Literary Project Research Articles

Dire les mystères en latin, et en vers, au IVe s. apr. J.C. : À propos d’orgia (Aviénus et Optatien Porphyre) et d’Eleusis (Claudien)

Abstract In this article, I first examine the use of the word orgia in the context of Optatian’s, Avienus’ and Claudian’s poetry. I then evaluate the references to the cult of Eleusis occurring in the proemium of the first book of Claudian’s Rape of Proserpina. By these two test cases, I try to survey the way in which the vocabulary of the mystery cults is used by Latin poets writing in the 4th century AD, a time punctuated by events which had progressively pushed the mystery cults to the margins of the Empire. In these texts, which might possibly mirror contemporary religious issues—although they are, first and foremost, literary projects shaped by their own models and narrative mechanisms—the mystery ceremony is sometimes likened to a theatrical performance; the emphasis is placed on the collective sensory experience, on the occult nature of these practices, as well as on their etiological aspects and symbolic meaning.

‘Then … Horror! Horror!': Laughter, Terror and Rebellion in the Unpublished Plays of H.I.E. Dhlomo

ABSTRACT The New African poet, playwright, and intellectual H.I.E. Dhlomo is often cited as one of twentieth-century South Africa’s most important cultural figures. In contrast to his celebrated theoretical writings, however, Dhlomo’s actual literary work tends to receive mixed reviews from scholars. This paper seeks to reassess Dhlomo’s much-maligned use of Romantic and Gothic tropes by focusing on two of his lesser-known plays: Men and Women and The Expert. These plays, which date from towards the end of Dhlomo’s playwriting career, have never been published, yet reveal a great deal about both the nature of his literary project and the conditions of Black cultural production in segregation-era South Africa. Indeed, I argue that these plays engage in some of the most radical social critiques found anywhere in pre-apartheid South African drama, and, furthermore that the melodramatic and incongruous elements of these works are essential to their intended impact. Having experienced segregation-era South African society as an unfolding nightmare, for H.I.E. Dhlomo laughter and horror were intimately related. Ultimately, I contend that Dhlomo’s linkage of laughter to the supernatural and the Gothic marks an important moment in South African history, illustrating powerfully the dashed hopes and aspirations of the New African generation within the context of tightening white philanthropic control.

Response to “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception” by Ryan Milov-Córdoba

Response to “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception” by Ryan Milov-Córdoba Lieselot De Taeye, Respondent In “Shahrazad’s Enormous Wings: A Parable of Reception,” Ryan Milov-Córdoba examines the reception of The Arabian Nights by Latin-American magical realist writers from the twentieth century. His article analyzes Jorge Luis Borges’s reflections on the infinity of the Nights, Gabriel García Márquez’s recollections of learning how to read the book, Isabel Allende’s thoughts on Shahrazad as a feminist rebel, and Arturo Uslar Pietri’s framing of the book as a historical predecessor of the Venezuelan short story. Milov-Córdoba mostly points out how these authors integrated The Arabian Nights into their own personal literary projects, and how that made them lean towards reductive readings and stereotypical representations. He thus highlights the missed opportunities of connection; the moments where Arab-American conversations or collaborations could have been established but were not. Milov-Córdoba especially reflects on the absence of non-American interlocutors: leading literary voices from the Arab- and Persian-speaking world were not part of the dialogue that defined the reception of The Arabian Nights in twentieth-century mainstream magical realism. Neither Allende, Borges, Márquez, nor Pietri engaged Arab or Persian authors in their writings about The Arabian Nights (also called The One Thousand and One Nights). In his piece, Milov-Córdoba retroactively establishes this dialogue, this South-South conversation, by juxtaposing the impressions of the Latin American writers with the words of three interpreters of the Nights from Arabic-speaking countries: Hussain Haddawy, Muhsin Mahdi, and Abdelfattah Kilito. Studying Congolese magical realist novels in a Western context can equally lead to stereotypical representations. Centering European literary history, which is always a risk, alienates the text from the West African environment in which it emerged and continues to circulate. Not allowing resonances with Congolese culture and religion to inform the readings of Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie (1979), the novel I discuss in this special issue, would be a continuation of colonialist behaviour. Tansi himself actually pushed against this way of reading his work. Although he debuted as a novelist with the French house Seuil, thus engaging with a global-ist, mostly Western-inspired literary tradition, his poetry was written in his native tongue of Kikongo, and he was also the founder of the popular theatre company Rocado Zulu Théâtre. By staging his plays in Brazzaville, in the Republic of the Congo, he could reach his own people first, before the work could be recuperated and [End Page 226] integrated into a more Western framework. I am aware that my traditional academic article, even if it leans on the insights of Congolese scholars, does not entirely counteract this tendency. Its contribution lies mostly in contextualizing Tansi’s work and letting it challenge extant narrative theory. Milov-Córdoba’s article operates on a different level and in a more expansive way. He, for instance, cites Iraqi translator Husain Haddawy’s memories of reading The Arabian Nights and points out the strong links Haddawy’s text establishes between the Nights and contemporary storytelling traditions in Iran. In contrast to my article, Milov-Córdoba’s aim is not strictly to describe and historicize, but, as Haddawy’s text is not related to magical realism, it is rather to enlarge the framework for future research on magical realism. Milov-Córdoba’s reception history of The Arabian Nights thus becomes an act of reception in and of itself-a “parable”-as it creates an alternative framework that can guide future readers, scholars, and magical realist writers. The comparison between the personal testimonies of the Arab speaking and Latin American writers is presented as a way to bridge macropolitical divides between the Arab and American world. Milov-Córdoba’s text does not only analyze the importance of the personal and the lived experience, but also enacts it. As a scholar himself, he acknowledges the influence of his own background and life; moreover, his personal position is foregrounded as the starting point for knowledge creation. Reflecting on all of this, it seems that the balance Tansi found...

Script Choice as a Defamiliarization Technique in Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango

ABSTRACT This article explains how writing-restricted variations in contemporary Japanese literature can be central to the author’s overall literary project, using Kuroda Natsuko’s ab sango (2012) as an example. Kuroda’s novel is written in a highly experimental style that deviates from standard Japanese writing conventions in many ways, including direction of writing, the use of Western punctuation marks, and script choice between hiragana and kanji. While many readers dismissed her style as being difficult for the sake of being difficult, this article will argue that Kuroda’s writing represents an important example of script choice being used as a defamiliarization technique – Kuroda’s unusual script choices make familiar words unfamiliar to the reader. In doing so, Kuroda defamiliarizes the Japanese language itself, revealing the arbitrariness of script choice-related rules. She also brings awareness to the fact that the Japanese writing system contains many possible ways of representing the language, beyond what is most used today. I conclude the article by comparing Kuroda’s literary aims to those of contemporary exophonic authors such as Tawada Yoko and Hideo Levy, whose works also play with the conventions of written Japanese.

„Rzuć K8 na inicjatywę”, czyli o narracji drugoosobowej w grach fabularnych

 The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of using the second-person narrative in tabletop role-playing games. Despite its ambiguous status in literary projects, the dyadic narrative is the basic component of the phenomenon of pen-and-paper RPGs. In the intro­duction, the author briefly introduces the specificity of text-based narrative games and the history of their creation. Then the most popular systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, were characterized, as well as examples of games created in Poland. To illustrate the phenomenon, official manuals, and recordings of sessions of the most popular Polish artists published on YouTube were used. When discussing examples of second-person narration, the author draws attention to its occurrence in guides and in the statements of the player functioning as the Game Master. The Game Master is a specific narrator of heroes’ adventures, who in his action smoothly moves between different types of narratives (first, sec­ond and third person): he describes the scenery and actions of NPCs and creatures, constructs statements of characters not guided by other participants of the session, but also comments on the actions and commands of player-created heroes. It is precisely in this last type of activity that the dyadic narrative is extremely important. In the statements of the Game Master, it manifests itself primarily as a commentary on the actions of the characters, the continuation of the plot after the actions and statements of the players, and when consulting the heroes’ further actions, but also serves technical communication related primarily to the mechanics of throwing polyhedral dice. The use of a second-person narrative in RPGs primarily contributes to increasing the immersion, the involvement, and the sense of interactivity between players.

Czy twórczość Jana Kochanowskiego może być źródłem poznania prawa?

The cognitive function of literary works is usually directly related to the social, historical or cultural context, reflecting, by means of literary fiction, the knowledge of what actually happened, or what could happen, being an expression of the projection of reality in the literary work. In this sense, it is possible for the creator of a literary work to relate to the actual reality in which he operated, legal and systemic relations, if their presentation in the presented work is important for the literary fiction that creates the work. Therefore, if we assume that a literary projection, even a fictional one, presents a sequence of events, and at the same time is embedded in a specific context, appropriate for the time of the work’s creation, in this case also covering legal and systemic relations relevant to the epoch, a literary work may thus fulfill a cognitive function. in the field of learning about the history of law or the political system. Based on these assumptions, the tragedy of Jan Kochanowski, The Greek Envoys, presented in 1578 in the presence of the royal couple during the wedding ceremonies of the then Crown Deputy Chancellor, Jan Zamoyski with Krystyna Radziwiłł, was examined. The current view that the work of J. Kochanowski reflected in the sphere of its literary fiction the course of the sessions of the former Polish Sejm from the second half of the 16th century, which its creator used to present political and ideological issues of that era, was verified in relation to the concept of the sources of learning about law. The result of examining the literary work of J. Kochanowski, especially those parts in which it was possible to demonstrate the Author’s reference to legal and systemic issues, is the recognition that the manner of their presentation can be treated as a special, historical source of learning about law, in which an important role, as an instrument for learning about it, it plays the historical as well as the political context, which is the basis of literary fiction.

Parcours transfrontalier de l’enfance : analyse comparée de trois ouvrages à portée autofictionnell

Travel has become a daily act in contemporary societies. These displacements have tiggered a paradigm shift echoed in the literature. This is how, in the space of Francophone creation, the literary corpus of xenographies evokes the traces of current migratory processes while drawing a new socio-cultural landscape. There are many perspectives that we could sketch in this context, but we wanted to focus on the literary projection of the cross-border experience of childhood outlined in three auto-fictional writing projects. To do this, we will analyze the first novels by Maryam Madjidi (Marx et la poupée, 2017) and Hadia Decharrière analyze the first novels by Maryam Madjidi (Marx et la poupée, 2017) and Hadia Decharrière

Literary Projections of French Culture in 18th-Century Russian Writing: Between Gallomania and Gallophobia

Using the example of the literary projections of French culture on the Russian literature of the eighteenth century, this article examines the evolution of Gallomania as the most important phenomenon of Russian noble culture. The aim of the article is to study the main stages of Gallomania in Russian literature from A. Kantemir to I. A. Krylov. An analysis of these stages makes it possible to trace how Russian literature, through ridiculing various types of Russian Gallomaniacs and types of Gallomaniac behaviour, made a decisive turn from Gallomania in its full sense to Gallophobia as an almost complete rejection of French culture and refusal to follow the precepts of Paris in all spheres of life — from politics to fashion. The main methods used in this work are the methods of cultural-historical, typological, and conception-character analysis of texts. The typology of the image of the Gallomaniac as a “Russian Frenchman”, which received various cultural forms in the 1730s–1750s, 1760s–1770s, and 1790s–1800s, determined various concept-character orientations of literary texts of the eighteenth century. Between the 1730s and 1750s, the dominant image of the Gallomaniac was the petit maître, for whom Gallomania was associated with objects of the “fashionable vocabulary”. The image of such a petit maоtre can be found in the satires of A. Kantemir, epistles, and comedies of A. P. Sumarokov. In the 1760s–1770s, fashionable Gallomania was replaced by ideological Gallomania, which included both the philosophy of Voltaireanism and the reaction to the creation of a cultural myth about Eastern Europe in Western Europe, of which Russia was an example. This stage in the development of Gallomania is characterised by the emergence of a pronounced Gallophobic mood, which is reflected in the works of D. I. Fonvizin and N. I. Novikov. Finally, the third period of Gallomania in the context of an aggravated military and political confrontation between Russia and France is characterised by accentuating the gender component, when mainly fashionable women and girls (Fashionable Wife by I. I. Dmitriev, comedies by I. A. Krylov) became the medium of Gallomanic mentality, who do not have corresponding male parallels.

LITERARY PROJECTION OF PANDEMIC IN MARLEN HAUSHOFER’S NOVEL «THE WALL»

The context of a historical period may provoke unexpected interpretation of this or that book because of its parallels with current social phenomena. The plot of M. Haushofer’s novel has such distinct similarities to the present reality, that it makes scientists reinterpret it. Though this literary work was published in German in 1963, it was translated into Ukrainian in 2020, that explains a small number of studies, devoted to its analysis. The number of the reviews on this novel has recently grown in English-language literary sources, emphasizing the need of reinterpretation of the novel in the context of the spread of coronavirus infection, that proves topicality of the theme of the article. The purpose of the study is to examine the specificity of a literary projection of pandemic in M. Haushofer’s novel «The Wall», identifying and analyzing literary versions of mythoscenarios in it. Yu. Vyshnytska’s concept described in her monograph «Mythological scenarios in the modern literary and publicist discourse» was chosen as a theoretical foundation of the research. The following methods of literary analysis – intertextual, semiological, psychoanalytical and poetological – were used in the course of the research. At the beginning of the novel «The Wall» there are elements of the mythoscenario of the end, based on eschatological plots. This mythoscenario in M. Haushofer’s work is a part of a dualistic model together with the mythoscenario of the beginning which is a universal worldview model. The dystopia «The Wall» can be considered an original literary projection of pandemic that is visible most distinctly in the plot of isolation, in articulation of the basic archaic opposition «life–death». The work of the Austrian author vividly visualizes it in the mythoscenarios of the beginning, the end and initiation which show diffusion of the structural contours and transgenic features – the ability of one mythoscenario to merge with another. Interpretation of these mythoscenarios allows identifying the analyzed novel as an example of neomythological literature. M. Haushofer’s dystopia opens space for literary studies of different aspects, in particular, prospects of further research can be seen in psychoanalytical investigation of the character-narrator’s state caused by isolation.

Enjeux et défis de la mobilité sociale dans Pour que je m’aime encore de Maryam Madjidi

Globalization and migratory flows have brought about the progressive transformation of societies. Consequently, many heterogeneous scenarios have been created in cross-border spaces. In this context, literature has become an archipelago of reflection where the conceptual challenges inherent to mobility are exposed from a humanist social perspective. There are many axes of analysis that we could trace in this regard, but we would like to focus on the literary projection of the cross-border experience of Maryam Madjidi, who explore the identity con-struction under the prism of autofiction.

Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All

Dondog and the Post-Exotic After All Églantine Colon (bio) Nearly twenty years after SubStance devoted a special issue to the contemporary French writer (and translator) we know as Antoine Volodine, we are thoroughly pleased to be publishing in this issue the opening of Dondog, a novel that Ben Streeter has translated with inspired exactitude and brilliant tonal precision. In English or in French, entering Dondog is not unlike entering any other "post-exotic" text (I will come back to this label shortly). One has to learn how to orient oneself to the ruination of Modernity, within the dysfunctional memories of post-traumatic subjects, between dark humor and luminous despair, in the liminal space between life and death, between humanity and animality, and, in the odd beauty of a language that gives transmissible form to the experience of our contemporary hellscape. Post-Exoticism has a soft spot for odd numbers, especially palindromes, and it was fitting that, in 2003, SubStance devoted its Issue 101 to Volodine. At the time, his highly singular literature was barely known in the United States. In France, the "happy few" who had discovered Volodine through his early Science Fictional trilogy in the mid-1980s had grown into a solid general readership. Volodine had theorized his fictional literary movement in 1998 and he started publishing post-exotic texts in the name of his three heteronyms, Ellie Kronaeur, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassman, becoming the object of significant, albeit dispersed, academic curiosity. In 1999 and 2000, Post-Exoticism gained clear critical recognition when his Des anges mineurs (later translated as Minor Angels) was awarded a couple of important awards (the Prix Wepler and the Prix du livre Inter). In the U.S., though, the post-exotic readership was limited to a few Francophones in the know, and to the lucky readers who had stumbled upon Volodine's Naming the Jungle, the only post-exotic novel [End Page 90] then translated into English. With its Issue 101, SubStance was therefore introducing Volodine's literature to an American, if not an international, academic audience, thus increasing the need for the translation into English of this massively compelling literary project. To some extent, this special issue also participated in constituting Post-Exoticism as an academic object—not that no one had written on Volodine before, but an edited volume had yet to take shape in a major academic journal, including in France. Since then, twenty-seven texts have been added to the post-exotic archive, winning a few more awards—the prestigious Medicis Prize for Terminus Radieux and the Prix Albertine for Bardo or not Bardo, among others—and a dozen books signed Volodine, Draeger, and Bassman are now available in English.1 According to Volodine, Post-Exoticism will find its point of achievement when the magical number 49 is reached: 49, seven squared, is symbolic of rebirth in the Buddhist tradition, putting a twist to the very idea of an ending. Within an ultimate opus titled, Retour au goudron (literally, "back to the tar"), the very last sentence of Post-Exoticism will be: "Maintenant, je me tais" ("Let me shut up now"). The extreme care with which Volodine is constructing his literary universe makes Post-Exoticism an ideal academic object, even though it has already been theorized by the author himself and contains the critique of its critics. In France, Volodine is one of very few living authors to whom several monographs and edited volumes have been devoted.2 Here in the U.S., giving proof that Post-Exoticism speaks to the archaeologies of our times, there has been much variation in the angles from which it has been academically approached. These variations may correspond to changing trends in the humanities, from theories of the novel and narrativity, to world literature, philosophy, political theory, care studies, new materialisms, and, increasingly, sexual violence and ecocriticism.3 But they all bear witness to the richness of the analysis that goes, book after book, into the composition of Post-Exoticism as an allegorical distortion of our precarious present. The critical traction generated by Post-Exoticism can also be explained by the fact that it presents academic discourse with an uncanny version of...

Dispossessing Animism: Zong! And Spiritual Baptism

This essay intervenes in the emerging discussions around animism by situating animism within the ongoing projects of colonial bio- and necropolitics. While 'animism' is often taken to denote pre- or anti- or counter-modern cosmologies that promise an alternative to the ontologies that sustain colonial violence, it has been recognised that there are in fact a variety of ways in which animism is 'built in' to modernity, and in which modernity itself is constituted as animistic. This essay pulls this recognition in a new direction by developing a theory of the 'distribution of the animate', describing a system of animist perception and expression by which different kinds of bodies, beings and forces are positioned and differentiated. This theory allows me to explore a shared zone in which the apparently relentless materialism of colonial biopolitics and the supposedly spiritual orientation of animism meet, collide and intertwine. This zone appears in this essay in a range of moments and modes, including the 'word' of possession in new world conquest, the anthropological invention of animism itself, the anticolonial resistance and spirit possession of the Hauka, the transubstantiative magic of chattelisation and, via an extended close reading, the text and performance of Marlene NourbeSe Philip's long poem, Zong!. I show that animism is not really the other to colonial modernity: to say this is to buy into a foundational colonial myth. Instead, what is at stake in the theoretical construct of animism are the qualities that distinguish one kind of life from another. The colonial systems for knowing the other (enshrined in anthropology) and dominating the other (exemplified by biopolitics) invent, recruit and disavow animism in order to naturalise the denial of personhood to colonialism's others. My argument is that for animism to escape these systems of possession it has to become something other than animism, by affirming a dispossession (rather than distribution) of animacy. I locate this dispossession in the sound and performance of Zong! and associate it with the poem's refusal of more familiar literary projects that try to reclaim and restore voice and personhood.

Dispossessing Animism: Zong! And Spiritual Baptism

This essay intervenes in the emerging discussions around animism by situating animism within the ongoing projects of colonial bio- and necropolitics. While 'animism' is often taken to denote pre- or anti- or counter-modern cosmologies that promise an alternative to the ontologies that sustain colonial violence, it has been recognised that there are in fact a variety of ways in which animism is 'built in' to modernity, and in which modernity itself is constituted as animistic. This essay pulls this recognition in a new direction by developing a theory of the 'distribution of the animate', describing a system of animist perception and expression by which different kinds of bodies, beings and forces are positioned and differentiated. This theory allows me to explore a shared zone in which the apparently relentless materialism of colonial biopolitics and the supposedly spiritual orientation of animism meet, collide and intertwine. This zone appears in this essay in a range of moments and modes, including the 'word' of possession in new world conquest, the anthropological invention of animism itself, the anticolonial resistance and spirit possession of the Hauka, the transubstantiative magic of chattelisation and, via an extended close reading, the text and performance of Marlene NourbeSe Philip's long poem, Zong!. I show that animism is not really the other to colonial modernity: to say this is to buy into a foundational colonial myth. Instead, what is at stake in the theoretical construct of animism are the qualities that distinguish one kind of life from another. The colonial systems for knowing the other (enshrined in anthropology) and dominating the other (exemplified by biopolitics) invent, recruit and disavow animism in order to naturalise the denial of personhood to colonialism's others. My argument is that for animism to escape these systems of possession it has to become something other than animism, by affirming a dispossession (rather than distribution) of animacy. I locate this dispossession in the sound and performance of Zong! and associate it with the poem's refusal of more familiar literary projects that try to reclaim and restore voice and personhood.

Betty A. Schellenberg. Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790.

Betty A. Schellenberg. Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790.

Literature and Project-Based Learning and Learning Outcomes of Young Children

In the early years, children learn by taking an action and touching opportunities which experiences the world as much as possible. It is an internal process that allows children to meaningfully reflect their experiences from abstract to further learning. Literature and project-based learning management is a learning approach that strengthens the attitude of the pursuit of knowledge, helping children to have a habit of reading, creating opportunities to leading in the discovery of something meaningful to life. The research objectives were to study learning outcomes of young children through literature and project-based learning. Twenty-five young children were studied and reported their learning outcomes. Data were collected through variety of methods: observation, debriefing focus group, and interviews after the scenario. Data were collected by qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings indicated that young children had the highest level of understanding and ability to manage literary learning and projects. They also had ability to provide the most literary and project management environment were ranges low and highest based on the different perception and potential of learning. It can be recommended literature and project-based learning is suitable for early childhood education.

The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation

Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, but worked to realise the settler-colonial projects through the literary projection of this fantasy. Through the re-reading, the paper focuses on two main points. One, the force of Wakefield’s work was the force of literature. It was not Wakefield’s scholarly contributions to political-economic thought that made his work such a force of history; it was the literary form of his writings on colonisation that enabled his work to capture and incite the social imagination, as works of fiction in a utopian tradition going back to Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. And two, the force of Wakefield’s literary work was the force of law. Not only did Wakefield’s utopian literature crystallise a social fantasy in a way that made it available, and seductively so, to legislators, but Wakefield’s literature gave meaning and effect to the resulting legislation of the colonies.

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Homosexual Desire in the Poetry of Blai Bonet

This article examines the interplay between homosexual desire and anxiety in the poetry of Blai Bonet, one of the most important, complex, and problematic figures in modern Catalan literature. Bonet is usually presented as a homosexual author, but the way his poetry articulates same-sex desire is far from straightforward. Critics have highlighted the sensuality and eroticism of his poetry, as well as the importance of mysticism and Catholic imagery. However, a specific analysis of homosexual desire in Bonet’s poetry has never been undertaken. Through a psychoanalytically-oriented reading of various poems by Bonet, this essay traces the movement and the effect of anxiety in a textual corpus characterised by a tension between a body mortified by pain, illness, and guilt, and an ecstatic body that seeks satisfaction in the social underworld, in voyeurism and fantasy, and in textual play. Blai Bonet’s literary project promotes a textual revolution through the dissolution of genres and the proliferation of voices: he defines himself as “a poet without intimacy” whose work performs a radical dispersal of the subject, yet paradoxically his own name is constantly enunciated in the poems, while his body remains silent, concealed behind ellipses or in elusive references to (gay) sex. This article argues that following the trace of anxiety in Bonet’s poetry allows us to move towards the locus where he confronts the complexities of his desire: through an act of sublimation that restates the sexual in creative life, Bonet turns anxiety into comedy, guilt into a sense of humour, and textual experimentation into a form of ascesis.

Author, text and cultural meaning: Vijay Mishra's Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Vijay Mishra's meticulous analysis of the Rushdie Emory Archive - Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy - is one of the most significant paperbacks to have been released in humanities publishing in 2021 (originally published in hardback in 2019). In one sense this book might be understood as a literary project, one that enriches understanding of the Rushdie's published works through the perspectives gained from close reading and detailed cross-referencing of Emory's extensive collection of the author's personal papers, unpublished manuscripts, digital materials and ephemera. However, to categorise The Genesis of Secrecy simply in terms of its literary credentials would be to overlook its conceptual and methodological value to wider areas of culture and media research. With this broader frame in mind, this review essay considers the book from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Writers and translators working together: the ethical dimension of the translation of post conflict literature

ABSTRACT What is the role of the literary translator when tasked with the translation of literary texts resulting from the experience of recent conflict? For the last three years, I have researched this question in the context of literary translation workshops organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) and project partner AATI (Argentine Association of Translators and Interpreters) at Instituto Lenguas Vivas, Buenos Aires. This article examines the potential of the literary translation workshop for creating a space, personal as well as collective, in which narratives are shared, re-imagined, and passed on. It also investigates the particular nature of this space as intrinsically transnational, multi-vocal, collaborative and creative. I will argue that this space, open to dialogue and creativity, as well as experimentation and reflection, can make a valuable contribution to the work of other disciplines and discourses, such as memory studies. I will address the ‘ethics of translation’ for translators working on these texts, as well as the more practical questions concerning what a literary translator needs to know when working in contexts which are difficult, conflict-ridden, and multi-vocal, and how they deal with such texts in practice.