Literary Community Research Articles

"Vis Probandi" albo na drodze do zrozumienia i współdziałania narodów

The text is a review of the book by Anna Choma-Suwała, published in Lublin in 2019, entitled Reception of Ukrainian poetry by the writers of the Lublin literary community in the interwar period: attempts at interpretation. The researcher briefly discusses all the values of the monograph noticed by her, emphasizing above all its unique and groundbreaking nature. He considers it particularly valuable that Choma-Suwała refers to extensive quotations, quotes fragments of works, and relies on other researchers’ records about the life and work of numerous cultural activists. In the summary of this review, there is a conviction that the reviewed book could be re-issued after corrections and supplements, even in a different, scientific and practical format, especially if the texts of translations appeared next to the critical-literary study. It is mainly about the addition to the book – the publication of an anthology of translations, perhaps the most important ones, of Józef Łobodowski, Józef Czechowicz and Andrzej Jaworski.

Pola OloixaracMona by Adam Morris

Pola Oloixarac Mona Trans. Adam Morris. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 176 pages. [Trigger warning: The following review mentions a sexual assault.] ARGENTINE AUTHOR Pola Oloixarac means business in her third novel, Mona, recently translated into English from the original Spanish by Adam Morris. The protagonist, Mona, is a Stanford-backed writer new to the circuit and nominated for Europe’s most prestigious literary award, the Basske-Wortz prize. We move with her through the festival—a parody of literary culture populated by ridiculous writer personalities —with a growing sense of unease as we realize she is struggling with something unnamed, heavy, and serious. The predictable plot follows the schedule of the conference, but the novel takes advantage of that natural structure in a delightfully absurd ending. A nebulous vibe of violent mystery seeps through the text, in which readers are made explicitly privy to none of the following until very late: the origin of Mona’s bruises; the significance of young girl Sandrita’s eerie, parallel story; and the explanation of the strangely threatening men and several dead animals spotted on the grounds. To glean everything, readers must operate with some working knowledge of literature —Oloixarac winks at those willing to go the extra mile in solving the puzzle. In a devastating, climactic recall of the offscreen events of Mona’s aggressor abusing, sexually assaulting, and disposing of her like garbage, an undercurrent of trauma swells and spills over despite her constant, futile attempts to suppress it with concerning amounts of drugs and alcohol. True catastrophe ensues as the prose style takes a sharp turn into the surreal. Mona is a critique of the literary community and publishing industry, and, on a broader level, capitalism and self-centered leftism in an era of technology. The interactions between the writers, particularly in the Q&A scenes, resemble Twitter discourse in which the goal is to be contrarian and heard regardless of quality of thought. From my perspective as a white person, Oloixarac is dead-on in that publishing and academia are couched in a racist, white casualness that forces authors of color to be reduced to their race or ethnicity—the “modern tools of the trade, weapons in the battle royale of ‘world lit.’” Through a constellation cast of near-caricatures from various backgrounds, Mona points out the toxic, holier-than-thou ecosystem of leftist artists and the implicit biases even they carry, which range from harmless shots taken at personal essayists all the way to substantial fatphobia and racism. While unlikable protagonists certainly exist in contemporary literature, making fiction more interesting, critical analysis plays a crucial role in differentiating between the worldview of the narrator and that of the author. Where this novel is smart, honest, and funny in spades, it is also too harsh, maybe problematic, in the name of satire. Mona is quite fatphobic toward Lena, especially after Lena makes Mona “feel a bit bad about herself, which Mona always figured was every fat woman’s secret objective.” The sheer number of these types of comments tips the objective over the line from a social commentary on beauty standards to a dunk on fat women. Similarly, the dialogue Oloixarac—who is not Jewish—wrote for her Jewish characters brings great pause: “My great-grandparents didn’t die in a concentration camp for me to have to listen to shit like that. I’m telling you: it made me ashamed to be Jewish . I’m so sick of everything people say in the name of the Jews.” The well-intentioned message of the novel becomes an enigma when juxtaposed against the blurb by her friend Junot Díaz, an author whose alleged sexual misconduct has divided the literary community in the culture of #MeToo. When asked about Díaz in an interview, Oloixarac responded in Spanish, which translates to: “It has arrived at an extreme in which men cannot even say ‘Hello’ to women. I don’t like the demonization of men, which disempowers women.” A regular talking point of systemic misogyny is that the enforcement of consequences for one’s actions equates to the demonization of (cisgender) men (i.e., “cancel culture”). According to this logic, doesn...

The Essential J. Frank Dobie ed. by Steven L. Davis

Reviewed by: The Essential J. Frank Dobie ed. by Steven L. Davis William Jensen Steven L. Davis, ed., The Essential J. Frank Dobie. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 2019. 320 pp. Hardcover, $28. The folklorist J. Frank Dobie holds a strange spot in the American canon. Popular and influential while alive, he has become something of an invisible giant within the literary community since his death in 1964. Though many of his books are now out of print, his writings loom over contemporary letters. Without Dobie there is no Larry McMurtry, there is no Cormac McCarthy. Without Dobie there would be no James Wade, Philipp Meyer, or Rick Bass. Though criticized for his negative depictions of Mexican Americans while simultaneously glorifying the violence of cowboys and the Texas Rangers, Dobie remains the grandfather of Southwestern literature. Now Steven L. Davis has taken on the herculean task of making a portable J. Frank Dobie reader. I should mention that Davis is the curator of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University where I teach; we’ve met. If anyone was going to make an anthology of Dobie, it should be Davis, who literally wrote the book about Dobie. His biography, J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind, a gem of literary biography, came out in 2009. The anthology’s selections range from Dobie’s most popular works to previously unpublished pieces. A large variety of sections have never appeared in book form. This book is not simply a “Greatest Hits” but a coalescence of a man, his ideas, and his passions. Broken into nine sections, Davis has compiled Dobie’s folklore, journalism, and even some of his personal letters into an impressive compilation. Some chapters are obvious choices, such as “Stompedes” from The Longhorns and “The Buried Gold at Fort Ramirez” from Coronado’s Children: Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasures of the Southwest. Of course not every famous story is included. Other beloved chapters from Tales of Old-Time Texas and A Vaquero of the Brush Country are absent. Dobie’s body of work is too vast to include everything. What is fascinating is that Davis has not limited this anthology to just Texas and the Southwest; he includes a healthy serving of Dobie’s essays, correspondence, and reporting from Europe during the World Wars. Also included are speeches [End Page 85] and articles concerning politics and education, which might not excite some but are important for painting a portrait of a man who cared deeply about people, literature, and conservation. Dobie led an active life. He fought for the desegregation of the University of Texas, and he worked to save the Longhorn cattle breed from dying out. Big Bend National Park also owes Dobie a debt. This anthology shows all of the man’s passions and philosophies. Dobie may have been known as “Mr. Texas,” but he was obviously a humanitarian before he was a regionalist. Some aspects of this book may upset Dobie purists. Davis has taken it upon himself to make various edits, which range from deleting redundancies to rearranging entire paragraphs. Though highly erudite, Dobie’s voice was formed more around the campfire than the peer-reviewed journal. The role of the editor (any editor) is always a delicate act between strengthening the author’s voice and completely altering it, though occasionally a complete overhaul is necessary. Davis’s edits go unnoticed in the best way. Honestly, Dobie reads better now than ever. Though a national Dobie renaissance is unlikely, this anthology will help seal his stature not just as a man of letters but a man of ideas. Literature, like music, goes through various trends and styles, and while some artists are rediscovered, others are forgotten, rejected, or flat-out cancelled. The selections in this book create a strong argument to keep Dobie alive and well into the twenty-first century. This handsome anthology is highly recommended for college courses on western literature and American folklore, and it will most likely become the new standard of all of Dobie’s works. Steven L. Davis makes a solid argument for why J. Frank Dobie is indeed essential. [End Page 86] William Jensen Texas State University...

The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past Robert Kramer (bio) Poetry and Freedom Discoveries in Aesthetics, 1985-2018 Paul Oppenheimer Anthem Press www.anthempress.com 213 Pages; Cloth, $125.00 This is a dazzling collection of essays, most of them published originally as book reviews. It deals with the nature of time, the comparative validity of induction and deduction, the reality of evil, and other profound philosophical questions. It also involves serious discussions of physics, history, government, psychology, art, music, and of course, literature, with a major focus on poetry. Works of British, American, German, French, and Italian literature are considered, as well as classical poetry. Obviously, in this brief review, from a collection of thirty-four articles I can only examine those that seem most significant. But even the "lesser" essays contain scattered aperçus and observations, launched in passing, but laden with insight and wisdom. "Eliot as Revolutionary," published in 1987, the centennial of Eliot's birth, begins the collection. The author's claim that T. S. Eliot "has never been more popular," was probably true at the time of writing but, unfortunately, I do not believe that it is true any longer." The poetintellectual is out of favor these days. Sincerity and passion are often seen as the major positive values to be sought in poetry. Wit, experience, learning, cultural awareness, and craft tend to be downgraded in favor of vague expressions involving love—or anger. Then Eliot's statement declaring himself a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion has not won him many new friends in the literary community. Allegations of anti-Semitism have also been damaging to his reputation, as well as feminist critiques of his "misogyny." Nevertheless, Eliot's achievements rise above anything on the contemporary scene. Oppenheimer's main thesis is "Eliot's poetry is revolutionary because it creates a new type of voice, a new type of fact and a new type of knowledge, all of which appreciably change the English language." This new type of voice is "a new universalizing and generalizing mode of utterance," as exemplified by Prufrock, who is "the twentiethcentury Everyman," "whose confidence in civilization and its nobility sickened and expired during four years of murder" and whose "values [End Page 25] floated free of their systems, which ceased to inspire belief." This is the voice "groping for meaning." The new sort of poetic fact consists of a deadpan association of past literature and present experience." Historical characters that might be termed archetypes reappear in a modern context, violating normal time sequence and naturalism. The author justifies this practice by asserting that "the aim of poetry at its highest is to turn history into a continuously present event." The third element in Eliot's revolutionary achievement is a new type of knowledge. By this the author means Eliot's realization that ordinary modern speech and the objects and processes of everyday urban life, including technology, can be fruitful for poetry. In the meantime, this insight has been exploited by countless modern poets. An essay on Ezra Pound is devastating in its negative portrayal of his character. But Oppenheimer's comments on his art in The Cantos is hardly more flattering as he remarks on "the frequent dullness of its lines, its clearly expressed bigotry, and the childishness of its theories of economics and history." He also mentions Pound's "occasional brilliance." It would have been interesting to read the author's perceptions in this regard. "Goethe and Modernism" offers a provocative historical precedent to Eliot's interweaving of poetry of the past with scenes of the modern world. In the late 1780's Goethe, having spent several months in Rome studying the monuments of antiquity and reading the Latin poets, composed twenty-four poems in the classical form of the elegy. The erotic aspects of these works combine Goethe's personal awakening and sexual liberation with the myths and poetry of the ancients. Oppenheimer maintains that "this is a type of modernist art indeed, in which the ancient, mythic and divine will blend—significantly—with the contemporary and the mundane. The ordinary, the quotidian, is to be lit up from within...

Poets of the samanids era

It is known that during the reign of the Samanids, great attention was paid to the development of science, art, literature and culture in general. As a result of the attention given to literature and culture, many generations of poets and writers have been formed and they have created unique works of spiritual wealth.During the period of the Samanids, literary literature, first in Arabic and later in the 10th century, lyrical and epic poetry in the Persian language, based on folk art traditions, developed. The works of Rudaki, Farrukhiy, Shahid Balkhi, Dakikiy, Abu Shukur Balkhi and Firdavsi were based on the traditions of the Samanids. At that time, the Arabic language was widely used, although the language of population was Sogdian, Tajik, and Turkish. Arabic was also the language of international communication, science, literature and religion in caliphate. It is not accidental that the sources contain information about 47poets who writes in Arabic language in Bukhara in IX-X centuries. It is known that the number of the most influential Persian-speaking poets in this period reached 200. This article is dedicated to study the life and work of poets of the Samanid period in Middle Asia. In this article along with the well-known poets, the works of the some poets who are far from attention of scientific and literary community, and the ideas expressed in their works. The article also states that the Samanids played an important role in the history of the early Middle Ages, Middle Asia reached cultural development during the period of the Samanids, Persian-Tadjik language emergenced from Iran and Bukhara has become a major cultural center of the East in the tenth century.

The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto

Reviewed by: The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto Erik Mortenson Steven Belletto. The Beats: A Literary History. Cambridge UP, 2020. x + 463 pp. Beat writers are often seen as postwar isolatos—Romantic figures of rebellion who turned their backs on postwar conformism to forge boldly ahead in new literary directions. As compelling as such formulations might be, they hide the Beats’ indebtedness to the culture that produced them. Steven Belletto’s The Beats: A Literary History offers a fresh perspective on these time-worn assumptions. By placing well-known as well as lesser-known Beat texts into a useful dialogue [End Page 806] with cultural concerns, Belletto has created a book that is extremely relevant and timely—a much-needed overview of Beat writing, it provides a general introduction while simultaneously making important claims that deserve further exploration. The book is divided into four parts that examine the Beats as both writers and social phenomenon and is organized, for the most part, chronologically. The first part starts with an engaging reading of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’s coauthored novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945. Belletto effectively demonstrates that, far from a simple chronicle of the famous murder of David Kammerer, which has become a staple of Beat lore, the novel rehearses the act of narrativization in ways essential for understanding the interplay between representation and lived reality in the Beat canon. Belletto concludes the section by tracing the beginnings of the Beat movement, putting it into dialogue with other mid-century avant garde literary communities such as the Black Mountain poets and the New York School. In the next part, Belletto provides an engaging examination of early Beat novels, which are only now getting the attention they deserve, then moves into more familiar territory with an examination of classic Beat texts by writers such as Burroughs, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Part 3, “The Beatnik Era and the Profusion of Beat Literature (1958-1962),” looks at early critical reviews, little magazines, and a series of discussions on lesser-known but equally-important Beat writers outside the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs triumvirate, from Diane di Prima and Gregory Corso, to the more obscure, such as David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn, and Sheri Martinelli. Part 4 is a shorter discussion of Beat politics but includes sections on Beat women’s writing, lesser-read Beat novels such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Her and Corso’s The American Express. It ends with an examination of how the 1960s Vietnam Era pushed many Beat writers into the overtly political, with special emphasis on Ginsberg and Ed Sanders. The work functions through a series of close readings coupled with either social or literary-historical contextualization, which provides readers with a sense of not only writers’ individual voices and preoccupations but also how they fit into the larger scene that is Beat. Ginsberg’s celebrated long poem Howl is discussed through an examination of publishing in and about San Francisco, the 6 Gallery reading and its aftermath, the textual construction of the poem, the poem as a “Secret history of the Beat Generation” (129), and its obscenity trial. This layered approach not only provides engaging new takes on Beat works but also reveals how Beat representations [End Page 807] are in dialogue with the contingencies of the postwar moment. At the same time, Belletto’s range is usefully broad. Readers are provided revealing discussions of classics such as On the Road and Naked Lunch but are likewise treated to analyses of seldom-discussed little magazines such as the parodic Sinking Bear, as well as important but unfortunately overlooked Beat authors such as Kay Johnson. Belletto includes those whose literary output was meager but who were nevertheless Beat figures worthy of attention and critical discussion. Though necessarily wide-ranging given its aim, the work could use more of a roadmap at times. Nevertheless, coupling interesting close reads with helpful contextualization makes for illuminating reading. Belletto’s approach has numerous advantages, not the least of which is that it allows him to sidestep problems that often plague other treatments of the Beats. Because of the confessional nature of their work and their...

Возрождение практики поэтической декламации в современном Китае на примере поэтической группы Фэньчуньгуань (г. Гуанчжоу)

The paper presents a description of the contemporary practice of poetry declamation in one of the literary communities of Guangzhou, among the poets who associate themselves with the tradition of the informal Fenchunguan group. The members of the group are authors and performers of classical poetry. They take an active part in the movement for the revival of traditional declamatory practices which were widely popular until the first decades of the 20th century. Their example allows us to trace some features of the declamation (oral presentation) used to promote poetry in classical formats (written texts) and thereby expand our knowledge of the written-oral dichotomy functioning within the Chinese tradition. The paper details the genealogy of the Southern School of text presentation, related to Fenchunguan, and analyzes how authors and performers appeal to the traditional practice of verbalizing poetry to construct and maintain a distinct “southern” (Cantonese) identity. This practice is utilized to create a distinct subspace within the system of national and local literature: quite a significant contribution is made by the original performing techniques of the Southern School (truncation of duration at the beginning of beats; repetition of rhyming words at the ends of phrases that coincide with the end of a poetic line, with a transition to a different pitch; merging adjacent lines into one phonetic-melodic unit) and the deliberate use of a local lect (Cantonese). In the process of (re)discovering the declamatory phenomenon, it becomes loaded with new aesthetic, social, practical and personal meanings. Those who participate in its functioning, thus, contribute to the great come-back of the classical type poetry and the spontaneous nature of declamatory practice.

Book Review

Invaluable Contribution to the Treasury of Translation Science
 Енциклопедія перекладознавства / пер. з англ., за ред. О.А. Кальниченка та Л.М. Черноватого. Том 1. Вінниця : Нова книга, 2020. 552 с.
 Reviewed by Tatiana Andrienko
 This year, 2020, has been marked by an outstanding event, long awaited by scholarly, linguistic and literary community: Volume 1 of Translation Encyclopedia edited by Oleksandr Kalnychenko and Leonid Chernovaty was published in Ukrainian by Nova Knyha Publishers, Vinnytsia, Ukraine. The book has seen light thanks to the leadership of the Ukrainian Translator Trainers’ Union (UTTU) headed by Dr. Leonid Chernovaty, as well as talents and efforts of a highly qualified team of translators and translation professors from major universities of Ukraine. It comprises a translation of The Handbook of Translation Studies (edited by Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010).
 By the depth of insights into problems, the variety of addressed topics, clarity and persuasiveness of argumentation, openness to innovation, as well as historical and geographical frameworks the reviewed book is definite to find its place among the major humanitarian publications, considerably broadening the horizons of Ukrainian scholars, students, and thinkers.
 The collection presents a wide range of articles summarizing the newest concepts and trends of Translation Studies, such as adaptation, self-translation, censorship, community and conference interpreting, technical translation, terminology and translation, multilingualism and translation, etc. Through the authors’ perspectives, the reader may follow the dynamics of changes in the content of translation science and its various approaches (descriptive, applied, interpretive, cognitive, functional) and its major concepts (such as translation quality, relevance, norms, units, strategies and tactics).
 Of great interest to the audience will be the scope of interdisciplinary fields, such as history of translation, translation didactics, ethics of translation, as well as articles unveiling the links of translation studies with semantics, semiotics, philosophy, hermeneutics, journalism, gender factors, ethics, sociology, ethnography and art. The Encyclopedia also embraces such fields of literary translation as postcolonial literature, censorship, children's literature, translating plays, humor and comics; it outlines the problems of industry-specific (political, technical, commercial, scientific, religious, legal translation, media interpreting) and even sign language translation. Much attention is devoted to practical applications of the latest translation research, as well as new technologies in translation, research and teaching translation methodologies, as well as the role of translation in foreign language teaching.
 The concepts and ideas in the book are presented by the outstanding translation theorists, many of whom are the authors and conceivers of new theories of translation and their major research fields: Fabio Alves & Amparo Hurtado Albir, Jorge Díaz Cintas, Riitta Jääskeläinen, Marianne Lederer, Jeremy Munday, Christiane Nord, Franz Pöchhacke, Christina Schäffner and others. A valuable feature of the ideas covered in the Encyclopedia is their openness to plurality of scholarly opinions, continuous dialogue over the major problems of translation theory and practice, which involves the reader into discussion and inspires the further search for solutions.
 The translation of the original theoretical insights into Ukrainian by seasoned scholars, professional translators and translation teachers will, first and foremost, open them to a broader audience, making their content more accessible and perceivable to the readers. But what is more important, it develops the conceptual network of translatology, enriching the Ukrainian terminology, and expanding the borders of the Ukrainian language scientific style. Besides being an invaluable source of theoretical knowledge, the book is also an exemplary application of theory into practice, a guide to the state-of-art choice of translation strategies, tactics and decisions, a model scientific translation to be emulated by practicing and aspiring translators.
 The 1st volume of Translation Encyclopedia, edited by Oleksandr Kalnychenko and Leonid Chernovaty will definitely find equally high acclaim of professors and students, theorists and practitioners, seasoned and aspiring scholars of translation and relevant fields. Welcoming the new pioneering publication, we strongly believe that it will initiate a tradition of publishing translated scholarly works in Ukraine, and look forward to the appearance of new volumes.

The stone wings of the ‘black swan’. On <i>Stoner</i> by J. Williams

M. Khlebnikov’s essay is devoted to the ‘rediscovered’ novel Stoner by the American writer J. Williams, published in 1965 but unknown to wider audiences until the early 2000s. Through detailed analysis of the novel’s plot and psychological structure the author offers his understanding of what caused the book to plunge into obscurity for many years and the meaning of its recent ‘rediscovery.’ According to Khlebnikov, the success of Williams’s novel is symptomatic of some serious process that has not come to an end: on the one hand, the enthusiasm for Stoner can be explained by a gradual ‘renewal of the canon,’ highly anticipated by critics, professors and other members of the literary community trying to bring back forgotten books; on the other hand, the attention towards Williams’s work may be viewed as a reaction to the excesses of Postmodernist aesthetics. Overwhelmed by excessive literariness and sheer concentration of quotes, one begins to hanker after ‘life that’s alive;’ thus the novel’s objective flaws, which inevitably caused it to flop in the past, are now hailed as its irrefutable merits.

Female images on historical background: victory of Omani writer Jokha al-Harti in The Man Booker International Prize - 2019

The article is devoted to the development of literature and, in general, the verbal culture of Oman from the early Middle Ages to the present day. For both objective and subjective reasons, the Omani national literature has not yet become an object of research by domestic specialists. However, the strengthening of all-round relations, including cultural, between our countries and the recognition of contemporary Omani writers by the international literary community necessitates such a study. The goal of the article was to highlight the main features that were inherent in the verbal work of Oman for centuries and for a long time constituted its originality, before Omani writers began to rapidly adopt the main creative tendencies of Europe. For this, as the most famous material, the work of the founder of the school of Omani poetry, the poet of the early XX century, Abu Muslim al-Bahlyani, was analyzed. Also the attempt to outline the rapid changes that have taken place in the literary environment of Oman over the past half century, and to answer the question of what caused the interest in the literature of the Gulf today was made. As part of the work was considered the novel Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harti, who received an international prize in 2019 and who today presents the women's prose of Oman, which simply did not exist in the recent past. The main conclusions that researchers come to are that Omani literature for a long time practically did not experience changes in its hermetic environment and acquired distinctive features, even if we talk only about the framework of the Arab world. And then, with the beginning of the Omani Renaissance, it made a sharp leap forward and began to be of interest due to the combination of contemporary artistic techniques and national colour, as in the work of Jokha al-Harti, whose last novel has been translated into two dozen languages.

On Refusing Canada, Canlit and More: National and Literary Identity in All Its Varieties

Abstract Two recent anthologies of Canadian writing – Refuse: CanLit in Ruins and Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry – reflect stances of resistance to mainstream institutional understandings of Canadian writing culture. They highlight recent scandals in academia and in literary communities, as well as highlighting the voices of Indigenous and women writers. These stances echo earlier forms of cultural revolution in Canada, in particular the Refus global manifesto, which provoked conventional Quebec society in the late 1940s. This paper contrasts these forms of refusal with a period in the 1950s and 1960s when influential Jewish writers, including Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, took a counter-cultural stance while appearing in mainstream venues offered to them by CBC television and radio.

Literary Planning and Development in Indonesia Through The Local Literature Community (LLC): A Challenge

Planning and fostering literature in Indonesia is very important as an effort to preserve it, especially regional literature and develop its existence. This is important because literature has a noble function, namely voicing the heart and phenomena that occur in society. We see that the development of literature in Indonesia such as "living reluctantly to death does not want", is in a situation and condition of concern. Attention from the government and the community is still very minimal. Even though literature in Indonesia still seems to exist, it is solely due to literary activists, both individuals and communities who still care and love literature. This presents a challenge. Challenges in planning and developing literature in Indonesia. It is time for literary issues in Indonesia to be seriously designed by involving people or people who have concerns. Does not always depend on the country. Therefore, independence is needed in discussing the planning and development of literature in Indonesia. In this case the direct involvement of activists / local literary communities is needed. This thinking originated from several existing communities and can survive and even flourish in producing writers and developing literary works in Indonesia. Thus, it is not impossible if the Local Literature Community will provide encouraging results on the development of literature in Indonesia.

Preserving Local Literary Community: Literary Planning and Policy as a Cultural Strategy in Indonesia

The development of literary communities in Indonesia which spread in every region receive less attention from the government. Literary communities can continue to productively produce works but struggle to survive. This article aims to providing recommendations related to planning and policy to overcome various kinds of Indonesian literary, especially problems in international arena, regional potentials, literary contests, or historiographic documentation of Indonesian literary works development. Literary communities should be optimally empowered through macro planning and policy to revitalize their self in each region. The author recommends several strategies to revitalize local literary communities, namely forming special institutions from independent governments, noting and archiving the development of the literary community from year to year, and setting aside grants for the literary community in each region. This recommendation is expected to overcome the problem of Indonesian literature in international arena.

Ускользающие читатели: трансформации популярной культуры на русском языке как вызов исследователям литературных практик

This article, which functions as a stand-alone analysis but also introduces this volume's cluster devoted to pop-cultural literary practices, highlights the possibilities and perspectives of an approach that puts the reader at the center of research on Russian-language literary practices and texts. The author focuses primarily on texts related to popular culture, but she also reflects on the contemporary reception of Russian classics and new novels. Drawing upon her experiences as researcher of online Russian-language literary communities that focus on fan fiction and manga, the author argues for methodologies that combine the underused classic paradigm of “Rezeptionsästhetik” with new research possibilities that follow “real” readers' traces online and offline. The author proposes Jenkins' concept of “participatory culture” as a tool that can potentially enrich scholarship on contemporary readers of Russian-language literature. As examples of such research perspectives, the author outlines three problems discussed within the framework of research on participatory cultures: new affective schemes of reading and writing, i.e. the “new emotionality” of popular literatures; the well-known problem of “treating characters as if they were real people” in popular reading; and the impact of participatory cultures on the transcultural flows of texts, ideas, and translations.

Krylov and Many Others: The Genesis and Meaning of Russia’s First Literary Jubilee

ABSTRACT This article is devoted to the 1838 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of I.A. Krylov’s literary career, an event that has been seen as representing a crystallization of Russia’s literary community’s sense of self and a point at which the state began to appreciate its importance.

Networks and fault lines in eighteenth-century Deccani literary communities: Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq’ and his circle

By the end of the eighteenth century, emerging states in South Asia drew on successive waves of migration to staff their institutions. Scholars, poets and bureaucrats in these new states were entrusted with the crafting and maintenance of new bureaucratic systems and cultural spaces. The attempts to create shared bonds in these new spaces, however, also created tensions between those who were recent arrivals in these communities and those whose families had settled there earlier. In the fiercely competitive world of late Mughal literary culture, the task of uniting these groups by creating new networks was complicated by divergent goals. I examine how the writing and dissemination of new histories, memoirs and literary works with a literary network connected with one author, Lachmī Narāyan ‘Shafīq,’ built a shared history in the eighteenth-century Deccan, but also created moments of acute conflict and dissent through its literary production. The competing needs for individual self-presentation and success in the competitive climate of the period undercut the desire to forge collaborative networks. The conflicting record of these collaborations and fault lines in the archival records of this period invite us to revisit the ways in which both collective and individual identities were forged in this period.

Seven Poems on Migration

Seven Poems on Migration Wendy Call (bio) and Irma Pineda (bio) Translator’s Introduction IRMA PINEDA (BINNIZÁ) has published nine books of poetry. Naxiña’ rului’ladxe’ / Rojo deseo (Red desire), published by Pluralia Ediciones in 2018, won Mexico’s Caballo Verde prize for best book of poetry. She currently serves as senior advisor for science, education, and culture for the MORENA Party in the Mexican National Congress. She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s National Association of Writers in Indigenous Languages (ELIAC) and was a 2013–15 member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In January 2020, she began a three-year term as one of two representatives of Latin American Indigenous peoples at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pineda writes bilingual poems in Spanish and in Diidxazá (also known as Isthmus Zapotec). Diidxazá has probably 75,000 speakers and is part of the family of languages known collectively as Zapotec, which has approximately 460,000 speakers (Sistema de Información Cultural [SIC] Mexico 2020). Pineda creates what she calls “parallel poems,” one version in Diidxazá and another in Spanish, reflecting her lived experience: a constant flow between two languages, two cultures, two cosmovisions. Educated in Spanish-only public schools in her hometown of Juchitán, Pineda learned to write in Isthmus Zapotec by looking up words one by one in books she borrowed from her neighbors’ bookshelves. At that time, there was no proper Isthmus Zapotec dictionary. Years later, Pineda’s mother, Cándida Santiago Pineda, founded the first (and still the only) library in her family’s neighborhood in Juchitán, in Mexico’s southeastern state of Oaxaca (Pineda 2012). Fewer and fewer children in Juchitán grow up speaking fluent Diidxazá. [End Page 145] Meanwhile, Diidxazá vocabulary shrinks under the relentless pressure of Spanish. Irma Pineda and other bilingual Indigenous writers in Mexico describe their literary work as “language rescue,” as well as artistic expression. That dual intent is often unappreciated by Mexico’s wider literary community, which long excluded them. Until recently, Mexican bookstores would shelve Indigenous writers’ fiction, poetry, essays, and drama under “Anthropology” rather than “Mexican Literature.” In a 2008 essay, Irma Pineda explained, “Indigenous Mexican cultures are developing a literature that recovers the cosmovisions and aesthetic values of our own cultures, strengthens our languages by reincorporating archaic words and creating neologisms, and also integrates the concerns of a globalized world with local community reflection” (Pineda 2008, 1). The poems published here are drawn from Pineda’s 2007 poetry collection, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos (Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like River Water), published by Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas (ELIAC), a national Mexican association of Indigenous-language authors. ELIAC began its own publishing house because traditional Mexican publishing houses did not take their members’ literatures seriously (Pineda 2012). Like many of Pineda’s poetry collections, Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ has a strong narrative arc; each poem serves as a microchapter in a highly compressed story in poems. It is a collection of persona poems told in two fictional voices from Pineda’s hometown: a person who has immigrated to the United States as an undocumented worker and that person’s partner, who has stayed at home. Pineda’s home community, Juchitán, has experienced heavy outmigration as people leave for jobs in Mexican cities, along the U.S.-Mexico border region, or in the United States. The current migration crisis in the United States—government officials separating families; government officials refusing to allow political, economic, and ecological refugees to apply for asylum; and children housed in cages—makes the poems of Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ urgently important. These persona poems weave a narrative about the physical and emotional challenges of migration under less dire conditions than those we are currently seeing. In the dozen years since these poems were first published in Mexico City, the situation for Pineda’s friends and neighbors who migrate to the United States has grown more awful than we could have imagined. Pineda...

Un-earthing the Eighteenth-Century Churchyard: Charlotte Smith’s Life Writing Among the Dead

The work of poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) has been consistently associated with life writing through the successive revelations of her autobiographical paratexts. While the life of the author is therefore familiar, Smith’s contribution to the relationship between life writing and death has been less examined. Several of her novels and poems demonstrate an awareness of and departure from the tropes of mid-eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’. Central among these is the churchyard, and through this landscape Smith revises the literary community of the ‘graveyard school’ but also its conventional life writing of the dead. Reversing the recuperation of the dead through religious, familial, or other compensations common to elegies, epitaphs, funeral sermons, and ‘graveyard poetry’, Smith unearths merely decaying corpses; in doing so she re-writes the life of the dead and re-imagines the life of living communities that have been divested of the humic foundations the idealised, familiar, localised dead provide. Situated in the context of churchyard literature and the churchyard’s long history of transmortal relationships, this article argues that Smith’s sonnet ‘Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789) intervenes in the reclamation of the dead through life writing to interrogate what happens when these consolatory processes are eroded.

Other White

In this hybrid personal/critical essay, novelist Monique Roffey reflects on Kei Miller's article, ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ (2018) and its suggestions about the ability of white Caribbean women to capture the language and lives of the people of the Caribbean. Referring back to the clash between Peter Hulme and E K Brathwaite in the pages of Wasafiri in the mid-1990s, Roffey draws on the work of Jean Rhys, Alison Donnell and Evelyn O'Callaghan to argue that there is a long tradition of positioning white women outside the bounds of Caribbean identity, a positioning that fails to recognise their unique relation to the Caribbean, Britain and the USA. Claiming her own identity as ‘Other White’, and therefore uniquely uncategorisable in/through the dominant discourses of race in the USA and UK, Roffey demands a more inclusive, ‘caribglobal’ understanding of the Caribbean literary community.

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education