Authors In Literature Research Articles

Killer Stories: 'Globalizing' the Grotesque in Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho and Leïla Slimani's Chanson douce

Focusing on Leïla Slimani's Chanson douce (2016) and Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho (2003), this article traces a grotesque aesthetics that draws on other globally circulated texts, such as North American crime fiction, the literary trope of the serial killer and the 'evil mother', as well as on the recognition value of the city of Paris to appeal to a global, and in particular Western readership. While this new aesthetics is clearly informed by previous generations of African literature, such as the texts that have served to illustrate Achille Mbembe's articulation of the grotesque, the 'commandement' in Slimani and Mabanckou's novels is exercised by less tangible dynamics of transnational capitalism, class differentiation, gender stereotypes, and social marginalisation. The article considers the ways in which both Slimani and Mabanckou's narratives place a new importance on, and instrumentalize the role of the audience — as readership — by making them a central element of their representation of the grotesque. The writers' public performance of their identities as celebrity literary authors then serves to better understand how their re-configuration of the grotesque as a 'globalized' aesthetic extends to a re-thinking of what African literature in French and its authors are today on the world literary market.

Pinnacles in Long-form Literary Texts: Cross-textual Evidence for the Pervasiveness of Megametaphorical Expression

Various scholars have recognized how literary authors use mega-metaphor (scattered metaphorical domain references) to unobtrusively shape their narratives. Corpus analysis proves useful not only in identifying the presence of such metaphorical systems in long-form texts but also in assessing their relative prominence across multiple texts. This article will examine 50 randomly selected literary narratives so as to discern the extent to which the relatively uncommon but metaphorically replete word pinnacle contributes surreptitious metaphorical meaning to the literary texts in which it is found. Results of the study confirm that the word “pinnacle,” when it is used at all, is nearly always placed so as to highlight climactic scenes or emphasize key turning points in protagonist character development. The fact that metaphorical lines of interpretation relating to certain words and phrases may be detected, not only by way of critical intuition but also through the electronic searching of multiple text corpora, demonstrates the value of cross-textual analysis strategies in certain cases. It also hints that megametaphor, rather than being a rare and idiosyncratic type of literary artifice, may be more prevalent than has been previously acknowledged.

Glossing the Diary: Women Writing for Posterity, the Case of Elizabeth Edgeworth (1781–1800)

ABSTRACT The inclusion of paratextual apparatus within a diary, alongside attention to presentation, historical contextualisation, and the employment of textual strategies makes it clear that an audience is to the fore, particularly a future or posthumous one. Connections with posterity permit the eighteenth-century female diarist to imagine a situation whereby their diary could be a document connecting them tangentially to literary and cultural authority. Analysis of the diary of Elizabeth Edgeworth (1781–1800) permits a better understanding of the relationship between diaries and posterity; the strategies for the achievement of an audience; the methods of communication with this audience; and the role of life writing in controlling and shaping a family’s narrative and legacy. The difficulties in achieving an audience for one’s works are evident throughout Elizabeth’s diary, as she attempts to negotiate her personal environs, and add to the family record of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland. Elizabeth’s diary functions primarily as a public document, one that tells us much about the experience of growing up within a famous family during a pivotal time, and of one family member’s attempts to communicate and preserve a particular version of this experience for posterity.

The Writer is a Sorcerer: Literature and the Becomings ofA Thousand Plateaus

In this paper, I trace the concept of ‘becomings’, most thoroughly articulated in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, as it relates to the notion of the writer as sorcerer. More precisely, my aim is to articulate how it is that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise the writer as really (not merely imaginatively) effecting what they understand as ‘becomings’ (-woman, -child, -animal, etc.). My thesis is that if the writer is a sorcerer, capable of enabling real becomings, it is because language itself, for Deleuze and Guattari, is bodily and material, and the author, particularly the literary author, has the ability to disrupt language's representational domain of sense, causing language to hum with the intensive vitality that puts it in closest proximity to the body, from whence language emerges in the first place. We shall first look to Bergson and Spinoza, from whom Deleuze and Guattari abstract their intensive conception of the body in A Thousand Plateaus. From here we will outline the apparent progression of becomings in the tenth plateau. Finally, we will look to the Kafka book as outlining the material and affective capacities of literature.

Spatial reading: evaluative frameworks and the making of literary authority

This essay uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading. Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority, this essay sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of “spatial reading” (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). Looking at developments from the 1780s to the present, I will show how the distinction between spatial and flat reading emerges in the eighteenth century, is transformed by the modernist institutionalization of high- and middlebrow notions of spatial form, and continues to provoke tensions between the civil sphere and the literary-artistic field (as the recent scandal around Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize attests).

El instinto de la literatura. Una aproximación a la actividad literaria a partir de la teoría de la evolución

El presente artículo pretende discutir la posibilidad de pensar la literatura a partir de la teoría de la evolución. Haremos, pues, una exposición crítica de esta posibilidad, esto es, que la actividad literaria tiene que ver con facultades innatas, producto de la selección natural y la evolución humanas. Lo haremos a partir de los autores que, de forma directa, la han abordado, principalmente tres: Joseph Carroll, Steven Pinker, y Denis Dutton. Para contextualizar el problema, pondremos todas estas ideas en relación con algunas ideas literarias (de autores literarios y teóricos de la literatura) que han intentado dar cuenta de la cuestión acerca de la naturaleza del hecho poético o literario. Entre otras consecuencias, la propuesta tiene unas implicaciones sobre el debate acerca de las relaciones entre naturaleza y cultura, esto es: qué hay en el ser humano de cultural y por ende de relativo en su conducta, o bien de perteneciente a una naturaleza humana común a todas las culturas, y si un hecho a priori tan obviamente cultural como el literario considerarse a la luz de los las cualidades naturales del ser humano en cuanto especie animal producto de un sofisticado proceso de evolución.

Dinamika Idiologi Perempuan dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Luh-Luh Karya I Made Suarsa

Various ideologies are expressed by the author in the literary works he created. One of the modern Balinese literary authors, I Made Suarsa in his short story entitled Luh-Luh reveals the dynamics of female ideology. The dynamics of women's ideology reflect the ideology of Indonesian women from various professions and are expressed by authors in various styles of language. The problems discussed in this research are: (1) how the dynamics of women's ideology in the story of Luh-Luh short story by I Made Suarsa; and (2) how the author discloses the woman's ideology in her story collection. Theories used to answer the above problems are feminist theory, ideology, and sociology of literature. The research method used is qualitative method through literature study, descriptive analytics, and descriptive. Techniques used are techniques of referring, notes, and tafseer. The results show that women's ideology is seen from three professions, namely: politician (legislative), artist, and state official (executive). The dynamics of women's ideology are expressed by the author through the style of metaphorical language, pleonasm, and comparison. In addition, the author also uses sound games to reinforce the image the author wishes to convey.

Part of an Englishwoman’s Constitution: Frances Burney, Sarah Harriet Burney, and Shakespeare

ABSTRACT By the end of the eighteenth century, the English national “bard” William Shakespeare had become an increasingly familiar figure of literary and moral authority upon which novelists and playwrights could draw for creative inspiration. For authors and half-siblings Frances Burney (1752–1840) and Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844), Shakespeare’s writings not only served as an influence over their published works, but were also frequently cited and discussed in their private writings and personal correspondences. This article examines the detailed engagement with the works of Shakespeare in the letters, journals, and fiction of both Frances and Sarah Harriet Burney. The Burneys not only demonstrated an extensive knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays in their private letters and journals, but also used Shakespeare as both a source of plot and an integral tool for characterization within their novels. While Sarah Harriet and her characters express a bardolatrous admiration for Shakespeare and his writings, Frances offers a more skeptical approach to the unquestioning adulation of Shakespeare that had come to pervade eighteenth-century literary criticism and culture.

Webs and Threads and Shirts of Destiny: Textile Imagery and the Aesthetics of Transmission in Barbara Honigmann’s Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004) and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Daughter narrators in autobiographical and autofictional texts by contemporary Jewish women writers such as Barbara Honigmann and Katja Petrowskaja employ textile imagery to overcome traumatic ruptures and losses of tradition. The history of (Jewish) embroidery and needlework in general is being evoked and alluded to in their literary texts, often via the character of the grandmother. The act of translation from cultural technique to literary text enables the writers to reconnect with Jewish and female artistic traditions, establishing new transnational genealogies of female artistic creation. Honigmann’s own female and Jewish version of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’ and Natalia Ginzburg’s concept of a poetry of ‘nothing much’ advocate a commitment to a poetics of the domestic and the seemingly trivial with a decidedly subversive edge. Both aesthetic approaches turn exclusion from male genealogies of literary and religious authority into a strength, asking questions about truth, memory, belonging and the problem of both traumatic and cultural inheritance. Tweetable Abstract: The use of textile and domestic imagery in the literature of contemporary Jewish women authors serves as a strategy to overcome genealogical and traumatic ruptures.

Diasporic Intertextual Musings: The Relevance of Classical Urdu Poetry to Contemporary Pakistani Situation in Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend

Anglophone literary works usually refer implicitly or explicitly to the culture, language and literature of authors’ native lands. Nadeem Aslam is one such author who makes explicit use of native language and literature in his fiction. Most of his works refer to classical Urdu poetry, phrases and extended adjectives to embellish as well as celebrate the rich legacy of the classical Urdu poetry tradition. Thus, intertextuality is a predominant feature of Aslam’s latest novel, The Golden Legend (2017). It is is not only an intertextual narrative but also an intercultural and inter-linguistic text because it incorporates popular classical Urdu poetry’s diction, metaphors and symbols. Aslam employs old poetic expressions and connects them to specific contexts of the characters in his novels. For instance, Urdu expressions like zamana and chaaragar are of special importance in the narrative structure of the novel. Moreover, the spatial structures of ‘garden’ and ‘Cordoba Mosque’ connect this text with classical Urdu literary tradition. Additionally, the English translations of many Urdu verses enrich the implied meanings of this novel. This study conducts a hermeneutic textual analysis of Aslam’s novel according to the theoretical frameworks of ‘intertextuality’ proposed by Julia Kristeva and Gerard Gennette. This paper contends that the use of Urdu language and literature is not random but a deliberate narrative technique that demonstrates the relevance of Urdu classical poetry to the contemporary socio-political situation of Pakistan. The Golden Legend illustrates the continuing relevance of Urdu classical poetry for present-day Pakistan and forges a new literary tradition of Urdu inspired poetic-prose in the mainstream contemporary Anglophone fiction.

A Paratextual Threshold: Epigraphs and Postcolonial Literary Authority in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven

Abstract: With epigraphs derived from a broad range of sources—Yoruban hymns, Jamaican proverbs, and contemporary poets, among others—Michelle Cliff's 1987 novel No Telephone to Heaven produces a Caribbean literary archive that differs compositionally and qualitatively from the colonial English canon's construction of literary authority. The epigraphs in Cliff's novel, read as a metanarrative, open up an explicitly literary space of resistance to enact a radical reordering of the aesthetic, historical, and cultural frameworks that shape most readers' understandings of what the term "canonical literature" encompasses. Cliff's epigraphs collectively comprise a network of influence that refuses conventional hierarchies of gender, national origin, and genre. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , Gérard Genette outlined four functions for the epigraph, namely, elaborating on a primary work's title, commenting on the main text of the work, making a gesture of affiliation with the author of the epigraphed text, and indicating "the genre, or the tenor of a piece of writing … [giving] a signal (intended as a sign ) of culture." Cliff's text performs what I argue to be the epigraph's fifth function—that of conferring authority—to declare her own canon.

The International Reach of E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake

Canada’s first notable Indigenous literary author, the Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake (1861-1913), appealed primarily to Canadian audiences, who valued her publications and recitations for their contribution to their sense of belonging to the places to which they or their families had immigrated. Her enthralling performance of Indigeneity extended to the larger English-speaking world, and, in line with the international publishing conditions of her era, she frequently depended upon American and British publication venues, sometimes modifying her work and her self-presentation to appeal to the expectations of foreign audiences. Many decades after her death, her contexts of reception were significantly expanded by new translations of her work, often in unexpected locales.

Life, death and the resurrection of the Harlem Renaissance femme terrible

Abstract The article deals with Afro-American literary author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and her place in the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on the reasons why she was not recognized during her lifetime. Analysing her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, it establishes what was it that made the Afro-American authors from the 1970s and 1980s adopt her as their literary predecessor and inscribe her in the literary canon. The article states that her literature is written from a feminist perspective and deals with the lives of Afro-American women without constantly positioning them in the context of racial difficulties of the period, as was done by her predominately male literary contemporaries.

Pluralities of History: Carrying Folklore Across Languages and Cultures

If history is a distilled collection of stories that was handpicked by colonisers, victors, and those in power, then folklore is a pool of abundant and overlapping remembered pasts from the common person. My research considers the possibility of folklore being a truer, more relevant version of history by analyzing written and oral stories from the province of Sindh. Research took place in two simultaneous phases: 1) Interviews in Karachi with people in the cultural sector, such as a literary scholar, author, musician, dancer, and archeologist to investigate the relationship between folklore and artistic and cultural practices; 2) Field visits to archaeological sites, shrines, and historic monuments that involve talking to locals about the presence of folk stories in their communities. Methods of carrying on folklore are interdisciplinary and overlapping. They include singing verses that detail stories at shrines, incorporating stories into new music, interpreting stories through dance and theatrical performance, and preserving archaeological sites. Folk stories are allowed to be multiple, overlapping, and contradicting, as the reality that they present is of a plural, collective memory. They belong in literature as much as they belong in anthropology, music, performance, and other disciplines. These pluralities are present in the interviews and field research, which will be shared and discussed, showing how the version told by an expert in the field of literature was just as valid as the story shared by a villager in interior Sindh.

The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction

My project here is to discuss the extent of Rhys's permeability to the voices of ‘others’, especially when it comes to quoting, inserting, using, or elaborating her own writing with a recourse to the literary authority of other writers. The postcolonial concept of ‘writing back’ obliterates the process of actual writing to the profit of the Western-constructed idea of an accusatory pattern in the literary agendas of authors from former Empires. As critical as Rhys might have been of European colonialism, a limitation of her work to a gesture of ‘writing back’ amounts to denying the polyphony orchestrated by the writer, thereby blurring any form of aesthetic purpose per se. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid a strictly postcolonial discourse, my article studies the wide scope of examples of intertextuality in Jean Rhys's short fiction (mainly in the short stories ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Hunger’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’ and ‘Temps Perdi’), in relation to the very notions of authority—both the author's, and her peers’. What is more, ‘others’ are present in her writing under the form of absent voices piercing through the fabric of the text, which results in a failure to locate the main source of authority. I shall enquire into the notion of failure as writing and reading aesthetics, rather than a simple literary motif.

Naar een diachrone blik op de verdiensten van Nederlandstalige auteurs

Abstract This article argues that it is both important and viable to develop a diachronic perspective on the profits of literary authors in the Low Countries. Up to now, conceptual and theoretical boundaries between different subdisciplines within Dutch literary studies have resulted in a compartmentalized, fragmentary narrative of the economic, social and symbolic profits of literary authors throughout the centuries. On the basis of a survey of the theoretical frameworks dominant in the subdisciplines of medieval, early modern and modern Dutch literature, we highlight the opportunities and difficulties for a diachronic perspective on financial advancement, focusing both on practice and discourse. In addition, we propose a schematic model that tries to overcome the difficulties and enables us to profit from the opportunities. This proposal allows for a sharper focus on both the practice of and discourse on literary authors’ economic gain from a diachronic perspective.

Echte schrijvers zijn niet te koop

Abstract A grand narrative of Dutch literary authors’ opportunities to economically profit from their writing is yet to be written. The general assumption, however, is that these opportunities developed teleologically from a dominant system of patronage during medieval and early modern times, in which financial gains were marginal and in which author’s independence of their supporters was constrained, to a system in which the commercial book market was dominant and where authors could be more self-supporting and thus more independent of supporters. This article argues that there is no such teleology. On the contrary: on the basis of an exploration of both practice and discourse of literary authors’ profits from the Middle Ages to the present, we conclude that in every period, it was possible for authors to profit from their writing through either patronage, market or governmental support, and often through a combination of these sources. Moreover, in every period varying types of independence of literary authors was valued highly. Our analysis of the discourse on profits shows that the continuous tendency to disguise financial advancement could be related to the importance of authorial independence throughout the ages.

Loon, lust, liefdadigheid

Abstract Throughout the centuries, many literary authors were engaged in writing theatre plays. Although there are many studies about the theatre business in general from Medieval Times to the present, the perspective of the playwright’s profits is seldom taken into consideration. This article presents both a survey of author’s options to gain an income in the world of theatre and an analysis of the discourse about this advancement. More specifically, on the basis of a comparison of cases from the seventeenth century on the one hand and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the other, this article argues that, despite the fact that for playwrights, as much as for other literary authors, it was a taboo to be open about economic profits, developments in the organization of institutional theatre created temporary openings for (public debate about) financial rewards.

Humanizing the Black Immigrant Body: Envisioning Diaspora Literacies of Youth and Young Adults from West African Countries

Background/ContextThis conceptual essay contributes to recent education research on immigrant youth from West African countries that examines the interplay of popularized narratives of immigrant youth and young adults, and their Diasporic literacy practices. Specifically, we examine embodied Diaspora literacies as affirming and extending presences and absences of Black immigrant bodies across two contexts: an after-school African Club, and a qualitative inquiry of civic learning and action-taking of immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries.PurposeWe theorize in this conceptual essay the interplay of the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults and their embodied Diaspora literacy practices. We highlight possibilities for research, literacy teaching, and teacher education when intentionally naming, affirming, and building with the humanity of Black immigrant youth and young adults from West African countries—what we conceptualize as humanizing the Black immigrant body. We conceptualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies. In theorizing embodied Diaspora literacies, we build with African Indigenous lensings, and African, Black, and Chicana/Latina feminisms. We further contextualize humanizing the Black immigrant body as an enacting of embodied Diaspora literacies expressed in the creative and artistic practices and artifacts of artists, literary authors, playwrights, and youth and young adults who have long authored and told narratives that affirm, extend, and historicize the strengths of Black immigrant communities.Interpretive AnalysisWe highlight in this conceptual essay the urgency of humanizing the Black immigrant body across four moments, or tellings of embodied Diaspora literacies. Our use of Diasporic tellings, an intentional naming and humanizing research approach, draws on the words of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author who refected on the urgency of a global “balance of stories.” We examine four Diasporic tellings: (1) youth in an African Club in a high school in New York City attending an off-Broadway play authored by a daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, (2) participating in a group discussion following the play, and (3) engaging in Youth Participatory Action Research inquiries; and (4) youth and young adults from West African countries discussing their creative and artistic embodied Diaspora literacies, and civic learning and action-taking across contexts of peers, schooling, and families.Conclusion / RecommendationsWe theorize humanizing the Black immigrant body as a vibrant, necessary research and teaching stance to recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth who daily negotiate and render visible their language and literacy practices. These practices comprise the coalescing of Black immigrant bodies, discursive perspectives, and material artifacts of teaching and learning, and their racialized, social, and educational experiences across contexts of schools and communities. These Diasporic tellings provide important insights for productive approaches in research, teaching, and teacher education with youth and young adults making sense of the lives of Black immigrants, across contexts of literacy learning and lived experiences that meaningfully recognize the humanity of Black immigrant youth from West African countries.

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir

Dreaming of Creativity: Imaging and Imagining the Creative Self in Memoir