Literature Today Research Articles

Theoretical Estimates of the Critical Reynolds Number in the Flow around the Sphere on the Basis of Theory of Stochastic Equations and Equivalence of Measures

The aim of this investigation is to show the solution for the critical Reynolds number in the flow around the sphere on the basis of theory of stochastic equations and equivalence of measures between turbulent and laminar motions. Solutions obtained by numerical methods (DNS, LES, RANS) require verification and in this case the theoretical results have special value. For today in the scientific literature, there is J. Talor’s implicit formula connecting the critical Reynolds number with the parameters of the initial fluctuations in the flow around the sphere. Here the derivation of the explicit formula is presented. The results show a satisfactory correspondence of the obtained theoretical dependence for the critical Reynolds number to the experiments in the flow around the sphere.

A case for religious criticism

ABSTRACT This essay returns to Edward Said’s juxtaposition of secular and religious criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to ask what benefits, if any, religious criticism might offer to the study of literature and culture in the twenty first century. Secular and religious, in Said’s catachrestic usage, do not describe specific traditions or historical structures of feeling or any particular set of orthodoxies; rather, they describe distinct thinking practices. The key difference is that religious criticism, in practice, stands on an appeal to some set of foundational principles, while secular criticism does not make any such stand. Looking at examples of criticism with religious valences in the works of Fredric Jameson and Hortense Spillers, the essay argues that religious criticism’s inherent commitment to collectivity and morality place it in necessary dialectical tension with secular criticism and thus render it integral to the work of critique as practiced by scholars of literature and culture today.

Psychological aspects of Pashto Landay

Pashto landay is a great and delicious asset of folk literature that has not only gained fame and importance in the Pashtoon community, but is now emerging day by day as a good and beautiful poem in the field of international literature. Pashto landay of Pashto oral literature is a short and meaningful poem that is free from rhyme, but in terms of weight it is equal to the fifth long syllable of free poetry. The stress comes on the fourth syllable of each column. The first hemistich is nine syllables and the second one is thirteen syllables and ends with an independent sound. In this brief article it hasn’t discussed on the framework of landay, but the content of landay which are the voice of the heart of the Pashtoon people are analyzed from the perspective of psychology. Pashtoons who have suffered many hardships throughout their lives have been deprived of the lawful pleasures of life due to the influence of their imposed culture and all their deprivations have been pushed from the conscious to the unconscious. As a result, they have told their deprivation in landay as a poem and made themselves happy and encouraged. These problems and deprivations are different and discussing them all is beyond the scope of an article. In order to attract the attention of researchers to this topic in the future, some obvious aspects related to human psychology have been discussed.
 MOTIVE OF ESSAY WRITING
 The poem is discussed from two aspects one is the form and the other is the content. In Pashto literature there have been many discussions about poetry framework in general, but its content has not been discussed as much as it should be. In today's modern literature the psychological aspect is relatively new and important, so this aspect is stronger than others in Pashto literature, because the Pashtoon are more oppressed than any other people, so this was the reason why I wrote this article. It has come so that readers of other languages will be informed about the deprivations of Pashtoons' lives by reading this article.

НЕСТАЦІОНАРНА РЕАКЦІЯ ЦИЛІНДРИЧНОЇ ОБОЛОНКИ З ПРУЖНИМ ШАРОМ НА ДІЮ РУХОМОГО РАДІАЛЬНОГО НАВАНТАЖЕННЯ

An analysis of studies and publications on the issues of determining the stress-strain state of constituent structures has shown that the problems of choosing and modeling the operation of structures in the form of infinitely long cylindrical shells with a soft, weightless elastic layer have not received enough attention in the scientific literature today. The use of modern approaches to the construction of mathematical models and algorithms makes it possible to take into account various kinds of dynamic loads that are transferred to structural elements in the form of cylindrical shells.The aim of the article is to develop an analytical method for calculating cylindrical shells with a weightless soft elastic layer under the action of a moving radial load.Based on the principles and approaches to the analysis of non-stationary dynamic processes in complex shells, the paper presents an algorithm based on the application of the integral Fourier transform along the axial coordinate, as well as the use of the Runge-Kutta numerical method for integrating the transformed differential equations of shell motion in the image space. Cases of load movement with different speeds and uniform pressure wave movement are considered. The dependence of the radial displacements of the shell on the reaction of the elastic layer, represented by an approximate model, taking into account only the radial displacement, is determined. The cases of motion of a radial axisymmetric load both with constant and with varying speed are investigated. The distribution of shell deflections along the length is given for different moments of time during the movement of the load at a constant speed, as well as for the slow movement of the ring load.In this work, for the first time, a mathematical model of the non-stationary behavior of a shell with an outer layer under the action of a moving load is constructed. A comparative analysis of various shell models has been carried out and deformation patterns of both accelerated and slow motion have been constructed. The transient processes that occur at the moment of load application and the subsequent time intervals immediately after this moment are considered. The presented materials can be used for dynamic modeling of the operation of structures in the form of plates and shells.

Sister Tongue by Farnaz Fatemi

Reviewed by: Sister Tongue by Farnaz Fatemi Taylor Nasim Stone FARNAZ FATEMI Sister Tongue Kent, Ohio. Kent State University Press. 2022. 77 pages. IN HER DEBUT verse collection, Farnaz Fatemi skillfully explores the nuanced between-life of Farsi and English and how that negative space houses language, displacement, longing, and the materiality of memory. Being a member of the Iranian diaspora and growing up in Southern California, Fatemi finds that there "is no word for [belonging] in any of [her] tongues" and straddles what it means to have a plurality of identities—including a twin sister. This inability to capture belonging does not stop her from writing gorgeous poetry that brings an unexpected understanding to those hyphenated identities and creating a sense of kinship across language(s). Fatemi crafts a lyric essay to be the backbone for her book that bears its namesake, Sister Tongue and extends to the reader an honest invitation to accompany her toward self-reconciliation: "I am trying to explain what it feels like to have not come from a place and to have come from the very same place." Fleshing out the spine of this work are numerous smaller poems hemmed into four categories: I Name the Eight Muscles of My Tongue, The Only Mistranslation, The Word for Heart, and Unveiling. These four acts allow the reader to get their bearings within Fatemi's journey of self and travels in Iran while moving through it with her in the shape-shifting tone of wisdom, whimsy, and all the emotions we can't place the words for. My first introduction to this collection was at a reading hosted at San Francisco State University's Poetry Center, where Fatemi herself read a curation of excerpts. Hearing the poetry read aloud before ever seeing the words carefully arranged on each page, tears fell from my eyes by the end of her poem "Untranslated." From my perspective, this is the heartbeat of the collection: All the womenWho disappeared into the silence inside me, I pull from the roar of the past.I make introductions. By which I mean, I want the foreigner in meto meet the foreigner in me. In this way, Fatemi expands on the borderless lives of ourselves and our ancestors though we feel the distance of generations pulling within us. From the onset of her collection, something in me perked up for more, and I was not disappointed. My journey within the diaspora looks vastly different from Fatemi's, so I was not prepared for her to pen the hurts and nuances of my soul, leaving me to feel known and welcomed. This celebration of honoring roots, as a poem and a collection of poems, creates a treasury of understanding and introduction within the Iranian diaspora as a culture. Truthfully, though, no matter your own journey, vulnerability is delivered in such delicate craft that your own heart tightens with nostalgia. Taylor Nasim Stone San Francisco State University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Cœur du Sahel Djaïli Amadou Amal

Reviewed by: Cœur du Sahel Djaïli Amadou Amal Edward Ousselin DJAÏLI AMADOU AMAL Cœur du Sahel Paris. Éditions Emmanuelle Collas. 2022. 364 pages. THE CAMEROONIAN NOVELIST Djaïli Amadou Amal (b. 1975) is best known for Les Impatientes (2020), which illustrates, from the contrasting perspectives of three main characters, the consequences of polygamy and arranged marriages on young women. While gender is the principal dividing line in Les Impatientes, the focus of Cœur du Sahel, Amal's most recent novel, is the apparently unbridgeable divide between social classes [End Page 64] (including the vestiges of Cameroon's caste system). In Les Impatientes, the recurring word is paradoxically "patience," repeated by the elders to each young woman who was coerced into an unwanted marriage. In Cœur du Sahel, the oft-repeated phrase is "nous ne sommes pas du même monde" (you and I come from different worlds). What this novel reflects is found in many of the countries on the African continent: the stark economic and cultural contrasts between a growing, relatively prosperous urban middle class and the less-educated rural villagers who are still trying to survive on subsistence agriculture. Faydé, the central character, has grown up in a farming village that is now being hard hit by both lack of rain and periodic attacks by the jihadi terrorist group Boko Haram. Faydé's father disappeared during one of those attacks, and her mother is left trying to work the land while raising Faydé's younger siblings. Faydé decides to do what other teenagers in her village have done: go find work as a domestic servant in Maroua, the biggest city in the area. This will allow her to send some money to her struggling mother. Faydé thus transitions from a remote village without electricity or running water to a regional center of commerce, a bustling metropolis with a university and other impressive buildings. Thanks to her extended family, she is hired by a wealthy household that includes—in an echo of Les Impatientes—one husband and three wives. The intelligent but initially naïve Faydé will quickly learn that she is, in terms of class, gender, as well as religion, at the very bottom of a rigid social hierarchy. Perhaps predictably, she will fall in love with an educated young man who is part of the local elite, but this will not be a typical Cinderella story. Amal writes about what she knows. Much of her own background—a Fulani Muslim woman from northern Cameroon who went through an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen—is present in her fictional work. She also clearly wants her readers from outside of Cameroon to learn more about her world. The narrative is preceded by a map of northern Cameroon, showing the main cities and the neighboring countries. The is also a map of the Sahel, the vast swath of semiarid land that separates the Sahara Desert from the lush coastal regions of West Africa. Throughout the novel, the author incorporates brief explanations about the socioeconomic and religious realities of the northern regions of Cameroon, a very diverse country with over 250 languages. The ultimate destruction of Faydé's village by the Boko Haram terrorist group, for instance, is an all-too-realistic pivotal event in the novel's plot. Also mentioned are global trends and events, from the foreign telenovelas that city-dwellers watch on their television sets to the disastrous effects of climate change on local farmers. In a country with a rich literary tradition, Amal confirms with Cœur du Sahel that she is one of Cameroon's most important living novelists. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Daniel Simon IN HIS SPEECH accepting the 2022 Neustadt Prize, Boubacar Boris Diop listed several of his intellectual and literary mentors: Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Cheik Aliou Ndao, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Mongo Beti. In notebook 5 of Diop's novel Doomi Golo, the grandfather figure, Nguirane, recites a similar litany of "real men" who "command respect": Cheikh Anta Diop, Amílcar Cabral, Mongo Beti, Samory Touré, Thomas Sankara, and Patrice Lumumba. "Each one of them was a Man of Defiance in his own right," Nguirane tells Badou, his grandson, "and for that reason and for that reason alone, the white colonizer killed them or at least reduced them to silence." Also in his acceptance speech, Diop declared: "It must be said that the moment when the writer, alone in front of the white page, is about to produce meaning and emotions, is the moment of their absolute freedom." Throughout his fiction, Diop's storytellers insist on the primacy of aesthetic freedom while at the same time embodying defiant truths—ethical, existential, political, and more. Such truths, for Diop, never exist in a vacuum: even amidst the moral clarity of his most celebrated novel, Murambi: The Book of Bones, truths must be told to assert their veracity, must be tested communally so that their concentric rings will envelop humanity as a whole, must, like the Sankofa bird, look to the past even as it flies into the future in order for such storied truths to remain viable, through remembrance, for generations to come. (In an aside about Murambi during his keynote speech at the Neustadt Festival—published here on page 50—Diop asserted that the novel "is not a work of the imagination; it is the truth," punctuating the word "truth" with the force of a griot who brings the full weight of his rhetorical power to bear on a phrase, lest his audience miss the point.) So often, Diop's novels and stories read like metafictions about the art of storytelling itself, but literature and art are ultimately marshaled in service of the truth, not for art's sake. A case in point is Kaveena, Diop's most recent novel to be translated into English. Two stories compete for the reader's attention at the beginning of the novel: (1) the story of a "decapitated" African state following a civil war that deposes its president, N'Zo Nikiema, and brings a Frenchman, Pierre Castaneda, to power and (2) the story of a murdered six-year-old girl, Kaveena. Nikiema's chief of police, Asante Kroma, asserts that the death of Nikiema is "a story worth telling . . . for the future" while he sifts through the notebooks and letters—and "thousands of corpses"—that the psychopathic tyrant has left behind, but the most powerful testimony is the videotape of one murder (Kaveena's), which was ordered by Castaneda. As the president's speechwriter, Castaneda tells Nikiema that "words are what drive the world," but the dying Nikiema reflects that words are "ambiguous, uncertain . . . little blows dealt by life, but so relentless, swirling around in the emptiness, then finding their place, one next to the other." As is frequently the case in Diop's work, politicians' corrupt speech is a scourge on society, whereas the nonverbal witness of characters like Kaveena and the woman in black in Murambi—a Tutsi whose husband and daughter are massacred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide—say more than what either heads of state or writers can ever convey in their "relentless, swirling" words. In an essay entitled "My Father's Library," Diop writes that the French library on his father's bookshelves, which he absorbed during the day, represented a "sarcophagus of signs," whereas the Wolof stories recounted by his mother at night ignited in him a "fire of words" that still burns to this day. As a storying truth-teller, Diop captures the fire of the spoken word, bringing light, truth, and life to the written page. [End Page 3] Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

An Excerpt from Shubeik Lubeik

An Excerpt from Shubeik Lubeik Editorial note: The panels and balloons in the cells should be read right to left, top to bottom, as they would be in the Arabic original. Here, the pages are sequenced left to right Deena Mohamed is an Egyptian designer, illustrator, and writer. She first began making comics at eighteen, when she created the viral webcomic Qahera, a satirical superhero strip starring a visibly Muslim superheroine. Her new work, Shubeik Lubeik (Pantheon, 2023)—a fairy-tale rhyme meaning "Your Wish Is My Command" in Arabic—is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more powerful and therefore the more likely to work as intended. The novel's three parts tell the story of three first-class wishes as used by Aziza, Nour, and Shokry. Although their stories are fantastical—featuring talking donkeys, dragons, and cars that can magically avoid traffic—each one grapples with the very real challenge of trying to make their most deeply held desires come true. The excerpt published here is from part 3, Shokry's story. Deena Mohamed's mix of calligraphy and contemporary styles brings to life a vibrant Cairene neighborhood and a cast of characters whose struggles and triumphs are deeply resonant. Shubeik Lubeik heralds the arrival of a huge new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist new voice. Originally published in Arabic in Egypt, Shubeik Lubeik was awarded the Best Graphic Novel prize and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comix Festival. Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 14] 1964 read panels/ balloons right to left, then down [End Page 15] 1970 read panels/ balloons right to left, then down [End Page 16] 1974 [End Page 17] read panels/ balloons right to left, then down [End Page 18] Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

GENDER REPRESENTATION OF ARTISTIС DETAIL IN THE NOVEL OF FRANҪOISE SAGAN “BONJOUR TRISTESSE”

The article clarifies the peculiarities of the gender representation of the material world as an artistic detail of the text. The research uses a gender-oriented approach to the representation of cultural constructs, embodied in the picture of the world, the point of view of the author and the hero, the system of characters, the nature of the author’s consciousness, the object-subject system. The gender approach to the study of literature today is a form of in-depth reading and is a higher, more measured tool, in such a way that it corrects the traditional view of beautiful writing and articulates the problem of female authorship and provokes “re-reading” of classical texts. The article examines the early work of Françoise Sagan in the context of postmodern interpretations of the stylistic manner of women’s writing, artistic thinking, women’s perspective on life, women’s experience through the representation of micro-images of the material world. The material of the study is the novel “Bonjour tristesse” by Françoise Sagan. The peculiarity of Sagan’s female writing is determined by the conscious female authorship, the presentation of the image of a woman as a protagonist, and the gendermarked specificity of the narrative. The analysis of the originality of women’s creativity is carried out taking into account the positions of existentialism, theoretical concepts of feminist criticism. The work uses the main methodological provisions of structural semiotics, the concept of text, cultural dialogism, literary studies of things in texts. As a result of the research, it was found that the artistic detail, due to its special content, symbolics, compositional and characterological function, becomes an important component of the poetic organization of the text. Through the detail, the way of the artist’s artistic thinking is revealed to a large extent, his ability to express the author’s idea of the work through the objects of the material world. The gender representation of an artistic detail emphasizes the individuality of the author’s style of Françoise Sagan, the gender-psychological marking of elements of poetics, which model in the space of the artistic narrative a specifically female relationship to reality, which ensures the reading of the work as a female text.

Toasting Friendships, Laying Down Memories in Wexford, Ireland

Toasting Friendships, Laying Down Memories in Wexford, Ireland J. R. Patterson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution IN 1972 THE Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew a line under Northern Ireland, moved south to the Republic, and settled in a cottage in County Wicklow. From his experiences in those first years living on the southeast coast came his book Field Work, an elegiac rumination on loss, friendship, reunion, and country life. During an extended stay with friends in the south-coast Irish town of Wexford, the first poem of that collection, "Oysters," continuously rapped on the doorway of my mind: "And there we were, toasting friendship, / Laying down a perfect memory / In the cool of thatch and crockery." Inclined though I was to stay home, sharing in the local seafood, my friends pushed me outside and onto a bicycle. And so, to North Slob to swim with harbor seals on the strand at Curracloe; to Forth Mountain, our fingers magenta-hued and probing the brambles for just one last blackberry; to a hurling match, the game a maker of champions and heartbreak; to restaurants and opera halls, pubs and castles and fields; always on my lips the sparkling tang of fun and freedom and laughter. The landscape of County Wexford is rolling and bookish. The coast is a recurring setting/nonsetting for the art-writing of John Banville, including his Man Booker–winning The Sea. Colm Tóibín, from nearby Enniscorthy, set his The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship in the inland countryside. Less prestigious but more notable, the original Guinness Book of Records was conceived here, after an argument about the speeds of different game birds couldn't be settled. Banville, speaking of his childhood in Wexford, considered the town "no more than a staging post on my way elsewhere." Like Chekhov's Irina in Three Sisters, he was "immured in the provinces and yearning for the magic of Moscow." Undoubtedly, the provincial is cast in stone here, and cosmopolitan Dublin feels worlds away. Tractors growl through the streets. Pastures grazed by bony Holsteins retain their toehold on the edge of town. Narrow sidewalks and private roads are a problem. And roadside litter implies some delinquent reaction against Wexford's nickname, "the Model County." But there is information in everything, and litter at least tells a little about what people do while out for a stroll. Wexicans seemed to take their air while putting in eye drops, eating pint pots of yogurt, and drinking cans of Dutch Gold lager. In the large, glass-walled library, I found books stuck with beer coasters and unsent letters. More often, when I needed a book, I strolled down to Reader's Paradise or Red Books, where the shelves heaved and the air was tinged with the old-paper scent of vanilla and hay past its due date. Red's proprietor, Wally, had a recommendation for any mood and a good memory for his quarter million books; I came away with Kundera, Sartre, Munro, Rushdie, and Anaïs Nin. Each morning, I woke up glowing. I knew I could count on the certitude of my morning coffee, on the rising pink sky, the warmth around me . . . and all the other necessities of deep leisure; I was immured in a "glut of privilege" and longed for nowhere else. Through it all, "Oysters" whispered in my ear. What to Read along the River Slaney John Banville The Sea Picador Álanna Hammel Cruel & Vicious Red Books Press Nicolas Furlong Young Farmer Seeks Wife Mercier Press Billy Roche The Wexford Trilogy Nick Hern Books Wexford Women Writing Undercover Ed. Deirdre McGarry-Barker Red Books Press [End Page 80] J. R. Patterson J. R. Patterson was born on a cattle and grain farm in rural Manitoba, Canada. He has worked as a farm laborer, factory worker, and writer. He has written for a variety of international publications, including National Geographic, Literary Review of Canada , and LARB. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

Reviewed by: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams Arthur Willemse MISSOURI WILLIAMS The Doloriad New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 228 pages. "EVERYBODY WHO HAS read Wise Blood thinks I'm a hillbilly nihilist, whereas I would like to create the impression over the television that I'm a hillbilly Thomist." Anticipating a TV interview, in late May 1955, Flannery O'Connor wrote this provocative statement [End Page 69] in a letter to Robie Macauley, her friend from the celebrated Iowa Writers' Workshop. This southerly theological sensibility, apt as it is for O'Connor's writing, also allows us better to approach Missouri Williams's haunting debut novel, The Doloriad—a science fiction story about human life in a postapocalyptic Czechia. Dolores is one of the many daughters of the Matriarch, the leader of a large family living at the far end of what used to be a city. The family has been able to grow only by accepting incestuous relationships, yet Dolores, one of the older sisters, is now married off to a man who reportedly lives at the other end of the forest. However, only the Matriarch herself can claim to have any knowledge of this other clan or tribe. The reference to Thomas is embedded not just in the fabric of the book: his name is frequently invoked. The children watch, on VHS tapes, a sitcom about a medieval saint who time-travels to present day, or they are schooled in medieval theology by a mysterious teacher who is taken every day from his home in the outskirts of the city—apparently against his will. A hillbilly Thomist is someone stretched in two directions at once: there is on one hand a deep understanding of virtue and a Catholic sensibility, which, on the other hand, intersects with a strong sense of the macabre. Perhaps the recent turn in Nick Cave's music gives us another example of how a theological frame of mind is concerned almost exclusively with the devil. Perhaps the hillbilly Thomist regards the devil not as the paradigm of evil but rather as someone or something both twisted and completely natural (I take it that the movies of David Lynch belong to a different, more secular-minded literature). Indeed, nature as a force to be reckoned with is present in The Doloriad on every page, most often in the form of the sweltering heat and the wilderness that is always on the brink of overtaking the clan's encampment. That wilderness, indeed, is also on the brink of usurping this novel. It is not just that the plot of The Doloriad is eclipsed by it; it is that its literary mechanics, the thing that would make it work, its very idea, is also in hiding behind its luscious style. This may very well have been the aspiration for the writer, if this is a story of how humanity ultimately can only commit to life itself, which would warrant the inflated reliance on theology here: life, here, exceeds any eschatology, any knowledge of the last things. For this reason, I suppose that The Doloriad stakes the very significance of humanity, and beautifully too, yet it leaves the reader with little sense of direction. In Williams's novel, there is no narrative to connect dark with light; it is the eventual collapse of the story that brings relief. This is the burden of the hillbilly Thomist, who cannot be a Dantesque comedian, when we meet them per una selva obscura. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Reviewed by: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton Graziano Krätli KATE BEATON Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2022. 430 pages. IN THE FIRST two frames of Ducks, Kate Beaton introduces herself as the protagonist of this very personal and profoundly moving memoir: "This story starts in 2005. I am twenty-one years old." Then, almost as an afterthought: "This is me at twenty-one. I'm much older now, and three-dimensional." It is an arresting statement, complicated by an ingenious reference to the underlying theme of the book: the relationship between art (which in the case of a graphic artist is bidimensional) and life (whose three-dimensionality is the result of experience, knowledge, and trauma). This third dimension (painfully acquired and tamed into art) is what makes Ducks a very different—and, inevitably, a more mature and compelling—achievement than Hark! A Vagrant, the witty and hilarious webcomic that established Beaton's reputation and popularity. When, fresh out of college, Beaton left her native Cape Breton and took a job in the oil sands industry of northern Alberta, she could not imagine that the experience would be as affective and transformative as her keen statement, "Now I can't extract myself from having come," eloquently implies. Her only goal, after all, was to repay her student loans as quickly and uneventfully as possible. But in a world where men outnumber women fifty to one, female employees are alternately (or simultaneously) objects of desire and scrutiny, and variously subjected to discrimination, contempt, patronizing attitudes, sexual harassment, and assault. Inevitably, Beaton suffers the whole hypermasculinity catalog but survives the traumatic experience thanks to her candid, compassionate, inquiring attitude ("People do things here that they wouldn't do at home"); her quirky empathy ("I like you guys. But you're assholes"); and her growing commitment to comic art and determination to pursue it. Her progress is marked, symbolically, by three totemic encounters. The first is with relocated buffalo ("They put them on reclaimed old mine land, a company thing"), a veiled reference to the multiple displacements caused by the oil industry—of the workers who come from all over Canada and beyond but also of the Indigenous peoples and the wildlife whose livelihoods are impacted by the mining operations. The second is with a fox who has lost a front leg but keeps prowling around the warehouse at night. Beaton's anger (she chases the poor animal away by throwing snowballs at it) may be surprising but makes sense as a presage of her own coming injury. The third, and most significant, encounter is the news that, in April 2008, 1,600 ducks died after landing on a Syncrude tailings pond north of Fort McMurray, one of the sites at which Beaton worked. This, and a YouTube video of an elder Cree woman speaking out against the oil extraction industry, raises Beaton's awareness of the abuse from a personal to a political level. As we reach the end of the book, we realize that the ducks of the title represent a double tribute—to the birds who died as well as to Beaton herself ("ducky" for her older coworkers), who was able to take off and fly away from the bitumen. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Asylum by Nina Shope

Reviewed by: Asylum by Nina Shope Beth Hinchliffe NINA SHOPE Asylum Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dzanc Books. 2022. 197 pages. I DIDN'T "READ" Nina Shope's debut novel, Asylum; I lived it, pulled into and almost physically held captive by this heartbreaking and mesmerizing labyrinth of a novel. Asylum explores the historical relationship between nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and a young hysteric named Augustine. The book is set in the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris between the years of 1875 and 1893. The author's afterword reveals that many of the techniques, quotes, and events in the book were based on the actual history of this troubled time in medical exploration. Shope's is thrilling writing at the intersection of prose and poetry; a fever dream of passion, trauma, and nightmare. It's a disquieting undertaking for the reader to become entangled in the ominous relationship between doctor and hysteric/man and woman/guard and prisoner/lover and lover as it becomes something entirely new—a rarely explored shapeshifting dynamic that has as much to do with mythic underworlds as historical reality. The dizzying disintegration of the power balance begins with this challenge, spoken by Charcot during a lecture but delivered directly for Augustine's benefit: Hysterics offer themselves up to us like relics abandoned, you proclaim. Their bodies goods to dispose of, granted to us even in death. They entrust to us the art of preservation, restoration. And we decide how they will be remembered. If and when they will be resurrected. We, and we alone, you say, your voice low and threatening, decide whether the patient will be immortalized or left in the ground to rot. In 2005 I wrote an article about Shope's collection Hangings: Three Novellas. I said it blazed a new direction in writing and was "a brave, scorching leap in experimental fiction, a stunning and audacious work of lyricism, style, and astonishing grace." It was, but in its profound torment Asylum explodes all of [End Page 76] this onto another extraordinary level. It is a brilliant and visionary book by a brilliant and visionary writer who is grabbing hold of the fiction genre and crashing it wide open, shattering its mirror and making readers question their entire previous reading experience. The book is hypnotically beautiful and viscerally disturbing, filled with gorgeous prose and anguishing images. In fact, I hesitated to finish the novel because I didn't want to rush through any of the emotions to be experienced deeply, and I also didn't want the revelatory journey to end. (Editorial note: Laura Larson's interview about her book City of Incurable Women, based on photographs from the Salpêtrière asylum, appears in the September 2022 issue of WLT.) Beth Hinchliffe Wellesley, Massachusetts Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Raft

Raft Ted Kooser (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution At the said-to-be bottomless pondat the sand pit, the raft we discoveredwas a heavy barn door, maybe ten feetby twelve, halfway in, halfway outof the water where others had left it,probably older boys, always the firstto find something good, use it a while,then leave it for us, Billy and Larry,Danny and me, floating it out ontothe water, wading in after it, holdingonto its edge as we slid down the slopeup to our shoulders, then one by onehelped each other climb on, soakedand shivering, standing to balance,arms spread, each to a corner, facingeach other, frightened but laughing,not a forethought among us for a poleto push out with, nor a plank for an oar,as we trusted that door as it floatednot on but just under the surface,one corner sinking, then slowly liftingas another went down, ankle deepover the cold, bottomless darkness.Seventy years later, I still feel that doorsinking under my weight, can still seethe white faces of Larry and Billyand Danny looking across into mineas we held our arms wide, as if to keepsome wild, free, invisible creaturethere at the center from running away,and at eighty I know what it was. [End Page 45] Ted Kooser Ted Kooser's most recent book is Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). He is a former US Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He and his wife live on sixty-two acres of rural Nebraska. Photo by Stancey Hancock Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg by Lasse Söderberg

Reviewed by: The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg by Lasse Söderberg Andrew Singer LASSE SÖDERBERG The Forbidden Door: The Selected Poetry of Lasse Söderberg Trans. Lars Gustaf Andersson & Carolyn Forché. Medford, Massachusetts. Arrowsmith Press. 2022. 200 pages. THIS VOLUME IS a wonder. Drawn from nineteen books of poetry (out of the more than thirty he's published since 1955), The Forbidden Door represents a major English-language addition to the work of the seminal Swedish poet Lasse Söderberg. Although less spartan and craggy, somewhat more generous with words than Swedish compatriot and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, one can detect a cultural affinity between them; Söderberg even has an early poem dedicated to Tranströmer, from 1959: "You know the broken history of things, / the alchemy of stones, a world masked / in the blind light of God." Söderberg's words form frames of thoughts, which, austere and concrete, can elide just as elliptically as those of Tranströmer. Here it is in the title poem from this book, "The forbidden door": Do not try to break in.No one has lost the key.It flows like water.It is heavy as a stone.It is one with the hand.As volatile as onewith it as a gesture. Given such a long career arc—the poet is now in his nineties—condensed into one generous collection, we can witness Söderberg's development, from the purely austere through the realm of the political ("The nights of stained velvet / have stolen away from the houses, / rustling like green banknotes / that have whirled all the way to Miami," from 1972's volume, A Rose for a Revolution) straight through to the more purely condensed and metaphysical ("The tree breathes in, the shadow breathes out. / If there were no trees, we wouldn't dare to die," from the 1991 poem "In the Willow Pond Park") and beyond, back to a more hybrid existence. We are further gifted by having these taut, shimmering translations by Carolyn Forché together with Swedish poet and scholar Lars Gustaf Andersson, a cooperation that began more than twenty years ago. This is the oeuvre of a major world talent—if there is anyone left to listen. There are ample forays into the prose poem format ("I arrived in Comala where everyone was dead. The starving dogs were also dead even though I could hear them bark"). Poems of short, clipped lines alternate with long-lined poems. Yet the voice is a steady constant, a massive, grounded presence, speaking forth the nucleus of human life in actual words. There is something about sitting with this work of expansiveness and depth, rendered in such fine English—like returning to source, to replenish, to reconnect with the all-in-all. It is the essence of what poetry can be; I couldn't recommend it more highly. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

NEW TRENDS IN ITALIAN LITERATURE: FROM ECOCRITICISM TO MIGRANT LITERATURE

In the present article the aim is to demonstrate that one of the ways to teach literature today, in the new millennium, when literary studies do not encourage interest among the new generations, could be through its relationship with other sciences, for example, with ecology. Since the 1970's, when ecocriticism was created, in a literary text the idea is to try to analyse the relationship between the individual and nature. Starting from the fact that in nature there are balanced relations, the ecocriticism is trying to overcome the hierarchical order imposed in the society by the secular centralism. The result of this order are the members that are marginalised and oppressed, the victims of the imposition of the concept of the vertical society which implies the dominance of some members over others.
 In the analysis the aim is to show that there are some contemporary literary texts that witness the attempt of exclusion of some characters, such as, for example, in the migrant literature in Italy, where the characters-immigrants are frequently discriminated. According to ecocriticism, in order to achieve a sustainable society, it is necessary to overcome these dicriminatory mechanism. Therefore, with this paper we try to find some literary examples in which, by the means of the autobiographical testimony, this attempt of dominance is rejected by the characters and they eventually find the way to integrate into the new society as well as to overcome exclusion and discrimination. In the analysis we examine some of these examples that we find in the literary work of the two contemporary authoresses in Italy: Igiaba Scego, and Laila Wadia.

IDENTITY DISCOURSE IN BALIKUI AND AIDS SHORT STORY BY PUTU WIJAYA

The role of literature today is not only as an imaginative work but as an expression of social, cultural and political criticism. One of the writers who is famous for voicing his criticism of the social phenomena that occur in Indonesia is Putu Wijaya. Two of his short stories that discuss cultural values are Balikui and Aids. The focus of this research is on the identity that appears in the characters in the two short stories by utilizing Michael Foucault's theory of discourse analysis. The results of this study indicate that in the Balikui short story, the identity of the character Wayan cannot be melted, even though he is in America for a few weeks as in disciplining time. In the short story Aids, it shows the existence of Indonesian cultural identity that corruption is a plague that is more dangerous than Aids.

Vegetal Cinema in Christine Montalbetti’s Novel Western

This article examines the vegetal agency taking place in the novel Western (2005) (Western: A Novel, translated by Betsy Wing in 2009) by contemporary French writer Christine Montalbetti. Building on the cinematographic performativity of the novel itself and on a materialist ecocritical approach, it studies the mobility of plants in this narrative to identify how the cinematographic transmediality contributes to engage the vegetal in the foreground. This analysis allows to feed the characterisation of cinematographic devices in the contemporary novel and to prolong the reflection on nonhuman agency and its presence in literature today.

The People Are (Still) Missing: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and the Problem of Minor Literature Today

In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proclaim the ‘productive use of the literary machine’ with the aim to extract from the text its ‘revolutionary force’ – their book on Kafka, in which the concept of minor literature is put forward, is their experiment in doing this. The premise of this article is that Bhanu Kapil’s book-length poem How to Wash a Heart provides an apt point of reference for thinking through the problem of minor literature today. Kapil’s work is part of a significant development within contemporary poetry and poetics, writing informed by and building on postcolonial and feminist critiques of humanism and its encoded whiteness. In the light of Kapil’s work, the three characteristics of minor literature identified by Deleuze and Guattari are examined: the deterritorialisation of language; the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; and the collective assemblage of enunciation.

Organizational and functional structure of the innovative and intellectual environment: concept and conception of interaction

Keywords: innovative and intellectual environment, subjects of intellectual propertyrights, innovative infrastructure, commercialization of property rights, marketfunctions
 In the article, the author examines the meaning of the concept of «innovative and intellectualenvironment» and, from a methodological standpoint, the economic andlegal model of the organizational and functional structure of the innovative and intellectualenvironment. This allows to disclose the content of the components of themodel, which are combined into functional connections, creating a productive field ofdirections of the transformation process in the production sphere of objects of intellectualproperty rights into innovative products for the purpose of commercialization ofintellectual property rights on the market of intellectual property, innovative technologiesand innovative products to profit-making purposes. It is noted that in theeconomic and legal literature today, there is no single approach to understanding theessence of the concept and content of the «innovative and intellectual environment».The concept of «innovative environment» is presented in a much broader sense. Froman economic and legal viewpoint, the use of the term «innovative and intellectual environment» is justified, where priority is given to innovation as the basis for the transformationof intellectual property rights in the production sphere of activity into aninnovative product, and also as the basis for the use of innovative technologies. Thereare considered from a theoretical and organizational perspective the target contentcomponents of the model, that include: the formation of human intellectual capital,which includes subjects of intellectual property rights; creation and organization ofinnovative infrastructure as a production sphere of activity; organizational combinationof innovative infrastructure with intermediaries for the commercialization of intellectual property rights, which are catalysts for the transformation of objects of intellectualproperty rights into innovative products; commercialization of intellectualproperty rights, which refers to the innovative and intellectual sphere of activity; purposeand functions of the market of intellectual property, the market of innovativetechnologies and the market of innovative products.