Kind Of Nostalgia Research Articles

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia

The paper in consideration talks about the impact of Indian philosophy in The Last Labyrinth. The paper opens various avenues on which the novel draws inspiration from the Indian Upanishadic traditions and how the actions of the characters reflect the influence of Indian Mythological Legends. The paper throws light upon the prevalent themes of Hindu Dharmic traditions that became the base for action in the novel. Having studied the life and actions of the characters like Som Bhaskar, Anuradha, Aftab, Mansoor, Amzad; the paper explores the relationship between their acts and the underlying Upanishadic implications. The paper also explores the role of an omniscient narrator who sets the tone for the action of the novel. The power further talks about Joshi’s Hindu psyche that was prevalent all along the novel through the actions of his characters like Bhaskar’s performing last rites of his father, names of the places like Haridwar, and reference to Hindu gods like Som Bhaskar’s mother’s prayers to Krishna. The paper shows how the personalities in the novel are not only characters but the personality types and how important was the conception of God.Hindu

Campus/Academic Novels and “Built-In” Nostalgia

Abstract The present article traces nostalgia across various campus and academic novels published during the last three decades and identifies different kinds of nostalgia – writerly and readerly nostalgia, vicarious nostalgia, ersatz nostalgia – not in the systematic manner of a classification but guided by the novels themselves. The readings are informed by theories stemming from different backgrounds – the social sciences, cultural and literary studies, psychology and cognitive science – in an attempt to create a productive dialogue, one that emphasizes the creative potential of nostalgia.

Ritual

Ritual

The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema

This article is concerned with the intersection of digitally augmented performance and nostalgia in contemporary Hollywood franchise cinema. The practice of ‘de-ageing’ or even resurrecting actors following their real-life deaths in films like Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010), Terminator Genysis (Alan Taylor, 2015), Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016), Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019), and a large number of Marvel Cinematic Universe films, is now commonplace. Though such digital faces are primarily still found in franchise cinema, some exceptions ( The Irishman, Martin Scorsese, 2019; Gemini Man, Ang Lee, 2019) are telling in their franchise-like appeals to cinematic nostalgia. In particular, the digital face is most commonly aligned with the ‘legacy film’ (Golding, 2019), resurrected franchises interested in transferring franchise protagonists, themes and fandom across generations. The digital face therefore is an expression of the convergence of the digital with film, with the franchise, with the past and with memory. For these films, memory and nostalgia are meticulous exercises involving thousands of work hours of highly skilled CGI workers and cutting-edge technology. These highly technical, virtuosic digital faces are quite literally the face of this kind of nostalgia, and as Ndalianis observes, position the face ‘as façade that opens up a time-travel passageway between past and present’, inviting a seam-spotting game between audience and filmmaker (2014). Even if the digital face is perfect in its recreation, the audience’s knowledge of the impossibility of the performance leaves a trace of artistry. Accordingly, digital faces are creative, technical and financial decisions above all. This article outlines the uses of the digital face for memory, nostalgia and seriality in contemporary Hollywood franchise cinema, with a focus on representation and death.

The Safavid Machiavelli: Shāh ʿAbbās I and the “Great Man” Theory Revisited

Abstract Political discourse in various countries around the world has been characterized by disillusionment with governments’ failure to address pressing concerns of today’s societies. It is also possible to discern a kind of nostalgia about strong, charismatic political leaders, which has lent poignancy to the question of whether great rulers are born or are the product of a specific historical milieu and the confluence of social or cultural factors. The focus of this article will be the accession to power of Shāh ʿAbbās I (1571–1629; r. 1588–1629) and the policies the emperor implemented to redesign and reorganize the Safavid state, as depicted by the court historian Iskandar Beg Munshī (ca. 1560–ca. 1632). I argue that Iskandar Beg’s World-Adorning History of ʿAbbās speaks to modern leadership trait theories about the existence of certain qualities that define a good leader and set him/her apart from other people. At the same time, Iskandar Beg formulates in embryonic form the notion that possessing the fundamental traits and properties associated with an optimal leadership style is never a panacea or absolute guarantee for political success nor does it suffice to yield desirable results. The methods and techniques required for a long reign are the second salient aspect of Iskandar Beg’s portrayal of Shāh ʿAbbās. Iskandar Beg engages with some of the key themes that inform the political theory of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) as well. Iskandar Beg’s narrative invites comparison with The Prince, published more than one century before the completion of the History. Iskandar Beg was unlikely to have had access or have been exposed to the Florentine author’s ideas. But his description of Shāh ʿAbbās’ leadership practices bears uncanny resemblance to Machiavelli’s works, particularly the portions in The Prince that discuss the cases of rulers who acquired power thanks to their own virtue or fortune.

Affective scaffolds of nostalgia

In this paper I analyse nostalgia by reflecting on the theories coming from cultural studies, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Then I use theories of situated affectivity to achieve a better understanding of the role the environment plays in this affective phenomenon. I focus on the way nostalgia is “ordinarily” experienced today, that is to say in a society deeply influenced by technologies that constantly allow quick access to an infinite amount of nostalgically relevant material. To better achieve these goals, I mainly focus on childhood nostalgia, which is one of the, if not the, most widespread kinds of nostalgia. In the first part of this paper, after having introduced the meaning and history of the term nostalgia, I focus on Boym’s theories to verify if her classification can be applied to the everyday experience of nostalgia, especially childhood nostalgia. In the second part, I show how at its core nostalgia consists in a selection and renarration of memories that deeply shape and reveal one’s personal identity. In the third section I offer an introduction to the concept of affective scaffolding. In the fourth section I show how the media we consume through material culture constitutes a synchronic scaffold for the alleviation of the sense of nostalgic longing. In the fifth section I show how the processes of selection and renarration can also be scaffolded, and I discuss whether these processes can be externally influenced in a way that resembles what Slaby calls mind invasion.

The Faces of Nostalgia in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Novel “Before We Visit the Goddess”

Nostalgia has become a popular topic of study across various disciplines. This paper explores how the ideas of nostalgia differ by the two authors in their writing and analyzing them concerning the novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The four forms of nostalgia, according to Gary cross, help us unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, and the two kinds of nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym, helps us in understanding the emotions of the individual.

The New Testament: Jewish or Gentile?

The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler, has recently been republished in a second edition. It performs the vital task of correcting Christian misunderstandings, distortions, stereotypes and calumnies to recover the various Jewish contexts of Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement. This is a welcome development in the painful history of Jewish–Christian relations. There is a danger, however, in the book’s Christian reception, of a kind of nostalgia for ‘Jewish roots’—an expectation that by returning to Jesus’ original message, and an ‘authentic’ Jewish form of Christianity, one can bypass centuries of mistrust and worse. Matters are not that simple. Christianity grew out of a complex dual heritage, already reflected in the New Testament. The Christian message quickly spread into the Greek-speaking world, and its adherents soon became majority Gentile. This paper explores the implications of that process, which was begun by Paul, who presented Jewish messianic ideas to a Gentile audience, assigning universal significance to the traditions of his own particular community. It examines how Jesus’ teachings acquired new meanings, often reflecting a Christian movement at odds with the majority of Jews. And it unearths the subtext beneath the New Testament’s defamatory polemic. Doing so involves negotiating the complex relationship between theology and sociology: between ideals (Jewish and/or Christian) and the lived experiences of Jewish and Gentile communities.

Business Suit, Briefcase, and Handkerchief: The Material Culture of Retro Masculinity in <em>The Intern</em>

Business Suit, Briefcase, and Handkerchief: The Material Culture of Retro Masculinity in <em>The Intern</em>

Guest editors’ introduction: Nostalgia, Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

The end of communism in the USSR and its satellite states produced a wave of collective euphoria that had not been seen in Europe since May 1945. Nowhere was this excitement stronger than in the former socialist countries themselves, where many felt that service had, as it were, been resumed. As former Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it at the time, after decades of following the wrong track, we are yearning to rejoin the road which was once ours too.1 Signs that things were returning to normal were everywhere: West Germans received their Os si neighbours back into the fold by giving each of them 100 West-Deutschmarks as so-called welcome money; Hungarians could once again sit alongside their Austrian cousins and thrill to La Traviata at the Vienna Opera; and Muscovites finally got to taste their first Big Mac. The socialist dream had been cancelled, but in its place there was to be another utopia, a consumerist paradise, buttressed by liberal democracy at home, and lasting peace abroad.Barely two decades later, there is, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, a new spectre haunting Central and Eastern Europe - the spectre of nostalgia. The idealization of the is, of course, a fundamental part of human nature. Regret for a lost idyll can often colour our way of looking at the world. Recalling memories of a bygone era, as Vladimir Jankelevitch has put it, sharpen[s] nostalgia and underline^] the irreversibility of the past.2 Until recently, nostalgia was essentially a private affair. Today, however, we can see a new type of nostalgia emerging, a collective form stretching over the entire area of the former USSR and its satellite states. This phenomenon is all the more paradoxical when one considers that the period on which this nostalgia is focused - the Soviet era - was once so roundly rejected by those who appear to feel it most keenly today. Perhaps this should not surprise us, however. As Svetlana Boym put it in her seminal work on the subject, [post-socialist] nostalgia became a defense mechanism against the accelerated rhythm of change and economic shock therapy.3 At one time this feeling was limited to emigres fondly reminiscing about their distant mother country. Now, however, it also appears to touch those who live where they always have, but whose homeland no longer officially exists.This new nostalgia has begun to attract considerable scholarly interest in recent years.4 It takes an astonishingly wide variety of forms, including the popularity among Berlin shoppers of the Ostpaket (East German products in their original packaging), the reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles in Russian glamour culture,5 the reappearance of Soviet brands of chocolate and other fast-moving consumer goods, the rise of nationalism in countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, and the rehabilitation of long-forgotten artists or literary genres. This tendency to look at the through rose-tinted spectacles can also be seen in numerous published collections of Soviet photographs of the 1970s,6 or on countless social media pages, both institutional and personal.7 It is quite distinct from traditional forms of nostalgia, as the term Ostalgie, widespread in the former East Germany, suggests.8 Despite Serguei Oushakine's claim that this new kind of nostalgia does not aim at political restoration, there is often an important political subtext.9It is in the arts that this new (n)ostalgia is perhaps given its most complex expression. In her most recent novel, for example, Russian author Svetlana Alexievitch laments the demise of homo sovieticas.l0 A number of filmmakers and artists have also attempted to capture this sickness for the past (nost-algia). These include Stanislav Govorukhin, director of The Russia We Have Lost (Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali, 1992) and Wolfgang Becker, who is best known for Good bye, Lenin! (2003). In Moscow, the Memory Art exhibition in 2012 of paintings by Ukrainian artists Vlad Yurashko and Vika Shoumskaia, which took as its main theme the events of 1991 and their impact on collective consciousness, was followed by an international conference field in the city's Higher School of Economics, titled The USSR: Life After Death. …

From Devdas to Dev.D: Melodrama, mourning and nostalgia

Abstract This article explores the trajectory of Indian cinematic melodrama as the site of cinematic exhibition shifts from the single screen theatre to the multiplex through an analysis of the archetype of the self-annihilating protagonist, Devdas. It examines, in particular, the three cinematic retellings of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Devdas (1917) – Devdas (Roy, 1955), Devdas (Bhansali, 2002) and Dev.D (Kashyap, 2009). Arguing that the melodramatic impulse to return to a ‘space of innocence’ makes the modality of melodrama essentially nostalgic, it explores the different kinds of nostalgia at play in the three retellings. The different relationship each instance of nostalgia has to time, it argues, is intrinsically connected to the different valences of loss that inform the different kinds of mourning at work in these films. Finally, the article attempts to answer if melodrama remains a valid lens through which one can continue to view cinema in the age of the multiplex.

Remembering lost paintings: Vanessa Bell’s The Nursery

During 1930—1932, Vanessa Bell worked on a large-scale, ambitious painting called The Nursery, a nostalgic delineation of childhood and motherhood. The subsequent loss of the painting has tended to curtail rather than to colour interpretation; in contrast, my reading interrogates The Nursery’s status as a piece of lost art. The work survives hauntingly through a multiplicity of related visual and textual objects, including contemporary photographs, personal correspondence, criticism and fiction. I analyse these as memorials, questioning the kind of nostalgia required to see the lost Nursery , and setting up an interaction between two sites of nostalgia in operation here: within the lost painting, and around it.

Nordic Nostalgia and Nordic Light: the Swedish model as Utopia 1930–2007

In the last decade, Sweden has emerged on the other side of the 1990s crisis with, if not its self-image intact, then at least a reasserted confidence as, once again, the most modern country in the world. Crisis management in the 1990s seemed to have succeeded. The Swedish bumblebee – the unthinkable animal that flies despite its high taxes and large public sector – flew again. The ‘Swedish model’ was back after a decade as the punch bag of neoliberalism. Throughout the European centre left – from the debate on the European social model to Ségolène Royal and Gordon Brown – Sweden has reemerged as ‘Nordic light’, proof that a better world is possible. This reappraisal in the eyes of the world has paradoxical consequences in Sweden, since it seems to overwrite the uncertainty and insecurity of crisis with assertion and confidence, while leaving many questions unanswered. It also leads to new definitions of what Sweden is. The paper suggests that Sweden post-1990s suffers from a particular kind of nostalgia, in which the famous Model emerges as a kind of paradise lost with uncertain links both to past and future. While Sweden yet again becomes the utopia of others, it is a kind of future past to itself.

Postmodern Hollywood: what's new in film and why it makes us feel so strange

Postmodernism is essential to American culture today. We can see its manifestations on billboards and on television; we can hear its tone on the radio and in everyday conversation; and we can even sense its outlook in how we live our lives. This volume presents an accessible and brief summary of postmodernism, especially as it pertains to American cinema-one of the central players and leading lights in the development of this cultural attitude. Four distinct sections investigate postmodernist fragmentation, musical use, and pastiches of previous television shows and cinematic genres in such films as Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Discussions of the phenomenon of postmodernism have established certain characteristics that are typical of postmodernist culture. These characteristics include formal fragmentation, a tendency toward a particular kind of nostalgia, and the use of materials and styles borrowed from previous films and other cultural products. This volume presents a brief summary of the characteristics that have typically been associated with postmodernism, especially as they pertain to film. It illustrates those characteristics with discussions of a wide variety of American films of the past thirty years, noting how those films participate in the phenomenon of postmodernism. Emphasis is on popular, commercial films, rather than the more esoteric, experimental products that have sometimes been associated with postmodern film. Booker's work contains detailed discussions of a wide variety of American films-including classics like Sullivan's Travels and The Last Picture Show, and recent successes such as Scream, Natural Born Killers, Memento, Moulin Rouge, and Fight Club-noting how these films participate in the phenomenon of postmodernism, and how they have helped to shape its current form.

Everybody knows this is nowhere: adventures in the back row of the cinema of the mind

Writing about music is like writing about dreams—everything. is lost in translation. How do you write about music when music isn't about anything? This essay attempts to answer the question by exploring the connection between music and memory; the specific reincarnatory power of music (in this case Neil Young's 1975 album Tonight's the Night) and the particular kind of nostalgia it evokes.

In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (review)

Reviewed by: In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature Paul Gordon Schalow In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature. By Jim Reichert. Stanford University Press, 2006. 282 pages. Hardcover $60.00. The forty-five-year reign of the Meiji emperor from 1868 to 1912 was long enough to encompass both the initial exuberant attempts to transform a land and a people into something suitably modern, as well as the subsequent sober recognition of the cost of that transformation and a kind of nostalgia, especially in the capital city of Tokyo, for what had been Edo culture. "Civilization and Enlightenment" was the byword of the [End Page 237] new imperial reign, and reform affected every area of life. The idea of what constituted an appropriately modern army and navy, or transportation system, or political structure, and so forth, evolved over time, and eventually new institutions replaced those of the Edo era. Once in place, moreover, the new army and navy, transportation system, political structure, and other state structures marked for reform were endorsed in various visible and gratifying ways: by, for example, the victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, by the obvious increased ease of commuting within cities and traveling across regions, and by the palpable sense that Japan had catapulted itself into the ranks of major world powers. The Meiji oligarchs also addressed the idea of what constituted a suitably modern sexuality for the Japanese people. Serving as a spokesperson for the government, the educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi endorsed the model of one husband/one wife embodied in his own marriage. In the legal realm, prostitution was outlawed, as was anal intercourse between males. (The limited effect of these laws has been discussed in detail by Greg Pflugfelder in his study Cartographies of Desire, University of California Press, 1999.) The regulation of sexuality had always been a major concern of the Tokugawa bakufu, as shown by the various attempts beginning in the seventeenth century to isolate male prostitution in "theater districts" and female prostitution in "pleasure quarters" in the urban centers, but the Meiji control of sexual commerce became prescriptive in ways never seen before. The aim of these reforms was ostensibly the ennobling of relations between the sexes and the elevation of the status of women, but in fact the results were highly ambiguous. Sexual reform had major repercussions for Meiji literature, of course, since the life force (eros) had always been one of Edo literature's wellsprings. Jim Reichert's fascinating and timely book, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature, is the first study of Meiji literature to consider what happened when "compulsory heterosexuality" was imposed in the wake of modernization. Reichert approaches his ambitious project by providing a detailed discussion of several important authors and texts that clarify in specific ways how writing on male-male sexuality was reformulated and even erased in the Meiji era. It is an important and revisionist project, intended to change the master narrative of Meiji literary history that until now, he argues, has "largely overlook[ed] the impact of changing notions of sexuality and masculinity on the development of modern Japanese literature" (p. 9). Reichert divides his discussion into four stages that correspond to the standard division of Meiji literary history into early, reformist, neoclassical, and late periods, roughly corresponding to decade-long intervals from the 1870s to mid-1880s, the late 1880s to mid-1890s, the late 1890s, and finally the first decade of the twentieth century to 1912. To illustrate the earliest transition from Edo to Meiji, the study addresses Shizu no odamaki (a late Edo work) and Sawamura Tanosuke akebono zōshi (from 1880), two popular books that circulated in the early years of the Meiji period and depicted male-male sexuality in terms consistent with the Edo construct of nanshoku (male love). These books and others like them remained highly influential despite the Meiji government's reform efforts. Reichert makes the excellent point that readers did not approach these transitional depictions merely as nostalgic remnants of a bygone Edo mode of male-male intimacy...

Mıgırdiç Margosyan and Mehmed Uzun: Remembering cultural Pluralism in Diyarbakır

AbstractLiterary narratives offer their audience opportunities to surpass existing monolithic social and cultural identities through reflecting on and representing the past from new perspectives. This article aims to elaborate this argument by a discussion of multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, reflective nostalgia, and cultural intimacy in the portrayals of Diyarbakir's “Infidel Quarter” in two literary works: Mıgırdiç Margosyan's Gavur Mahallesi and Mehmed Uzun's Nar Çiçekleri. Both works, the former as a short story collection and the latter as a collection of essays, share autobiographical features and reflect the multiculturalism of Diyarbakır in the 1940s and 1950s from the point of view of an Armenian and a Kurd with similar sensitivities. Margosyan and Uzun's works indicate a cultural pluralism in Diyarbakır where different religious cultures used to exist side by side. The intermingling of languages in this neighborhood shows a kind of “inclusive multiculturalism.” Svetlana Boym's differentiation and discussion of two kinds of nostalgia as restorative and reflective, the former as nationalist and the latter as individual or collective memory oriented, help us to evaluate Margosyan and Uzun's works as alternatives to nationalist narratives. Both of these works, dealing with reflective nostalgia through the depiction of cultural intimacy between ethnic groups, provide their audience with possibilities for the future.

Future Imperfect: An Introduction

Future Imperfect:An Introduction Keith D. Leonard (bio) and Kyle Dargan The Changing Same Again Being asked to name the future—I originally thought that this was the strange privilege and humbling burden inherent in serving as guest editors of "The Next Thirty" issue of Callaloo. I thought that our task would be to name and claim the voices in African-American and Africana studies and literature that were most fully pushing the boundaries of the known, writers whose scholarship actively bucked trends and whose poems and plays and fiction insistently defied convention. I had even worked out a nice little schema in my head. Whatever its subject matter, the work accepted into "The Next Thirty" issue would be theoretically sophisticated in terms of the self-critical stances and thoughtfulness about culture, power and discourse so prized in postmodern thought. It would be devoid of the divisive pieties of authenticity and resistant to the simplistic, even romanticized, valorization of the vernacular. Our best writers and thinkers included here would be invested, I thought, in the implications of multiplicity so beautifully brought to the fore by studies of diaspora, even if those writers were not explicitly writing about or out of that perspective. And I imagined that questions of sexuality would constitute a broad foreground of the work we would get. Picking and choosing from these great submissions, I would be like a Hollywood agent, looking for the newest hip-hop art or the hottest post-human critical perspective. And my final responsibility, I thought, would be to use my soapbox as editor, based on the authority of learning from these new works first, to illuminate the face of the future by asserting the lessons of this material as a challenge. And I almost expected that this arduous task would be easy. But I was wrong. It turns out that the work of this issue, as least for me, was not and is not about naming the future. Instead, it is about seeing and confronting the past. During the past year, I have been consistently reminded of how, in The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha critiques the emphasis on the "post" in contemporary cultural thought, an emphasis evident in terms like "postmodern" and "postcolonial" in which the naming of the future paradoxically resists the naming it claims to offer. With such terms, Bhabha aptly observes, one is claiming only a chronology—calling oneself "after"—without unseating the previous regime or providing any substantive definition of the present. This misnamed "beyond," as he calls the era that is after the past, constitutes a missed conceptual opportunity too easily disciplined by our emphasis simply on being "after." What results, paradoxically, is a kind of nostalgia in which the terms by which we reject past cultural narratives, especially oppressive ones, imply an absolute difference between the now and that past even though that past is actually what gets affirmed and defined and therefore continues to [End Page 959] dominate. The future's face actually darkens then, shadowed by this nostalgic spotlight. By contrast, says Bhabha, "[t]he wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological 'limits' of [past oppressive thought] are also the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices" (Bhabha ). In these terms, what this issue of Callaloo should do is resist dubiously claiming that the epistemological limits of the past are fixed and that the "beyond" is fixed against that past. Instead, it should acknowledge and represent the interactions between past and present from which the dissonant and dissident voices gain their force. To conceive of the future is not to treat it as if it could be sliced from the past with the cutting edge of innovative writing, an ideal that paradoxically gives too much power to the past. Rather, it is to inhabit the permeable places in the past and present where cross-cutting and splicing create the new. I now think Bhabha is right that naming the future in the way that I had imagined is actually taming it to our past priorities, and the work accepted here proves that point. All of the best submissions were in...

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry by Susan M. Schultz

I 152 Reviews after World War II. In opposition to thosewho deplore thekind ofnostalgia embodied in theheritage industry,or perhaps in the idyllic childhood memories celebrated by negritude poets like Senghor, he cites Svetlana Boym's recent The Future ofNostal gia, which explores theways inwhich nostalgia can be either restorative or reflective, shaping a certainway of thinkingabout a particular time and place, and granting such memories a transformative and reconstructive power. But whereas Boym focuses on artists exiled fromRussia and Eastern Europe (including Nabakov, Brodsky, Stravin sky,and Benjamin), Su takes a broad range ofCaribbean, African American, Native American, Nigerian, and British writers. Through detailed analysis of textsby Toni Morrison, JeanRhys, V. S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, IanMcEwan, Chinua Achebe, N. Scott Momaday, JoanRiley, Leslie Marmon Silko,Wole Soyinka, Paule Marshall, and Evelyn Waugh, Su argues for theconstructive role ofnostalgia fora lostor distant homeland in establishing ethical ideals in a fragmented and dispersed society. Rejecting what he sees as an ethics centred on individualism, Su chooses amodel based on the philosophy of Levinas and his emphasis on the interactive encounters between individuals and responsibility for the 'other',while recognizing the 'other's' difference. This model works particularly well in the analysis ofMorrison, Native American, Caribbean, and Nigerian writers, but seems less appropriate to the com parison of Waugh and Ishiguro in thechapter on theBritish 'estatenovel' (which also refers to Mansefield Park and Howard's End). Su could have discussed more fully the differences between thesewriters and one might have expected him also to link this discussion to the analysis ofNaipaul's Enigma ofArrival in an earlier chapter. One difficulty in reading thisbook is itsshiftingdefinitions of 'nostalgia'. It begins by establishing place as the key point of reference, arguing persuasively for the sig nificance of 'theClearing' (as a place forcommunal gatherings and gradual healing), inMorrison's Beloved. But in the final chapter it is not place but an imagined ideal community which becomes the focus of nostalgia, Abazon inAchebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Aiyero in Soyinka's Season ofAnomy. Nevertheless, both the general argument linking specific kinds ofnostalgia with theethics ofLevinas and thedetailed analysis of thiswide range of texts are suggestive and often illuminating. UNIVERSITY OFKENT, CANTERBURY LYN INNES A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. By SUSANM. SCHULTZ. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press. 2005. Viii + 247 pp. ?28.50. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5i98-4. It isno easy task to survey contemporary poetry, ofwhich there are countless practi tioners and schools. It is also a question of criticalmethod, ofwhat language we shall use in speaking of the texts of our choice. The Italian Eugenio Montale once wrote thatpoetry is in theclutches of those thatare less fittounderstand it, meaning profes sional critics.On theother hand, who but a professional critic reads 'advanced' poetry? Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse is a good example of the ongoing debate on poetry, ofwhich it isdifficult tograsp thebeginning and the conclusion. A professor at theUniversity ofHawai'i and a poet herself, she devotes the introduction (written inverse) and Chapter 7 ('Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcolonial ity') to the relation of poetry and academic politics, e.g. to the rightof local 'pidgin' poets tobe accepted within the 'canon'. Some of this,given thegravity of the discus sion, borders on involuntary parody, and could well be quoted in a fictional satire on academics: 'I do not want to suggest that silence, a focal point in this conversation With myself (a silent one, except for the tapping of thekeys) is a univocal I(as it were) term, for silence needs to be stripped away from silencing [... .]' (p. 21). Impasse, the MLR, I02.4, 2007 II53 titularsubject, has a notable history in twentieth-century literature,fromSam Beckett toHenry Roth. Schultz follows itspresence perceptively in some figuresofmajor, or disputed, standing: the little-known last poems ofHart Crane, thatattempt to break away from his emphatic earlier lyricism (Chapter i), 'Laura Riding's Essentialism' (Chapter 2), the disregarded poems ofGertrude Stein (Chapter 3), and 'JohnAsh bery's Critique ofHarold Bloom' (Chapter 4). Some of thecomments here are astute, and Schultz moves into territories that to some extent are of her own making. There isno...

The Reza Shah Period: Document Collections Recently Published in Iran

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, many causes have spurred a renewal of interest concerning the reign of Reza Shah, unmatched perhaps since his fall. Firstly, one must mention the increasing interest and curiosity about the modern history of Iran, manifested in this country and abroad. Secondly, the opening of government and some private archives has provided new perspectives on the era. Thirdly, one can point to a kind of nostalgia for the period, as reflected by the many popular histories and biographies of debatable value published in recent years.Several archival repositories, such as the National Archives (sāzmān-e asnād-e mellī), the Institute for Cultural Studies and Research (mo'assaseh-ye moṭāle'āt va pazhūheshhā-ye farhangī), and the foreign ministry, began publishing documents rather than opening their archives and making their documents available for research.