Familiar Genre Research Articles

Appealing to the World: Du Bois and the Transnational Politics of Petition

As a mode of radical, anti-colonial politics, the petition and related genre of the appeal would seem to hold little promise. This paper uncovers the radical and transnational politics of petitioning in W. E. B. Du Bois's work with and against the United Nations in the 1940s. Examining a range of petitions beyond the more widely examined Appeal to the World (1947), this article argues that Du Bois subverts the familiar genre conventions of the petition and appeal. The effect is not an appeal to a higher political authority to correct domestic injustices but to contest the shape of the international order itself by highlighting the transnational connection between colonial domination and racial exclusion within the domestic jurisdiction of imperial nation-states and the racial hierarchies of the international order. Instead of leaving the authority of the international order defined by the primacy of the sovereign state system intact, Du Bois contests this authority by exposing how racial hierarchy and colonial rule cut against enshrined divisions between internal state sovereignty and international law. The essay closes by exploring how other anti-colonial figures in the twentieth century such as B. R. Ambedkar and Malcolm X similarly turned to the transnational politics of appeal.

대학 글쓰기에서의 장르 인식에 근거한 서평 작성 교육 방안

This study aims to present an educational plan for writing a book review based on genre awareness. Drawing upon previous discussions, this study analyzed the problem of perception of book review and presented a book review education plan based on modern genre theory.
 After reviewing previous discussions on how to write a book review, this study found that there were many cases that proposed a book review method based on the comparison between a book report and a book review. However, by looking at the contents of the book reviews written by students, it was found that the distinctions between the instructor's book report and the book review were unclear.
 Accordingly, this study aimed to propose an educational plan for writing a book review based on genre awareness. It was designed to foster an understanding of the book review genre through individual and group activities, which included the following stages: “collecting samples of the genre,” “identifying the scene and describing the situation in which the genre is used,” “identifying and describing the genre’s features,” “analyzing what these patterns reveal about the situation and scene,” “understanding genre transformation patterns,” and “conceptualizing a summary of genre awareness.” Subsequently, as part of the genre-writing practice stage, this study proposed a procedural instructional model for writing a book review. This model includes the following stages: “drafting the book review,” “feedback regarding the book review,” “writing a final version of the book review,” and “reflecting on the process of writing the book review.” This study is significant in that it allows students to self-directedly write a book review based on their awareness of the genre, which is distinct from the familiar genre of book report. In addition, by presenting detailed procedures for genre awareness learning stages that have not been dealt with so far, this study can be evaluated as meaningful in that it allows students to develop a genre awareness of book review.

Discovering the Living Fossil Short Story in the Late Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT The founders of cryptozoology in the 1950s implied that their objects of investigation, animals elsewhere presumed mythical or extinct, were beyond respectable science. Back in the late eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had been by no means idiosyncratic in believing that American fossils represented living animals. The subsequent near-consensus regarding extinction was, moreover, complicated in the mid-nineteenth century by evidence that early humans lived alongside mammoths, and by views that myths about monsters were based on human encounters with prehistoric creatures. Such creatures were soon incorporated into a genre of short horror stories. The origin of this familiar genre has rarely been considered in detail. Firstly, I explain, in a transatlantic context, why the ‘living fossil short story’ emerged when it did. Next, I argue that these stories displayed simultaneous urges, firstly, to disturb the natural order by putting the monstrous inhabitants of deep time in contact with contemporary humans, and secondly, to interrogate the directionality of nature by asking whether manly, modern St Georges can return these animals to extinction. I focus on two key examples written by American authors: Charles Jacobs Peterson’s ‘The Last Dragon’ (1871) and Wardon Allan Curtis’s ‘The Monster of Lake LaMetrie’ (1899).

Modelling Tang Emperor Taizong and Chinese Governance in the Eighteenth-Century German-Speaking World

ABSTRACT From the middle decades of the eighteenth century Tang Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649) was cited in French, German, English, Italian, and Dutch books and periodicals as a universal model of good governance. This article sets out how eighteenth-century writers recognized a familiar genre in translations of medieval Chinese governance texts and discusses two prominent examples of the adaptation of Taizong’s mirror literature into comprehensive universal models of good governance. The work of Johann Gotlobb von Justi (ca. 1717–1771) shows how the translation of Chinese governance texts gave impetus to new and bold critiques of European governance and to a comparative theoretical analysis of monarchies with practical consequences for institutional and policy reform. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) extended the earlier comparative analysis of monarchies into a historical utopian novel that offered a model for political and social reform. Even though their conceptualization and uses of translation differed, Justi and Wieland were exceptional in crafting a political treatise and a utopian mirror novel that suggested that a durable blueprint for the revival of the monarchy in Europe was available in the translation of Chinese mirror literature like Jin Jing (The Golden Mirror) or Di fan (Model for an Emperor).

How the medium shapes the message: Stance in two forms of book reviews

Book reviews on academic blog sites are becoming increasingly visible and important as they give scholars a space to evaluate research and reach a wider audience. While reviews are a familiar genre in academic journals, their similarity to this more recent incarnation is unclear. While it appears to be the same genre with the same purpose to explicitly evaluate a published text and the contribution of its author, the blog book review operates in a very different interactional context. The question arises, then, whether this is the same genre. Does the channel of communication introduce particular communicative constraints and affordances which make this a different kind of text? Based on 30 book reviews in journals and 30 in a respected academic blog, we explore the similarities and differences in reviewers’ use of stance in these two forms. Findings show that all stance resources were employed by both sets of writers but were more frequent in the blog book reviews. The study thus has important implications for understanding the concept of genre, for analysing rhetorical stance choices, and for novice writers embarking on reviewing in new platforms.

Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

Review: Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation, by David Church

Review: <i>Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation</i>, by David Church

Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

A Study for Composition and Comparison of the Music Perception Tests for Normal Hearing and Cochlear Implant Users

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compose the test for music perception and analyze the characteristic of cochlear implant users’ music perception.Methods: The test was made up with the pitch, melody, and timbre factors, using three low and high frequencies, six music genres, and four types of musical instruments correspondingly. The tests were conducted to 10 normal-hearing (NH) young adults and 10 young cochlear-implant (CI) users.Results: All the music perception tests showed significant differences between NH and CI group [F(1, 4) = 0.018, p = 0.019]. In the pitch test, CI group showed significantly lower correction rate(51.3%) than NH group (82.7%) did with higher correction rates in low frequencies. In the melody test, CI group showed significantly lower correction rate (29.7%) than NH group (95.8%) did with the highest performance in folk songs (51.7%). In the timbre test, CI group showed significantly reduced performance (22.5%) than NH group (65.8%) did. For both CI and NH groups, the pitched percussion showed the highest scores (45% and 100%) while the woodwind showed the lowest scores (13.3% and 48.3%).Conclusion: Out of three tests, CI group showed better performance in pitch perception than melody and timber perception. CI group showed better performances in low pitch sounds, melodies of familiar genre, and sound of pitched percussion instruments’ timber showing complicated music perception ability. To enhance the music perception ability for CI users by aural rehabilitation, more specified and systematic music perception test material should be developed.

Riding High in the Saddle: African American Subversion in the 1930s Western

While the 1930s in the United States is oftentimes overshadowed by the effects of the Great Depression on everything from the economy to everyday life, at the same time, it was an era filled with avid moviegoers. The advent of sound in film provided a unique opportunity for minority filmmakers to contribute to the early cinema. African American filmmakers like Spencer Williams, for example, turned to the genre of the western because it was a familiar genre for both mainstream and minority audiences. It was also cheap to produce, a boon for screenwriters and directors like Williams with limited budgets. By adopting a popular genre like the western, Williams brought minority perspectives to the silver screen during a period when these perspectives were often met with hostility or completely ignored within mainstream culture. In doing so, Williams includes elements of the western that are familiar to audiences, such as the singing cowboy genre. He then pairs this familiar element with subversive ones like the use of dialect and the trickster figure. Through an analysis of Williams’s adhesion to and disruption of tendencies in the western, it becomes clear how he appealed to both white and black audiences during a period of poverty, unemployment, and segregation. In addition to this, a closer look at William’s manipulation of a western like Harlem Rides the Range helps locate and explore black identity in early cinema history.

Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities by Richard Serrano

Reviewed by: Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities by Richard Serrano Susan Spencer Richard Serrano, Reexamining World Literature: Challenging Current Assumptions and Envisioning Possibilities (New York: Routledge Press, 2020). Pp. 138. $59.95 cloth. The author of three engaging books on topics covering interrelated traditions in French, Arabic, and East Asian literatures, Richard Serrano has spent the past two decades broadening the Comparative Literature curriculum at Rutgers University. In Spring 2020, he initiated a popular new course on “The Global Eighteenth Century.” This fourth volume, which informed that class’s teaching philosophy, is the latest installment in Serrano’s lifelong project of expanding the availability of obscure works and encouraging us to reflect on how we read literary works in a global context. A fifth work currently in progress, World Literature and the Challenge of Translation, will concentrate on 21st-century authors. [End Page 1030] On the face of it, Reexamining World Literature is not an eighteenth-century book. The subject matter ranges from the medieval period to the present day. Three of the six chapters, however, are concerned with overlooked authors of the long eighteenth century, making a powerful argument in favor of their inclusion in our assessment of the period’s literary production. For academics in their roles as both educators and researchers, this book is important to consider for the innovation of its conception as well as for its argument and readings. Through six representative case studies, the author invites us to break from the temptation to ignore or push aside works that resist familiar genre boundaries or prevailing schools of criticism. This temptation is especially strong in the classroom, where we often strive to create a cohesive thematic narrative at the risk of oversimplifying the human experience to fulfill expectations that we ourselves have set up. Citing the claims of Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter that “our view of the world is necessarily skewed by the availability of works relatively easy to translate into English,” Serrano suggests, “I would push this further. It is not simply a question of whether a work can be translated easily or well into English, but whether it fits easily into categories of literature that the reader in English finds comfortable” (119).1 In Reexamining World Literature, Serrano proposes that the vitality of the study of world literature demands that we counteract such overdependence on familiar anthologized material and theoretical frameworks by asking new questions, drawing attention to works, authors, and genres that few many have heard of, and, when possible, making new works available for further exploration by our colleagues and students through translation. In Chapter 1, Serrano challenges prevailing notions of prose fiction as the preeminent form in eighteenth-century China through a close reading of seven short poems by Sun Yunfeng (1764–1814). The first and most important poet in the coterie of her patron Yuan Mei, and a focus of his influential Anthology of Poetry by the Female Disciples of Harmony Garden (1796), Sun Yunfeng was famous during her lifetime but lost popularity when later generations turned away from the classical style she favored and extended. Unlike the subjects of Chapters 5 and 6, Sun Yunfeng has not been neglected altogether; in fact, her reputation is currently on the rise.2 As with other undervalued authors who have regained prominence both in the West and in their home countries as a result of renewed interest from Western academics, Sun Yunfeng has benefited from the “literary archeology” of feminist critics who in the past two decades have returned attention to Qing dynasty poets along with their European sisters—though Serrano suggests that some of her more transgressive poems still languish in obscurity because “their inability to meet the expectations of the scholar reading them as a woman’s poetry has further marginalized them” (7, 8). Chapter 1 provides fresh translations and detailed analyses of representative examples of such neglected poems, alongside precursors on similar subjects by some of the male Tang Dynasty poets who developed the conventions that underlie Sun Yunfeng’s imagery and subjects. Such comparisons can be overlooked in a World Literature courses because of the traditional separation of medieval and early modern...

Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie par Giovanni Dotoli

Reviewed by: Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie par Giovanni Dotoli H. Jay Siskin Dotoli, Giovanni. Défense et illustration de la langue française et de la francophonie. L'Harmattan, 2019. ISBN 978-2-343-18431-9. Pp. 215. Dotoli's volume conforms to a familiar genre of prescriptivism: the integrity of French is being undermined by lexical borrowings from English. The title recalls du Bellay's 1549 manifesto, in which the author vaunts the French language as equal to Latin and Greek in expressive power. In no sense does du Bellay claim that French must commit violence against the classical languages in order to assure its survival. Deviating from du Bellay's careful expression, Dotoli's volume exhibits a lexical slippage in his use of the verb défendre. He takes us from rational argument to an almost apocalyptic battle between French and English. Dotoli's volume has numerous historical precedents. Étiemble's 1964 Parlez-vous franglais? is an influential title. Like subsequent works, Étiemble condemns lexical borrowings. More recent authors (Hagège and Rey, for example), have associated borrowings at the word level with a larger project of cultural appropriation. The widespread use of an English technological lexicon signifies a capitulation to American cultural ideals of capitalism and the goal of economic imperialism. Borrowings are not innocent but rather signify an allegiance to an alternative worldview. Dotoli's expression elevates this perceived issue to an existential crisis. In my view, these borrowings simply represent the natural evolution of languages, where any number of factors, from lexical gaps to perceived prestige, influence usage. The examples cited by Dotoli reflect the appeal of American youth culture as well as technological innovation in many cases. The field of advertising has been particularly vulnerable, with borrowings from English signifying that the product is "buzzy." Many of his examples are unknown to me or have passed from usage, indicating the ephemeral or superficial nature of these items. Dotoli also claims that English is influencing French syntax, shown by a preference for the passive over the active voice. Quel est ton nom? is an Anglicism replacing s'appeler. He offers no empirical proof, nor does he account for internal linguistic factors such as analogy. Moreover, the utilitarian Anglo-American "Globish" is lexically impoverished, poorly written and spoken. English is infecting Europe like the AIDS virus (yes, really!) that tricks defensive T-cells into destroying national languages. Europe will be unilingual if it does not boost its defense system. How might this be accom-plished? Dotoli makes an appeal to la Francophonie, following the lead of other authors. The Francophonie construct provides a space for pluralism. It is a place of cultural encounters, linguistic dynamism, and unity in diversity: "[Elle] se bat contre une langue unique, une culture unique et une pensée unique" (104). This volume follows the lines sketched out by a number of previous authors. It distinguishes itself (nega tively) by its combativeness and alarmist scenarios. On the positive side, Dotoli proposes over 75 concrete plans of action to promote the status of French. I have never seen a similar variety and specificity, and we can be grateful that this author supplements the scholarship with new voices. Que la défense avance! [End Page 281] H. Jay Siskin University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others).

Sexology, Popular Science and Queer History in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others).

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”1: How Intellectual Biography Obscures Marx's and Engels's Gendered Political Partnerships

Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx (née von Westphalen) (1814–1881), Helene Demuth (“Lenchen”) (1820–1890), Mary Burns (1821–1863), and Lydia Burns (1827–1878). How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions.

Beyond a Tolerance of Ambiguity: Symbolic Competence as Creative Uncertainty and Doubt

Author(s): Richardson, Diane | Abstract: Tolerance of ambiguity has been referred to as “the indispensable component of symbolic competence” (Kramsch, 2006, p. 251) and the recommendation was later made for college-level language instructors interested in emphasizing symbolic competence in their classrooms to “bring up every opportunity to show complexity and ambiguity” (Kramsch, 2011, p. 364). Within foreign language (FL) education, however, there is often a tendency to encourage negotiation of meaning in intercultural communication as a means of overcoming ambiguity. Yet ambiguity is an integral attribute of poetic and academic language as well as of day-to-day interactions, and embodies the very experience of language learning. Thus, FL pedagogies that incorporate the notion of symbolic competence emphasize that ambiguity—that is, multiplicity or indeterminacy of meaning—is not to be reduced, solved, or overcome. Rather, it should be promoted in order to emphasize the creative, productive side of the accompanying uncertainty and doubt. This can lead to the enhancement of creative abilities in learners—abilities that may be useful in navigating the ever-changing language game in which they are engaged.This article makes the case for FL education to move beyond a pedagogy that simply tolerates ambiguity, to one that wholeheartedly embraces it so as to promote and activate symbolic competence. Drawing from a curriculum-development project for an intermediate German language and culture class at a large public university in the southwestern United States, I explore the three types of ambiguity that were highlighted in that course; namely, ambiguity of genre, ambiguity of perspective, and ambiguity of silence as they are experienced in and through a variety of literary and non-literary texts. The course focused on the ambiguity of a seemingly familiar genre, the fairy tale, and how learners’ understanding of this genre became more nuanced by engaging with multiple versions, perspectives, and cultural narratives related to it—from a variety of sources, including celebrity interviews, medieval literature, and sports discourse, among others. Based on the analysis of student reflections to various tasks and assessments, this article illustrates which moments of ambiguity learners identified, how they reacted to those ambiguities, and how this contributed to the enhancement of their symbolic competence.

Embodiment and Stardom in Shahrukh Khan’s Fan

Embodiment and Stardom in Shahrukh Khan’s Fan Neepa Majumdar (bio) Fan belongs in the familiar genre of films about obsessive fans, ranging from the naïve to the deranged, but it ends up defamiliarizing both the genre of such films and the star Shahrukh Khan, first by having the star play both fan and star, and second by both extending and playing against the actor’s current star persona as developed over the past two decades in a number of media sites. Dispersed across media and live platforms, contemporary arenas for star and fan interaction, in the case of Shahrukh Khan, range from twitter to sightings “in the flesh” in front of his house, which the film also incorporates. Although at one level the film might be considered a narcissistic take on his own stardom by a transnational media icon who cannot bring himself to share the screen with another actor playing the fan, the choice of performing the fan here upends this genre while also playing into Indian cinema’s longstanding fascination with double roles. While the dual and multiple role film has been a staple of Indian popular cinema since the 1920s, and doubling has been a significant element in Shahrukh Khan’s own filmography, in Fan the double role, and thus its sameness/difference dynamic, in itself constitutes an essential element in the film’s argument about the relationship of stars and fans in the context of the contemporary intensification of long-standing paradoxes of intimacy/distance, presence/absence, and access/inaccessibility that have always characterized the star-fan relationship. In playing a star who has significant differences from Shahrukh Khan, the film can arguably be understood as a triple-role film, including first, Gaurav Chandna, the fan; second, Aryan Khanna, the fictional star (who is given the real star’s son’s name and is thus his creative child); and third, footage of Shahrukh Khan himself in various film roles and interviews. [End Page 144] In Fan, doubling does not function as in pre-Bollywood films, to showcase the star’s acting range in negative roles while safeguarding his stable star persona,1 but rather as a gateway to a proliferation, not just a doubling, of the star body, while detaching it almost completely from Shahrukh Khan’s current star persona and returning it to the persona of his earliest film roles. Here, the double role serves to work out the central idea in the film of the mutual constitution of star and fan, which is articulated several times in the words and actions of the obsessed fan, Gaurav Chandna, who quotes, or rather, re-performs Aryan Khanna saying, “Whatever I have done today is because of my fans. Without my fans I am nothing.” Re-stated as a threat, this sentiment is what the fan and the film then proceed to act out. But the threat of fan practices that go beyond the acceptable is also the subject of the film in other ways, having more to do with control over the star’s image across an ever-proliferating mediascape. My argument here concerns three closely interrelated dynamics that apply to both Fan and to contemporary modes of star- and fandom, especially in India. These are not really oppositions but work together as a range. The first dynamic is the relation between “fake” and “real” star/fan, with a greater interest in the fake or the copy or the duplicate2 in its many manifestations, both material and conceptual, and at many levels, including lines of dialogue. The many kinds of fake come together in the Madame Tussauds scene in which the diegetically fake Aryan Khanna manhandles the materially fake wax version of Shahrukh Khan standing in for Aryan Khanna, while berating his wax version about his fakeness in a rant that is clearly directed at the diegetic star’s fake persona. This scene materially and performatively draws attention to the copy, the fake, and the double in ways that stress the impossibility of seeking the real here. In a context like this, there is seemingly a distinction to be made between the real and the fake, with the wax statue, for example, clearly...

After 1492: Nature Rebounds

Postapocalypse stories about human survival and rebound of nature following mass disaster are a familiar genre. A major real world example is the demise of most Native Americans after 1492. This essay is a review of some of what is known about the subsequent return of forests and the explosion of wildlife numbers in the neotropics and in North America. The belief by many early Europeans in the New World, including influential postcolonial writers, that the bounty they observed had preceded them, was mostly false.

Interpreting Undergraduate Research Posters in the Literature Classroom

This essay explores the use of undergraduate research posters in English literature classrooms; at the same time, it argues for a scholarship of teaching and learning responsive to how meaning is constructed in the arts and humanities. Our scholarly practice requires interaction with texts and with each other, yet the undergraduate research paper typically does not involve much interaction between peers. The posters disseminate preliminary interpretations of research projects to peers; they are a way to make visible some of the cognitive, affective, and aesthetic aspects of literary research. This essay analyzes student reflections on both the process of creating and the process of presenting research posters before providing “close readings” of several posters. Reading the posters reveals key elements of students’ interactions with literary texts: close reading, integration, negotiation, theoretical generalization, and aesthetic judgment. As the students explored a less familiar genre, disciplinary processes of knowledge creation were defamiliarized and made visible.

Reel Indigenous Women’s Lives: Female Protagonists in Films by Indigenous Women

This essay examines two films by Indigenous feature-film women directors: Kissed by Lightning (2009) by Shelley Niro (Mohawk) and Older than America (2008) by Georgina Lightning (Cree). My essay contextualizes these two films in terms of both Hollywood westerns and more recent feature films by Native American men, including Smoke Signals (1998) and others, before it analyzes how the two films use familiar genre trappings to engage non-Native viewers while simultaneously layering in tribally and historically specific material.