Distinct Genre Research Articles

Locke and the Churchill Catalogue Revisited


 
 
 At the time of his death, in 1704, the library of John Locke held 269 volumes of philosophy—but 275 volumes of geography and travel. Works of geography drew on discoveries related in books of travel, but Locke did nevertheless see them as distinct genres. In both, his holdings were extensive. He owned several volumes of maps; the great recent surveys of Africa, America, and Japan printed by John Ogilby; and the descriptions of the world by Abbot, Purchas, Morden, and Moll. It was in books of travel, though, of which Locke owned 195, where his holdings were most remarkable. He owned the massive collections of Ramusio (in Italian), de Bry (in Latin), Thévenot (in French), and Hakluyt and Purchas (in English). He owned accounts of the well-known voy- ages of Hariot to Virginia, de Léry to Brazil, Sandys to the Ottoman Empire, Gage to the West Indies, and Choisy to Siam. He owned as well accounts of dozens of more minor voyages, such as those of Blount to the Levant, Monconys to Syria, Ray to the Continent, Josselyn to New England, and Fryke to the East Indies. No student of Locke’s library has failed to remark upon what Harrison and Laslett, its modern editors, have called its ‘great strength’ in these areas. This is to understate the matter, for it seems that among libraries of its size in late Stuart England, only the library of Robert Hooke (and perhaps that of Robert Boyle) rivalled Locke’s in works of geography and travel.
 
 

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths

Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths

From Eye to Tongue: Lengua in the Early Works of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

A central feature of the narrative authority El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega constructs for himself in the Comentarios reales is his linguistic knowledge. As a native speaker of Quechua, Garcilaso is able to act as an interpreter—that is, a lengua—between the Andean and Spanish traditions to which he is heir. This article analyzes the forging of this authority in the first two works published by Garcilaso: his translation of the Dialoghi d'amore by Leone Ebreo (1590) and his history of the expedition led by Hernando de Soto to La Florida (1605). Although they pertain to very distinct genres, both of these works consider the nature and capacities of lenguas (the tongue, the interpreter), especially in relation to the eye. While in both philosophical and historiographical terms, the eye is the privileged organ, Garcilaso subtly refines this corporeal hierarchy and begins to shape the authoritative tongue that will become crucial in his later works.

The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades, and: Essays on the Essay Film ed. by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, and: The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction by Nora Alter

Reviewed by: The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades, and: Essays on the Essay Film ed. by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, and: The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction by Nora Alter Larson Powell The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia. Edited by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower, 2016. Pp. 315. Paper $25.00. ISBN 978-0231176958. Essays on the Essay Film. Edited by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 372. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0231172677. The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction. By Nora Alter. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 394. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0231178204. In the most systematic presentation of genre formation until now, Rick Altman analyzed the rise of genres through a kind of feedback loop between producers, critics, and audiences: "Genres begin as reading positions established by studio personnel acting as critics, and expressed through film-making conceived of as an act of applied criticism" (Film/Genre, 1999; 44). For this move to be confirmed, however, "broad industry acceptance" is required (46). Genres can also be reevaluated and redefined by academic critics and not only journalists, as with the "woman's film" or melodrama, brought back into currency and reinterpreted by feminist scholars in the 1970s during second wave feminism. Altman also offers a paradigmatic sketch of how genre definitions work, namely through a process of identifying corresponding films, compiling a canon of those films, and analyzing the genre's characteristics. Such a process often involves reassigning a new place for films previously assigned to other genres, or redrawing prior generic boundaries (e.g., between science fiction and horror, or action and adventure). Even art film, once seen as the opposite of genre cinema, has been treated as a genre. Since film scholars first turned toward questions of genre in the later 1960s, a considerable body of work on the topic has been produced, along with continued work on literary genres. The essay film as a distinct genre has only emerged as a scholarly topic in the last decade or so, put forth by Laura Rascaroli (The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, 2009), Tim Corrigan (The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, 2011), and David Montero (Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema, 2012). The appearance of three publications on the subject in little over a year—two edited volumes, Papazian's and Eades's The Essay Film and Alter's and Corrigan's Essays on the Essay Film, and Alter's monograph The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction—suggests that its time may have come. Despite their overlap in topic, the three volumes are all distinct in their organization: The Essay Film is made up of new work, whereas Essays on the Essay Film begins with a compilation of foundational texts on the subject, ranging from Lukács, Musil, Bense, and Adorno to Bazin; another section reprints work by more recent scholars, and the final part is composed of work by filmmakers themselves. Finally, Nora Alter's [End Page 667] The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction offers a complete history of the genre from its origins to the present. All volumes utilize to one degree or another the generifying strategies listed by Altman, yet reference to genre theory is surprisingly infrequent. Raymond Bellour mentions the genre theories of Genette and Schaefer in his contribution to Essays on the Essay Film (235–236), and Alter herself briefly cites Alastair Fowler's theory of literary genres (17), but nowhere in any of these books is there any sustained engagement with genre theory—something one might reasonably have expected, given how rich the discussion of genre formation has been in film studies. Instead, many of the authors seem to presume the existence of the essay film genre, and assume the reader does, too. However, this assumption is not at all self-evident. One cannot define the essay film in most of Altman's terms, whether semantic or syntactic: "common topics, shared plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects, or recognizable shots and sounds" or "plot structure, character...

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane Crystal Lynn Webster Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900. Edited by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. xvi + 384 pp. Cloth $120, paper $30. The burgeoning attention paid to African American children in the field of childhood studies has enriched critical approaches to both African American history and literature. This emerging focus has been marked by formal symposia, informal academic conversations, and new publications on topics in black childhood, a trend that represents a significant scholarly moment in childhood studies. Who Writes for Black Children? capitalizes upon this momentum and provides a valuable reflection on and contribution to each of these spaces of scholarly inquiry. The volume contains twelve essays and is divided into five sections. The final section offers a rich collection of literature for African American children authored and edited by both white and black writers. The twelve essays as a whole explore the formation of African American children's literature and readership by deploying new and innovative analytical lenses. In doing so, the collection produces both commentary on, and reproduction of, nineteenth-century literature that is an essential resource for scholars and students of African American and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane pose generative inquiries in their introduction to the collection by identifying methodological entanglements inherent within locating nineteenth-century black child-readers and literature. These include social trends that dictated who could claim the category of "child" and infantilized African Americans. Capshaw and Duane argue that uncovering black literature and child-readers destabilizes conventional interpretations of childhood, authorship, and audience, a task the contributors enthusiastically embrace. As such, their definition of African American children's literature is intentionally [End Page 468] capacious, including literature and writings authored by adults and children, African Americans and whites, and texts that African American children may or may not have directly engaged. The first section uncovers black child-readers through an engagement of African American poets whose contributions to the field of African American children's literature have gone largely unrecognized, including Lucy Skipwith, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Harper. Each of these essays employs "conjuring," a groundbreaking conceptual framework introduced by Angela Sorby, as a way to identify eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors' attention to black child-readers. In the process of conjuring real and imagined black children, Sorby aptly argues these authors "make literate agency possible" (6). Conjuring, then, becomes an especially useful framework to locate both black readership and historical black children. The volume's second section on schooling practices and instructional texts provides salient archival representations of both of these topics, with especially illuminating examples of African American children's voices in the historical archive. Mary Niall Mitchell's exploration of the letters written by black children who attended New Orleans's Couvent School powerfully demonstrates the political agency of nineteenth-century African American children in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of children, African Americans, and emergent black political thought. In part 3, the contributors examine literature authored mainly by whites that directly addressed and represented African American children. As such, each of these essays challenges the exclusion of such texts from the genre of African American children's literature, as well as the assumptions of presumed readers of white texts and their significance for African American children. Here, Brigitte Fielder provides a model for examining white-authored children's literature by analyzing African American children's interpretations of nineteenth-century narratives of human-animal relations, thereby challenging readings of this literature as a reproduction of racist values. The bibliographic essays of the fourth section summarize sites of African American children's literature and provide an overview of works published in the Christian Recorder. The final section includes primary sources—poems, essays, and excerpts—many of which are addressed by the contributors. This collection of texts lays the groundwork for the development of a distinct genre of African American children's literature. As is stated in the volume's introduction, most of the essays are concerned with...

Life Writing in the Long Run by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Reviewed by: Life Writing in the Long Run by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson Thomas R. Smith (bio) Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run. Maize Books, 2016, 730 pp. ISBN 978-1607854098, $39.99. When and if the story of Anglophone studies of life writing from the 1950s to the early 2000s is written, Sidonie Smith (no relation) and Julia Watson's Life Writing in the Long Run will be an invaluable source document, not only because Smith and Watson have been important theorists in the field since the late 1980s, but also because they have been important influences on the development of its criticism and pedagogy. While a major focus of their scholarship has been women's autobiography, this selection of their work, spanning 1991 through 2016, amply demonstrates that they see "the autobiographical"—in many incarnations, in various media, in any part of the world—as their objects of study. Reflecting this broad scope, Life Writing in the Long Run selects a wide range of their coauthored work and single-author essays—from synoptic discussions of women's autobiography, its theory and criticism, to nineteenth-century American women's autobiography, to contemporary uses of personal narratives as witness and testimonio in human rights campaigns, to online and visual self-representations, to narratives of ethnicity and exile. More than any other scholar of autobiographical writing I know of, they have tried to make sense of seemingly all the manifestations of the autobiographical as practiced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have been a powerful force in broadening our understanding of the autobiographical by showing its pervasiveness across media, cultures, and continents. In the introduction, Smith and Watson describe the collection's connecting thread as a tracing of the shift in the early 2000s from the scholarly topic of "autobiography" to the more inclusive field of "life writing" in their own work and that of others. Their book documents this shift well. In the 1990s [End Page 455] they use various forms of the word "autobiography" and, prefiguring the shift, "autobiographical practices." In 2006, they use "life narration," and by 2014, "life writing" is firmly in place. In my view, this shift came about for at least two reasons: 1) the awareness by many students of the autobiographical mode that the classificatory work of parsing genre distinctions among letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and "autobiography proper" was garnering diminishing returns, suggesting that the genre problem it was trying to solve needed reconceptualization. That problem was that, while the canonical autobiographies most usually studied up to the 1980s were book-length, retrospective, chronological narratives of usually Anglophone males' self-formation and rise to successful adulthood on the model of the bildungsroman, other kinds of self-referential writing, often by women or other marginalized people, did not conform to that model and suffered thereby from second-class status. But since there was no umbrella term but "autobiography" for this non-conforming writing, the word had to serve to name many disparate kinds of writing, some so different from each other as to call into question the ability of the term to specify anything concretely. This semantic confusion bothered everyone in the field, since it led to endless terminological debates that seemed to go nowhere. The other reason for this shift, I believe, was that online writing and visual media offered new forms of self-representation so far removed from traditional retrospective prose narrative autobiography as described by Philippe Lejeune's pacte that "autobiography" became a misnomer. If autobiography was what Lejeune said it was, how could it apply to such rapidly expanding and changing kinds of self-expression and self-representation? While "life writing" cannot adequately describe many visual autobiographical forms, it does create a large tent for verbal self-representations and obviates endless and often unrewarding discussions of the formal differences among the various kinds of autobiographical writing. Using James Olney's constitutive terms for autobiography, "life writing" preserves bios (life) and graphe (writing) but discards autos (self). That may not be a great loss since the "self" component of "autobiography" only establishes a heuristic distinction between biography and autobiography, a distinction first...

Meaning-making practices in the history of medical English

AbstractGenres work through conventions of communicative patterns. Variation in them is related to sociolinguistic parameters of writers and readers as well as situational and contextual factors, including culture. Conventions of writing change slowly and there are elements that remain constant throughout centuries but acquire new connotations. I shall first discuss genre theories and methods of studies at the interface between language and literature, and then provide a case study. The top genre of scholastic research was the commentary with a distinct genre structure. It was first introduced in Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became established in Early Modern English, as my examples will show. The transition period is particularly intriguing as the old thought style began to give way to new ideas, and observation proved inherited wisdom erroneous. Commentaries had an afterlife in spurious writings, providing an empirical example of genre dynamics and proving the usefulness of the notion of genre script as applied in this case study.1

Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television by Brian Baker (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television by Brian Baker Brian Faucette Brian Baker, Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television. Bloomsbury, 2015. 260pages. 120.00, hardcover. Building on the work he began in his first book, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945–2000, Brian Baker’s new book explores the idea of contemporary depictions of specifically British and American masculinities. To do so, he examines examples from literature and fiction to illustrate the changing and complex nature of gender identities for men. Baker reads these modes of masculinity in terms of the crisis narrative, that is, the idea that white men lost their status and power because of progressive movements such as the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and the LGBTQ movement, which allegedly victimized white men. He argues that as a result of 9/11 the narrative of masculinity has centered around “discourses of trauma, pathology” and dislocation” (1). According to Baker these narratives have resulted in cultural texts that “across a range of different genres” represent the idea of masculinity as “troubled, anxious, fissured” and “unable to cope with the alienating dynamics of contemporary globalized capitalism” (1). To better understand these modes of masculinities, Baker draws upon Robert Connell’s idea of “hegemonic masculinity” and Freudian psychoanalysis among many other theories. The book is organized around an analysis of three distinct genres: that of the action/war film, sci-fi and the Gothic/Horror/Fantastic. The first part, labeled Narratives of Power, focuses on the figure of the veteran or soldier suffering from PTSD and connects this idea to a renewed cultural stress on narratives about surveillance and spies. The section consists of four chapters across which Baker makes the case that contemporary masculinities are linked to questions about the increasing influence of technology, the “war on terror” and the growing impact of globalized capitalism. Of the four chapters in this section, the most compelling is the first in which Baker offers an extended reading of the differences between the depictions of James Bond in a Cold War context and that of the contemporary world. To illustrate his point Baker offers a detailed analysis of the opening scene of Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006) where Bond is shown in full pursuit of a suspect. Baker argues that this exciting scene, filled with acrobatics and daredevil moves in the urban environment of Madagascar, “signals a rupture in the visual regime of the Bond series, embracing contemporary globalized capital’s emphasis upon free movement: of information, of resources and of the gaze, and, at the same time the necessity to police this movement and maintain borders or erect barriers to restrict this fluidity” (8). For Baker, this new type of Bond film operates in stark contrast to previous films in the series like A View to a Kill (Glenn, 1985). He argues that A View to a Kill “uses the mobilized gaze, and the spectatorial strategies of tourism, travel and the panorama to limit the disruptive effects of cinematic spectacle,” a point he makes as he discusses the use of the Eiffel Tower in that film and Bond’s battle with the character of Mayday who escapes from Bond by diving off the structure and using a hidden parachute to get down whereas Bond relies on the elevator to continue the chase (16). Barker, using Anne Friedberg’s notion of the spectator and Urry’s idea of the tourist gaze, thus argues that earlier Bond films were more interested in providing audiences with a feeling of tourist spectacle and excitement that were achieved via horizontal movements of the camera and actors. In the case of Casino Royale, as he shows by looking at the long chase sequence that opens the film, there has been a shift in [End Page 59] Bond’s mobility toward the vertical, as he is shown running up cranes, walls, and jumping from one dangerous and improbable location to another. Baker argues that these changes in movement, including his constant running, place the film within the norms of contemporary blockbuster aesthetics by portraying Bond as a global figure who feels at home in any place and any situation even as...

An Investigation into the Optimal Experience in Reading Journalistic Texts in Light of Instructing Fairclough’s and Van Dijk’s Model

The present study aims at exploring the extent to which Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) familiarity may have an impact on flow experience. In so doing, the community sample of 60 students comprising 16 males and 44 females participated in the study. Initially, the pretest was conducted to ensure the homogeneity of their proficiency level. Besides, the participants were asked to reflect on their flow experience while reading three distinct genres of journalistic texts prior to the application of the treatment. During the treatment phase, they were instructed how to critically examine other journalistic texts relying on Fairclough’s (1989) three dimensional model along with Van Dijk’s (1995) theoretical framework of CDA over 10 successive sessions. Finally, utilizing paired- samples t-tests, the results of the posttests on the very three texts which were conducted at the pretest stage, indicated that the application of CDA has a significant influence on the students’ optimal experience while reading descriptive, expository, and narrative genres of journalistic texts.

C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

C. D. Blanton centres his book around Ezra Pound’s simple yet challenging statement that ‘[a]n epic is a poem including history’ (3). Far from drawing expected connections between classical epic and modernist poetry, Blanton’s book aims ‘to account for the emergence of the modernist epic as the central formal problem of an apparently postepic age’ (3). Can a ‘modernist epic’ be thus detected as a distinct genre? And is this indeed the best way to describe works by such modernist poets as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and H.D.? Blanton identifies a modernist epic in a variety of textual units. Most strikingly, he labels Eliot’s review The Criterion, MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939), and H.D.’s Trilogy (1946) as modernist epics, encouraging modernist scholars to reconsider these works in a new, rather unexpected light. According to Blanton, the late modernist poem’s ‘laconic force, its ambition to make history a part of poetry’s domain’ was not entirely comprehended by scholars (12). With Lukács’s argument about the impossibility of a modern epic in mind, and based on the genre’s problematic ‘ultimate principle of totality’, Blanton argues for a late modernist epic which asserts itself by using the ‘paradoxically totalizing force of negation’ which he feels is ‘at the formal heart of … modernism’ (6).

Cartographies of gender in contemporary Greek theatre: A work in progress?

Abstract The article explores some ways in which Greek theatre production during the last 30 years has engaged with gender politics. Most theatre historians and critics agree that the impact of second-wave feminism was rather insubstantial in the context of Greek theatre, and despite the presence of women in fields such as acting, playwriting, set and costume design and directing, there is no trace of a collective effort to develop a tradition of feminist playwriting and theatre practice. Discussing selected works by women playwrights in the light of the reception of feminist thought in Greece from the early years of Metapolitefsi until today, my intention is to trace the different trends of feminist dramaturgies and their genealogies. The first trend refers to plays that expose and discuss issues related with the everyday experience of women and that, in their majority, adopt a realist aesthetic; the second includes women-centred works that adopt a more experimental dramatic style and use intertextuality in order to turn to history, myth or popular legends; and the third refers to the form of the monologue as a distinctive genre carrying a strong feminist dimension.

Decades of Recorded Music for Children: Norwegian Children’s Phonograms from World War II to the Present

This article presents a study of Norwegian-recorded music for children from World War II to the present, combining a historical perspective with an ethnographic approach. The underlying research has employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches, producing various data sets. The results of the data analyses indicate that the evolution of children’s phonograms is characterized by some distinct genre- and style-related development features. This article describes and interprets such features in light of concepts and theories of children’s culture and music sociology. It also elaborates on the emergence of a music market aimed at children, with an emphasis on phonograms. The association with the popular music industry enables an apparent contradiction, addressed in this article, between pedagogical and commercial considerations and outcomes.

Stories about Climate Change in Political and Survey Discourse

Narration as a fundamental activity practiced among human beings dates from long before writing was invented, and spread throughout many different civilisations. Within cultural and literary studies it underwent a renaissance through the work of the Russian folklorist and scholar Vladimir Propp, who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales (published in Russia in 1928, translated to English in 1958, Morphology of the Folktale). Then, with the breakthrough of text linguistics, the narrative perspective entered forcefully into analyses of non-fictional texts (Wehrlich 1976, van Dijk 1980, Adam 1992). There have been many discussions about the number of components in the narrative structure, but there is currently a more or less clear consensus on the 5 component schema: initial situation, complication, reaction, resolution, final situation. The narrative structure has also entered non-linguistic fields, such as psychology and political science, and more particularly into climate change discourse, where even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has described its reports as “narratives”. With this as a backdrop, we will in the present contribution discuss the notion of narrative and its relevance in the analysis of climate change discourse within different genres, to show that despite their differences in both content and structure, there is a common climate change narrativity. The comparison involves two very distinct genres, the first of which is the political speech, exemplified by French President François Hollande’s prepared remarks at the climate change conference (COP21) in Paris in late 2015. The second genre has not yet received a label, but can be called “survey discourse”. This corresponds to answers to open-ended questions in a survey undertaken by the Norwegian Citizen Panel in 2015, where respondents answer freely in their own words the following question: “Concerning climate change, what do you think should be done?” The differences between the two genres are manifold. A political speech is carefully drafted by professionals and represents an institutional commitment by a leader. Survey answers are formulated by anonymous respondents who most often are not specialists in the field, and who in no way are bound by their statements. Despite these differences, our findings will show how these texts belonging to very different genres comprise a plot, and how different characters (heroes, victims, and villains) are integrated into the unfolding ‘story’, thus reflecting the socially pervasive nature of narratives.

Longing for home: The Tosa Diary's funa uta and Heian popular song

Less discussed than its other noteworthy characteristics is the degree to which Tosa nikki marks the ways that song permeated Heian culture. A particularly valuable example is provided by the funa uta or ‘boat songs’ that are transcribed in the diary, which are the only extant examples of this genre. Moreover, they represent a rare instance of popular songs from the period that are sung by commoners rather than professional performers or aristocratic amateurs, making them truly distinctive within the corpus of Heian song-texts that have survived. This article seeks to flesh out our understanding of the diary's funa uta through a close reading of their formal features as they relate to other types of Heian song and their content as it relates to their historical context. In doing so, it will present new hypotheses about their characteristics as a distinct genre whose signature refrains expressing a desire to return home operated on the level of meaning as much as musicality in binding together their lyrics, and whose concern with the forms of alienation that extreme mobility engender is particularly suited to shipborne travel and the sorts of exchanges between unrelated parties that it entailed.

Life in a Forgotten Scottish Gulag: Punishment and Social Regulation in HM Peterhead Convict Prison

AbstractThis paper contributes to filling a lacuna in our knowledge of penal history in Scotland by examining the voices of convicts through records of prisoners experiencing Penal Servitude during the period 1897–1942. The sources utilized are the archived files of thirty‐two male convict prisoners in Scotland's Convict Prison at Peterhead. These files give insights about life in this remote prison as conveyed through records of punishment, prisoners' requests, and prisoners' letters. Prison Rules about convict correspondence highlight penal letters as a distinctive genre of communication: political and personal boundaries were enforced on all exchanges. The convict prison, like nineteenth‐century British labour colonies, imposed workhouse conditions at the extreme; it was a place of exclusion, dominated by religious and social sentiment and suppositions about criminal psychology and containment. The extent of the curtailment of convicts' liberty and the aim of re‐socialization is refracted in penal practices fostering convict dependency. The ethos of Scotland's convict colony was immersed in military traditions of training, subservience to authority and generalized gloom.

Technological change and generic effects in a university Herbarium: A textography revisited

Herbaria principally host and study collections of dried vegetal specimens, and the curators and researchers employed there are mainly systematic botanists working on plant taxonomy. Twenty years ago, a textographic investigation of the University of Michigan Herbarium was conducted as part of a larger study. In this follow-up inquiry, we investigate what sort of changes have – or have not – occurred over the intervening period. Two of the five original Herbarium informants are still working there, and mainly through text-based interviews and discourse analysis we trace their subsequent careers and research outputs. We find that there has been considerable technological change since the 1990s, such as the growth of molecular studies, the digitization of specimens, and the use of the web, which has greatly impacted the processes of scholarly textual production. However, technological effects on the highly distinctive genres of systematic botany turn out to be more moderate. This genre set, comprising monograph, flora, treatment, and protologue, remains little known to those who study the more general discourses of the academic and research worlds.

Fieldwork research and website research. Keyword ‘Occitan music’

In the last few decades Northwestern Italy, particularly Piedmont and the interregional area closely connected with France, has seen the birth of a distinctive genre: the socalled Occitan Music. The first fieldwork about the folk sound expression in this area started between the 1960s and 1970s. Significant research was promoted in the context of Italian ethnomusicology which was then living a historic period of development. At the same time, the basis for surveys within the local space was established. The latter process led to an initial phase of cultural reappropriation, designed to point out the confines of a territorial and political identity. The interpretation of traditional heritage soon turned towards modern composition. Recent experiences maintain a symbolic bond with the original background have absorbed languages and communication tools from outside. The present work analyzes the results of this process, focusing on the increasing adoption of new media.

Political Narrative Fiction and the Responsibility of the Author

Art in general and fiction in particular have had close affinities with politics throughout history. When there is a close tie between a narrative fiction and political issues then critics may deem it as “committed fiction”. Political fiction is at the crossroads of political science and the art of fiction. And more often than not, novelists are involved with politics but not all of them are dubbed as or even consider themselves to be political novelists. In this article I attempt to investigate political fiction as a distinct genre produced (un)consciously by a range of (politically committed) novelists and critics. The authors discussed in this paper demonstrate dissimilar perspectives on freedom and democracy. Also, regarding political fiction and the responsibility of author, we will see how divergent is the attitudes of critics such as George Orwell, Allen Robbe-Grillet, Juan Goytisolo, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende.

James Baldwin’s <em>Another Country</em> as an Abstract Machine

This article on James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , examines how abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. One abstract machine, described as a machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , shapes the perceptions (cognition), significations (meaning), and language (representation) of a protest-literature narrative that takes place in Greenwich Village during the late 1950s. Embedded within this text is an abstract machine described by Deleuze and Guattari as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Its bipolar movement interrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surface with neurologically based emotions expressed by a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, this article examines how these abstract machines shape a novel that generates new meanings for the reader as a result of this encounter of discourses.

Shifting Perspectives on the Shogunate’s Last Years: Gountei Sadahide’s Bird’s-Eye View Landscape Prints

Shifting Perspectives on the Shogunate’s Last YearsGountei Sadahide’s Bird’s-Eye View Landscape Prints Sugimoto Fumiko (bio) Translated by Michael Burtscher Multicolored woodblock prints, or nishiki-e 錦絵, brought information about out-of-the-ordinary topics and happenings to a broad audience, depicting everything from popular kabuki actors and courtesans to the latest rumors and incidents.1 By the first half of the nineteenth century, nishiki-e had become a distinctive genre produced in a standard format by publishers specializing in the genre. Rapidly printed in large quantities, they were quickly sold on the open market to the general public by similarly specialized urban-based booksellers.2 As such nishiki-e evolved into a medium for taking up current events and, together with amusement and entertainment, brought news of the momentous developments of the shogunate’s final decades into the everyday life of Edo townspeople.3 [End Page 1] The shogunate, not looking favorably upon the open circulation of news about current political affairs and controversies, repeatedly issued regulations aimed at preventing the spread of such information. In response, authors, artists, and publishers devised means to circumvent these regulations, such as presenting current events through allusive references rather than direct exposition. For their audience, looking for hidden meanings became a customary part of the reading and viewing experience, and one of its expected pleasures. Research on nishiki-e as a source of information about current events and on the allusions they employed has generally focused on types of prints where the coding is quite overt, such as those that allude to current political developments in the guise of retelling a well-known legend. Little attention has been given to another genre that began to appear in the same nishiki-e format in the mid-nineteenth century: bird’s-eye view (chōkanzu 鳥瞰図) prints of geographical vistas.4 Bird’s-eye view perspective screens and paintings of cityscapes have a long history, and until recently, researchers have tended to regard bird’s-eye view landscape prints as simply an extension of earlier modes and to see them as no more than unmediated representations of picturesque scenery. But why would landscape prints in the nishiki-e format have appeared and sold in considerable numbers at precisely this point in historical time? And are they as innocent of allusions to topical events as has been assumed? This article argues that the popularity of panoramic landscape prints of this kind in fact stems from their adoption of nishiki-e conventions to bring topical references and allusions into the depiction of landscapes. They may thus be considered a subgenre of what has been termed “current-event nishiki-e” (jiji nishiki-e 時事錦絵).5 This kind of panoramic landscape is associated particularly with Gountei Sadahide 五雲亭貞秀 (1807–1878/9). Sadahide developed a distinctive style of spatial expression in the large number of bird’s-eye view nishiki-e he produced. Below I focus on how he adapted this distinctive style to depict current events between 1862 and 1868, a turbulent period when the long-standing early modern political order centered on the shogunate started to come apart at its seams, civil war erupted, and new political arrangements began to emerge.6 Sadahide’s panoramic prints spoke in an entertaining yet informative way to Edo residents’ desire for news about events impinging on their world, information that in the absence of established forms of journalism had to be garnered largely from rumors and broadsheets.7 [End Page 2] Scholarship on the Edo-based media that sprouted in this environment has tended to see it as supportive of the shogunal cause. Recent research, however, has shown that it often was oriented more toward communicating news about what was happening than conveying a particular political message.8 The same may be said of the bird’s-eye view landscape nishiki-e that Sadahide produced during this time period. They did not necessarily take a readily detectable political stance, but inserted in them were layers of references that served simultaneously to pique viewers’ interest and to alert them to the tumultuous course of events swirling around their city. The invitation to interpretation of the clues provided may be more subtle...