Contemporary Literary Criticism Research Articles

Crucial Points of Subtextual Analysis in Contemporary Literary Criticism

Crucial Points of Subtextual Analysis in Contemporary Literary Criticism

The Evolution of Modern Literary Criticism From Structuralism to Postmodernism: A Case Study of Edward Said and His Critique of Orientalism in Literature

The study aimed to examine the development of literary criticism throughout its history from structuralism to postmodernism, using Edward Said's criticism of Orientalism as a case study. A discourse-grounded analysis approach was used to analyze critical texts and articles related to this development. The results showed, according to Said, that the traditional Western depiction of the East is biased and based on power relations, which influenced postcolonial philosophy and the literary canon (Smith, 2018). Said sought to expose biases in Western literature’s depiction of the East (Jones, 2016). His writings have sparked debate about the role of the critic in shaping literary discourse, shifting critical focus toward questions of power, representation, and identity, and increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups to have their voices heard (Brown & Johnson, 2019). Said's critique of Orientalism has influenced contemporary literary criticism, opening the door to a more diverse and comprehensive literary study (Garcia & Lee, 2020).

Keinen Verfasser, nur eine Verfasserin? Literarische agency schreibender und ‘geschriebener’ Frauen in Prag (1770–80)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the characteristics of female authorship in Prague in the 1770s. The moral weeklies Die Unsichtbare (1771) and Die Sichtbare (1771) highlight the differences between the Prague reading public's expectations for female writers to focus on superficial, feminine topics and the complex and sophisticated writing of the female authors themselves. Experiences of limitation due to writing in Bohemia, in less valued genres such as novels, and because of their gender in fact led to women writers such as Viktorie Rupp and Maria Anna Sager developing self-confidence as authors. A central aspect of this paper is the juxtaposition of male and female writing patterns and their contrasts, as illustrated by Sager in her novels Die verwechselten Töchter (1771) and Karolinens Tagebuch (1774). Finally, her contributions as a female writer are contextualized within the framework of contemporary literary criticism and the academic aesthetics surrounding the Prague professor Karl Heinrich Seibt.

Writing the Female Body: A Study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

Ishiguro projects the struggle of a migrated woman and the search for her identity primarily, at the same time subtly describing the pains and fears of a woman who traverses through the phase of pregnancy and imminent motherhood. Contemporary literary criticism may focus on the problematics of the conscious and subconscious desires of the characters, but body essentially is the locus of all human adventures which are represented through desires, moods, fears, creativity and feelings. The paper discusses Ishiguro’s depiction of pregnancy in A Pale View of Hills and his projection of female body in order to determine that pregnancy and procreation are no longer taboo subjects and to analyze the impact pregnancy has on female. Kristeva talks about the female body, motherhood and pain which is not a construct of the society and culture. She presents a universal and natural interpretation of womanhood. Ishiguro effectively presents this pressure of being a female through Etsuko’s character in A Pale View of Hills. Etsuko’s own painful experience of pregnancy and maternity has made it difficult for her to believe that for other women, pregnancy can be a matter of happiness and joy.

RESEARCH OF MODERN KAZAKH LITERARY CRITICISM

Literary criticism is one of the most important and complex parts of literature, closely related to history and the theory of literature. It defines the nature of verbal art, the relationship and aesthetic peculiarities between the reality of life and artistic reality. It is aimed to evaluate literary heritage, artistic works in terms of the requirements of today. Literary criticism mainly considers contemporary literary trends, its development, writers and their work from a modern point of view. Since it defines the ideological power and aesthetic qualities of a literary work, literary criticism is based on the challenges facing the development of a society, differentiating it from the heights of human values. One of the topical issues of modern Kazakh literary scienceis the analysis of the current state, development directions, shortcomings and achievements of literary criticism, the study of features, the study of internal laws. It is awell known fact that the Kazakh literary criticism has passed various stages and is based on the best experience of world literature and sets up ts own scientific conclusions and positions. Scientific principles of literary criticism are interconnected with new methods of semiotics, structuralism, postmodernism in modern Kazakh literary science. Contemporary literary criticism focuses on receptive aesthetics and aesthetic categories. Comprehensive understanding of new directions has determined the goals and objectives of our research work. In this connection, the article has covered issues of generalization, analysis, comparisons, study of critical views, new searches, scientific works, critical views of modern Kazakh literary critics. The review of new approaches to the study of Kazakh literary criticism was conducted as well. Having conducted the analysis of significant research works of foreign and domestic researchers, the role in the literature has been determined. As a result of a comprehensive analysis, the article has presented its findings.

Gheorghe Grigurcu’s Exegesis. Some Opinions

Gheorghe Grigurcu is known as a literary critic of poetry, while the position of poet was the writer’s first vocation. We identify the marginalization of the poet both geographically, being isolated in “Amarul Târg” (Târgu Jiu), and literary, by imposing some malicious restrictions: all this placing him under the badge of suspicion. Regarding the exegesis of Gheorghe Grigurcu, it is appropriate to selectively inventory some opinions belonging to contemporary literary critics or writers who have asserted themselves and capitalized on the status of a literary critic, but also a poet, as the writer Grigurcu himself wanted to be received. The dual nature of the writer, critic and poet, makes it impossible to analyze the two vocations separately, a fact that requires their twin research. Nonconformist, awkward, atypical, formidable polemicist, judicial spirit, corrosive is just some of the defining attributes that highlight the personality legitimized by the book universe. For the literary critic, poet, polemicist and author of aphorisms of the same name, to give up writing is to deny oneself.

Perkembangan Kritik Sastra Arab Pada Masa Kontemporer: Faktor Kemakmuran, Metode Kritik, dan Kritikus

Abstract: The development of literary criticism in the Arab world has gone through a long process, where some methods also changed and developed along with the development of literary works in the Arab world. Not much different from the world of Arabic literature which has been echoed since the jahiliyah era, since that time also literary criticism began to surface. In the realm of Arabic literary criticism, classical literary criticism is the root that exerts an influence on contemporary literary criticism. The popularity of Arabic poetry became a stimulus for the birth of criticism to the point of giving birth to several figures with their own styles of criticism. This article aims to provide a glimpse into the journey of literary criticism in the contemporary period, by presenting some of the figures who struggled and were directly involved in the develoment process of contemporary literary criticism.Keywords: Contemporary, Literary, Criticism, Arabic

Contemporary Literary Criticism: The Challenges of Democratisation

The aim of this article is to discuss the forms of contemporary Lithuanian literary criticism in the context of more general cultural processes. The current situation, which still tends to be described as crisis, is brought about not only by the structure of the national literary field, the specifics of its historical development, or the local cultural policy, but also by universal factors, such as the epistemic, social, and institutional uncertainty that characterises professional literary criticism in general, and the so-called democratisation of culture, which has been accelerated by the emergence of social networks. The latter provide an opportunity for everyone to express their value judgements, disrupting the established hierarchies of critical evaluation and deepening the crisis of authority. This factor together with the meritocratic model that has taken root in the media, along with the commercialisation of publishing policy creates the conditions for the emergence of new ways of talking about literature, or what is known as ‘non-professional literary criticism’. Drawing on theory of New Formalism, I discuss the main types of professional and non-professional literary criticism, and their affordances, which foresees the social and cultural uses of literary criticism.

Лирика К.М. Фофанова в восприятии Вл. Соловьева. Часть 1

The article is devoted to Vl. Solovyov’s aesthetic evaluation of K.M. Fofanov’s works, well-known poet of the 1880s–1900s. The reconstruction of V. Solovyov's perception of the poet's lyrics was carried out, due to the philosopher's lack of a separate work on K.M. Fofanov. It allowed to establish Fofanov's place in Solovyov’s hierarchy of the leading lyricists of the second half of the XIX century (A.A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, A.N. Maykov, Ya.P. Polonsky, A.K. Tolstoy, A.A. Fet) and reveal the connection between the aesthetic evaluation of Fofanov's creative work and the general attitude of the thinker to the decadent trends in the literary process of the 1890s. These trends distort the “eternal truth” and “universal meaning”and cause Solovyov’s rejection of other authors of this period (V.Ya. Bryusov, A.L. Volynsky, D.S. Merezhkovsky, N.M. Minsky, V.V. Rozanov, etc) as well as to identify the coincidences or discrepancies of Solovyov's position with contemporary literary criticism (N.M. Sokolov, N.N. Strakhov). For a holistic presentation of V. Solovyov’s aesthetic assessments of K.F. Fofanov’s lyrics it is necessary to take into account his views in such areas as ethics and historiosophy. It is shown that the rejection of Fofanov-the lyricist is also connected with his categorical protest against ethical and historical “decadence”, which, among other things, includes the newest “patriots” who, in their national, ethical and religious blindness, reached the apotheosis of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. This allows us to hypothesize that the aesthetic denial of Fofanov-the lyricist is associated in Solovyov's mind with the general process of diagnosing the “spiritual disease” of modern society, which makes itself felt in various forms (literary or social). This disease makes itself known also in a specific ideological division into “parties” in Russian society in the 1880s–1890s (apotheosis of Ivan the Terrible in the poems by A.N. Maykov in Katkov's “Russkij Vestnik”, as well as the patronage of Fofanov by A.S. Suvorin's “Novoe Vremia”). It is shown that Fofanov's lyrics seem to Solovyov to be one of the examples of substitution of concepts (a phenomenon characteristic of the epoch): Christ – superman, the idea of monarchy – tyranny, the Russian idea – Byzantinism, self –consciousness – narcissism, the higher sense – pretentious nonsense. It is no coincidence that Fofanov becomes the cult-figure of the ego-futurist Igor Severyanin, who, partly recognizing Fofanov's involvement in decadence, makes a step further from the “formulaic” and “banal” in Fofanov's poetry to the avant-garde cult of “the trivial”, blurring the distinction between “true” and “false”.

Literature and Totality

Abstract This essay foregrounds the hermeneutic purchase of totality in contemporary literary criticism. Responding to the recent proliferation of the “gig work” novel, the essay takes up two interrelated lines of inquiry: How might we rethink the conceptual affordances of “totality” for the ongoing project of the critique of political economy? What would a rethinking of totality’s position in the conceptual architecture of literary criticism offer in the way of new heuristics for the analysis of the novel? Through recourse to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic and Michael Theunissen, Hans-Friedrich Fulda, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s Critical Presentation of Metaphysics: A Discussion of Hegel’s “Logic” (Kritische Darstellung der Metaphysik: Eine Diskussion über Hegels “Logik”), this essay proposes a method of literary analysis that approaches the formal aspects of the novel as defined through the historical-material conditions for the writing of the text. The essay then puts a close reading of Hilary Leichter’s Temporary in conversation with Sarah Brouillette’s account of the decline of the English-language literary novel to suggest how the formal properties of the contemporary gig work novel respond to the general crisis of novel production in the twenty-first century.

Peter J Katz. Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority

In 2015, in an interview with the novelist Marilynne Robinson, Barack Obama claimed that the most important things he had learned about citizenship, ‘setting aside being president’, he had learned from novels. ‘It has to do with empathy’, he explained (18). Obama’s easy elision of empathy, moral improvement, and novel reading might well elicit a scornful curl of the lip from some contemporary literary critics, but as Peter J. Katz shows in this engaging monograph, it would have been entirely familiar to many mid-Victorian readers and writers, who held ‘a philosophy of fiction in which literary value depends on a text’s capacity to cultivate empathy through feeling’ (2). Katz argues that this philosophy was most vigorously propounded and interrogated in the fiction of the great mid-Victorian sensationalists, Dickens, Collins, and Braddon, all of whom positioned empathy as central to the experience of reading, an idea that was at the time strongly associated with popular fiction, and is now associated instead with popular responses to ‘serious’ literature. As Katz shows, the debate about whether and how reading fiction was (or was not) morally improving, and who got to decide, was as heatedly political then as now, with popular fiction and ‘common readers’ pitted against ‘classic’ literature and professional authority. In the mid-Victorian era, however, it was also a fraught philosophical and scientific argument, in which competing theories of language and ethics were invoked to judge both the significance of novels and the competence of their readers.

Динамика автобиографизма в американском модернистском романе: от Г. Миллера до Дж. Керуака

The study is devoted to the evolution of autobiographism in the American modernist novelof the 1930s–1950s. The article briefly describes the genre features of literary autobiographies and discusses the problem of ambiguous interpretation of the term ‘autobiographism’ in contemporary literary criticism. The study is based on Naum Leiderman’s theory of genre constructed on the idea that any genre is a certain combination of its structural units, i.e., ‘genre carriers’, these primarily including subject-oriented, spatial-temporal, and speech organization. Autobiographism, considered in the article as a principle of the author’s portrayal of his own life in a work of fiction, manifests itself precisely in the genre carriers, transforming them in a certain way. Following this, we define the autobiographical novel as a genre variety possessing the following features: the author aims to portray his life in dynamics of his personal relationships with the exte-rior world; the author’s life experience serves as the material; the leading principle of depiction is autobio-graphism. Based on a comparativeanalysis of the features of autobiographism in modernist novels, the paper traces the tendency, typical of modernist writers in the 1930s–50s, to abandon the ideas of elitism and text-centricity of the 1920s literature, and shows their increasing interestin their own writer’s individuality as well as the ways of expressing it in a literary work. The autobiographical novel, ideologically oriented to-ward the representation of the author’s ‘I’, became a genre in which this trend found expression through the complication of the forms of autobiographism, reflecting the structural, stylistic, and ideological features of modernist autobiographies. The material under research are the autobiographical novels Tropic of Cancerby Henry Miller and On the Roadby Jack Kerouac.

Expresívne a emocionálne výrazy v literárnokritických recenziách prezentované v literárnych periodikách a mienkotvorných časopisoch (so zreteľom na rok 2021)

Contemporary literary criticism is increasingly seen in an interdisciplinary concept between literary science and journalism (e.g. Mária Stanková). There may be several reasons for this, not least the fact that literary critical texts are now written not only by renowned literary critics, but also by anyone interested in commenting on literature. In view of the increasing subjectivity of expressing and presenting the reader's evaluation of a work of fiction in literary-critical reviews, we focus on its various types published in 2021 with regard to emotionally-expressive lexical units. The aim of the paper is to compare the peculiarities of expressive-emotional expression in reviews of literary-cultural periodicals (Fraktál, Books on the Reach) and opinion-forming media (Pravda, .week) by means of text analysis.

La infancia en un mundo posible entre lo utópico y lo distópico: "República Luminosa" (2017), de Andrés Barba

"República Luminosa (2017), by Andrés Barba (1975), tells the story of a group of children who, for about a year, invade a tropical city in which violence will prevail. These events are recounted years later by a witness who assumes the role of a chronicler in a narrative full of uncertainties. The recognition of the novel, which has received various awards, has not been reflected in a scholarly interest either by contemporary literary criticism or, more specifically, by the emergent field of critical studies on dystopias and utopias, which has grown in recent years both inside and outside Spain. This novel is a singular work because Andrés Barba, who had already written about children (and for children), offers a suggestively ambiguous gaze at childhood and at the narrative act itself; in fact, a priori antagonistic readings of the novel, moving between the dystopian and the utopian, have been proposed. After exploring the singularities of the novel and considering the critical readings that have been made, a narrative analysis of time, space, characters and style is presented in this essay, so as to help illuminate the paradoxical nature of its reading. It is argued that these elements are built on duality, an element that can help to explain both the ambiguity of the concepts present in the novel and of its sources (e.g., Plato’s works)."

Realismus a dekadence jako „nákaza“ v dobové řeči o literatuře 19. století

The aim of this paper is not to analyze the thematization of diseases (whether specific or general) or contagion expressed in literary form, but to explore the ways in which the discourse of contemporary literary criticism applied imagery associated with disease to descriptions of shifting literary norms in conjunction with changing cultural and social paradigms of the time.

Humanistic Knowledge-Making and the Rhetoric of Literary Criticism: Special Topoi Meet Rhetorical Action

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

Contributors

Contributors

Who Is Afraid of Techno-Fiction? The Emergence of Online Science Fiction in the Age of Informatization

Abstract An important and distinctive characteristic of the emergence of South Korean science fiction for an adult readership is its flourishing in digital space, predominantly written by the new generation of middle-class, techno-savvy youth beginning in the late 1980s. This article, which terms these science fiction texts from the late 1980s through the 1990s “techno-fiction,” begins by examining how contemporary literary critics viewed both science fiction and the practice of digital writing as concerning symptoms of “postmodernity” that threatened older aesthetic axioms of the literary field. For these critics, techno-fiction signified the empirical facts not only that increasing numbers of texts were being produced via the mediation of computer technology but, even more concerning, that the larger, politico-economic transformation of informatization was radically restructuring the cultural landscape and everyday cultural practices. Building on these critics’ calls to pay attention to the rising middle-class habitus and related cultural techniques to better understand the state of literature and culture in the age of information, and set against the backdrop of state-initiated and neoliberal processes of informatization, this article closely examines how these middle-class youth grew up to become key players in the production and consumption of techno-fiction.

Generations, Contemporaneity, and Intersectionality in Literary History

"Generations, Contemporaneity, and Intersectionality in Literary History. While several traditional concepts of literary history, including literary periods, periodization itself, and genre, have been recently put into question and reframed in transnational, cross-temporal, and transdisciplinary ways, the notion of generation has received much less attention. At the same time, in various branches of cultural studies, and even more prominently in sociology, the problem of generations has taken center stage once again. In this article, the critic takes as her departure point Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 to discuss how the generational operator could be employed in post-Cold War literary history. Mironescu argues that a transversal and intersectional integration of generation into contemporary literary criticism could ensure a better understanding of intra- and transgenerational dynamics in terms of self-representations and group narratives, inclusions and exclusions, as well as gender and literary affiliations. Keywords: generation, generationality, literary history, postcommunism, intersectionality"

Justine Moritz, a subaltern in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley represents series of critical issues like disability, gender, inequality, masculinity, and among those issues and concerns, the representation of the “subaltern,” especially of the “female gendered subaltern,” is particularly significant because it plays a decisive role in examining the social context of the novel. In contemporary literary criticism, postcolonial theory is one of the most gripping schools of thought. The subaltern, as a theoretical concept in literary criticism, stays under the umbrella of Postcolonial theory. “Subaltern,” a term was first familiarized by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist and political activist, refers to people represented as being of inferior status or rank; subordinate of rank, power, authority and action. This essay, the result of my study on the novel and the subaltern, argues that Justine Moritz is a subaltern and her representation in the novel, voice and silence, alienation, resistance and death are integral components of her subalternity. It considers the illustration of Justine Moritz as a character, the treatment she gets as a member of the community and as an individual, her social mobility, her being trapped in an oppressive system, her being abused by the creature, her psycho-alienation and her struggle and resistance to establish her own agency as a subaltern. It will review the concept of “subaltern” given by such critics and thinkers as Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, and Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. Then, it will interpret close reading with a special focus on the character of Justine Moritz to find out her positionality and relevance to “subalternity,” with reference to the establishment of her individual subaltern agency through her death. However, analysis in this essay will examine how hegemony and supremacy of the dominant class plays constructive role, and will also include examples of subaltern resistance against the hegemonic power structure though this act of resistance leads to death and destruction. The methodology of this essay is analytical and