Literary Form Research Articles

:Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850

:<i>Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850</i>

Review of Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, by Mary M. McGlynn

Review of Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, by Mary M. McGlynn (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022) 320 pp., ISBN 9780815637776, $80.00 (hardback)

Historical Detective Story and History as a Detective Story: to the Question of Cross-genre Synthesis

The article presents an analysis of the popular historical / retro detective genre, considered in terms of semantic fields shared with other literary genres, which for their synthesis. In particular, the motive of the activity of the past in the present and the future, present in almost all literary forms, is of a formative significance in the detective story. The plot is built on a retrospective reconstruction of events leading to a particular situation, typically a crime. This motive is crucial for historical and quasi-historical genres such as alternative history and cryptohistory, in which similar “detective” work on the reproduction of real or hypothetical events, their origins and results is carried out by the author himself and to some extent by the recipient. Such artistic research holds a significant place in the “investigation novel” genre, allowing the author to present his/her own scientifically based version of ambiguous historical material.The motive of understanding the true causes and nature of events is also present in the psychological novel, where the focus is shifted from the “external” mystery of the situation to the secrets of the depths of the human psyche. The fundamental principles of the detective genre reach considerable archetypal depth, based on such mythological and philosophical themes as the essence of time and the cause-and-effect relationships of events, the meaning of being and the essence of repentance. All this creates significant opportunities for philosophy, including historiosophical artistic research, allowing a complex synthesis of genres (most often: detective story – history – science fiction and fantasy), with extensive use of the achievements of psychological and social literature. All these forms of the artistic interpretation of the “past-in-the-future” are very relevant to the culture that is seeking new understanding of its own past and the history of international relations. It explains the relative popularity of the historical and retro-detective in contemporary Ukrainian literature.For Ukrainian authors, the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries remains the most attractive period. The strongest points of their novels are a significant amount of historical and local history information, as well as efforts to understand (and rethink) the imperial heritage in its various forms; after all, it is not only about the Russian but also about the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form

Abstract [The] significance [of Mark Twain’s Autobiography] for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.

Understanding People’s Occupations in their Proverbs: The Case of Fulɓe Ethnic Group

Literature and culture are two inseparable entities. The former exploits the latter and represents it in a literary form. This is so because literature is a product of people’s experiences either individually as in the case of written texts or collectively as in the case of orature of which proverb is a part. This paper aims at using Fulɓe proverbs to study the way they encapsulate and portray herding which is the major occupation of the Fulɓe. The proverbs were collected over a long period from various literature as well as from individuals by the researcher. The analysis which is based on the researcher’s cultural experiences as a native of Fulfulde (the language of the Fulɓe) as well as the use of literary criticism strategy reveals that herding is encapsulated in the proverbs as an important occupation of the Fulɓe. This is because both the cattle rearers and the cattle as well as the various activities and ‘paraphernalia’ involved in the cattle rearing are also encapsulated in the proverbs. This has further justified that literature can be used to study a societal culture.

Zwischen Folklore-Forschung, Anthropologie und Journalismus

Based on the publication Légendes et curiosités des métiers (1895) by the French folklorist Paul Sébillot (1843–1918), this article, in an exemplary and exploratory manner, discusses the connections between early works in the field of folklore studies and journalistic publication formats. The use of diverse source material and the conception of the publication as text oscillating between academic and ‘popular’ reading material are interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, they are examined concerning the scientific identity, the working method, and the oeuvre of Sébillot. On the other hand, they are placed in the context of recent considerations of nineteenth-century journalistic and literary formats as important source material for the historiography of social sciences.

'Yang Indah-Indah', Bahasa dan Ideologi dalam Pantun Perbahasan Parlimen Ke-14

As the oldest Malay literary art form, Pantun aspires to the creation of ‘yang indah-indah’. In addition to the harmonious musical elements, vivid alternate rhymes that are both perceived, the beauty of a Pantun lies in its ability to convey deductive meanings using solid and transcendental allegory. For this reason, politicians are inclined to make use of this art form as a discursive strategy in political discussions despite its brevity due to its accurate, concise, and captivating quality and its deep effect on readers. Consequently, discourse Pantun becomes one of the important sources of explanation of the phenomena of language and power that take place in political discourse. Therefore, this study aims to elucidate the relationship between language and power that exist in Pantun forms, as well as to analyse the principles that support the aesthetics of Pantun recited in the Fourteenth Parliament of Senate Assembly’s Hansard text. Van Djik’s Ideological Square Scheme within the Critical Discourse Analysis is applied, along with Muhammad Haji Salleh’s literary theory Puitika Sastera Melayu (PSM). In short, in addition to its procedural function, it was found that poetry plays an important role in generating binary polarization through various discursive strategy such as Evidentiality, Self-Glorification, Victimisation, Burden, Lexicalisation, Illustration, Argumentation, Generalisasion and Metaphore. The selection of Pantun in this study dynamically and relatively fulfilled all six principles of ‘yang indah-indah’ of PSM theory.

Narrating Cultural Displacement and (Dis)Locating Beur Identity in Fouad Laroui’s De Quel Amour Blessé

Abstract In this article, I analyse the prominent Moroccan-French author, Fouad Laroui’s novella De quel amour blessé (What Wounded Love, 1998) which narrates a story of an intercultural love affair in the diaspora, shaped in-between France and Morocco. This tragicomedy romance story, maps migrants’ cultural displacement and identity (re)construction. I look into how Maghrebian migrants’ French-born youths, known as the Beur generation, plot transcendent cultural and national routes of belonging. Through the protagonist’s case, the son of Moroccan migrants, the novella unfolds how postcolonial Maghrebian migration in France has engendered an intercultural and relational identity that belongs to different cultural subjectivities. It suggests a deconstruction of the idea that migrants’ identity are inextricably linked to a fixed culture, time and place, and instead, stresses identity as a process of becoming. Laroui’s narrative is a productive literary form of self-representation, of contesting homeland roots, (re)deconstructing identity and mapping intercultural attachments of belongings.

A Review of The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture

A Review of <i>The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture</i>

Between Nature and Spirit: Lucretian Resonances in Paulinus’ Carmen 23

Abstract This paper contributes to the reassessment of the role of Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Epicurean philosophy in early Christian writings by conducting a close study of Carmen 23 composed by the poet Paulinus of Nola. While previous scholarship has examined classical influences on Paulinus’ poetry, especially from Vergil, no existing study has attended to Paulinus’ incorporation of Epicurean elements. This paper argues that in Carmen 23 Paulinus incorporates Epicurean doctrines and Lucretius’ poetic imagery to appeal to an audience familiar with Epicurean ideas. Through the creative fusion of Epicurean physics with Christian metaphysics, Paulinus conjures up a poetic world in which the natural and spiritual realms constantly interact. While using Lucretian imagery to direct his audience’s gaze toward the natural world, Paulinus nevertheless reveals a higher reality in which the invisible operation of God’s spirit governs and perfects the mechanism of nature. In thus stretching his poetic imagination to encompass the working of nature and spirit, Paulinus invents a new eclectic literary form and a kind of physiological miracle account that blends naturalism and mysticism. As such, Carmen 23 attests to Paulinus’ literary achievement in repurposing a classic of Epicurean philosophy and Latin poetry for Christian panegyric and hagiography.

Reconsidering Polar Literature in the Anthropocene: Locating Hope in the Works of Jean McNeil and Barry Lopez

Abstract This article examines the capacities of polar literature within an interwoven framework to think through climate crisis and human involvement therein in the midst of the Anthropocene. Ice Diaries (2016) and Arctic Dreams (1986) provide the opportunity to reconsider Earth’s cryosphere in literary form as mediated places that participate in the global network of the planetary imaginary (Clarke). Examining polar literature through a reparative lens (Sedgwick) enables the tutelary aspects of both landscapes to emerge as they provide strategies for investigating present and future trouble (Haraway). Employing theories from Earth System Science and spatial studies, this paper locates the potential for hope in remote regions that are nonetheless embedded within global realities—climatic and political—through the sharing of stories that encourage life to flourish even in what appear to be the harshest of circumstances. (IMK and IS)

On Dissonance and Late Style: Spenser with Theodor W. Adorno

This essay makes a case for a reassessment of The Faerie Queene in light of Adorno’s philosophical thinking about dissonance. Focusing on Book II, I analyze Spenser’s productive use of dissonant elements at the different levels of narrative and style, which produce a similar effect to the alienating techniques that Adorno praises in literary and musical forms of expression. I then consider Adorno’s discussion of dissonance as an essential aspect of late style and bring it to bear on Spenser’s poetic practice in the conclusive Mutabilitie Cantos of the epic. I suggest that this comparative analysis may not only open up new avenues for interpreting Spenser’s epic but also help us to reassess the significance of Adorno’s more neglected discussions of dissonance in his minor works of literary criticism, which gesture toward the importance of this concept as a tool for textual analysis.

What Scene, What’s Seen, What’s in A… Word: Thoughts in and on Artists’ Writings

Abstract While the humanities have become a multimodal domain in which visual culture is immanent and various new cross-disciplinary perspectives and theories are being employed to investigate the relationship between artistic and literary forms of representation, artists’ writings remain understudied and underappreciated. Art/literature studies often proceed by pairing a specific work of art with a particular literary text or an aesthetic style with a poetics or a narrative technique, but they rarely consider situations when both elements of the chosen pair come from the same source — an artist-writer. But questions related to whether and how an artist’s ‘natural’ visual disposition may impact on how she/he approaches and handles verbal language and vice versa need to be asked to illuminate what is still a shadow zone in word and image studies. Citing examples of major representatives of American modernism in art and literature, the essay addresses some of the problematic issues involved in studying verbal expression by visual artists and the cogency of posited correlations between the painterly and writerly intuitions and competences at play in artworks and texts produced by artist-writers.

Stolen childhood. War memories of children and young people from 1945-1946

The article analyses a collection of school essays of world-wide uniqueness, written by Polish children and young people in the years 1945–1946. This collection consists of two independent collections. The first is the 99 wartime memories of pupils from Greater Poland schools, created between May and September 1945. The second contains over 1,200 war memories written by pupils from schools in the Kielce region (south-eastern part of Poland) in the second half of 1946. A common feature of wartime memories is that the young authors combine elements of private written forms with elements of text intended to function in the public space (public literary forms). They smoothly switch between confessional style, full of dramatic details related to the war, and the style typical of a school essay, the aim of which was to test language skills and proficiency in creating a story based on real events. The themes in both collections were imposed on pupils by a programme of writing campaign for writing war memories. Thanks to the conditions provided by the educational system of the time, pupils usually honestly and directly described the traumatic war experiences which they had participated in. In the article, wartime memories in the form of a school essay are treated as a record of a microhistory, containing many details related to local wartime events, such as round-ups, public executions, secret education, and Nazi violence against adults and children.

Vibrancy and Desolation in Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa (2020)

Mugre rosa (2020), by Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías, portrays a dystopian world devastated by a plague linked to environmental toxicity. It is also, I argue, a work of extraordinary vividness that evinces a concern about literary form and language. Trías’s style – her intricate use of description, formal and structural innovations, and figurative expression— possesses a vibrancy that works against the desolation enfolding through the diegesis. This essay probes how the novel’s concerns intersect with questions explored in fields such as ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. It also delves into the particularities of Trías’s style, parsing the implications of her use of language and form, which alternatively expand, nuance, transform, and collide with premises established at a diegetic level. Throughout the discussion, attention is given to the novel’s affective resonances and to its engagement with the nonhuman. The essay seeks to illuminate how Mugre rosa intervenes in the debate about the agency of literature in the Anthropocene.

The Real World in Fiction: A Comparative Literary Perspective on the Portrayal of China in the Early Twentieth-Century in Midnight and on a Chinese Screen

Both Chinese and foreign writers cast their eyes on China during the early twentieth-century, when China was at an intersection of feudalism and modernism. They depicted and recorded this complex period from their own perspectives in different literary forms. Among them, Mao Dun and Maugham present the 1920s and 1930s China from different angles through their literary works Midnight and On a Chinese Screen, respectively. There are lots of research analyzing the two works from various perspectives, but few put them together by doing comparative studies of the early twentieth-century Chinese society and people. Therefore, this essay aims to analyze the two works together from a comparative perspective and offer a more comprehensive view through the analysis. Besides official historical records, literary and visual arts are also chroniclers of history. Fictional works might also provide the real world, even with detailed social contradictions, and even the inner world of people under specific writing purposes, like what Mao Dun and Maugham held. This comparative research focuses on the depiction of China from both domestic and foreign perspectives and analyzes the narrative of the two literary works from the fictional realism in characters as well as social and natural environments. Since the two writers held different viewpoints with diverse social backgrounds, their understanding of Chinese society and people varied accordingly. Through the comparative analysis, this research explores a great deal of the historical value of these two literary works that offer a more enlightened way to link the real historical events and the fictional characters, as well as a fuller picture of China at that time.

Loss and Pursuit: A Greimas Structuralist Analysis of the Japanese Anime Violet Evergarden in the Feminist Perspective

Anime can, to a certain extent, symbolize the growth of Japanese feminism as one of the most significant literary creative forms in contemporary Japan. Although the trend of female characterization in anime in recent years is diversified, there is a lack of independent female characters that break through the traditional gender division. A hugely popular anime called Violet Evergarden in 2018 tells the story of a young girl named Violet who lost her arms in a war, but fortunately regained robotic arms and started to help others write letters. In the process, she, who once knew only combat skills, gradually learned to express her emotions. Her story is a journey of seeking out the true meaning of love. The anime adaptation focuses on her growth and inner self, breaking the gender stereotype and showing Girl Power. This essay examines the feminist implications of Violet Evergarden, revealing its role in the growth of Japanese feminism by using Greimas' actantial model and the semiotic square following structuralism's theoretical thinking.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

‘To Learn from Nature, not to Exploit Her : Discerning Postcolonial Green Speculations in Vandana Singh s Indira s Web and Widdam

As a new generation of writers and artists from the Global South deal with the effects of human-caused environmental damage and climate change, they rely heavily on science fiction and fantasy as a genre to show the most important parts of the Anthropocene. Due to the geographical peculiarity and history of the colonial past, the Global South experiences inequitable effects of the Anthropocene as compared to the Global North. Therefore, speculative climate fiction from the Global South demands a critical interpretation contextualized in the geopolitics of the Global North and the Global South. The paper discusses the manner in which science fiction anchors ecological consciousness in the narratives from the Global South and further strives to depict the specific traits of Global South SF that make it different from Global North SF. This study intends to investigate two short stories, Indira’s Web and Widdam, by an Anglophone science fiction writer, Vandana Singh. The paper demonstrates how Singh’s stories, firstly, subvert the hegemony of western sciences by legitimizing indigenous knowledge systems as scientific, rational, and eco-friendly, and, secondly, criticize the need for technological and neo-colonial advancements at the cost of our environment. With the analysis of these stories, it would be argued that postcolonial futuristic fiction not only acts as a tool to question anthropocentrism but also functions as an appropriate literary form for enunciating environmental crises and climate change affecting the Global South.

This Shall Be Your Wisdom (Deut. 4:6): The Wisdom of Deuteronomy Amidst Changing Paradigms for Hebrew Wisdom

Abstract The death of ‘Wisdom Literature’ as a literary genre that has controlled understandings of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible has resulted in a need for new investigations of the concept of wisdom in biblical books outside the ‘Wisdom Literature’, which have often been considered to be ‘influenced’ by the artificial genre of ‘Wisdom Literature’. This paper will analyse the relationship between wisdom and law in the book of Deuteronomy, in order to show how freeing the concept of wisdom in Deuteronomy from the influence of ‘Wisdom Literature’ opens up perspectives to appreciate the wisdom of Deuteronomy on its own terms as a unique contribution to conceptions of Hebrew wisdom. Rather than thinking of the wisdom of Deuteronomy as being influenced by ‘Wisdom Literature’, the wisdom terminology in Deuteronomy is better accounted for by Deuteronomy’s rhetorical appropriation of the ancient Near Eastern Instruction and Law Code literary forms, each of which focuses on transmitting wisdom for successful living. The wisdom of Deuteronomy, which is cultivated throughout the book in the literary forms of Instruction and Law Code for the transmission of knowledge and intellectual skill in Torah interpretation and application, is distinct yet complementary to the wisdom found in the traditional ‘Wisdom’ books, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes.