Interface Of Literature Research Articles

Financial literacy in the Early Years of Primary School: children's literature as a proposal for children to reflect on conscious consumption

Financial Literacy is understood as the ability to understand, analyze and apply financial concepts in everyday situations, not necessarily linked to money, but which cover topics such as conscious consumption, sustainability, the environment and other ways of being and relating to the world. Based on this concept, this paper, which is part of a dissertation developed as part of a professional master's degree, aims to present a pedagogical practice carried out at the interface of Literature and Mathematics, designed to address Financial Literacy topics with students in the Early Years of Primary School. The dialogues established with the children raise questions about conscious consumption, sustainability and respect for the environment, topics that run counter to the attitudes encouraged by the consumer society.

“A Light in Sound, a Sound-Like Power in Light”: Poetry, Synaesthesia & Multimedia

Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon of cross-modal perception in which stimulation of one sensory pathway results in automatic, simultaneous, involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway, such as the perceiving of sound as a colour. Creatively employed as a literary trope, synaesthesia involves the blending of different sense modalities, often in the form of figurative language. Exploring the interrelationship of synaesthetic aesthetics and experimentation from a historical perspective, this essay traces the transgressive artistic impulse to blur sensorial boundaries through technical innovation from the eighteenth-century audio-visual experiments of Louis Bertrand Castel’s ocular harpsichord (clavecin pour les yeux) to twenty-first century LED colour organs, speech coding, and Augmented/Virtual Reality interfaces used in multisensory art exhibitions. By outlining a few of the major historical developments of synaesthetic theory and poetics as well as some of the diverse immersive experiences made possible through original combinations of discrete sensory channels via transmedial artistic experimentation, the present paper aims to demonstrate how synaesthesia – located at the interface of literature and neuroscience, sensation and ideation, mind and body – might also fruitfully be explored in relation to lyric poetry at the interface of multisensoriality and multimedia.

From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Reviewed by: From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter Eleanor Courtemanche (bio) From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter; pp. xiii + 287. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $119.99, $84.99 paper, $64.99 ebook. This fascinating and useful volume of essays marks a new stage in the study of political economy from the standpoint of Victorian studies. This subfield, with its origins in New Historicism and the "New Economic Criticism," has developed new branches in response [End Page 521] to recent work on environmental crisis, the history of slavery, and critiques of inequality that sharpened after the global financial crisis of 2008 (5). This subfield of Victorian studies has always had an edge of ideology critique, in its claim that axioms of economic law have been abstracted from their historical and social contexts and then used to dominate discourses of capitalist experience. Yet it was also defined at the outset by a rather abashed bracketing out of Marxism, as in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics (1999), which claimed that "most literary critics' knowledge of economics begins and ends with Karl Marx" (edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen [Routledge], 12). In response, scholars drilled down specifically on the British tradition of political economy, including the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, as well as representatives of the neoclassical or marginalist turn such as William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, and a vast, shadowy host of otherwise-forgotten economists. The goal was to carefully disentangle this theoretical tradition from its oversimplification as "capitalist ideology," and to read it for its own internal contradictions and use of literary terms, as well as its historical embeddedness in an age of turbulent industrialization and imperial expansion. That subfield was mapped out by Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Regenia Gagnier between roughly 1985 and 2005 in work that articulated the crucial transition between "political economy," a term that admits that economics is a field structured by power, and "economic theory," which naturalizes its prescriptions with narrow mathematical certainty (10). As its title suggests, this volume follows in this tradition by defending the "social" against the presumably anti-social abstractions of economic theory. Its general thrust is to defend the empirical and inductive—observed social life and historical impasses—rather than to follow the path of formalist analysis laid out by Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell, or of Marxist-semiotic analyses of money and credit as themselves fictional. The autonomy of fictional or aesthetic ways of knowing is not the main point here. But the banishment of Marx is over, and this volume is a welcome opening in Victorian studies to some non-British and even radical approaches to economic history. The volume's introduction frames its task in terms of this critical genealogy, stressing its allegiance to historical rigor and aversion to presentism. But it also defines its intervention as making the connections between contemporary capitalist crisis and the study of the nineteenth century more "directly" than earlier work—perhaps more in the line of Audrey Jaffe's The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (2010), which connected Victorian and contemporary obsessions with stock market graphs (7). I am not sure any of this work will ever give a University of Chicago economist even a momentary twinge of regret about their discipline's limitations. However, in an age when neoliberalism seems to be cracking under multiple pressures, the opportunities for critical engagement with economics extend beyond rereading the classics. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which used novels by Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to illustrate a world of inherited financial inequality that might be returning, is referenced by several writers as a new interdisciplinary interlocutor. Though unified by their engagement with nineteenth-century political economy, the essays in this volume splinter out in many directions, each engaging with a new set of contemporary theorists and problems. [End Page 522] The essays...

Literary representation of Jewish departure in “The Saga of Muziris” by Sethu

Literature and history are fields of knowledge that cannot have an independent existence. This article aims to analyze the interface of literature and history with reference to the novel “The Saga of Muziris” by Sethu. It mainly focuses on the levels which historical events impact the society and the resulting changes in sociocultural realms. An important event in the history of Kerala is considered here - the Jewish departure. Authors have identified literature as history concentrating on significant historical events: for example, K.N. Panikkar in his essay “Novel as Colonial Narrative” analyzes colonisation as individual experience. The article analyze how social constructions were altered during and after these events. The eventual conclusion is that this events contributed to the restructuring of society largely resulting in triumph of community and hence the novel can be considered as a narrative of history as a social experience.

O Ensino da Mecânica Quântica no nível médio por meio da abstração científica presente na interface Física-Literatura

O presente artigo tem por objetivo investigar o ensino da Mecânica Quântica no Ensino Médio por meio da abstração científica criada na interface física e literatura e é fruto da pesquisa de dissertação presente em Lima (2014). A relação entre física e literatura é defendida com o propósito de ser utilizada como ferramenta ao ensino e aprendizagem da física, especialmente por propiciar o desenvolvimento da abstração científica. A formação de conceitos científicos e a importância da palavra são analisadas em Vygotsky, na formação dos pseudoconceitos e desenvolvimento da abstração, juntamente com o aporte das representações semióticas de Raymond Duval. O desenvolvimento dos conceitos sobre Mecânica Quântica ocorreu por meio de duas leituras. A primeira tratou do capítulo XVIII da Era dos Extremos de Hobsbawm, objetivando a inserção filosófica, histórica, política e social sobre o surgimento da Física Quântica. A segunda ocorreu por meio da leitura dos três capítulos iniciais de Alice no País do Quantum de Gilmore, visando os conceitos físicos de Mecânica Quântica. Os dados colhidos dos alunos após a leitura e a análise destes apontam a interface física-literatura como uma alternativa didática promissora para o ensino da Mecânica Quântica, em particular, e para o ensino da física, em geral.

Vicissitudes of Reading the Mahabharata as History: Problems Concerning Historicism and Textualism

SummaryOne of the significant developments in contemporary Cultural Studies is the emergence of the concept of “modernities” in its multiple and vernacular iterations as opposed to “Modernity”, purportedly understood with reference to the epistemic legacies set forth by the Western frameworks. This article takes on Simonti Sen (2005) – who assumes colonialism to be a watershed that renders rupture between the “traditonal” and the “modern” – and demonstrates why the tradition/modernity dichotomy is a “false paradox” when it comes to discussing travel(ling) in the Indian context. Working on the interface of literature, translation and historiography, this article unpacks Working on the interface of literature, translation and historiography, this article unpacks Sen's historicist and textualist reading of the Mahabharata, and examines how it forecloses the multifarious hermeneutic possibilities of the text, while problematising a certain reductive translation upon which her reading is apparently premised.

2016 JELL Forum: A Roundtable “The Interface of Literature and Economy”

2016 JELL Forum: A Roundtable “The Interface of Literature and Economy”

Cultural Diversity and Management Learning: A Study on Tagorean Leadership in Philosophy and Action

A development in Management research is observed in recent years: interface of literature and management. The paper highlights the possibility of constructive impacts on human development through philosophy and experiments of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate literary genius from India (1913), in the field of education. The essential equality of all, preservation of cultural diversity, and the infinite possibility of deepening our understanding of each other form the core of Tagorean values. Tagore was a visionary and, throughout his life, he tried to bring about a radical change in society through education which would enable the world to come together—irrespective of diversity of language, identity, race, nationality, or religion. He recognized the need to promote a culture that fosters intellectual, social, and cultural growth in the global community. Using the classic example of Tagore the paper will examine how embracing of diversity in leadership and organizational development can contribute to holistic effectiveness through the introduction of non-conventional and alternative learning as advocated by Tagore that makes him all the more relevant in the present globalized context. The paper will also attempt to outline a learning path and unfold a voyage from knowledge to wisdom for leaders and organizations in future.

Linkterature: From Word to Web Or: Literature in the Internet - Internet as Literature - Literature as Internet - Internet in Literature

This paper offers a perspective on the Internet and literature interface, with a special focus on the issue of intertextuality, in an attempt to delimit those issues specific to networked literature, as against digital or hypertextual literature. I will focus on literature as a family of medium-conditioned discursive practices, and examine the consequences of digital networks for a redefinition of these practices. These consequences will be approached from four viewpoints: a perspective on the Internet as literature, and of literature as an Internet: together with an examination of literature in the Internet, and of the Internet in literature. Among the topics addressed will be issues of interactivity, the blogosphere, postmodernist fiction, and the cyborganization of social communication.

David E Shuttleton, Smallpox and the literary imagination 1660–1820, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xiii, 265, illus., £48.00, $85.00 (hardback 978-0-521-87209-6).

Uniting their forces, it seems, by sheer dint of scholarly writing, literary historians of the last generation have rewritten the cultural profile of numerous diseases: cancer, consumption, gout, heart disease, obesity and others. David Shuttleton, a literary historian interested in the interface of literature and medicine, has rounded out this record with his fine study of smallpox's profile in the eighteenth century, its most transformative epoch before inoculation and vaccination turned around its fortunes after 1800. Shuttleton revises smallpox's harsh realities, social effects, and especially its verbalizations and mentalizations by onlookers, close and distant. Smallpox's narrower medical history is, of course, far from certain. Identified in the ancient world, first described by the Arab physician Rhazes, and distinguished from measles by Fracastoro, its progress from the Middle Ages to 1600 still conceals mysteries. What can safely be affirmed is that by 1700 it was killing many thousands each year: the scourge from which the eighteenth century could never be free. Jenner's vaccinations at the end of the century, building on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's earlier inoculations, were the Enlightenment's best hope for prevention. But the resistance to inoculation was immense. It was only when empire and imperialism in the Indian subcontinent made plain that smallpox would become a menace as dire as cholera, that the benefits of vaccination were securely applied. “Medical history” is a smaller field than “medical profile”, which extends to a malady's public understanding: here think of mental illness and AIDS. Shuttleton appropriately begins with this larger, bewildering profile in mind and augments our sense of smallpox's cultural casualties. A scourge that disfigures its victims through visible sores, scars, and red spots erupting hot pus will be moralized despite attempts to neutralize the condition. Yet if disease clusters possess inherent symbolic resonances, as cultural historians have been demonstrating for three decades that they do, smallpox's salient sign was disfigurement: disfigurement more than death. This perception did not sit easily with a Georgian civilization steeped in the lure of widely disseminated cults of beauty—aesthetic, physical, moral and sublime—and beauty's opposites in the realms of the ugly and grotesque. Historians have interpreted much Enlightenment culture through this specific opposition. Yet read the pathetic accounts of those dying of smallpox and the horror of disfigurement terrorizes them far more than death does. If obesity in our time has become the site of fiercely contested debates trading on our obsession with symmetrically trim bodies—so slim that they are often anorexic—smallpox before 1800 took a similar toll on the faces and figures of women and men, rich and poor. Shuttleton's accounts are often riveting, demonstrating the part played by imagination in the framing of this condition, especially the literary imagination that conceptualizes malady by first verbalizing it. This is not another pedestrian representation of a disease cluster: Shuttleton also embeds perplexing philosophical dimensions of “representing malady”—its degree of stigma—and takes sides in the ongoing debate about the need for demystification. Students of medical history know how assiduously Susan Sontag campaigned in the 1980s to demystify disease, which (in her view) should be a scientific category rather than moral sign or cultural stigma. Her aim was noble and eloquently argued, but history from time immemorial—continuing into the present—weighs against her position. People have always given meaning to disease; infected individuals cannot refrain from attaching morally loaded significance to their maladies that exceed the limits of the pathological signs and literal physical symptoms. For centuries smallpox was living proof of the moral tendency rather than its exception, just as psychological depression is today.

The return of Christian humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the romance of history

Among the prominent intellectual debates of the twentieth century was the literary clash between a dogmatically relativist modernism and a robust revival of Christian humanism. In The Return of Christian Humanism, Lee Oser ranges widely over English literature, from Chaucer to Beckett, taking in the thoughts of critics, philosophers, and theologians in order to compare the fruits of Christian humanism with those of its rivals, both secular and religious. Oser reveals that Christian humanism informs a broad and important literature and maintains that it encourages a genuine diversity of thought based on reason, nature, and the accomplishments of artistic genius. He first describes how the liberal humanism of Matthew Arnold gave way to the Christian humanism of G. K. Chesterton, then proposes the work of J. R. R. Tolkien as a litmus test for modern critics - contradicting those who dismiss it as childish and defending its imaginative power. And in pointing out a strong Augustinian strain in T. S. Eliot, Oser shows that this poet can best be understood in comparison with Chesterton and Tolkien. Along the way, he tackles such issues as the canon and the education of taste and takes on some of today's most prominent literary critics, including Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Writing at the interface of literature and religion, Oser challenges the assumption that Christian orthodoxy is incompatible with humanism, freedom, and democracy. He argues that contemporary academic culture has overlooked Christianity's gifts to literature and civilization, and he shows humanism's influence on the shape of Western cultural history, as well as the consequences of humanism for philosophy and theology. The Return of Christian Humanism argues that the Christian humanist occupies the radical middle between church and state, past and future, faith and reason, as it makes a compelling argument for reconsidering how this movement informs and sustains much of our great literature. In addition to reopening this important debate, Oser argues that Christian humanists are often more genuinely tolerant than are champions of multiculturalism and diversity - and that Christian humanist authors offer a balanced yet dynamic view of art and life.

Mining the Law/Literature Enterprise

Binder, Gyora, and Robert Weisberg, 2000. Literary Criticisms of the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. xv + 539 pp. Amsterdam, Anthony G., and Jerome Bruner, 2000. Minding the Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 291 pp. Dershowitz, Alan M. 2000. The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law. New York: Warner Books. xii + 259 pp. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. 2000. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Literature, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xvi + 192pp. College Literature has provided updating reviews of new books in law and literature (1999, 26.2; 1994, 21.2) as well as a special issue on the topic of law and literature (1998, 25.1).The present review continues this service with four new books, representing only a limited part of a range of works that continue to issue forth in this field. For example, two recent books that this reviewer would have liked to consider in depth, had time and space allowed, are Maria Aristodemou's Law and Literature: Journeys from Here to Eternity and Patricia Ewing and Susan S. Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Aristodemou reminds us that stories, or myths, themselves acted as law in earlier times and that fictionality is itself a large part of law. She does so in chapters devoted to exemplary readings of individual works that range from Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights to Albert Camus's The Outsider, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Jorge Luis Borges's Dream Harder. That she does so with a particular focus on the representation of women is yet another reason why her work holds interest. Her retellings rebirth feeling in the law, reaching out to others, the cyclical rather than the linear, and, as Aristodemou puts it in her analysis of Ariadne and the Minotaur, new entrances to the legal labyrinth. Ewick and Silbey's work, by contrast, presents a fresh reading for a wholly different reason. This book grew out of a New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force request to address minority concerns and racial discrimination in the law. Looking at the differential use and impact of the law, stories of everyday experience emerged as a fresh point of departure as well as an opportunity to look in on the law from the eye view of the proverbial fly on the wall. Having approached their study from the point of view of legal consciousness and self-identity, they present the everyday stories and understandings of people who experience the law. Stories become a mode of inquiry and analysis for those who must live the law or act from within it. We are thus offered chapters that read the social construction, confusion, and contradiction of the law from Before the Law, With the Law, and Against the Law.1 As an interdisciplinary field, law and literature has attracted works that break through narrow disciplinary perspectives to demonstrate the many ways in which law and literature interface or otherwise comment on one another. The works considered for review here must in some way have earned themselves a place in law and literature classrooms because they play in the interstices between disciplines or because they otherwise bust predictable boundaries and open new ways of seeing and knowing about the ways law and literature can mean in relation to or in resistance against each other. The centerpiece of this review essay is Gyora Binder and Robert Weisberg's massive tome of over 500 pages of theory (the fact that it is a book on theory makes its own contribution to the sense of the work's massiveness). Literary Criticisms of the Law breaks each of its chapters into two sections: one on literary theory and one on its application to legal studies. Hermeneutics, narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, deconstructive criticism, and cultural criticism each have their own chapter, some (hermeneutics) more evenly balanced than others, some (narrative and rhetoric) with double the emphasis on literary theory, and some (deconstructive and cultural criticism) with a much stronger sense of the applications to the law. …

Cultures of Melancholia in Late Capitalism—A Reflection Response to Discussion by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

Our reply to Jeanne Wolff Bernstein claims that she is an ideal reader for the type of analysis we offered: because she is familiar with the European literary tradition, because she so obviously harbors a sense of the interface of literature and psychoanalysis, and—not least—because she herself has so meticulously studied the nuanced details of our diagnosis. We concur, furthermore, with the melancholia diagnosis she attributes to us and understand why our analysis led her—almost by association—to remember the models of earlier theorists of melancholy and depression. However, we caution that these three are merely a few among many models and that they should not, in any case, be considered definitive (as if models could ever be ultimate arbiters in an enterprise such as the posthumous analysis of a historical figure). Finally, in our reply we petition for a more historical approach than the one found in Bernstein's response or in the writings of the three thinkers whose approach has influenced her thinking.