Lost Generation Research Articles

China&Apos;S Lost Generation: Changes in Beliefs and Their Intergenerational Transmission

China&Apos;S Lost Generation: Changes in Beliefs and Their Intergenerational Transmission

Visions and Revisions in Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"

Visions and Revisions in Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" Christine L. Grogan In "How I Accompanied Katherine Anne Porter on the Last Great Pilgrimage of Her Life," Charlotte Laughlin recounts a conversation she had with Porter regarding "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." Like most readers of "Jilting," Laughlin was curious about the destiny of Ellen Weatherall. She questioned: "despite all Granny Weatherall's good work, the priest had been in the house the second time and the 'bridegroom' had not come. 'Was it because she had never forgiven the man who jilted her? … Is that why she couldn't go to heaven?'" Porter responded that she did not know where Ellen went when she died, adding that "We all have too much to forgive." After a pause, Laughlin noted that her voice became "nearly mischievous," as she said, "But the first bridegroom had given her plenty." After receiving puzzled looks, Porter clarified: "The baby. She fainted you know" (238). One of Porter's most popular stories, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" leaves many questions to ponder, among them the identity of the baby to whom Porter refers. In a 1975 interview with Mary Anne Dolan of The Washington Star, Porter states that this "particular story has brought more letters from students and teachers. Hundreds of them in the last 25 years" (181). Indeed, this story has been one of Porter's most anthologized out of her many highly crafted works. However, the version that the majority of us read and teach is not the one she originally published. Even though the later version does not make explicit all the ambiguous parts in the original, a comparison of the first one published with the version collected just seven months later reveals that Porter made significant changes that merit exploration and that somewhat clarify the protagonist's relationships with other characters. Crafting her story in 1927, Porter first printed the tale of Ellen Weatherall's last day in the February 1929 (fifteenth) issue of Eugene [End Page 49] Jolas's transition, the literary magazine widely regarded as the most influential in shaping the modernist avant-garde. Already published in Century, she was still building her name, reputation, and confidence. Most likely, Porter's friends Josephine Herbst and Matthew Josephson encouraged her to submit her stories to transition. Never really a member of the so-called Lost Generation, Porter nonetheless published "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" and "Magic" alongside the works of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom went to Paris while Porter went to Mexico. According to Joan Givner, the publication of these two stories in a magazine of international standing marked a turning point in Porter's career: "their completion was a significant achievement because they show that she was at last finding her own subject matter and establishing some control over it" (197). On September 11, 1930, the story appeared in revised form in Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, a slim volume (comprising "María Concepción," "He," "Magic," "Rope," "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," and the title story, "Flowering Judas") with a limited run of six hundred copies published by Harcourt, Brace that established her critical reputation. With slight modifications to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, this 1930 version of the story was reproduced in three subsequent volumes published by Harcourt, Brace during Porter's lifetime: Flowering Judas and Other Stories in 1935, a revision of sorts to the 1930 collection that published all of the 1930 stories and an additional four ("Theft," "That Tree," "The Cracked Looking-Glass," and "Hacienda"); The Old Order in 1955; and the version recognized as the definitive one, The Collected Stores of Katherine Anne Porter in 1965. Several recent articles read Porter's collected stories in relation to their original magazine publications. In her 2015 article, "Katherine Anne Porter, Magic, and transition," Kerry Hasler-Brooks charts the role of "Magic" in the transformation of Jolas's magazine from a transnational monthly into what Jolas subtitled "an international quarterly for creative experiment" (222). She credits Porter's story for speaking the political potential of patois...

World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis

Reviewed by: World War I and Southern Modernism by David A. Davis Sydney Bufkin World War I and Southern Modernism. By David A. Davis. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. x, 234. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1541-5.) David A. Davis's World War I and Southern Modernism examines the role of the Great War on the period known as the Southern Renaissance, arguing that the war and its effects on the region were considerably more significant to the development of southern modernism than has been generally recognized. Much of the book's analysis centers on the distinction between "proximal modernism"—work produced by writers located in cosmopolitan sites of modernity such as New York and major European cities—and "distal modernism"—work produced by writers located outside these centers of modernity and whose contact with modernity was secondary or attenuated, which Davis calls "modernism without modernity" (pp. 6, 7). World War I brought an understanding of modernity to a region that had yet to actually experience any significant modernizing forces, and the resulting literary production was a modernism that was often (though far from always) conservative in nature and skeptical about the disruptiveness of modernity to southern tradition. Davis argues that those figures who had the most experience with proximal modernity—such as soldiers who spent time in Europe and African Americans who relocated to Harlem—were more likely to see modernity as a positive force and to produce work that more closely resembled the fragmentation and disillusionment associated with the modernism of the Lost Generation. World War I and Southern Modernism surveys a range of southern writers and considers the experiences of southerners who fought in the war, those who remained in the South, and those who migrated away from the South as a result of the war's economic effects on the region. Davis examines works by black and white writers; the chapter on southern women's fiction addresses works by black and white southern women and traces the ways race affected southern women's experience of the war, while a chapter on the experience of black southern soldiers functions as a counterpoint to the preceding chapter about the tension between sectionalism and nationalism in writings by white southern soldiers. This broadly inclusive understanding of southern writing—which also attends to class tensions in the region—introduces considerably more nuance into the discussion of a war that had significantly varied effects on different groups of southerners. [End Page 213] While the book draws from a range of sources—both well- and lesser-known southern texts, as well as authors' letters and memoirs—the most extensive discussion of the formal characteristics of southern modernism is confined to the first chapter, which explores the relationship between the contact with modernity that emerged from the war and the forms of modernism produced by southern writers. The subsequent chapters are light on extended close reading, instead pairing a historical overview with a synthesis of critical perspectives before transitioning into a discussion of the literary figures and works. Chapter 2, for instance, surveys historical and literary-critical scholarship on the tensions between sectionalism and nationalism in the transition from the post-Reconstruction heyday of the Lost Cause to the unifying patriotism of the war, before exploring the ways that William Alexander Percy, Paul Green, and Donald Davidson negotiated their sectional and national identities in their writings about the war. World War I and Southern Modernism provides a valuable and multidisciplinary reassessment of the history of southern modernism and the ways modernity unevenly permeated the region, contributing to the scholarly conversation that reevaluates the role of modernity and the relationship between region and nation in the literature and history of the South. Sydney Bufkin Washington and Lee University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Literary Responses to the War on Terror: A Psychological Analysis

Politics as theory and practice of the power, and the existence of authoritative structures for the governance of a country remains among the staple contents of imaginative literature. The catastrophic incident of 9/11 at the turn of the new millennium has not only impacted the international politics but also resulted in the proliferation of political ideas in the literary writings. Glut production of fiction on War on Terror exposes the readers to the wide range of ideological constructions regarding the issue. Compared to the theoretical discourse, fiction serves as a better medium to persuasively depict the emotional and psychological traumas of the local population whose lives continue to suffer years after the 9/11 tragedy. In particular, Fatima Bhutto’s novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013) counters the fixed ideas about War on Terror. By portraying the social and political relationships and institutions within which this evil conflict thrives, she draws into our imagination the understanding and reality of the War on Terror, and to those who are its worst victims. For Bhutto, the psychological understanding of the worst victims of war on terror reveal that neither West nor the Pakistani state has suffered those dire consequences that the youth of the tribal areas face. As a consequence of this unending war, their fate is sealed as ‘lost generation’, both as a result of denial of justice, and the destruction caused by war on terror.

The ‘lost generation’ of the 2008 crisis: Generational memory and conflict in Spain

Since the 2008 crisis, youth unemployment in Southern Europe has hindered a return to social and economic stability: in Spain, the young and unemployed are sometimes referred to as a ‘lost generation’. This article investigates how rampant youth unemployment in Spain has darkened expectations for the country’s future inside the European Union (EU) as well as altered views of the past. Using interviews with jobless young people, the article argues that the severity and duration of the 2008 crisis has prompted historical revisionism. Age cohorts often organise around pivotal events and the article shows how young people have questioned the success of democratisation (1980s) and European integration (1990s), causing a growing rift with their parents’ generation. Finally, it explores generational conflict in Spain through three interconnected experiences of unemployment: returning to live with parents, urban to rural migration for a lower cost of living, and emigration to Northern Europe for employment.

The Effect of Changing Capital-Labour Relations on the Universities: Some Interpretations of the 2008 Financial Crisis

Neoliberal capitalism has faced severe criticism both in principle and in practice since the Lehman Shock in 2008. The purpose of the paper is to identify and explain how the current mode of neoliberal capitalism redefines and reshapes the societal roles of the university sector in neoliberal capitalist societies, notably the UK and the US in the post-credit crunch period. The paper examines capital-labour relations in relation to the concept of capitalism, which is then interpreted in the context of the socio-economic roles of the universities. This paper argues that the 2008 financial crisis per se has not removed government expectation of the economic role of the universities, which has been shaped in government neoliberal policy and practice over three decades and lately developed in relation to the discourse of the knowledge economy. The effect of 2008 was rather the rise of ontological insecurity, the loss of credibility in degrees and awareness on problematic graduates’ transition from university to work in a secure, managerial or professional occupation, as new dominant political discourses such as ‘lost generation’, ‘youth unemployment’ and ‘living wage’ suggest. This paper clarifies the differences between higher education access and graduate employment opportunities.

Book Review: Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms by Scott Reinardy

Book Review: Journalism’s Lost Generation: The Un-doing of U.S. Newspaper Newsrooms by Scott Reinardy

The Last of the Lost Generations? Formal and Non-Formal Education in Ghana during Times of Economic Decline and Recovery

AbstractUsing a cohort approach, this paper examines educational attainment in Ghana and its potential determinants considering both educational attainment in the formal education system and participation in non-formal education in the form of adult literacy programs. The results indicate an overall substitution between formal and non-formal education across the generations, with participation in adult literacy programs decreasing as the formal education system expanded its coverage across space and time in Ghana. Individuals who completed any formal education were also much less likely to participate in adult literacy programs, by about 10 percentage-points per year of formal education completed. Additionally, the generations subject to the declining education system during the 1970s were substantially disadvantaged, with the cohort that was roughly of primary school age at the time of the economic breakdown in 1983 and the first few years thereafter being the last of the disadvantaged cohorts—the “lost generations.” This is especially true for the particularly vulnerable group of individuals who never received any formal education, where the crisis cohort peaked in terms of adult literacy program participation relative to later (and earlier) cohorts, possibly in response to a decrease in the quality of the formal education system as well as increased competition from returning refugees. We perform a simple test for the declining quality of the formal education system in the 1970s and find evidence consistent with a decrease in the quality in the education system during the 1970s, followed by an increase in quality thereafter.

Weimar Migrations: Katherine Anne Porter in Berlin

In the 1920s and the 1930s the Texas author Katherine Anne Porter lived out the life of a modernist expatriate, restlessly moving from one country to another, but it was a short trip to Weimar Berlin between September 1931 and January 1932 that had the strongest influence on her fiction. Porter came to feel by 1940 that her Berlin stay shaped what she called the entire “plan” for her literary output. This is because she found exemplified most starkly in late Weimar Germany the moral predicament that most of her fiction is about: a “collusion with evil” on the part of supposedly “good people.” In Berlin she witnessed at close hand the demise of the nineteenth-century liberal state and the rise of a new type of total or biopolitical state, one that was specific to twentieth-century modernity. Her two Weimar fictions, the novel Ship of Fools (1962) and the long story “The Leaning Tower” (1941), attempt to find modernistic literary forms that can represent this shift. The political element in Porter’s writing makes her transatlantic modernism quite unlike that of the Lost Generation writers. It is more appropriate to compare Porter’s work with that of a Weimar expatriate, Hannah Arendt, especially in their mutual emphasis on the thoughtlessness of evil; on the particular need for the exercise of the faculty of judgment in times of crisis; and on Saint Augustine’s concept of natality as a means for counteracting the existential despair of interwar Europe.

Priorities in Recovering From a Lost Generation of Firearms Research.

An editorial is presented which addresses firearms research in America as of 2018, and it mentions gun-related violence in the U.S., media coverage of mass shootings, and school shootings at places such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Lobbyists for the firearms industry are examined, along with support for gun safety reform. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and population health research are assessed.

Finding the Lost Generation: Identifying Second-Generation Immigrants in Federal Statistics

This article underscores the importance of adding a question on parental birthplace to the American Community Survey (ACS). This question was removed from the long form of the U.S. Census after 1970 and replaced by a question on ancestry. While the former provides accurate information about a demographic fact that is critical to the identification of the children of immigrants, the latter refers to a subjective social construction that has limited utility for purposes of program administration, apportionment, or governance. At the time that the parental birthplace question was eliminated, the percentage of ACS respondents who were foreign-born had reached an all-time low, and the second generation was aging and shrinking, so the loss to the nation’s statistical system was not immediately apparent. With the revival of immigration in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the inability to identify and study the second generation has become glaringly apparent. Immigrants and their children now constitute a quarter of the U.S. population: their nonwhite racial origins and a widespread lack of legal documents among them render their prospects for integration uncertain. Our current inability to accurately measure progress between first- and second-generation immigrants now constitutes a major weakness in the U.S. statistical system.

Regional collaboration to strengthen education for nationals & Syrian refugees in Arabic speaking host countries

The international community launched the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP) to help meet the needs of more than 4.8 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. The education arm of 3RP is the No Lost Generation (NLG) initiative, which supports the ministries of education in these host countries expand access to education; ensure the provision of quality, relevant education; and strengthen national and sub-national education systems. Planning of NLG efforts is regional; however, decision-making and implementation remain at the country level. Our study analyzes NLG initiatives for refugees in the context of recent education reform undertaken by Jordan and Lebanon, as these countries have focused on improving their national systems. We find that continued political instability in the region, and uncertainty of where refugees will reside in the future, coupled with common socio-economic concerns of the four countries, and comparable weaknesses of their education systems, suggest regional collaboration is needed to strengthen education systems. Three recommendations are offered to build the region's education systems: standardize K-12 curricula in STEM and standardize accreditation requirements for secondary formal education and NFE; develop regional databases in Arabic of evidence-based best teaching practices; improve linkages between universities and industry to secondary schools to ensure skills developed are compatible to those needed in the 21 st century economy. These recommendations make education more portable for refugees, given their uncertain future; they equalize learning opportunities for students, regardless of SES and geography; they make education relevant for refugees and nationals, providing skills young people need for better prospects. At the same time, our recommendations respect national authority in key subjects and promote local ownership of teaching and learning processes.

The Last of the Lost Generations? Formal and Non-Formal Education in Ghana During Times of Economic Decline and Recovery

Using a cohort approach, this paper examines educational attainment in Ghana and its potential determinants considering both educational attainment in the formal education system and participation in non-formal education in the form of adult literacy programs. The results indicate an overall substitution between formal and non-formal education across the generations, with participation in adult literacy programs decreasing as the formal education system expanded its coverage across space and time in Ghana. Individuals who completed any formal education were also much less likely to participate in adult literacy programs, by about 10 percentage-points per year of formal education completed. Additionally, the generations subject to the declining education system during the 1970s were substantially disadvantaged, with the cohort that was roughly of primary school age at the time of the economic breakdown in 1983 and the first few years thereafter being the last of the disadvantaged cohorts-the lost generations. This is especially true for the particularly vulnerable group of individuals who never received any formal education, where the crisis cohort peaked in terms of adult literacy program participation relative to later (and earlier) cohorts, possibly in response to a decrease in the quality of the formal education system as well as increased competition from returning refugees. We perform a simple test for the declining quality of the formal education system in the 1970s and find evidence consistent with a decrease in the quality in the education system during the 1970s, followed by an increase in quality thereafter.

A Lost Generation But Renewed Hope: Oregon's Pension Crisis and the Road to Reform

A Lost Generation But Renewed Hope: Oregon's Pension Crisis and the Road to Reform

War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature by Keith Gandal

Reviewed by: War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature by Keith Gandal Aaron Shaheen GANDAL, KEITH. War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 227 pp. $44.95 hardcover; $44.95 e-book. In War Isn’t the Only Hell, Keith Gandal sets himself the ambitious task of reframing the way scholars and the reading public regard World War I–era American literature. He contends that the prevailing narrative understands these works, most of which are from the so-called Lost Generation of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as “an outcry over the horrors of modern warfare and a revulsion from the patriotic propaganda about a moral crusade and great adventure that [End Page 590] the government mobilized to promote the war and the draft” (9). Rather, the works of these and other writers should be understood as a response to the Selective Service Act of 1917, which brought an unprecedented level of meritocracy to the enlistment and promotion for men entering the Great War. Since merit was such a pervasive force in mobilization, critics will derive a deeper understanding and appreciation of war-related literature by grouping it into at least three major categories of authors: noncombatant males, female participants and nonparticipants, and male combatants. Writers in all of these groups wrote about the shock and anxiety of confronting “new systems of power and publicity” that controlled and categorized men “not on the traditional basis of who they are or where they come from—their families, classes, and ethnicities—but on what they do and what they are deemed able to do” (10). In the noncombatant section that opens the book, Gandal argues that because Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, and William Faulkner did not actually fight in the war, their writings about it reflect a feeling of masculine inadequacy. Thus, in Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay, Cadet Lowe, who is stationed stateside for the war’s duration, envies Donald Mahon for the debilitating, yet masculinity-affirming, wounds he received in battle. In Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned, the well-educated and upper-middle-class Anthony Patch never makes it past stateside boot camp, where his love interest in Dot lands him in military jail. In a stand-alone chapter on The Enormous Room, Gandal makes the compelling case that what makes E. E. Cummings accept his imprisonment for having been suspected of sedition is that his jail is run not by the meritocratized American army, but by the French army, which “does not assess each [prisoner] separately or distinguish between them on the basis of individual attributes and behaviors” (72). Gandal then argues that A Farewell to Arms revises the bitterness found in Hemingway’s earlier war fiction, “A Very Short Story” and The Sun Also Rises, which depict characters whose wounds are either symbolically or literally emasculating. In Farewell, Gandal argues, Frederic Henry may lose Catherine tragically in childbirth, but in escaping with her to Switzerland beforehand, he gets the heroic romance denied him (or his creator) as an ambulance driver. The subsequent section of chapters on female writers begins with a cogent reading of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” arguing that wartime attitudes toward meritocracy turned women—even those critical of the war effort—into unwitting supporters of a martial masculinity. In the following chapter, Gandal explains how Ellen La Motte’s nursing memoir War’s Waste decries the inadequacies she found among medical personnel who lacked the training and professional experience she had received. Willa Cather’s Pulitzer-winning novel One of Ours, which is discussed alongside La Motte’s memoir, demonstrates the opportunities the military makes available to men from the working classes and obscure rural districts. Gandal’s most insightful readings are those of the novels by combatant authors. Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat shows the dark side of meritocracy as Hicks’s talents and abilities in the ranks eventually bring him to the point of soul-deadening battle fatigue. In Laurence Stallings’s Plumes, Richard Plume feels self-conscious about...

The youth in the European labour market. Is it lost generation?

Young people, school leavers, graduates and those who have not completed education, belong in many countries of European Union among the disadvantaged in the labour market. Because of that, they often face serious social situation. This paper focuses on the situation of young people in the labour market in the European Union, for whom the term lost generation is used in the media. It is investigated whether the concept of a Lost Generation is an adequate name for the situation or it is just journalistic hyperbole. The paper is a systematic review. It includes a meta-analysis component which involves using statistics. The methods of analysis of statistical data, synthesis of researched findings and monitoring of press and media are used.

Effort to Create Hope for ‘Lost Generation’: Perspectives of Turkish EFL Teachers

Millions of refugees have recently migrated to Turkey with the start of the crisis in their countries. As educationis one of the most crucial factors shaping the future of these refugees, studies are needed in thisrespect to reflect their current needs and problems in the host countries. From this point of view, this paperaimed to explore the views of Turkish EFL teachers working with refugee students in public schools invarious parts of Turkey. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 EFLteachers. The relationships of refugee students with host country students, the problems they encounteredwhile learning English, their basic needs in English classes, and potential suggestions of EFL teachers forrefugee students’ English language learning were among the issues addressed in the interviews. Fourcategories and their sub-categories were found out as a result of the analysis. The findings indicated severalproblems both refugee students and their English teachers faced in English classes in public schools.The findings also included the teachers’ suggestions with regard to materials used in the classes, suitablecounselling for refugee students, employment of Syrian English teachers, and many other topics. Finally,implications drawn from the findings with the aim of easing the language learning process of refugee studentsin public schools and some suggestions for further research were provided. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.31.19078

Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies of the RLG Project Participants – Applicability of Assessment Tools and Results of Pilot Studies

The paper shows the results of the research on competencies, including assessment of acquisition of ten entrepreneurial competencies specified within the Reaching Lost Generation (RLG) project. The competencies developed among participants are classified to broadly describe the sense of initiative and entrepreneurship as one of the eight key competencies in the European education system. In Poland, competency assessment was based on the observation of participants in the two selected schools-partners of the RLG project. The target group were students of final grades of upper secondary schools, who were preparing for the matriculation exam and had serious problems in choosing their educational and career path, and had a weak sense of mastery of entrepreneurial competencies. The assessment of acquired competencies was based on the observation tasks carried out during the initial and final evaluation. Based on the study, it can be concluded that the level of acquired competencies of the participants after completing the course of workshops for all tested ten competencies has increased significantly among both groups analysed, as well as in most individual cases. In addition to that, self-assessment of workshop participants was conducted. With the help of a questionnaire, the workshop participants assessed their acquisition of given competencies. The results of participants self-evaluation also show an increase in acquired competencies, although they are not as vast and clear as in the case of the assessment done by the observers, which may indicate a high sense of responsibility and prudence in the self-assessment among workshop participants. The conducted research can be a starting point for further studies and analysis of the process of developing entrepreneurial competencies among students of different types of schools and teaching profiles, especially showing the process and methods of acquisition of skills necessary for finding an attractive profession in the rapidly changing labour market. Nevertheless, the results of the pilot studies conducted during the test phase of the project indicate the usefulness of the proposed tools, both regarding the assessment of the level and the development of entrepreneurial competencies in the training practice.

Entrevista a Mariano Antolín Rato, traductor, novelista, ensayista, psiconauta y agitador cultural

Mariano Antolín Rato (Gijón, 1943) es un distinguido traductor, novelista y ensayista que supo personificar como nadie la figura del traductor como agente cultural que incide en el desarrollo de las letras y de la cultura. Su amplia experiencia y su oficio contrastado en la traducción de autoresnorteamericanos de entreguerras, posguerra y último tercio de siglo hacen de Antolín Rato un especialista en la traducción de literatura estadounidense del siglo xx. Sus traducciones de la generación perdida y la generación beat son reconocidas y alabadas por el público lector, colegas de profesión, académicos y críticos. Como novelista, ha sido señalado como uno de los más personales e innovadores de las letrasespañolas de los últimos cincuenta años.

Z: The Beginning of Everything

Z: The Beginning of Everything