Consumers Of Literature Research Articles

World Literatures, Cosmopolitan Publics

Abstract In this article we use the rich sources provided by the press coverage of the 1936 Congress of the PEN Club in Buenos Aires to examine international interactions around literature in times of violence and censorship. We contend that the Congress allows for a reading of the different worlds of literature beyond the traditional categories of text, reader, writer and critic. Our study moves away from canonical authors and literature as an institution to focus on World Literature as a form of experience. We focus on the producers and consumers of literature as embodied multilingual presences and thereby provide a more nuanced understanding of World Literature. Bruce Robbins’s notion of “cosmopolitanisms from below” allows us to rethink the notion of World Literature within the framework of a “lived” cosmopolitanism deployed at a time of political danger.

Individual Differences Versus Consumer Readiness Variables Predictive Power Over Internet Banking Adoption in South Africa

Self-service banking technology is gaining recognition globally in spite of its numerous challenges. Debit cards, ATMs and other Self Service Technologies (SSTs) are well received in South African market; however, customers seem cynical about Internet Banking (IB). IB consumer’s adoption patterns frameworks are tested within this paper based on a framework providing for the South African market with the best explanatory power. Thus, investigating consumer readiness (CR) and individual differences (IDs) variables as common groupings usually cited in the literature consumer variables predictive efficacy, provide better understanding of the consumers towards SSTs in South Africa.CR comprises role clarity, ability and motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic), while IDs includes inertia, technology anxiety, need of interaction, previous experience and demographics. This study purposes to identify among IDs and CR variables, which one with greater predictive power on IB adoption in South Africa.Considering this gap within the body of knowledge, in relation with IB adoption behaviour among the South African consumer is therefore the present article primary objective. Consumer’s individual differences (technology anxiety and education variables specifically) as exogenous variables, through a large sample size (n=1516), descriptive quantitative analysis, were found in context of South African market with greatest predictive power for IB adoption by comparison over consumer readiness. In South Africa particularly for marketers, these findings therefore are a set of relevant keys that can be useful in promoting IB adoption.

Satiric Literature for an Education System in Crisis: Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine!

In the press and in public appearances, Moroccan authors frequently accuse the education system of not sufficiently encouraging students to become readers and consumers of literature. Mohamed Nedali’s novel Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine! uses the form of a semi-autobiographical novel to make a similar accusation. Nedali’s text is one of a growing number of Moroccan narratives that criticize local school systems, thus occupying a paradoxical position. Can a novel truly critique the institution responsible for its continued existence? In this article, I argue that Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine! uses the literary form to reimagine the relationship between literature and education. The text’s enigmatic narrator, Mohamed Né… tests the boundaries of autobiography in order to satirize the foundational assumption of the educational autobiography: that the school turns students into authors. The novel also utilizes Jean de la Fontaine as an allegorical figure. La Fontaine’s Fables, a traditionally pedagogical text that nonetheless uses satire to speak truth to power, echoes the problematic position of Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine!. Ultimately, I show that by interrogating and deconstructing the cultural significance of La Fontaine, this text imagines how Moroccan francophone literature can use its marginal status as a space of educational critique, while still promoting the continued growth of local literary culture.

Disparate Libraries, Erratic Scribes: Borges and Literary History

Borges is notoriously suspicious of any system presenting as authoritative and commanding a single reading, and he is particularly suspicious of histories. Think of singular, gently mocking way which he uses term his titles: of Angels, A of Eternity, A Universal of Infamy, of Tango, of Echoes of a Name, History of Night. The titles are excessive, purposefully inappropriate for texts that are fragmentary, casually incomplete, riddled with hiatus and hardly delivering well-rounded summary or document their title announces. Nowhere this list of histories by Borges do we find a history of literature or, for that matter, of any one literature. The closest Borges gets writing literary history are books written in collaboration with his women friends and he never calls them histories: Ancient Germanic literatures and An Introduction English Literature (the latter a meager 47 pages long and devoted, mainly, Borges's favorite authors) are books whose purpose is not so much offer a historic panorama as to interest reader and stimulate his curiosity ... (Introduction 1). Borges's dislike for histories is compounded, case of national literary histories, by their identitarian pretensions and their teleological bent, by fact that they didactically propose national representativity and national belonging, two notions that Borges tirelessly questions (except when it suits him uphold them). A firm disbeliever national assignations when it comes literature, Borges disparages Ricardo Rojas's Historia de la literatura argentina as being, he was fond of saying, mas extensa que la literature argentina, longer than Argentine literature itself (Obras completas 279). (1) When asked about works that are representative of Argentine literature he will, more often than not, name The Purple Land, by William Henry Hudson, a book written English by an Anglo-American writer. Borges believes that principal goal of all literary texts--including literary histories--is open themselves impertinent re-readings and deviant interpretations, create permanent dissatisfaction, be not a reservoir of facts, but a stimulus for further literature. If it is be seen as patrimony (as Rojas's Historia de la Literatura Argentina is usually read), it is patrimony that must be rethought, challenged, recreated through fanciful recourse family romance--even replaced. The need question conventional views of literary history relation national representativity is a constant not only Borges's writing but his pedagogical practice. If I may resort anecdote, Borges, who taught English literature at University of Buenos Aires 50's and 60's, once sent a reader's letter daily La Nacion criticizing way literature was taught and exams administered at university of Buenos Aires and, general, throughout country. He was formally reprimanded for voicing a negative opinion by Dean and his Advisory Council who, true form, considered Borges's criticism not only targeted university of Buenos Aires but Argentina itself, el senor Borges senala no so1o a las autoridades de la Casa, sino al pais, Mr. Borges points not only authorities of this Institution but country itself (Borges y la Universidad 143). In an early review of Valery's Introduction a la Poetique, first published 1938 in, somewhat surprisingly, glossy Argentine weekly, El Hogar, Borges praises Valery for setting forth what would become an important part of his own literary practice. He writes: Valery, like Croce, thinks that we do not yet have a of Literature and that vast and venerable volumes that usurp that name are really a of Literary Authors. He writes: the of Literature should not be history of its authors and incidents their careers or careers of their works but of Spirit as producer and consumer of literature. …