Collection Of Essays Research Articles

Book reading: a compensation for rare personal contacts

This article deals with four books by Matjaž Kmecl, which belong to the early period of his writing academic and student manuals (Mala literarna teorija / Little Literary Theory, Od pridige do kriminalke / From Sermon to Criminal Story, Rojstvo slovenskega romana / The Birth of the Slovenian Novel) and a collection of essays (Slovenska postna premišljevanja / Slovenian Lenten Meditations). I present them in a way that summarizes Kmecl’s innovations in literary-historical writing, while at the same time recreating the experiences of a student on the path of becoming a professional reader. The discussions on the rise of the Slovenian bourgeoisie and fictional storytelling in the second half of the 19th century, as well as the reflections based on personal experiences from the times of crisis just before the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, are permeated by the same attitude from the author: a witty discovery of the natural primordiality and integrity of existence, a tireless gathering of evidence for perseverance, defiance, vitality and faithfulness in the face of despondency, fear, and inhibition. This attitude is rooted in Kmecl’s insightful analyses of the literary past and evolves into a sympathetic assessment of contemporary anomies. In the former, in particular, he recognizes the rich cultural capital that generations of creators have accumulated, despite weak political and economic power, and passed on to their contemporaries and successors with the hope for a self-confident survival of the Slovenian people.

Insects and the American Farmer: Crèvecœur's Response to Buffon's and Raynal's Theories of American Nature

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer includes memorable scenes in which the farmer revives bees he has rescued from the craw of a king bird, and welcomes a hornet's nest inside his house. As I will argue, the book represented insects in a sentimental manner, as a retort to theories advanced by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, that insects were noxious and overabundant in America. Insects played a key role in the late eighteenth-century controversy Antonio Gerbi called “the Dispute of the New World,” in which Crèvecœur's book weighed in to promote the North American colonies. In the collection of manuscript essays Crèvecœur presented to London publisher Davis and Davies in 1781, some described plagues ruining crops, or swarms biting colonists, but these texts were passed over, and not published until the 1920s. The article traces Crèvecœur's interactions with Buffon and with Raynal, who were variously rivals and mentors to him, as well as examining how the French-American soldier, farmer, author, and diplomat survived two revolutions and laid down principles today associated with sustainable agriculture.

“The Aberrant Is the Classic”: William Carlos Williams and Literary History

Abstract The “classic” is a vexed term in the work of William Carlos Williams. He uses the category to describe both the stale classicism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and, conversely, the authentic, “aberrant” classic of James Joyce and surrealism. Analyzing unpublished archival manuscripts alongside the posthumously published collection of essays, The Embodiment of Knowledge, I approach the classic through Williams's theories of pedagogy. Williams parodies and rejects academic modes of reading that cling to the “malignant rigidities” of the past. Yet Paterson and The Embodiment also theorize the reader's interpretive power to disrupt any homogenizing conformity latent in the literary tradition. This dissonant hermeneutics can recuperate the classics and represents a form of resistance to a binary logic of past versus present, or European versus American literature.

What is the Far-Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

Matthew Cunningham, Paul Spoonley, and Marinus La Rooij (eds.)Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New ZealandDunedin: Otago University Press, 2023, 444pp
 In 1988, Stuart Hall published The Hard Road to Renewal, a collection of essays written over the previous decade that attempted to grapple with the nature and significance of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain. The Thatcherist neoliberal project, Hall argued, attempted to reconfigure the common sense of the people. The aim of the neoliberal project was to dismantle social democracy and the post-war welfare state and construct a new modernity characterised by free-market enterprise, imbued with conservative values of tradition,family, and nation. 

Photographing Sites of Nazi Violence, 1933–1945

By far the greatest number of photographs of Nazi sites of violence were taken by the perpetrators. Some Jews did work as official photographers in the ghettoes, but during deportations, in the camps and extermination centers, and at the sites of mass shootings, only Gestapo officers, SS men and women, or other authorized personnel were officially permitted to use cameras. In the Mauthausen concentration camp, for example, as Lukas Meissel explains in his contribution to the excellent collection of essays, Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhethische Praxis, “only members of the so-called Erkennungsdienst (identification department) were allowed to take photographs.”1 These photographs “do not reflect the reality of the camp” (45). They seldom confront us directly with Nazi violence. Instead, these pictures offer (false) images of frictionless operations, visual testimony to the efficiency of the perpetrators, usually meant to impress their superiors.

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Abstract The present article discusses, in a first step, ground-breaking recent publications on the lyric subject, and dedicates itself, in a second step, to a new concept of lyric persona, which is devised to overcome the constrictions of the categories of subject and subjectivity and to open access of theory to all kinds and eras of lyric poetry from the Old English Seafarer to modern concrete poetry. The first book to be reviewed is Autor und Subjekt im Gedicht. Positionen, Perspektiven und Praktiken heute (2021), a collection of essays which pursues an argumentatively stimulating dialogical strategy. The articles begin with Wolf Schmid’s twenty theses on the abstract author, an appropriation of the narratological »implicit« author to the theory of lyric poetry. This statement is followed by a number of articles which alternatingly argue in favour of and against the concept of the abstract author. Peter Hühn, for instance, believes the term to be analytically especially fruitful, while Ralph Müller speaks of it as a »narratological spectre«. It is significant that, using Schmid’s term, Rainer Grübel analyzes a number of intriguing modern Russian poems, which he calls hybrid, since he identifies transitions from poetic to quasi reality-related passages and diagnoses concomitant stylistic changes in the texts. The international perspective is then widened by a comprehensive investigation of Russian, German and English terminological traditions. Marion Rutz demonstrates that handbooks and textbooks are by far not compatible. Among other terms she deals with the controversial German term »das lyrische Ich« (the lyric I). An investigation of the use of this term is then afforded by Hermann Korte’s examination of the poetry and poetics of Gottfried Benn, Thomas Kling and Durs Grünbein. Subsequently, a group of articles deals with the fate of the subject in recent and current German poetry. Analyzing poems by Sabine Scho, Anne Cotton and Thomas Kling, Friederike Reents verifies, instead of »subject fatigue«, new possibilities of the subject. Analogous insights are gained by Mirjam Springer in her investigation of the lyric portrait and in a politically tempered article by Peter Geist, which discovers examples of varying degrees of imaginative self-construction going together with increasing author-relatedness. The volume concludes with a large-scale philosophically oriented article by Henrieke Stahl which constructs the model of a polymorphous subject based on Heinrich Barth’s existential variant of transcendental philosophy. The second publication to be discussed is Varja Balžalorsky Antić’s monograph The Lyric Subject. A Reconceptualization (2022), which, though treating roughly the same subject as Autor und Subjekt, is oriented a totally different way. Like the one year previously published work, Antić proceeds from the awareness that the numerous new developments of poetry call for a reconceptualization of the genre and especially of the concept of the subject. In order to clarify the relation between the subject of language and the subject of poetry, she makes wide-ranging excursions into philosophy and discourse theory, which have not been undertaken in that way by other researchers in the field. Antić’s treatment of the prehistory of the concept of subjectivity is comprehensive. She erects her edifice of ideas on the basis of the theories of Émile Benveniste, Henri Meschonnic and others. Also, she goes back to Germanophone philosophers and theorists like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In particular, she emphasizes the development of Benveniste’s linguistics of enunciation to Meschonnic’s poetics of enunciation, according to which subjectivity does not reside in the lyric persona, but in the »the transsubject, the I-you of enunciation expanded onto all discourse«. In this context Meschonnic’s rhythm theory, which has profound ethical implications, is of central importance. Literary works which she subjects to analysis are troubadour poetry, in which she identifies polyphony and internal dialogism and consequently subjectivization, Nerval’s sonnet »El Desdichado«, to which she applies Paul Ricœur’s dialectic of ipse and idem, and Henri Michaux’ long poem »La Ralentie«, in which she identifies »dispersed multiplicity« and simultaneously integrated totality. The last chapter »Recapitulation and Systematization of Subject Configuration« has deserved special attention. Inspired by a short article, »Persona. Its Meaning and Significance«, by James Dowthwaite (2023), the present author elaborates the concept of the lyric persona in the last part of the contribution. The creative capacity of persona is seen to occupy the free space between the empiric author and the finished product. The independence of the persona from the author has a liberating quality, which allows the author a fictional space and a range of possible expressions. The lyric persona can be called the aesthetic and cognitive laboratory between author and poem, which is responsible for the invention of speakers, the use of pronouns and all the formal and aesthetic elements represented in the poem. One advantage of the persona concept is that it has a liberating effect in regard to the overuse of the subject concept, though forms of I-saying are within the reach of the persona. Another advantage is the scope of the term persona. It can be applied from the Old English »Seafarer« to modern concrete poems like Edwin Morgan’s »Pomander«.

The Dignity of Legal Subjects

Abstract The dignitary account of the rule of law proposes that values of human dignity and agency are appropriately recognised through legal rules and institutions that create opportunities for legal subjects to engage in deliberation and the exercise of practical reason. In a collection of essays published over a period of almost two decades, Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law, Jeremy Waldron offers a comprehensive account of the grounds and institutional implications of taking dignity so understood as a core rule-of-law desideratum. The ensuing account is novel, stimulating and distinct. There is, however, a chasm between the platforms identified by Waldron and his ambition of advancing dignity. Further, a dignity norm cannot supply a plausible evaluative benchmark under all (or most) plausible circumstances. Its domain might in consequence be more circumscribed than Waldron intimates.

The Lord of History in Cynthia Ozick’s “Ruth”

Abstract Cynthia Ozick has published widely on the categorization and definition of Jewish literature. This article reexamines her definition in “Toward a New Yiddish” in light of Ozick’s essay “Ruth,” published first in Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible (1987) and later in her essay collection Metaphor & Memory (1989). In “Ruth,” Ozick’s enigmatic definition of Jewish literature as carrying “the echo of the voice of the Lord of History” can be read as a transtemporal or Talmudic relationship with contradiction and paradox. Utilizing the Jewish approaches to time described in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor (1982) and Lynn Kaye’s Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative (2018), this article examines how Ozick’s elliptical writing style underscores the Talmudic character of her writing. Moreover, “Ruth” exemplifies Ozick’s destabilization of linear time as she adopts the role of a modern-day rabbi who reinterprets ancient texts and illustrates how future readers might do the same.

Katarzyna Fazan, Michal Kobialka, and Bryce Lease, eds. A History of Polish Theatre

A History of Polish Theatre, edited by Katarzyna Fazan, Michal Kobialka, and Bryce Lease, is a collection of essays that examines Polish theatre history from the Middle Ages on and makes a special effort to connect various phenomena in the past to the present day.

Kenosis or sovereignty? Christ Jesus and the disclosure of the divine mind

This article is the fruit of engagement with Bruce McCormack’s comprehensive The Humility of the Eternal Son: reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and with Christoph Schwӧbel’s essay ‘The generosity of the Triune God and the humility of the Son’ in Paul Nimmo and Keith Johnson’s Kenosis: the self-emptying of Christ in Scripture and theology (Eerdmans, 2022), a collection of contemporary essays dedicated to McCormack. Drawing on research set out in Church, Gospel and Empire: how the politics of sovereignty impregnated the West (Wipf & Stock, 2011), it investigates the difficulty that theologians have with arguing directly from Jesus’ kenotic life to God’s. The article begins by considering McCormack’s attempt to resolve the inherent contradictions necessary for the repair of Chalcedon. Recognizing that the statements about the Incarnation found in Philippians 2.5–11 from which the word ‘kenosis’ derives are the earliest we have, the article investigates his treatment of these and the difficulties that arise. It suggests an underlying problem that is itself ongoing evidence of the assumption by theologians that God is a hierarchical sovereign power. McCormack’s extraordinary answer to the question of whether there is a kenosis of the Father and the Holy Spirit with an emphatic ‘No’ is cited as evidence of this. Finally, Schwӧbel’s suggestions for a conversation with McCormack in his essay are considered as a means to a sympathetic way forward.

Wilkie Collins in Context, ed. by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari

Edited by William Baker and Richard Nemesvari, Wilkie Collins in Context is an extensive collection of essays that mark the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins’s birth by celebrating the multifaceted life of the author in four parts: life and works, critical response and afterlife, literary contexts, and cultural and social contexts. In the preface, Baker and Nemesvari put emphasis firstly on the treatment of Collins’s writing in his age as belonging to a second-class status, stemming from the fact that the most impact he had on the period’s culture has been through his sensation novels, especially The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins in Context makes an invaluable contribution to the current scholarship of Collins, especially by including an extensive context regarding Collins in the same place as knowledge of his life and critical reception of his work.

Uprooted in the ‘Postcolonial’ Moment: Attia Hosain’s No New Lands, No New Seas

‘Attia has come home.’ This is how Shama Habibullah describes the publication of a Distant Traveller (2013), a collection of essays and fiction written by her mother Attia Hosain. After the Partition of India in 1947, Hosain could not reconcile herself to India or Pakistan, created by imperial border-making and nationalist sentiments, and decided to remain in England. Hosain continued to grapple with the multitudinal meanings that came with leaving, making, and claiming a ‘home' in an unfinished novel No New Lands, No New Seas included in Distant Traveller. The novel centred recently settled and itinerant South Asian migrants in Britain as they struggle to establish roots and reconcile the borders of new homes. This article explores Attia Hosain's portrayal of migratory experiences in No New Lands, No New Seas on three levels. Firstly, it contends with how the migrant writer, Hosain, navigates border-making and the reorientations of ‘home' within these half-formed, tentative chapters. Secondly, it reflects on the form of the unfinished novel — Hosain embeds a longer pre-war, pre-Partition migratory narrative into chapters set in the 1970s. Thirdly, it considers how the novel’s protagonists deal with migration, economic hardship, racism, early formations of British South Asian identities, and the trauma-laced consequences of finding home after Partition.

In Conversation with Olivier Marboeuf

Olivier Marboeuf is a writer, performer, independent curator and film producer of Caribbean origin. He founded the independent art centre Espace Khiasma, which he ran from 2004 to 2018, in Les Lilas on the outskirts of Paris. At Khiasma, he developed a program addressing minority representation through exhibitions, screenings, debates, performances and collaborative projects across the North-East of Paris. He is an educator and has taught visual arts in several European Fine Art schools. He is a member of the cinema and performance collective ‘The Living and The Dead Ensemble’ and recently presented, as an artist, the first part of his sonic collective project ‘The Museum of Breath’ in the context of the Berlin Biennale 12. He currently produces films within Spectre Productions, a production company he founded in 2013 in Rennes (France). In 2022, Marboeuf published the collection of essays, “Suites décoloniales: s’enfuir de la plantation” (Decolonial Suites: Fleeing from the Plantation) as well as the poetry book “Les matières de la nuit” (Matters of the Night) (both published by Éditions du commun, Rennes, France). In 2023, two new books will be published: L’emeutier et la sorcière’ (The Rioter and the Witch) in French and Vers un cinéma déparlant (une hypothèse caraïbe) (Towards a De-speaking Cinema: A Caribbean Hypothesis) in French, English, German and Spanish. Many of his texts are available to read on his blog, Toujours Debout.

The Book of Requiems, 1450–1550. From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. David J. Burn, Leuven 2022

The review of a collection of essays devoted to the most important examples of the Renaissance Requiem edited by David J. Burn. The Book of Requiems, 1450-1550: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period is the first volume of the 'Book of Requiems' series, which treats the Requiem as a specific genre, with its distinctive features and conventions and historical significance.

War – Writer – Text: Discursive Features (on the Material of Oksana Zabuzhko’s Essays)

The article is dedicated to a complex analysis of the “war texts”. Discursive features of the triad “war – author – text” are proposed to be researched through the prism of the holistic linguistic act of communication. Discourse analysis of “war texts” is carried out on the material of works of Oksana Zabuzhko, namely, the collection of essays “And Again I Crawl into the Tank” and “The Longest Journey”. The way the topic of the Russian-Ukrainian war is understood and interpreted in the public intellectual discourse is investigated. Such research gives a possibility to acquire data on how the author presents her/his own activity-in-the[1]world and transfers her/his attitude to the events described. It is reiterated that the topic of the Russian-Ukrainian war can be researched within the boundaries of development of the discourse portrait of language personality, as the author’s texts are the information tracks of public discourse. Models of “war texts” of Oksana Zabuzhko are characterized with the help of three types of meaning: experiential (thematic sphere of communication), interpersonal (meaning of social roles), and textual (characterizes the channel of communication). The sense structure of the corresponding respective texts was scrutinized. That helped to acquire new data about their semiotic models.

Kemas Ulang Informasi di Perpustakaan Universitas Respati Yogyakarta

This paper uses a qualitative method with a descriptive approach. The aim of this writing is to narrate the repackaging of information in the form of scientific writing so that the overall aim of the essay is to support scientific search, learning and research. Repackaging information in the Yogyakarta Respati University Library is important in providing fast and efficient access. With the display provided, users are directed to log in with the previously registered username and password, and after that, they can enter keywords to explore the diverse collection of essays. Librarians have also posted the website address on the library desk to make it easier for users to access information. Although the Essay has several limitations, such as limited coverage and restrictions in subject matter, this resource still plays an important role in supporting research and scientific development in the university environment. Overall, repackage this information into a tool that advances scientific pursuits and makes it easier for users to pursue necessary knowledge.

Literature and reading under the light of intermedial and multimodality studies

Professor Grzegorz Maziarczyk specialises in contemporary English and American literature and culture as well as transmedial narrative theory. His main research interests include textual materiality, intermediality, relations between literature and new media, multimodal storytelling, utopia and dystopia. He has been a recipient of fellowships and research grants from the University of Notre Dame, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and European Society for the Study of English. He is the author of two monographs – The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction (2005) and The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English (2013) – and the co-editor of five collections of essays, including (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked: Utopian Discourse across Media (2015) and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (2017). He has published widely in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Word & Image, Journal of Narrative Theory, Utopian Studies, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Language and Slavia amongst others. Since 2019 he has been Director of the Institute of Literary Studies at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

GEORGES BERNANOS’ WRITING AS MODERNIST CODE OF FRANCOPHONIC METAMODERNISTIC SENSIBILITY

The article analyzes the presence of an intertext between literary prose and political essay writing by a representative of the French Catholic literary revival of the first half of the 20th century. - Georges Bernanos - within the limits of modern intergenre French literature. The example is the collection of essays by the French-speaking writer Juan Asensio. However, the broader context of the reactualization of modernist writing in the contemprorary literary process is shown. The metamodernist sensibility of the 2000s is considered to be a result of the end of the dominance of the postmodernist discourse, its main theorists are investigated and the reasons for its appearance are shown. The dialogic character of metamodernism with the clue ideas of both modernism and postmodernism is noted, which is a middle way between modernist enthusiasm and postmodernist irony and skepticism, between hope and melancholy, between empathy and apathy, between truth and relativism, between totality and fragmentation, between experience and omniscience. Linguistic etymology and semantic plurality of the concept of “metamodernism” at the epistemological, ontological and historical levels are shown. The basic characteristics of the metamodernist worldview are named, such as: the return of metanarratives, belief in the truth, sincerity, empathy, the return ofhistory, the seriousness of religious experience, the search for the real, the importance of subjective experience. On the basis of these categories, the intertextual connection of the texts of Bernanos and Asensio is revealed according to four categories based on G. Genette’s narratology. It is about architextuality, thus citation at the genre level, narrative and poetic-stylistic closeness, explicit citation and allusions, and Bernanos’ meta-literary criticism provided in a comparative way. It is proved that the writing of Georges Bernanos became not only an intertext, but also a productive pretext of modern French literature, although the radical prophetism of the former was turned into a voice that just found the right to the truth and sincerity.

Kicking Back: Negation of Enlightenment in Brian Dillon’s Objects in This Mirror

In this article I will examine aspects of the work of the Irish writer Brian Dillon which allow us to propose the continuing relevance, from an Irish perspective, of a strain of critical discourse which engages with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Specifically, I look primarily at Dillon’s 2014 essay collection Objects in This Mirror as well as his 2017 collection Essayism, with a view to establishing some key characteristics of his artistic project, while showing their compatibility with the cultural materialism of key scholars of the Frankfurt School, before finally making explicit the compatibility of Dillon’s work with the values which underpin the Irish Field Day project which has influenced Irish studies since the 1980s.

Reception of Herzen’s “From the Other Shore” in China: problems and prospects

The history of the reception of Herzen's collection of essays and dialogues “From the Other Shore” (“From Another Shore”) in China from the late 19th century to the present is considered. The objectives of this study are: 1) to identify the timing, background, and mode of the early reception of “From the Other Shore” in China; 2) to analyze the different emphases and factors for its reception in China at different times; 3) to explore the problems, reasons and perspectives in the process of its reception in China. The significance of the research topic lies in the necessity to elucidate the peculiarities of perception of Herzen's work in China, which is closely linked to emerging trends in the Sino-Russian intercivilizational dialogue. The process of reception of the book in China, focusing on translation and counting the socio-cultural transformations that have taken place in China from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the present day, is explored. The evolution of Herzenology (Herzen studies) in China has been characterized by rises and falls, and even the periods of oblivion. This was influenced by both historical changes in Chinese society and the international environment. An important range of issues for modern Herzen studies is highlighted: the basics of the interest of Chinese intellectuals to Herzen's book in the early 20th century; the main directions of Chinese scholars' research on this collection of political essays; the reasons for the prolonged neglect of the book by Chinese academics since the late 1960s; the prerequisites for regained attention among Chinese researchers in the 21st century; the new discoveries of Herzen scholars that enriched the culture of China. This research will be valuable in advancing the understanding of the mechanisms underlying Russian-Chinese literary and cultural dialogue, as well as the impact of Russian classical literature on Chinese literature.