Minor Literature Research Articles

WORLD LITERATURE IN HUNGARIAN TRANSLATION ANTHOLOGIES IN SLOVAKIA

The study draws on minor literature theory and cultural theory of literary translation. As a case study, it analyses Olivér Rácz’s Csillagsugárzás (1978), an anthology of translations from world literature into Hungarian in Slovakia, and also compares it with the volumes by László Cselényi (1986) and Árpád Tőzsér (2002). In Hungarian literature, the anthologies compiled during the modernist period can be attributed mainly to the oeuvre of the poets who grouped around the literary journal Nyugat, and like the journal, these anthologies are linked to Western literature, complemented by the canon of classical antique literature. This initial tendency changed radically, especially after the Second World War, when the ruling ideology expected the literature of the socialist bloc to be represented. The collection of poems under analysis draws on this tradition but also seeks to incorporate Slovak and Czech literature into the world literary canon, given its minority position, while also making use of ideological and manipulative gestures.

Nanoparticles: balancing benefits, ecological risks, and remediation approaches

Nanoparticles are the simplest form of structure, having sizes ranging from 1 to 100 nm and can provide considerably high surface areas through rational design. Their size, shape and structure are responsible for their high reactivity and strength. In the last few decades, nanoparticles have been widely used in many dosage forms due to their excellent solubility, less size and better penetrability. They have attained prominence in various technological advancements because their properties can be tuned as desired via precisely controlling the size, shape, synthesis conditions, and appropriate functionalization. Due to these unique properties, Nanoparticles have acquired a substantial global market in various commercial and domestic applications, including catalysis, imaging, medical applications, sports equipment, sensors, energy-based research, and environmental applications. Due to the increased growth of the production of nanoparticles and their industrial applications, issues relating to toxicity are inevitable. Several reports are available on the benefits of these nanomaterials in various sectors, but relatively more minor literature is available on their effect on the environment and human health. Several heavy metal nanoparticles are reported to be so rigid and stable that their degradation is not readily achievable, leading to much environmental toxicity. This review discusses a brief history, various applications and the possible fate of the Nanoparticles after use. In particular, we describe how Nanoparticles affect the environment, natural resources, natural micro-flora and humankind. It also describes several techniques currently being used to remove nanoparticles.

Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Narrative Heritage

Abstract This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

Kleine Literaturen und die Globalgeschichte der deutschen Literatur Zur rumäniendeutschen Literatur vor und nach 1989 in Rumänien und in Deutschland

Abstract The aim of the essay is to formulate approaches towards a global history of German-language literature from Romania and to discuss them using examples. To this end, the concept of minor literature according to Franz Kafka is utilized and linked with the concept of a global history of German literature. Emphasis is placed on the continuity in this literature despite the changes resulting from engagement with the communist system in Romania before 1989 and through the 1989 revolution in Romania. Many of the authors have emigrated and live today in Germany. Nevertheless, their works remains part of the minor literature in Germany as well.

Positivity as a moderator of the association between enacted stigma and mental health among lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals.

In this study, we investigated the association between enacted stigma and adverse mental health outcomes in Israeli lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. Additionally, we explored the moderating effect of positivity, namely the inclination to perceive oneself, one's life, and one's future in a generally positive outlook, in this association. For this purpose, we surveyed 520 cisgender LGB Israelis (Mage = 33.20, SD = 8.68; 30.8% self-reported as lesbian women, 48.8% self-reported as gay men, 20.4% self-reported as bisexual individuals), and assessed enacted stigma, depressive symptoms, anxiety, negative affect, and positivity. The results of the hierarchical regressions and simple slope analyses indicated that enacted stigma was associated with higher depressive symptoms, anxiety, and negative affect. As hypothesized, positivity played a moderating role in the association between enacted stigma and adverse mental health indicators, whereby the association was weaker among participants with higher positivity scores and stronger among those with lower positivity scores. The findings contribute novel insights to the sexual minority literature within the field of mental health by unfolding the role played by positivity in mitigating the detrimental effects of enacted stigma. The results underscore that practitioners should not only be knowledgeable about the negative repercussions of enacted stigma, but they should also monitor positivity and integrate interventions aimed at enhancing positivity into their clinical work with sexual minority individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Contested Communities: Small, Minority and Minor Literatures in Europe ed. by Kate Averis, Margaret Littler and Godela Weiss-Sussex (review)

Contested Communities: Small, Minority and Minor Literatures in Europe ed. by Kate Averis, Margaret Littler and Godela Weiss-Sussex (review)

Research on the English Translation of Culture-Bound Terms in Yi Dialect Oral Literature from the Perspective of Four-life Maxim

The accurate translation of culture-bound terms is vital for ensuring the faithful representation of ethnic minority oral literature. Analyzing the English translation of these terms can significantly promote minority cultures, offer a comprehensive view of China to the world, and enhance the narrative of Chinese stories. China’s Eco-Translatology, rooted in Eastern ecological wisdom, provides a framework for translation in the new era, emphasizing Four-life Maxim. Guided by this theory, this paper examines the English translation of culture-bound terms in the Yi oral literature Meige, providing a reference for translating China’s minority literature.

Spirituality in the Black Arts Movement

The article investigates the significance of spirituality in the works of the Black Arts Movement poets. By examining the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou, the study uncovers the various facets of spirituality that African Americans embrace, including “Africanized” Christianity, jazz poetry, and Islam. The article aims to show if spirituality is merely a way to celebrate cultural diversity or a vehicle for social change. It draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature to demonstrate that the Black Arts Movement is a minor literature, whereby cultural markers such as spirituality are politicized. Because spirituality endows the Black Arts Movement with a political value and a collective enunciation, this movement becomes a revolutionary force that aims to enact social change. This politicized spirituality is symptomatic of a desire to foster a strong, positive bond with Africa, which is an antidote to the strangeness of mainstream society. The remembrance of the African past through Afrocentric spirituality is a tool for defining and redefining one’s sense of belonging. It is also a quest for an essentially black aesthetic.

Auteur Theory and Minor Literature: Meg Jayanth as a Game Auteur

The auteur theory, when applied to collaborative pieces like digital games, has faced criticism. This article aims to explore the feasibility of reviving the auteur theory by illustrating the work of screenwriter Meg Jayanth as a case study. Assuming that symbolic authorship can be identified through recurrent themes, distinctive game mechanics, and recognizable authorial signatures, Jayanth can be considered an auteur, despite frequently performing supportive roles for more prominent designers and directors. Jayanth's contributions, classified per Deleuze and Guattari as minor literature, encompass critiques of colonialism, advocacies for environmental consciousness, distinctive game mechanics associated with her name, and cameos. The article advocates for the revitalization of auteur theory studies to facilitate progressive dialogues on individuals whose contributions have been overshadowed in the discourse surrounding digital games.

Joseph Reményi and socialist world literature

Hungarian American scholar, Joseph Reményi’s concepts of “minority literature,” “small nation literature,” and “world literatures” highlight the shift from the singular forms Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature,” Pascale Casanova’s “small literature,” and Marx and Engels and Karl Radek’s “world literature” to their plural counterparts. In the discourse on “minor literature” and “small literature,” Reményi offers a nuanced categorization of Hungarian literary production following the First World War. He delineates it into three distinct strands: “literature in Hungary,” “literature of Hungarian exiles,” and “Hungarian literature in the Successor States.” This tripartite classification not only encapsulates the varied loci of Hungarian literary expression but also underscores the emerging literary dichotomy between Hungarian and Slavic & Soviet literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. As for “world literature”, Reményi’s conceptual framework, which pivots on the axes of “regionalism” and “internationalism,” segments world literature into four stratified layers: minority and marginal → local → national → world. This theoretical model facilitates a repositioning of the intrinsic diversities inherent within each stratum, mapping them onto a spectrum of diverse nations, cultural groups, and minority populations. Furthermore, Reményi’s concept of “world literatures” represents a shift from the singular notion of Geothe’s “eine allemeine Weltliteratur”, Marx and Engels’ “eine Weltliteratur”, and Radek’s “contemporary world literature” to a pluralized understanding. For “socialist literature”, Reményi’s categorization of Hungarian literature within the Western European tradition, as opposed to Eastern European literature, signifies the multifaceted nature of socialist literature. This concept, initially introduced by Marx and Engels in 1848, further elaborated by Radek in 1934, is eventually expanded by Reményi into a more pluralistic form as socialist literatures in 1956. The fusion of Reményi’s concept of “world literatures” and “socialist literatures” provided a gateway to construct Socialist World Literature.

‘My open eye’: Souvankham Thammavongsa, Anthony Veasna So and short fiction as minor literature

From the 1980s to the 2000s, contemporary world fiction gained increasing prominence through the maximalist form of the postcolonial novel. More recently, short story collections with postcolonial themes, realist styles and minimalist constraints have gained in prominence, even as patterns of migration entangle the categories of local and global. This article focuses on two recent and acclaimed books, How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, in order to argue that these reflexive, humorous and polyvocal collections provide new and generative iterations of contemporary global fiction through the form of the short story.

Analysis of Postcolonial Kazakh Poetry in the Context of Minor Literature

In the article, the characteristics and manifestations of post-colonial Kazakh poetry are analysed based on the concept of “minor literature” introduced by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to the field of social sciences and postmodern discourse. During the period of the Soviet Union, that is, in the understanding of colonialism, the literature of the colonised peoples was always considered as someone else's literature, and the author himself was excluded and considered as “another person”. Even after independence, these complexes continued on literary/cultural/political basis. As a result, the image of the typical writer in literary texts, works, language, style, political content and collective discourse has undergone significant changes. This article analyses these and other changes in post-colonial Kazakh poetry in the context of minor literature. Focusing on the works of Kazakh poets, including Turmanbay Moldagaliyev's poems written after independence, and poets such as Yesengali Raushanov, Bakhytzhan Kanapiyanov, Meirkhan Akdauletuly, Temirkhan Medetbek, Bakhyt Kenzheev, it draws attention to the deterritorialisation of the language and the transformation of the Kazakh language into a creole language and the political and collective discourse of literary works. Within the framework of these studies, the psychological impact of colonialism and emancipation tendencies in post-colonial Kazakh society and political and social issues were evaluated through literary texts.

Exponential minor literatures: a Yiddish poem of the Shoah in Judeo-Spanish translation

This essay applies the notion of the minor to the field of translation in order to explore the transhistorical relations between two minor literatures and languages – Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish – that have been radically affected by violent persecution and genocide. Interrogating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature as a point of departure, the essay develops a multifaceted analysis of the Judeo-Spanish translation of the Yiddish lament Dos lid funem oysgehargetn Yidishn folk (1943–4). It shows how the translation work of Arnau Pons in El kante del puevlo djidyó atemado constitutes an “exponentially minor” rewriting: a multi-layered practice with the ability of reparation that complicates the notions of the minor and the ultraminor by bringing into the conversation translation in situations of linguicide and epistemicide. The essay’s comparative and interdisciplinary outlook participates in the special issue’s ambition to pluralize the notion of the minor as it proposes to think translation as a modality of postmemory.

Minority, collectivity, and the short story cycle. Identity and difference in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late

This essay expands the politics of minor literature that, in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rests on the identification between the individual and the collective, by drawing on the affordances of the genre of the short story cycle. While highlighting the relational dynamics between the minor and the major that underlies Deleuze and Guattari's account, I show how a focus on genre offers the critical tools to articulate the enclosure of community with the pluralities of subjective belonging. The short story (cycle) has often been considered to have close affinities with minor literature due to its fairly low reputation, its interest in marginal characters, and its typical narratives of community. The essay complicates this equation through a discussion of Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late (2019), a series of interconnected stories illuminating the shared struggles of a group of Nigerian migrants in Belgium. While the cycle as a whole conveys a sense of belonging in which linguistic difference provides the very ground of group formation, the individual stories reveal the gaps within the collective and illustrate the ways in which identity and migration are affected by divergent intersectional subject positions marked by class and gender. By examining how political and aesthetic concerns go hand in hand in Unigwe’s short story cycle, the essay argues that minorities’ political struggles for emancipation do not necessarily require internal cohesion, but can also be enhanced through social diversification and multiple literary practices that shift with new contexts of linguistic production and global circulation.

Introduction: the aesthetic agency of minor literature

This introductory essay traces a genealogy of the notion of the minor in critical theories of the past four decades to then articulate the notion’s aesthetic dimension. Foregrounding that dimension, we argue, offers a powerful analytical tool for fostering a dialogue between world literature and postcolonial studies. Through a critical survey of the important work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, Pascale Casanova, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, as well as David Damrosch and Bergur Rønne Moberg, we contend that these theoretical formulations of the minor have rarely lived up to their methodological promise to articulate creativity, change, and solidarity in ways that are in the final instance not determined by vertical opposition to the major or by an overly restrictive account of aesthetic agency. Going back to the work of Kafka that is so central to Casanova’s and to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the minor, we retrieve the figure of Odradek and propose to read it as instantiating a self-reflexive aesthetic intervention that configures its own relation to political constraints. This insistence on aesthetic agency, we submit, challenges and complements both Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking philosophical and political account of the minor and world literature’s focus on circulation and postcolonial studies’ emphasis on sociohistorical contexts. The introductory essay concludes by presenting the six essays that make up the special issue, and emphasizes the ways in which these essays’ attention to the formal and imaginative devices of the minor pluralize the notion by articulating not only minor literatures and languages, but also literary figures (children, women, sisters, queer men), genres (short story cycles, flash fiction, buried laments), and literary practices (indirect translation, diasporic publication, rewriting, adaptation) in ways that capitalize on the aesthetic agency of the minor.

Reterritorialize, Baby

ABSTRACT: “Reterritorialize, Baby,” is an investigation of Torrey Peters’s recent novel, arguably the most popular novel written in the English language by and about a transgender person. This inquiry breaks down the novel according to a new conception of minor literature, borrowing some of the basic structure of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s original design, while considering the specific ways in which trans minor literature challenges not only heteronormative conceptions of identity, epistemology, and labor, but also the ways in which each of these is built into the tradition of the Western novel in modes that reflect phobic public conceptions of family, community, progress, and work. The article works through a series of deterritorializations and ultimately proposes that some of the work Detransition, Baby does is actually that of reterritorialization: remapping, extracting, and subsequently proposing new and disidentifying contexts and frames for subjects. Whether these reterritorializations represent a “new frontier” for fiction or an alternative manner of subject formation and narrative construction, trans minor literature is at a tipping point, presenting some of the most varied and incisive literature being generated on this continent today. This inquiry offers a hermeneutic for considering both one of its landmark works and its future prospects.

Recalling Lan Xang: Short Stories and Novels of Contemporary Isan Writers as Minor Literature and Affective History

Recalling Lan Xang: Short Stories and Novels of Contemporary Isan Writers as Minor Literature and Affective History

Regional literature and interculturality - using the example of literature from the Bohemian Lands

The author strives for the (theoretically substantiated) conceptualization of the German literature of the Bohemian Lands (and Prague). The analysis of Eduard Goldstücker’s unsuccessful attempts to classify them as a national literature demonstrates that this does not lead to any results. But the concept of ‚minor literatures‘ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari also offers no basis. Johannes Urzidil’s diagnosis of ‚Hinternationalität‘, which is entirely compatible with the concept of regionality, seems more suitable. In principle, however, nothing is gained by understanding the German literature from the Bohemian countries as ‚regional literature‘. It is necessary to show in detail how the various ethnic groups in Bohemia differentiate themselves from one another, interact, and coexist with each other. This can only be achieved with an open concept of the region – such as the concept of ‚soft spaces‘ with ‚fuzzy boundaries‘ that has become established in human geography. Finally, it must be demonstrated in which acts of communication a phenomenon such as the literature of the Bohemian Lands has been established – only in case that such communication can also be demonstrated between the ‚Germans‘ and the Czechs we can speak of an intercultural region with reference to literature. The concept of the border is to be transcended by the concept of a horizon, in which it is not assumed that units are juxtaposed and thus demarcated from one another, and the production of which must always be proven anew in detail.

Aspects of a Minor Literature in Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand Stories

Aspects of a Minor Literature in Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand Stories

Translating Social Items From the Tibetan Epic “King Gesar” Into English: What a Corpus-Based Analysis Reveals and How It Can Help

The Ge Sa-er (also known as Gesar) saga has been handed down for above 1000 years by Tibetan Chinese, Mongolian Chinese, the Tu and the Naxi, describing a heroic story in present-day Kangba Tibetan area. This article analyse the English translation of social discourse in the Ge Sa-er version retold by Alai (2009). Due to different knowledge shared by source and target readers, it is difficult to represent the source social meaning in the English translation. Aiming to resolve the translation problems revealed by social cognition, this article uses statistical methods together with corpus to conduct stylistic analyses on Ge Sa-er Wang (Alai, 2009). An unexpected finding of this research is that the data from statistical methods can better predict the translation difficulties of Ge Sa-er Wang than the data from corpus. Based on the stylistic features of Ge Sa-er Wang, we propose a social discourse translation model for Chinese ethnic minority literature.