Corpus Of Novels Research Articles

Surrogacy and dystopian positionality: narrative reproduction between speculative fiction and chick lit

Abstract When it comes to Anglophone surrogate fictions, it seems that one reader’s dystopia is another writer’s chick lit: whereas widely received fictional narratives about surrogacy which are set in a future North America, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, are mostly read as dystopian or speculative fiction, the small corpus of novels which negotiate commercial surrogacy in India (Origins of Love, The House of Hidden Mothers and A House for Happy Mothers) all contain chick-lit elements. As this constellation of genres might create the impression that exploitative forms of surrogacy do not exist yet, this article brings together postcolonial and ethnographic scholarship on surrogacy with research from gender and queer studies in order to explore the wider socio-political implications of these generic complexities. Arguing that more work is needed to conceptualise dystopian positionality, the article first shows that speculative and dystopian texts about surrogacy often invite Western-centric interpretations in which the dystopian element is mostly configured in temporal terms while aspects of space and positionality tend to be neglected or universalised. Further unfolding the generic complexities of surrogate fictions, the article then explores the extent to which the chick-lit mode in the texts on Indian surrogacy consolidates biocapitalist consumer market ideologies. In a last step, the article discusses the interconnections between generic conventions and hetero- and bionormative teleologies, and it reflects on the problems which might arise when attempts to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions about reproduction do not simultaneously also question the – often stratifying – implications of bionormativity.

Exploring the potential of sentiment analysis for the study of negative empathy

Abstract In connection to literature, negative empathy is a sophisticated form of narrative empathy with fictional characters portrayed as markedly evil and seductive at the same time. Several studies on narrative engagement have explored negative empathy mainly from a theoretical perspective. Conversely, empirical approaches have rarely delved into the dynamics of the linguistic construction of the texts studied. To fill this gap, this paper employs computational techniques to investigate the language of a corpus of novels whose characters are particularly apt for the arousal of negative empathy. More specifically, this study uses Sentiment and Emotion Analysis to explore the lexical representation of emotions and to locate fluctuations in the emotional content of the texts. The ultimate aim is to assess both the potential and the vulnerabilities of Sentiment Analysis for detecting emotional shifts in a literary text and thus for revealing the intensity of its emotional content, which may facilitate the readers’ morally challenging engagement with negative characters.

Fragmentary, Censored, Indispensable

Abstract While the massacre of peaceful Algerian demonstrators by French police on October 17, 1961, has been thoroughly studied by historians and is well known to the general public thanks to a sprawling corpus of novels, plays, songs, films, bandes dessinées, and other retrospective representations, to date there has been no careful archaeology of the event's original audiovisual archive from 1961. This article takes up that challenge in two stages: first, by identifying the photos and newsreel footage shot on the night of October 17, specifying the circumstances of their production, (non)distribution, and impact in the immediate aftermath of the massacre; second, by surveying how key elements of the original archive were recycled over the following sixty years to serve in turn as surrogates for and complements to other sources of knowledge about this infamous and long-dissimulated crime d’état.

Seeing Poems of Suffering and The Future of the Nation: On the Meaning of the Eyes in Italian Literature of the Great War, 1915–1935

ABSTRACT Using a selected corpus of novels, diaries, memoirs, and theatre plays published between 1915 and 1935, it will be shown how, in the Italian literature of the Great War (the so-called letteratura di guerra), eyes became symbols of patriotic martyrdom, incitement to violence, military community, and humanised authority. Coded as male, nationalistic, and militaristic, in the writings of both prominent and obscure Italian writers and veterans, eyes were simultaneously transformed into chauvinistic and xenophobic marks of exclusion of perceived enemies, women, and social outsiders. It will finally be shown how similar patterns of meaning, as associated with the description of eyes in the letteratura di guerra, can be traced in Fascist literature, pointing towards a hitherto unexplored semantic universe of ocular imagery in interwar Italy.

Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): arealul național

This article is part of a series that investigates through quantitative and geocritical means the corpus of novels created by the research project Astra Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 novels digitized). One of the many foci of our analyses delves into the internal geography of the Romanian novel as it manifests itself through geolocated metadata that reveal the spatial diversity of the corpus, concerning not only plot setting, but also relating to the main topographical nodes underpinning the novelists’ consciousness. Because of such geolocational diversity, the following study will only deal with the national setting of the Romanian novel.

Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): străinătatea

The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this period by smaller cities in France and Italy. The article also describes the relation between social mobility and geographical coverage in the epoch. Keywords: Romanian literature, distant reading, geocriticism, literary geography, planetarity.

‘Le feu est de retour dans la vallée’: The Noir Landscapes of Deindustrialization in Lorraine

Abstract The region of Lorraine is often seen as paradigmatic of the social problems arising from deindustrialization in France. Noir novels set in the region offer rich re-imaginings of the landscapes of deindustrialization, both geographical and social. This article examines what noir aesthetics do to these landscapes, studying a corpus of novels from four writers. In the first section, the article looks at how the novels engage with deindustrialization through ruins and natural environments. In the second section, the article examines how Dominique Manotti’s Lorraine Connection critiques the policies of reindustrialization implemented in the region since the late 1980s. The article concludes with an analysis of how noir genre conventions allow the novels to critique the cruel optimism of reindustrialization.

Doing Memory. Parisian Hotels’ Portraits with Old Migrants

Parisian hôtels meublés are traditionally short-term accommodation where migrants, first from French provinces, then from abroad – especially Maghreb, and more specifically Algeria – where living in poor conditions. From the ‘golden age’ in the interwar period where they housed around 11% of the Parisian population until current times, the sector has decreased, and become more and more stigmatised. Nevertheless, they can be considered as post-colonial ‘milieu de mémoireʼ of migrations belonging to different generations, contexts and origins. Thanks to a composite approach, ethnographic (observation and interviews) and literary (study of a large corpus of novels related to hotels meublés), the chapter shows that those places are emblematic of specific regimes of memories, both dominated and unconventional, suffering and creative. The first part is dedicated to describing the hotels as ambiguous and complex places, where the subtle hierarchy of spaces makes the co-habitation possible, and can be considered as support for memories. The second part deals more precisely with ‘doing memoryʼ: Both oral histories and literary works are embraced as interpretative constructions reformulating experiences. The last part shows categories and assignments at work in the hotels, where narratives are calling for both a right to the city and a certain acknowledgment of the subalterns beyond disruptions, displacements and silences.

Passeurs: Narratives of Border Crossing in the Western Alps

This article focuses on representations of passeurs: migrant smugglers across the French-Italian and Swiss-Italian borders. I analyze a heterogeneous corpus of novels, films, and essays published between 1990-2017 that refer to different waves of migration, from World War II to the contemporary migration crisis. I argue that these texts complicate and help question the current criminalization of migrant smugglers most often found in the media and political discourses. In particular, I claim that these discourses confuse or dismiss migrants’ experience of border crossing, as they neglect important ethical and legal differences between smuggling and trafficking, humanitarian actors and professional smugglers. The texts I analyze insist on these nuances, enriching our understanding of the human stakes of “illegal” migrations. Through the analysis of literature and film, I present figures of migrant smugglers who have operated illegally to facilitate migrants, but who must not be confused with human traffickers. For example, in his bio-fiction Il vuoto alle spalle (1999), journalist Marco A. Ferrari gives an uplifting, idealized portrayal of Ettore Castiglioni, an Anti-Fascist Alpinist active during World War II, who smuggled Italian Jews and political opponents to the Fascist regime to Switzerland, including the second President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi. Francesco Biamonti, who lived at the French-Italian border and was a prolific novelist in the 1980s and 1990s, insists on the professionalism of smugglers who have been traditionally present in the Western Alps. In particular, Biamonti stresses that good passeurs are those who never put the life of their clients (migrants) at risk. Novels such as Vento largo (1991) and Le parole la notte (1994) not only point at the negative effects of globalization in Liguria (Italy), but also lament Europeans’ lack of attention to and understanding of increasing migratory flows, well before the media started talking about a migrant “crisis.” Lastly, I present the work of journalists who occasionally performed the role of “humanitarian smugglers” and later reported their experience in written or cinematic form: Io sto con la sposa, by Gabriele del Grande, Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, and Antonio Augugliaro (2014); Passeur, by Raphaël Krafft (2017). These works express the authors’ need to reconnect with the professional and anti-Fascist tradition of passeurs in the Western Alps, at a time when there is no alternative to “illegal” border crossing for too many migrants.

Stylistique de l’hypotypose dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Marin Le Roy de Gomberville

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El mundo del trabajo en la novela francesa contemporánea: por una estética de lo real

The article aims to determine the way in which contemporary literature represents work as an object of fiction by means of studying a corpus of novels that includes Francois Bon’s Daewoo (2004), Jean Rolin’s Terminal Frigo (2005), Delphin de Vigan’s Les heures souterraines (2009) [ Underground Time ] and Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous etions des etres vivants (2010). With the purpose of answering questions regarding the relation between the experience of the present and the transformations it causes on current poetics of novel, it is purported to identify the most relevant features of the writing of the real, which has established itself as an aesthetic trend with a nature of its own within French current literary scene.

Syntactic methods for topic-independent authorship attribution

AbstractThe efficacy of syntactic features for topic-independent authorship attribution is evaluated, taking a feature set of frequencies of words and punctuation marks as baseline. The features are ‘deep’ in the sense that they are derived by parsing the subject texts, in contrast to ‘shallow’ syntactic features for which a part-of-speech analysis is enough. The experiments are made on two corpora of online texts and one corpus of novels written around the year 1900. The classification tasks include classical closed-world authorship attribution, identification of separate texts among the works of one author, and cross-topic authorship attribution. In the first tasks, the feature sets were fairly evenly matched, but for the last task, the syntax-based feature set outperformed the baseline feature set. These results suggest that, compared to lexical features, syntactic features are more robust to changes in topic.

Release from PI: An analysis and a model.

Recall decreases across a series of subspan immediate-recall trials but rebounds if the semantic category of the words is changed, an example of release from proactive interference (RPI). The size of the rebound depends on the semantic categories used and ranges from 0% to 95%. We used a corpus of novels to create vectors representing the meaning of about 40,000 words using the BEAGLE algorithm. The distance between categories and spread within categories jointly predicted the size of the RPI. We used a holographic model for recall equipped with a lexicon of BEAGLE vectors representing the meaning of words. The model captured RPI using a hologram as an interface to bridge information from episodic and semantic memory; it is the first account of RPI to capture release at the level of individual words in categorized lists.

Filthy “Others” in 1990s Environmentalist Fiction: From Steinbeck to Boyle

Abstract T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain (1995) begins by paying homage to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939): Boyle's epigraph, quoted from Steinbeck's novel, creates a direct analogy between the Okies and the Mexican immigrants, their (im)migration, and their subsequent fate. Indeed, both novels protest against the Californians' attitude toward the weakened “Other” who struggles to make a living in their home state. As critics have noted, the parallels between the two novels are visible in various features, structural as well as thematic. Similar themes include the Californian Edenic dream, the economic depression, and a critique of consumer culture. I argue that a deeper similarity between the novels is their common preoccupation with filth. This focus, overlooked by scholars, can be read as part of an entire subgenre which I call “filth-fiction.” Exploring the novels' shared interest in the racial and socioeconomic significations of filth and the latter's connection to the ecological aspects, my article demonstrates how Tortilla—like the entire corpus of novels within this subgenre—carefully follows Steinbeck's lead despite the fact that it depicts a different racial layout. As my analysis shows, the impact of The Grapes of Wrath on contemporary U.S. fiction is evident, both in the representations of filthy “Others” and in the environmental awareness.

Investigating Possible Evolutionary Reduction in Subject Nominal Group Complexity in Prose Fiction Text

In this paper, an attempt is made to put to text analytic and stylistic test Norman Blake's hypothesis (Blake, 1990) that the system of clause in literature-text has evolved from the eighteenth century all the way into the late twentieth in terms of noun groups becoming less complex and elaborate. A corpus of novels is selected such that every time span of fifty years can be represented by at least two novels. Then, in order to study the noun groups of respective evolutionary periods in question, it is the noun group in subject position that is subjected to analysis in terms of complexity, the key term of this stylistic study, which is taken to be analyzable through two yardsticks: a) the straightforward lexical density, i.e. the number of words inside the subject, and b) how many instances of ‘embedding’ there are in that nominal functioning as subject. The study could not find support for Blake’s initial hypothesis as to the downward evolutionary trend in the complexity of noun groups, yet it brings out other implications and functions attributed to noun groups in subjecthood, over these respective historical periods, as used by novelists thereof.

Feminism in the “Father Book”: Complicating the Emancipation Narrative in Assia Djebar’s Nowhere in My Father’s House

But you--I am speaking to myself, like a sarcastic stranger--, where have you gotten, you who began your life through intervention of father, father and his supposedly or truly beloved daughter--and who declares, suddenly, to nearly whole world: in my father's house? Dispossessed? Really? And what goads you into writing that? Why shout it to four winds? Mais vous--je me parle a moi-meme, comme ferait une etrangere sarcastique--, ou en etes-vous, vous qui avez commence votre vie par l'intervention du pere, du pere et de sa fille pretendument aimee ou reellement aimee--et qui declarez soudain presque a la face du monde : > ? Depossedee ? Vraiment, et quel aiguillon vous incite a l'ecrire ? Pourquoi vouloir ainsi le clamer a tous vents ? --Assia Djebar, Nowhere in My Father's House (1) If passing of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar in 2015 has been occasion for scholars to revisit a number of issues in her extensive corpus of novels, plays, and films, then I begin by raising a question that Djebar herself asks in passage above, taken from her final work, Nowhere in My Father's House (Nulle part dans la maison de mon pere, 2007). What compels her to publicly declare that she is nowhere in her father's house? This preoccupation is apparently so central that it appears as title of this autobiographical novel retracing her childhood and adolescence in colonial Algeria. In asking titular question, Djebar addresses herself in second person as a stranger or foreigner (etrangere), emphasizing cultural estrangement caused by her personal and professional trajectory. This estrangement is directly linked to figure of her father, who was only native (indigene) (2) schoolteacher in colonial school in Algeria where she began her French education, a formation that ultimately enabled her to develop her prestigious literary career. Publicly claiming estrangement from her father is thus a symptom of self-doubt, as if, writing between Paris and New York, she has no right to criticize man who started it all. This self-doubt reflects larger tensions in Djebar's work that relate primarily to her status as an Algerian woman intellectual who writes almost exclusively in French and whose greatest literary success has been in Europe. (3) Born Fatima-Zohra Imalayene in town of Cherchell in 1936, Assia Djebar spent much of her life writing novels and holding teaching appointments in France and United States. After working for Algerian nationalist newspaper El Moudjahid during Revolution and teaching history in Algiers after independence, she increasingly distanced herself from her home country, first because of National Liberation Front's cultural policy of Arabicization in domain of education, and then because of waves of violence and political unrest that shook country in 1990s, resulting in deaths of at least 150,000 Algerians. She moved to United States in 1995, where she became a professor, first at Louisiana State University and then at New York University. Her last visit to Algeria occurred that same year, when she attended her father's funeral. Though most of her novels concern her country of origin, she is known only in certain milieus there, largely because Nowhere in My Father's House is her only novel to date to be translated into Arabic. (4) But if, as Jane Hiddleston asserts in Out of Djebar's relationship to her homeland grew increasingly fraught and distanced over years (181), I would agree with Mildred Mortimer that rather than continuing along this path out of Algeria, Nowhere in My Father's House instead marks a decisive return (114). Composing this novel of return--to both Algeria and her father--appears to have posed a significant challenge. In an interview conducted in 2006 by Daniel Simon, she stated that she was working on what she described as the father book and anticipated that it would be final work in Algerian quartet, (5) a series of novels focusing on women's experiences in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Algeria. …

L'Ambition by Iegor Gran

Ron Butlin The Magicians of Edinburgh Polygon This collection of poems from Edinburgh’s poet laureate gives a fresh face to an old city. The Magicians of Edinburgh is a moving presentation of the Scottish capital city, exploring many of its most characteristic attractions: the Parthenon on Carlton Hill, the Walter Scott Monument, and (of course) whiskey. This new collection is particularly timely as Scotland considers the future of its national identity. Mongo Beti Cruel City Pim Higginson, tr. Indiana University Press Experimental and controversial, the 1971 groundbreaking Cameroonian novel Ville cruelle is finally available in English translation. The conflict between the expectations of a traditional French readership and the honest representation of postcolonial Africa are reflected and explored through the story of the villager Banda and his journey through a changing Africa. Nota Bene Years later, Adrián remembers that one of his father’s last wishes was for him to search for Miriam, for whom the colonel apparently had developed a true affection. At that point, the protagonist embarks on a long, personal journey that takes him away from his well-to-do lifestyle and confronts him with Peru’s true social reality, including the scars left from the war that had killed some 69,000 Peruvians. Adrián’s anguishing search for Miriam is not only a discovery of Peru’s poor people but also a quest to answer the dark mysteries surrounding his father’s wrongdoings. Personal redemption proves to be a complicated task for the protagonist; in reality , it becomes a cumbersome exercise of soul-searching that unexpectedly involves his own family history. Cueto’s riveting, fast-paced novel, impeccably translated by Frank Wynne, starts out as a political thriller and turns into a wellcrafted and gripping psychological drama of a son attempting to come to terms with the painful ghosts of a father he never really knew. On a broader scale, this novel seems to suggest that social reconciliation is also a pending task in Peru after this violent period of its history. The Blue Hour joins an important corpus of novels that in recent years deal with Peru’s violent political past, and it is the first major novel by the author available in English. A prolific and talented writer, Alonso Cueto is an important name to remember in contemporary Peruvian letters. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Iegor Gran. L’Ambition. Paris. P.O.L. 2013. isbn 9782818017555 The hero of Iegor Gran’s latest novel, histenthforEditionsP.O.L,isatwentysomething Parisian man named José. When his girlfriend leaves him, citing his lack of ambition as her reason for breaking things off, José is forced to examine himself and his situation in life. Certainly, he is less accomplished than he might have expected to be at this stage. He has a part-time job in a third-rate computer repair shop. He sells vintage trinkets and baubles on the side, barely recouping the money he invests. He shares an apartment with a young man far more ambitious than himself, and he always comes up short when the rent is due. In his studies, he wagered upon computer science, thinking to become the next Mark Zuckerberg; but that field is now utterly saturated, leaving no place for a fellow of moderate intelligence and middling energy like José. By a twist of chance, he falls into a job tutoring an underachieving high-school student in mathematics , but he quickly discovers that his tutee is more able than he. In short, the train has left the station, and he is not on it. Sometimes José wonders if his ambitions serve more to motivate the people around him, rather than himself. His roommate is clearly prospering; his ex-girlfriend, Cécile, seems to be doing well; even his tutee appears to be on the road to success. Gran weaves several subplots in the interstices of José’s story. He gives us a few glimpses of Cécile’s postJos é life. He casts his glance back to the Neolithic era, showing us one of José’s ancestors, a man who is just as belated as his descendant, refusing to abandon his hunter-gatherer practices when everyone around...

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide ed. by Martin Munro (review)

Edwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide. Edited by Martin Munro, foreword by Dany Laferriere. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 232 pp. $22.50 paperback.Review by Tomaz CunninghamEdwidge Danticat: A Reader's Guide, edited by Martin Munro, is a collection of fourteen essays followed by a personal interview with Edwidge and a thorough bibliography on her work. Divided into four sections, reader's guide addresses all of from her first highly-acclaimed and controversial novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) up to and including moving personal memoir Brother, I'm Dying (2007). Lesser known portions of work, such as her young adult fiction and travel writing, are addressed in this reader by academics, literary critics, and fellow writers of Caribbean fiction. Together, these fourteen essays provide a thorough and current perspective on work of an incredibly prolific writer whose personal story is one Munro describes as of modern (25).The first section of book, entitled Contexts, contains four essays, which attempts to examine both Edwidge personal life and her as they relate to Haitian, Caribbean, and African-American literature (11). Inside Out: A Brief Biography of Edwidge Danticat, a biographical essay by Munro, traces certain aspects of life from her youth in Duvalierist Haiti to her immigration to Brooklyn, New York and later relocation to Miami. Munro notes that connection to Haiti has largely been a result of migrant Haitian communities that she has been able to find in United States. Munro also names some of literary influences, both Haitian and African-American, and traces her growth as a writer from Eyes, Breath Memory to The Dew Breaker (2004), latter of which he describes as Danticat's most accomplished work to date (23). Similarly, essays by J. Michael Dash (Danticat and her Haitian Precursors) and Carine Mardorossian (Danticat and Caribbean Women Writers) examine work in context of Haitian and Caribbean literature and explore how both fits into and expands certain constructions of identity (national identity, gender, class and race for example) normally accepted in Caribbean literary expression. The most ambitious essay in this section is Danticat and The African American Women's Literary Tradition, in which RegineMichelle Jean-Charles compares with African-American women's writing. This essay seeks in some way to explain selfidentification as an African-Haitian American (AHA) woman and writer and explore how this identity impacts her writing. According to JeanCharles, shares certain themes common to AfricanAmerican women's writing, such as healing from sexual violence, closeknit female relationships, silence and voice and the transformative power of reading and writing (59). However, Jean-Charles also notes that race does not play such a crucial role in work as it does in literary tradition of most African-American women writers. Other factors, such as nationality, language and common experience of immigration inform identity of subjects as much as issues of race (58).Texts and Analyses, second section, is most useful portion of work from a standpoint of literary criticism. This section examines entire corpus of novels, young adult fiction, and travel writing. In Writing Young: Young Adult Fiction, Kiera Voclavik examines Behind Mountains (2002) and Anacaona (2005), noting that recurrent themes of exile, violence and sadness that characterize are as present in young adult fiction as they are in her fiction for mature audiences. The understandable absence of adult theme of sexual relations make young adult fiction an effective way to introduce young non-Haitian readers to culture and history. …

Writing Immigrant Aid: The Settlement House and the Problem of Representation

Historians have chronicled the importance of the settlement house to the development of public health, social work, and governmental welfare, but literary critics have been slow to acknowledge that the institution had a significant impact on American literature. (1) Rose Gollup Cohen's memoir Out of the Shadow (1918) offers one emblematic account of the literary culture of the settlement house when it describes the author's visit to a public lecture on Shakespeare at Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement. For Cohen, a Jewish immigrant garment worker, this cultural event was fraught with mixed emotions. Ashamed of her evident poverty and inability to read English, she regrets her decision to attend within moments of entering the room. Nonetheless, Cohen sits across from the lecturer and takes hold of a volume of which glows with symbolic power. felt the light full upon Cohen writes, merging her anxious sense of being looked at with the book's totemic power. It was on my hands, it shone into my lap, it seemed to shine right into me, showing my ignorance (251). Although she can scarcely follow the thread of conversation that evening, Cohen walks home to her tenement apartment with a feeling of pride at having made contact with such elevated secular culture. Shakespeare is no longer alien to her, however daunting his language remains: Shakespeare, this was an old friend.... I felt proud of this new knowledge and I walked home with a feeling of superiority over myself of the day before (252). As her memoir proceeds, Cohen continues to recount her coming of age on the Lower East Side by referencing the books she received at nearby settlement houses; the volume of Shakespeare reflects Cohen's pursuit of erudition, Little Women signals her provisional connection to genteel American girlhood, and the New Testament points to her religious and generational alienation. Cohen charts her narrative of Americanization through these various intersections of settlement reform and literary culture; her memoir, in turn, holds a valuable place in early twentieth-century American literary history. As a historical document, Cohen's memoir indicates how literature functioned within the settlement movement as a recreational activity, a measure of social and cultural progress, and a means of communicating particular ideas and values to patrons. However, as a work of imaginative literature, Out of the Shadow joins a large corpus of novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, plays, and periodical and reform tracts about the settlement house that constitutes a veritable sub-canon of American literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The closer one looks at this body of texts, the more Jewish it appears to be--much like the settlement movement itself. The turn-of-the-century settlement house was the source of a great deal of Jewish American literature from this period, as many participants later wrote about their experiences as clients, workers, or critical observers of this foundational pedagogical environment. An enduring symbol for the fraught process of assimilation and for the patron- client relations between uptown and downtown Jewish constituencies, the settlement house was also a site through which key period debates over Americanization, identity, and literary value were waged, particularly as these concerned the vexed issue of Jewish representation. Tracing the institutional connections among the various genres and diverse subcultures of Jewish literary culture around the turn of the century often leads back to this reform organization. Like Cohen, thousands of immigrants and second-generation Jews had their first taste of English-language literary engagement through the settlement's system of literary clubs, lectures, and libraries and the writing that has become emblematic of the period reflects this legacy of access. Mary Antin's classic The Promised Land (1912) describes Boston's Hale House settlement as an institution whose business in the slums is to mould the restless children on the street comers into noble men and women and a place in which she was able to explore her burgeoning interest in the natural sciences (254). …

Linguistique de corpus, genres textuels, temps et personnes

Denise Malrieu : Linguistique de corpus, genres textuels, temps et personnes. After having specified our concept of the "genre" as dependent on the fields of practice, the semiotic tools brought into play and the standards of communication regulating the enunciative situations, results are presented of a comparative statistical analysis of the categories of verbal tense and persons i) on a large corpus of tagged texts of contrasted domains, generic fields, and genres and ii) on a more restricted corpus of novels (genre that shows a great variability) according to marked parts dialogues/récit of the narrator and according to the type of narration (1S vs. 3S, past vs. present).