheid, to some extent a metonymic representation of South Africa. An immediate impulse to inquire whether and, if so, how the writer explores the boundaries of portraiture, derives from an explicit textual and visual thematisation of the practice in two of Vladislavić’s works, i.e. the collection of “verbal snapshots” entitled Portrait with Keys and his joint interdisciplinary project, TJ& Double Negative, involving the writer and David Goldblatt, a South African photographer. The article concentrates primarily on the uses and adaptations of the city portrait genre. Vladislavić’s foregrounding of the genre category invites us to consider a series of questions: How does Vladislavić proceed with the appropriation and transformation of the traditional practice of city portrait? Do the portrayals of Johannesburg merely address the past? To what extent does Vladislavić propose contemporary adaptations of the practice? What happens to such categories as realism, accuracy, and likeness? What knowledge does portraiture generate? Finally, the article reflects on whether Vladislavić responds to the need for a new epistemological project in rendering the urban.

‘Bad Retail’: A romantic fiction

Abstract ‘Bad Retail’ is a work of fiction that I wrote to accompany a series of my own narrative paintings. The text was originally disseminated through a series of exhibitions in the form of printed handouts that were included alongside the visual works. The story evolved from a simultaneous investigation of two related devices in literature and painting: anachronism and collage. These terms are linked by an act of displacement: of objects from history and of images from their source. This compositional tendency is characteristic of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century romantic fiction, which often refuses to conform to (and remain within) accustomed genre categories. The aforementioned narrative will be accompanied here by a series of illustrations based on the paintings and drawings that I produced in tandem with the text. The aim will be to treat the journal submission as a form of ‘illuminated manuscript’, in which anachronism might be understood as both a verbal and a visual strategy.

Personalizing the Apocalypse: Frontier Mythology and Genre Hybridity in „Maggie”

An independent U.S.-Swiss co-production released by Lionsgate Films and Roadside Attractions, Maggie 2015 is marketed as apost-apocalyptic Horror drama and appears most obviously as azombie-apocalypse film. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Maggie differs markedly from other, more traditional zombie-apocalypse films. It blends recognizable elements from several mainstream genres and, though largely conforming to the well-known conventions of so-called classical realism, echoes some of the alternative narrative strategies traditionally associated with independent American and European cinemas. Although Maggie is rich with interpretive possibilities, this article shall touch on a less overt, some might even say fringe aspect of its narrative; namely, its engagement with a number of aspects of America’s frontier mythology. This might seem astrange connection to make at first since the frontier myth as apopular cultural referent is most often associated with the Hollywood Western, and the Western is clearly not Maggie’s most recognizable narrative schema. However, the myth’s association with the Western, while historically dominant, is far from exclusive and it would also be amistake to deny the myth’s links to other film genres through the related connections that exist between categories of films that, on the surface, seem to have little to do with one another. This is especially so in afilm as “genre confused” as Maggie.To be clear, this article does not claim Maggie to be a Western, at least not in any traditional sense that we might understand it. Rather, it interprets Maggie as apart of amore general trend in contemporary cinema typified by the hybridization of the codes and conventions of numerous genres and subgenres; especially, but not exclusively, those that bring an international perspective to bear on traditional genre categories. In the case of Maggie, this works to undermine audience expectations through aprocess of inversion and deconstruction that reconfigures the erstwhile familiarity of the zombie-apocalypse’s popular-cultural terrain. For, in referencing the Western and its related frontier mythology in the way that it does, Maggie demonstrates the adaptability and continued relevance of both in relation to the complex dynamics of contemporary global film genres. It is within this context that Maggie references the Western and, in so doing, highlights the continuing influence of frontier mythology in contemporary popular culture. PERSONALIZACJA APOKALIPSY — MITOLOGIA POGRANICZA I GATUNKOWA HYBRYDOWOŚĆ W FILMIE MAGGIE HENRY’EGO HOBSONANiezależna amerykańsko-szwajcarska produkcja zrealizowana przez Lionsgate Films i Roadside At­tractions — Maggie 2015 — jest reklamowana jako postapokaliptyczny horror, a jawi się w sposób najoczywistszy jako zombie-apokaliptyczny film. Wkrótce stanie się jednak oczywiste, że obraz ten różni się znacząco od innych, bardziej tradycyjnych zombie-apokaliptycznych obrazów. Łączy w so­bie rozpoznawalne elementy z wielu gatunków głównego nurtu kina i mimo że przeważnie opiera się na znanych konwencjach tak zwanego klasycznego realizmu, przywołuje pewne alternatywne strate­gie narracyjne, tradycyjnie identyfikowane z niezależnym amerykańskim i europejskim kinem. Mag­gie obfituje w liczne możliwości interpretacyjne, jednak niniejszy artykuł koncentruje się na mniej widocznym, można by nawet rzec marginalnym, aspekcie jego struktury. Mianowicie na obecności w nim kilku aspektów mitologii amerykańskiego Pogranicza. Na pierwszy rzut oka może się to wydać dziwnym odniesieniem, ponieważ mit pograniczny jako odwołanie w kulturze popularnej jest najczę­ściej kojarzony z hollywoodzkim westernem, a sam western nie jest też najbardziej rozpoznawalnym narracyjnym schematem filmu Hobsona. Jednakże skojarzenie mitu z westernem, historycznie domi­nujące, nie jest przecież wyłączne i byłoby również błędem odmawianie związków zmitem innym filmowym gatunkom przez ich pokrewieństwa, istniejące między kategoriami filmów, które na pozór wydają się mieć niewiele wspólnego. Jest tak szczególnie w przypadku utworu tak „gatunkowo mie­szanego” jak Maggie. Dla jasności — w artykule film ten nie jest definiowany jako western, przynajmniej nie w tradycyjny sposób rozumienia gatunku. Jest raczej interpretowany jako część bardziej ogólnego trendu we współczesnym kinie, naznaczonego hybrydyzacją kodów i konwencji wielu gatunków i podgatunków; zwłaszcza, choć nie wyłącznie, tych, które przynoszą międzynarodową perspektywę na podstawie tra­dycyjnych gatunkowych parametrów. W przypadku Maggie działa to tak, aby podważyć oczekiwania publiczności przez proces inwersji i dekonstrukcji, który przeformułowuje dotychczasową swojskość popkulturowego zombie-apokaliptycznego obszaru. Dlatego że odwołując się do westernu i ide­ologii Pogranicza w sposób, w jaki czyni to Maggie, film ten demonstruje zdolność adaptowa­nia się i trwającą ważność obu tych fenomenów w relacji do złożonej dynamiki współczesnych glo­balnych gatunków filmowych. To właśnie w tym kontekście Maggie przywołuje western i — czyniąc to — rzuca światło na trwający wpływ ideologii Pogranicza na współczesną popularną kulturę. Przeł. Kordian Bobowski

A CITY THAT NEVER EXISTED: XIAO BAI’S LITERARY REMAKING OF 1931 SHANGHAI

This article provides an account of the literary recreation of the semi-colonial Shanghai of 1931, carried out by the Chinese contemporary author Xiao Bai in his 2011 novel Zujie. It also includes the features and implications of such an operation. Critically praised as a turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction about old Shanghai, the novel appears to transcend genre categories, and was welcomed as a heterogeneous “third type” crossing the boundaries between genre fiction and pure literature. Inspired by historical facts and supported by painstaking archival research, Zujie originally incorporates a variety of literary models, narrative techniques, sources, genres, themes, and perspectives. The heterogeneity at play in the novel can be essentially scrutinised at three levels. Such levels are: the debate on the genre as it emerges from a number of paratextual sources; the treatment of historical factuality and its relationship with fictional creation; the use of polyphonic devices, with reference to the portrayal of hybrid characters, deliberately disorienting narrative techniques, and a re-elaboration of imported and domestic sources and literary models that plays havoc with the very notions of foreignness and identity. Xiao Bai’s original representation of 1930s Shanghai is analysed and commented upon with respect to such factors. Finally, the significance of this multi-layered literary operation and its implications for the reader are highlighted.

Graphics and Global Dissent: Marjane Satrapi'sPersepolis, Persian Miniatures, and the Multifaceted Power of Comic Protest

Marjane Satrapi'sPersepolishas been embraced by critics and popular audiences alike as an accessible intercultural memoir-in-comics that challenges predominant Western stereotypes about Iran through the universality of its first-person narrator. But the text's global legibility goes beyond the familiarity of Satrapi's graphic avatar. In examining the surprising factors on which the text's globalism depends, I look closely at one ofPersepolis's diverse inter-texts—the Persian miniature painting—and situate Satrapi in both Parisianbandes dessinéesand Iranian diasporic artistic contexts to argue that the work's concurrent production of local, national, and global scales is inseparable from its connection to several genres and across several media, engaging its readers through multiple modes of perception.Persepolisdraws on a global history of graphics as dissent by challenging preconceived notions about comics as a mass culture form, memoirs as limited confessionals, and Iranian women as silenced victims of an oppressive fundamentalist state. The global accessibility of this graphic novel exists not despite but because of porous categories of genre and culture, which are at once integral to its narrative structure and secondary to the aesthetic of protest that it ultimately embraces.

GENRE INDUCTION FROM A LINGUISTIC APPROACH

In most current work on genre, a set of genre categories needs to be predetermined. However, there are some cases where such predetermined genres cannot be clearly identified. Popular science, for instance, is a broad register carrying several specific purposes within it, suggesting that there are several genres of popular science, but it is unclear what these genres are. This paper introduces a linguistic approach to reveal hidden genres. For 600 written popular science texts from a variety of sources and disciplines, linguistic features were analysed using a range of computer programs and a cluster analysis conducted. The analysis produced four clusters with shared linguistic features, representing text types. The association of these text types with key features, functional relations, dominant sources, and prototypical members of each cluster helps us to induce genres on the basis of communicative purposes, a traditional criterion in identifying genres. Whether the produced text types are equivalent to genres was evaluated with a test set of data. The proposed approach achieves more than 70 % accuracy. The approach appears applicable for identifying genres of popular science and has pedagogical implications.

The Writings

The Writings OP Stephen D. Ryan, Christopher T. Begg, CSJ Lorenzo A. Tosco, Hemchand Gossai, CFC Alan J. Moss, and Thomas Hieke 653. [Psalms] Nancy L. de Claissé-Walford (ed.), The Shape and Shaping of the Book of Psalms: The Current State of Scholarship (SBL Ancient Israel and Its Literature 20; Atlanta: SBL, 2014). Pp. xv + 267. Paper $36.95. ISBN 978-1-62837-001-0. This volume contains sixteen essays on the formation of the Psalter. A preface by the editor explains the genesis of the volume and provides an overview of canonical criticism of the Book of Psalms. Most of the essays were presented in the Book of Psalms Consultation group at the annual meeting of the SBL in San Francisco in 2011. That occasion celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gerald Wilson's The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter (1985), and this volume is dedicated to Wilson's memory and his seminal work on the Psalter. Essays by scholars from Germany, South Africa, Canada, and England are included in order to provide a broader perspective. The volume concludes with a list of contributors and indexes of ancient sources and modern authors. For abstracts of the essays, see ##392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 400, 402, 403, 404, 406, 411, 415, 418, 419, 420.—S.D.R. 654. [Psalms] Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from Psalms: Foundations for Expository Sermons in the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). Pp. 615. Paper $40. ISBN 978-0-8028-7366-8. In this fifth and final volume of his series on preaching Christ from the OT (previous volumes dealt with the OT in general and with Genesis, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel in particular), G. offers expert guidance to busy pastors on preaching Christ from the Psalms. Beginning with a general introduction on how pastors can interpret and preach from the biblical [End Page 181] psalms—and why they should, G. proceeds to discuss 22 psalms used in the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A. In so doing he supplies the necessary building blocks for preaching from Psalms at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and other major days and seasons of the church year. In addition to laying out basic homiletical-theological approaches suitable for each given psalm, G.'s chapters also provide verse-by-verse exposition, bridges to Christ in the NT and ideas for placing the psalmist's words into a contemporary context. The psalms treated by him are 1, 2, 8, 22, 23, 29, 32, 47, 51, 72, 80, 95, 96, 100, 104, 118, 121, 122, 130, and 146. The volume comes with six appendixes: Ten Steps from Text to Sermon; An Expository Sermon Model; A Meditation on Psalm 23; Sermons on Psalms 72 and 80 by Ryan Faber; A Sermon on Colossians 1:15-20 by Roy Berkenbosch; and A Series of Sermons on Psalms. There is also a bibliography and indexes of subjects and select Scripture references. [Adapted and expanded from published abstract—C.T.B.] 655. [Psalms] Roland Meynet, Les huit psaumes acrostiches alphabétiques (Retorica Biblica e Semitica 6; Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2015). Pp. 320. Paper €30. ISBN 978-88-7839-315-8. M.'s work consists of a rhetorical analysis of the alphabetical acrostic psalms of the Bible (Psalms 9–10, 25, 34, 37, 111 & 112, 119, and 145). Five of the volume's component studies have appeared previously (those on Pss 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, and 145). In a brief introduction, M. distinguishes his rhetorical analysis from the study of literary genres and form criticism, noting that biblical rhetorical analysis intends to highlight the "composition" or "organization" of the text of each individual psalm rather than to consider it as representative of a genre category. He notes as well that acrostic psalms have generally been considered artificial and mechanical, constrained and as not very coherent. For M., however, the alphabetical acrostic constraint does not prevent the above psalms from being true poetic compositions. Each of the eight psalms is discussed in a chapter of varying length (the treatment of Psalm 119 runs to 133 pages). Following the MT with a literal French translation, M. highlights, with...

Las posibilidades de la loa novohispana dieciochesca a través de la Relación peregrina del agua

Este artículo estudia un conjunto de seis loas representadas en carros triunfales como parte de la fiesta llevada a cabo en Querétaro en 1738, con motivo de la inauguración de su acueducto. Aunque la historiografía y la crítica de la literatura novohispana no suelen considerar este tipo de textos, se pretende demostrar que las loas escritas para carro triunfal constituyen una de las modalidades del género dramático breve loa, cercano por sus características formales y escénicas a la loa cortesana, pero con una marcada función ecfrástico-explicativa del aparato efímero que le sirve al mismo tiempo de referente alegórico y de marco físico de representación. Por otra parte, por la notable presencia de la música, el canto y el estilo recitativo, representan una muestra del proceso de musicalización al modo italiano de este género en la praxis novohispana.

Making intersexuality visible through the circulation of Lucia Puenzo's XXY

This article looks at how the film XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007) makes intersexuality visible and transmits to the public identities that question the binaries man-woman and homo-hetero by means of its circulation. By acknowledging the challenges of assessing the film’s sociological impact without carrying out audience research, this is a study that analyses the importance of the film’s form in normalising intersexuality as well as its effect in helping the film circulate across various film festivals. Since film exhibition and circulation are emerging academic fields, this research also needs to look at unconventional sources in order to argue that the film’s circulation enables it to be discussed across multiple platforms and to different audiences. By considering the film’s funding, this article argues that film festivals are platforms which allow films to obtain distribution agreements, and therefore increase their exhibition windows, and also have an important and often unacknowledged role in promoting progressive thinking into society. The article ends by examining how through fiction discourses normally restricted to the academic and medical fields can be mediated to general audiences as exemplified by XXY. In addition, the film’s availability under different genre categories makes it accessible to diverse audiences.

Considerations on conceptual frameworks for writing liminality into popular film

Abstract This article addresses the widely accepted, yet fictive dichotomy between the categories of ‘genre’ and ‘art’ film. These paradigms are perpetuated throughout the global film-making system by Hollywood norms that encourage screenwriters for popular films to write for genre category, rather than to reflect complex human experience in stories of liminality and interstitiality. An alternative conceptual framework for filmic narrative architecture that addresses these concerns can be developed out of the epistemological paradigm of ‘realism’ put forward by Birger Langkjaer. This construct is both-and-neither ‘genre’ and ‘art’, and enables a more grounded view of film narrative as composed of complex plots, characters and subject-matter/themes. However, in order to conceive of alternatives in ways that are pragmatically sound, account must be taken of how the profit-motives of Hollywood perpetuate dominant discourses. Such scholarship should also acknowledge the complexity of anthropological constructions of liminality, as well as the nature of film narrative as semiotic communication rendered to active (rather than passive) audiences. Taking account of these considerations, effective paradigmatic re-phrasing of film screenwriting can be engaged to encourage a philosophy of embodied experience in film practices, thereby reclaiming the power of subjectivity and voice in filmic narrative.