Literary Category Research Articles

Spiritual Realism as a Literary Category

Spiritual Realism as a Literary Category

Premissas e perigos de um constitucionalismo distópico: reflexões à luz de Philip K. Dick

This article is based on the Law and Literature methodology. It analyzes the shortage of contemporary utopian narratives. The object of analysis are the characteristics of constitutionalism in light of literary categories from dystopian literature – especially regarding Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”. Thus, this paper examines to what extent the contemporary paranoia – both subjective and systemic – has strengthened court decisions based on pretentious illicit conspirations, as well as institutional solutions justified by the prospective use of automated processes, supposedly neutral and efficient. This paper also discusses the incorporation of a certain time paradigm of contemporary cultures, which is linear and unidirectional, with a rigid differentiation between past, present and future. Such conception creates temporal ghettos, besides imposing a dominant social rhythm that frustrates the very protective trait of constitutionalism, regarding the life projects of vulnerable minorities. Thus, this work reflects upon the fragility of the argumentative integrity seen in certain judicial sentences which are justified by consequentialist lines of thought, and which, by projecting future catastrophic effects for possible decisions, end up legitimizing opposite outcomes. In conclusion, the need for overcoming fear as the fundamental feeling in the social, institutional power is discussed.

Fantasy in Literature: A Symbiotic Relation to the Real

This article attempts to explore the use of fantasy in literature and how it has attained the position of a literary category in the twentieth century. This work also concerns how as the form literature, it functions between wonderful and imitative to combine the elements of both. The article reveals that wonderful represents supernatural atmospheres and events. The story-telling is unrealistic which represents impossibility as it creates a wonderland. In the imitative or the realistic mode, the narrative imitates external reality. In it, the characters and situations are ordinary and real. Fantasy in literature does not escape the reality. It occurs in an interdependent relation to the real. In other words, the fantastic cannot exist independently of the real world that limits it. The use of fantastic mode in literature interrupts the conventional artistic representation and reproduction of perceivable reality. It embodies the reality and transgresses the standards of literary forming. It normally includes a variety of fictional works which use the supernatural and actually natural as well. The developers of fantasy fiction are fairy tales, science fiction about future wars and future world. A major instinct of fantastic fiction is the violence threatened by capitalist violation of personality that is spreading universally.

Oral Narrative Genres as Communicative Dialogic Resources and their Correlation to African Short Fiction

Oral and written storytelling traditions in Africa developed at the same time and influenced each other in many ways. In the twentieth century, the relation between the deeply rooted oral tradition and literary traditions intensified.We aim to reveal literary analysis tools that help to trace ways how oral narrative genres found reflection in African short fiction under analysis. A case study is based on two short stories by women writers, The Rain Came by Grace Ogot and The Lovers by Bessie Head. Images and symbols both, in oral and written traditions in Africa, as well as the way they evolved and extended in a literary genre of short fiction are considered within the framework of hermeneutics, reader reception theory and feminist literary criticism.The results obtained in the study prove that oral narrative genres interact with literary genres, though most importantly, women’s writing as a literary category and images embodied in the short stories play a decisive role and deviation from the images embodied in African oral tradition.

Écritures transgressives et pensée de la transgression. Sade et Bataille lus par Foucault

My paper begins with a reflection on the Foucauldian category of “infamy,” which I would like to consider both as a political category and as a literary category. “La vie des hommes infâmes” (1977) is a particularly noteworthy text in that there is both a clear distinction between archive and literature and an analysis of a recomposition of the relationship between discourse, truth, and power that draws what Foucault calls “the line of literature’s tendency since the seventeenth century, since it commenced to be literature in the modern sense of the word.” On the one hand, Foucault defends the idea that, to allow the archive to deliver its strictly political dimension, it is necessary to clean it up, to build it out of literature and in a strict relation to reality. On the other hand, he claims that literature has become capable at some point of having the ambition to tell the real, to “tell of the ultimate, and the most minute, degrees of the real”: of being, perhaps more than any other form of language, the “discourse of infamy.” This paper aims to explore this tension, from the (methodological/archaeological) exclusion of literature to the genealogy of a literature of reality and infamy.

PECULARITIES OF REALITIES CONCEPTS VERBALIZATION IN MODERN GERMANLITERARY DISCOURSE

The article is devoted to the analysis of the modern German language means used in the process of CITY and TRANSPORT concepts verbalization, presented in contemporary art discourse. It is precisely contemporary art prose that plays a special role in creating concepts of realities that are the semantic dominants of the work in question. From the point of view of the conceptual analysis method, the essence of the named concepts is revealed and their basic functions are determined. It is established that, taking into account the field structure of the concepts, language facilities are appropriately grouped and distributed. Due to this fact, it’s possible to isolate the core, the subnuclear zone, the near periphery, and also the far periphery of the analyzed concepts. In the structure of the literary concepts of realities the conceptual and figurative strata are under consideration. The conceptual stratum is actualized by language means with zero stylistic coloring. In turn, the shaped stratum is represented by the stylistically colored means of modern German language. Their frequency depends on a number of factors. First of all, the texts are written from the first-person point of view. This contributes to creating trust-based relationships between the writer and the reader. Secondly, the explication of concepts largely depends on the language personality of the writer and his/her mentality, which correlates with the characteristics of the worldview. In this case, literary constants, which are units of mentality, play a specific role, which makes the need for further comprehension of the concept as a literary category. There is emphasized the need to further study the concepts representation on the contemporary literary discourse texts basis, taking into account their national and cultural specifics. Also, it’s emphasized further concepts representation study based on the modern literary discourse texts with a glance to their national-cultural specifics.

СИЛА КАК ТЕОРЕТИКО-ЛИТЕРАТУРНАЯ КАТЕГОРИЯ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ЛИРИКИ АЛЕКСЕЯ ПАРЩИКОВА)

The author of the article proposes to introduce into active scientific circulation the theoretical and literary category of power, the effect of which he reveals following the poetry of Alexei Parshchikov (1954–2009). The research is based on the works on energy in a work of art by L. Vygotsky, A. Losev and other scientists. The author of the article considers power to be a special literarytheoretic category, correlating with energy as a particular and general. The power in a lyric work is a theoretical and literary category determining the relationship between the objects and phenomena and directing them to a metaphysical continuum, close to an incomprehensible absence. As a category, power permeates all levels of the work – subject-object, chronotopic, compositional, lexical, intonational-syntactic and others. As a vector quantity, it directs the lyrical plot, develops the motive field forward and upward, creating a painful metamorphosis for the subject / object, leading to silence as a blissful time-space. Form (tense or rarefied rhythm, change in the lyrical plot) and content (depiction of earthly existence), developing in opposite directions, neutralize each other. The presence of the verbal motive “power” is the dominant, and not a constant of the “work about power”, the word “power” can be replaced by contextual synonyms (“stream”, “abyss” etc.) or absent (“Hedgehog”, “Coal Elegy”).

To the clarification of the contentofthe "adventure" concept as a literary studies category

To the clarification of the contentofthe "adventure" concept as a literary studies category

A Literature of Questions. Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders

Reviewed by: A Literature of Questions. Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders Jutta Reusch and Nikola von Merveldt A LITERATURE OF QUESTIONS. Nonfiction for the Critical Child. By Joe Sutliff Sanders. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 274 pages. ISBN: 1-5179-0301-7 Mainstream opinion holds that nonfiction is a literature of answers—especially nonfiction for children. Accuracy of facts is then allied with didactic intent to produce doubt-proof authoritative books claiming to tell things as they are. In his game-changing study, Sanders argues that books adhering to this creed produce less truthful accounts than nonfiction books that invite critical engagement by asking questions and reflecting the process of inquiry. His argument is not ideological, however, but theoretical. Sanders is the first scholar to propose a theory of nonfiction, along with "a method for examining children's nonfiction from a literary perspective" (7), which "looks for where a text is willing to invite its readers to dialogue, to negotiation, to the testing of information to critical engagement, and where it is not" (12). Following a clear-sighted introduction situating his theory within the relevant literary and pedagogic debates, Sanders develops, tests, and expounds his theory over seven chapters. In the first chapter, he critically considers what it means to understand nonfiction as a literature of authority and makes the provocative claim that nonfiction shouldn't be a literature of facts at all. If it is to truly educate young minds, it should invite them "to the dialogue of intellectual work," "to involve them in the analysis and production of knowledge" (44). Based on this argument, Sanders examines formal and aesthetic aspects of nonfiction, which either rebuff or invite critical engagement. In chapter 2, he considers the literary category of voice and shows how visible first-person authors voicing doubt and allowing for alternative perspectives rupture authority and encourage questions. Chapter 3 focuses on the characters of nonfiction, and thus on its human dimension. By presenting knowledge as something provisional produced by fallible humans rather than a collection of immutable, objective facts, critical nonfiction engages both the reader's intellect and emotion. Having identified the timeless rhetorical hallmarks of a literature of questions and thus provided a useful analytical tool kit, Sanders goes on to consider peritexts (chapter 4) and photography (chapter 5) as potential sites of engagement typical for contemporary fiction. The multiple peritexts, such as sidebars, footnotes, or afterwords, he claims, invite nonlinear reading, which in turn promotes critical engagement. Photographs, commonly believed to be true depictions of reality, can draw attention to their artificiality through captions or layout. In a close reading of Russell Freedman's photobiography Lincoln (1987), Sanders demonstrates how photographs in nonfiction can encourage readers to examine the visual information critically instead of simply seeing through them. The last two chapters offer an in-depth case study of Tanya Lee Stone's nonfiction book Almost Astronauts (2009). According to Sanders, this award-winning US title perfectly illustrates the conflicting cultural conceptions of what [End Page 103] children's nonfiction should be; it attempts a delicate balancing act between the commercial demands of the schoolbook market asking for a literature of answers and the aesthetic and intellectual ambitions of the author who wants to challenge and inspire her readers to ask their own questions. The conclusion addresses the question literary historians prefer to avoid: Are children actually capable of engaging critically with nonfiction? Several empirical studies have found that they are and readily do so, even if not prompted by adults. However, adult guidance encourages and improves critical literacy. This is why, in his last paragraph, Sanders urges us all to "invite critical engagement and foster it where we can because doing so is democratic, respectful, and humanizing" (230). Sanders celebrates the "democratic potential" of nonfiction (231). Sanders's theory makes an important contribution to an underestimated and undertheorized field children's literature criticism is only beginning to discover. His provocative claim that nonfiction shouldn't be about facts at all will help overcome the dead-end debates trying to assess the accuracy of facts. His sound theoretical framework, his practical analytical tool kit, and his celebration of the "democratic potential...

A refração do realismo em Luiz Ruffato: um inferno permanente

Resumo De acordo com Bourdieu (1996), as representações são convenções de entendimento e modelagem das estruturas e relações sociais, além de práticas que atribuem sentidos ao real, com efeitos em sua construção. Considerando ainda o conceito de “realismo refratado” (Pellegrini, 2018), este artigo procura verificar como Inferno provisório, de Luiz Ruffato, representa, por meio do tratamento específico das categorias literárias, aspectos da sociedade brasileira, como a desigualdade e a exploração, combinadas com a modernização conservadora das últimas décadas, criando uma forma particular de captar a relação entre os indivíduos e a sociedade.

La forma del dialogo platonico nel De poetis di Aristotele

Abstract The analysis of the testimonia of Aristotle’s De poetis fr. 73 Rose suggests a new interpretation of the meaning of the literary category of medietas, attributed by Aristotle to the Platonic dialogue.

Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett's Erasure

Reading Percival Everett's novel Erasure through the musical techniques of 1940s bebop jazz shows how experimental and improvisational musical performances structure and animate this literary work. By mixing genres, and by creating a sensibility of what I call disharmonious harmony—a dissonance that deconstructs notions of paradigmatic identities—Erasure destabilizes the idea of literary category and prompts critical inquiry into the legitimacy of racial representation, provoking the reader to confront the racial discourse that supplements processes of reading and interpretation. Everett's bebop sensibility is a device of radical blackness because it incites the reader to question the viability of categorization in all its forms, but particularly in the groupings through which the racial episteme of the modern period makes legible the idea of African American identity and experience.

'Salimu': from Memory to Literary Narrative in Twentieth-Century manding Culture


 
 
 This essay explores the creation of new literary narratives, many inspired by true incidents, from the late nineteenth century to the present, among Manding- (specifically Maninka-) speakers in Mali and Guinea. It simultaneously queries the relationships between Manding and Western literary categories, showing that the traits typically associated with African ‘epics’ – including poetic language, alternation of sung and recited passages to continuous instrumental accompaniment, and multi-generic qualities – characterise some (but not all) examples of several distinct Manding literary categories (fasa, tariku and maana); furthermore, these traits appear in narratives of various lengths, centred on sentimental as well as heroic themes. It then focuses on the stories and songs inspired by the apparently contradictory personality of Salimou Haidara (ca. 1930-1991), an eccentric who claimed sharifian descent. A performance by Amadou Kouyaté and Jekoriya Doumbia, a bard couple based in the village of Dabadou near Kankan (Guinea), is transcribed, translated, and analysed1.
 KEYWORDS: EPIC, LITERARY GENRE, GRIOTS, MANINKA, KANKAN (GUINEA), CHEIKH MOUHAMMAD CHÉRIF
 
 

Periodização imperativa: retórica, teoria e história literária

O artigo trata das implicações teórico-críticas da renovação dos estudos de retórica, com atenção para os estudos de João Hansen, Alcir Pécora, Adma Muhana, Hélio Alves e Belmiro Pereira. Numa primeira parte, discutimos esquematicamente a limitação das categorias literárias para abordagem de textos anteriores ao conceito “teórico” de literatura; numa segunda, fazemos observações para um modelo de estudo que atenda ao imperativo cognitivo da discriminação de períodos e que não recaia naquelas limitações epistêmicas. Trata-se de pensar a possibilidade de periodizar a partir dos estudos de retórica, tomando por horizonte a elaboração de uma ideia de “espaço ético-retórico” como ferramenta periodológica. (Projeto Fapesp No. 2017/11260-4.)

Rachel Stenner. The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature

The material turn in literary studies has drawn our attention to the objects of literary production, both formal and physical. Not only materialist and object-oriented focuses on the physical properties of paper, ink, punches, letter-cases, and the corkscrewing press itself, but also the legacy of historicism’s attention to forms and genres outside of traditional literary categories have kindled new studies of recipes, ballads, jests, sententiae, and other shorter genres as well as husbandry manuals, conduct books, miscellanies, sammelbände, and other printed collections. As stolid as a table or a wheel when not in use, a book nevertheless may differ from other objects in that its use constitutes a reactivation process in readers’ minds, one involving mental processes like judgment, emotion, and imagination among others. A table is designed, measured and made, and then has dinner laid upon it. A book is designed, printed and bound, and then lights out into the reader’s imagination, reinstantiating itself there in a process both material and immaterial.

„Thomas Mann – langweilig und ohne dramaturgische Spannung“. Deutschsprachige Literatur in Nikodem Cieszyńskis Zeitschrift Roczniki Katolickie

The periodical Roczniki Katolickie, published in the 1920s and 1930s, was part of an anti-modernist project created in European Catholic circles. The information about German literature, which can be found in the magazine, on the one hand, served as a means of reinforcing feelings of belonging to a borderless confessional community and, on the other hand, constituted an element of German-Polish cultural transfer. Analyzing its content helps determine the extent of influence of the forms and aesthetic and literary categories disseminated within the Catholic milieu as well as the transformations of the image of the stereotypical German that was dominant in Poland at that time.

« Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette histoire? »: l'autofiction selon Delphine de Vigan dans Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit et D'après une histoire vraie

Cet article étudie les stratégies narratives mises en place dans deux ouvrages de Delphine de Vigan présentés comme des « romans », Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit et D'après une histoire vraie. Si les deux livres relèvent du même genre autobiographique, les moyens utilisés sont fort différents: tandis que le premier s'apparente davantage à un récit autobiographique présenté sous le couvert d'une autofiction, le deuxième relève pleinement de cette catégorie littéraire conceptualisée par Doubrovsky et en exploite efficacement toutes les ressources. Au-delà de ces deux œuvres, ce sont quelques problèmes liés à l'autofiction de façon générale que l'essai tente d'aborder.

‘Salimu’: From Memory to Literary Narrative in Twentieth-Century Manding Culture

This essay explores the creation of new literary narratives, many inspired by true incidents, from the late nineteenth century to the present, among Manding- (specifically Maninka-) speakers in Mali and Guinea. It simultaneously queries the relationships between Manding and Western literary categories, showing that the traits typically associated with African ‘epics’ – including poetic language, alternation of sung and recited passages to continuous instrumental accompaniment, and multi-generic qualities – characterise some (but not all) examples of several distinct Manding literary categories (fasa, tariku and maana); furthermore, these traits appear in narratives of various lengths, centred on sentimental as well as heroic themes. It then focuses on the stories and songs inspired by the apparently contradictory personality of Salimou Haidara (ca. 1930-1991), an eccentric who claimed sharifian descent. A performance by Amadou Kouyaté and Jekoriya Doumbia, a bard couple based in the village of Dabadou near Kankan (Guinea), is transcribed, translated, and analysed.

Reconstruction of the fantasy world

Among the four literary categories of ancient Chinese classics, the Zi collection (子部), the third category including works of the philosophers, arts, novels and etc., is the least utilitarian and can best represent the essence of aesthetic tastes and the playful nature of Chinese people. However, the tradition of the Zi collection has been misinterpreted, depreciated, and eventually distorted since the modern times which was overburdened by the missions of ‘enlightenment, revolution, and national rescue’. It is the rise of the web fiction and its ‘virtual space’ in particular that furnishes the ‘playful nature’ the best, safest, and freest environment to ‘revive’. Meanwhile, the trend of ‘reviving the Zi collection’ extends beyond the cyber literature to the scope of elite literature.