Field Of Literary Production Research Articles

Family Historiography in The White Earth

ABSTRACTIn recent years, family history research has become a popular activity for many Australians. This imperative to connect with our ancestors extends into the field of literary production. In this essay, we examine one prominent novel that reflects this movement, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). Looking through a lens of family history and historiography, the novel asks questions about postcolonial belonging, inheritance, and the violent foundations of the nation. McGahan’s young protagonist, William, stands to inherit a vast but crumbling property on the Darling Downs in Queensland. As William discovers more about the land, he comes into contact with both his own white pastoralist ancestors, and the powerful Indigenous spirits who inhabit secret and sacred spaces in the landscape. We argue that William’s encounter with secret family histories produces the hysteria at the climax of the novel, when the repressed violence of the past returns to haunt the present. Confronted with hidden knowledge, William—and, by proxy, the reader—is called to reconsider inherited histories in light of contemporary historiographies. The move towards knowledge of the family’s origins is a realisation of the complexity of the white Australian relationship to the land and its first inhabitants.

Exode : l’identité naufragée entre displacement et nostos. Représentation littéraire de la mémoire de l’exile en Istrie et Palestine

This article analyses and compares the experiences and the memories of traumas of the Istrian exodus in 1947 and the Arab Palestinian exodus in 1948. Beyond the diversity of accents and ideological motivations, in the field of literary production, the themes are the same i.e.: the exile, the displacement, uprooting, the sense of belonging to the lost land and the nostalgia of the return. To leave a place also leads to the loss of the identity linked to that place. In this essay, I examine the image of the exile, which lives in precarious equilibrium between two borders, without entirely belonging neither to one side or the other, and acts as a bridge between different cultures and civilizations. I would also emphasize the difference between the real national identity and the new identities built afterward, through a choice of fragments of some Italian and Arab writers, in particular Anna Maria Mori, NelidaMilani, Lina Galli, Edward Said, GhassanKanafani, Mahmoud Darwich, Emile Habibi and TawfikZayyad

The Quiet Editor: Ivan Vladislavić and South African cultural production

This article examines the literary and sociological significance of Ivan Vladislavić’s “double life” as both editor and writer. With reference to a number of his editorial roles as well as the joint projects he has worked on with writers and visual artists, the article considers how Vladislavić’s work with others spreads symbolic value. Described by one of his clients as the “quiet editor”, Vladislavić can be read as a new kind of author; what he terms “creative editing” as a new kind of writing, through which more traditional models of authorship and literary production are thrown into question — less Bourdieu’s “field of literary production” or Casanova’s “world literary space”, red in tooth and claw, and more Howard Becker’s “art world”: a convivial “network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome”.

<b>Esteticismo e decadentismo nos dândis de Wilde e Huysmans: retratos de Des Esseintes e Dorian Gray

In this paper, I will discuss the figuration of the dandy character in the field of literary production. Initially I discuss its origin during the nineteenth century in French and English contexts. In order to understand this characterization, I will analyze the characterization of the characters of the novels A rebours by J. K. Huysmans and The Picture of Dorian Gray , by Oscar Wilde. As a methodology I intend to search in the field of literary studies which are the formative elements of the dandy in the works of the above mentioned authors.

Screening history: television, memory, and the nostalgia of national community in Cuéntame and Temps de silenci

Fictional narratives devoted to the recent past have become increasingly popular in the last two decades, not only in the field of literary production but also – and perhaps more surprisingly – on television. Series like Temps de silenci (Televisió de Catalunya, 2001–2002) and Cuéntame (Televisión Española, since 2001) have proved that there is a significant audience for the recovery and transmission of stories associated with the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, and the Transition to democracy. This essay explores the interest in historical memory and analyzes some of the prominent features of those two television series, and argues that the allure of the past in contemporary Spanish culture is linked to the crisis of national identities (in both Catalonia and Spain) and expresses a nostalgia for forms and experiences of political community, imagined as grounded on models of kinship and family.

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Fitting in and Rebelling: On the Ambivalence towards Tradition in Modern Swedish Working-Class Literature
 This article analyzes the ambivalent attitude of several Swedish working-class writers towards the tradition of working-class literature during the period 1945–2010. To certain extent, this ambivalence is a product of some aspects of the general symbolic economy in the field of literary production. Primarily, however, it is the result of conditions specific to Swedish working-class literature. Working-class writers often motivate their membership to the tradition of workingclass literature in terms of the tradition’s legitimizing of radical class discourses both within and beyond the field of literature. At the same time, however, the subaltern status of this tradition often makes its conventions for literary representations of class appear aesthetically and politically unsatisfactory. Furthermore, over time, the general cultural production of class on a societal level necessitates a break with the class-political literary strategies developed within the tradition of working-class literature.

Problemet med Pearl S. Bucks problematiska position

Positioning Pearl S. Buck: Thoughts on the Valuation and Classification of Literature
 The position of American Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) on the field of literary production is problematic. In her own lifetime she was an enormously successful writer and a well known intellectual, as well as a bridge between east (China) and west (US), but today she is either forgotten by literary history/critics, or known as the most infamous of all Nobel Prize winners: »the worst writer ever to receive the Prize.« This makes her a very interesting case study for an analysis which focuses on questions of valuation and classification of literature, especially from a postcolonial perspective. I argue that by studying Buck, and particularly the reasons why she is typically portrayed as such a problematic writer, we can learn about these important processes. Because Buck is a writer that crosses borders and claims multiple homes, her trajectory foregrounds the intimate relationship between literature, nation states, and identities. Her history also sheds light on the functions of the imaginary and real communities involved in the processes of valuation and classification of literature, not least the Swedish Academy.

Orientalist Strategies of Dissociation in a German 'Jewish' Novel: Das neue Jerusalem (1905) and its Context

This article traces notions of Jewish Orientalism current in German-speaking countries around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Expounding the cultural context of its production, it focuses in particular on an anonymously published novel which provoked a short but heated debate among German-Jewish critics. Purporting to be the work of a Jewish author, but in fact written by a non-Jewish anti-Semite, Das neue Jerusalem appears to be situated quite deliberately at the interface between anti-Semitic and Zionist discourses and to be the vehicle of subversive strategies of dissociation: it presumes not only to speak to its Jewish readers but, from an (allegedly) inside perspective, to speak for them. Thus, in effect, it attempts to insinuate Orientalist stereotypes to its Jewish readers with the aim of relegating them quite literally to “their” place in the Orient (Palestine). But it is obviously also intended to intervene in the contemporary debate about the “authenticity” of Jewish cultural production and ventures to set prescriptive standards to proper Jewishness, especially in the field of literary production. For its gentile reader, the supposedly Jewish provenance of the novel confirms Jewish otherness, lends credibility to its allegations, and seemingly takes the edge off its anti-Semitism: Jewish dissociation appears to be justified and, indeed, mutually desirable.

Commentary: The Transnational Turn and the Hemispheric Return

America's interconnected and violent foundational histories are a common point of departure in the essays by John-Michael Rivera and Jesse Alemain that open this special issue of American Literary History on Hemispheric American Literature. Rivera's 'A Complete Though Bloody Victory': Lorenzo de Zavala and the Transnational Paradoxes of Sovereignty examines the formation and writings of Lorenzo de Zavala, a participant in the Mexican and, later, Texan struggles for independence. Zavala provisionally reconciled his seemingly conflicting patriotisms in the field of literary production, where he created a utopian vision of the US for Mexican readers. Rivera maintains that Zavala's 1834 travel narrative, Viage de los Estados-Unidos del Norte America, is not invitation to his compatriots to engage in mimicry but rather an aesthetic representation that renders for Mexicans guidelines for becoming autonomous national people who can emerge from the legacy of Spanish colonialism and racialization. There is no independence, Zavala might argue, without interdependence. Alemin's Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Specter of Conquest illustrates this point with respect to north-to-south trajectories. Alemain identifies a trans-American gothic in the gory tableaux that so fascinated nineteenth-century chroniclers of colonial Mexican history. For Alemin, this aesthetic operates through the Freudian uncanny; it confronts expansionist US in search of a usable past with unexpected, horrific self-portraits, refracted through images of the Spanish and Aztec empires. Through theoretical insights derived from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, these two essays establish a strong connecting thread that runs throughout this issue. The logic of historical returns, psychic projection, and fragile self-other relations that trouble nineteenth-century narratives of US nation formation vis-a-vis that of Mexico also influence US literary engagements with other parts of the Western hemisphere.

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCENE OF RIOTING: MALE WORKING-CLASS AUTHORSHIP IN ALTON LOCKE

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed

To be fully understood, literary production has to be approached in relational terms, by constructing the literary field, i.e. the space of literary prises de position that are possible in a given period in a given society. Prises de position arise from the encounter between particular agents' dispositions (their habitus, shaped by their social trajectory) and their position in a field of positions which is defined by the distribution of a specific form of capital. This specific literary (or artistic, or philosophical, etc.) capital functions within an ‘economy’ whose logic is an inversion of the logic of the larger economy of the society. The ‘interest in distinterestedness’ can be understood by examining the structural relations between the field of literary production and the field of class relations. A number of effects within the literary field arise from the homologies between positions within the two fields. This model is then used to analyze the particular case of the literary field in late 19th century France.