Native Writers Research Articles

Juan Luna as nationalist painter and hero: examining configurations of public memory in the Philippines

ABSTRACT On 12 June 2023, the Ayala Museum in the Philippines launched an exhibition entitled Splendor: Juan Luna, Painter as Hero for the commemoration of the 125th anniversary of the Philippines’ independence from Spain. It showcased Luna’s long-lost work from 1889, Hymen, oh Hyménée. Equally if not more important, however, was the exhibition’s aim to present Luna himself, his life and achievements, positioning him as a hero and protagonist in the nationalist struggle. The event was preceded by many other activities that commemorated Luna as a national hero. Using concepts derived from public memory studies, this paper examines the formation of public memory and its configurations. It delves into the historical context of the evolution of public memory and the institutions and individuals that contributed to this evolution. The paper argues that the public memory of Juan Luna owed to the nationalist reading of his achievements, promoted first by nationalist writers, then adopted and continued actively by the state. Meanwhile, private museums continue to shape public memory through exhibitions that attach Luna’s name to the national narrative. Moreover, public memory is continually shaped by popular memory that arises through ongoing commemorative activities in Luna’s locality.

Development and validation of an automated machine for self-injury assessment via young Koreans' natural writings.

Self-injury is common in all countries, and 20% of South Korean youths experience self-injury. One of the barriers to assessment and treatment planning is the tendency of young self-injurers to conceal their identities. Following a new stream of research that uses online text data to assess psychological symptoms as they are described in online posts, this study developed a computerized machine that can analyze South Korean self-injurers' writing in assessing their self-injury severity. Based on 16,645 online posts, Study 1 developed a machine called the Korean Self-Injurious Text Reviewer (K-SITR) using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and machine learning. The K-SITR's text-assessment results were statistically indistinguishable from those of professional counselors. Study 2 confirmed the validity of the K-SITR through a survey of 47 young Koreans who had experienced self-injury. Results showed that the K-SITR scores converged with participants' self-injury frequency and duration and discriminated from other heterogenous factors. The K-SITR also had incremental validity over two popular self-injury questionnaires. This study provides a new measure that may reduce the tendency of young self-injurers to self-conceal compared to traditional direct-item questionnaires.

ЛИЧНАЯ БИБЛИОТЕКА КАДЫРА МЫРЗА АЛИ КАК СОЦИОЛИТЕРАТУРНОЕ ЯВЛЕНИЕ В ЖИЗНИ КРАЯ

Аrticle it is devoted to the study of the literature of Kadyr Mirza Ali's personal library. At the present stage, the study of owner's inscriptions, bookplates, autographs, valuable, rare books from the personal libraries of famous personalities has become an important area of work in the libraries of the West Kazakhstan region. The relevance of the research is determined by the high historical and cultural significance of Kadyr Myrzali's book collections. The book collection of the national writer of Kazakhstan Kadyr Myrzali is one of the most important areas of research on literature and of book culture at the present stage, the key plot of the study of the sources of the poet's creativity. The thematic diversity of books in the personal library is analyzed, the history of the Kadyrov collection and its fate are revealed. The analysis of books from his personal library demonstrated a significant variety of reading interests of Kadyr Myrzali. Many rare copies of the 20th century have been preserved in his library. The method of thematic analysis of literature made it possible to identify and analyze the author's marginalia on the poet's books, their significance for the characteristics of the poet's literary work. Studying the experience of collecting, completing and preserving the funds of Kadyr Myrzali's personal library provides significant experience for philological science, research bibliographic work and education of the reading culture of modern readers.

We Belong Here: Queer Rurality and the (Eco)Poetics of New Nature Writing (Mike Parker, Luke Turner, Amanda Thomson)

This paper studies a body of hybrid non-fiction works that lie at the intersection of queer and nature writing and which articulate a new conceptualisation the queer subject’s relationship with rurality. Those pioneering narratives – which for the purpose of the present research have been labelled “queer new nature writing” – do not offer a simple reversal of the traditional mode of thinking about the agonistic character of the queer-rural dyad. Instead, having recognised the very potential and possibility of the queer life beyond the city, they remain deeply aware of the need to imagine new ways to think and write about their experience of queer belonging in the rural space. The major aim of the paper is thus to identify the signposts of queer new nature writing and argue in favour of acknowledging the micro-genre’s unique (eco)poetics: one that is distinguished by such markers as the exploration of queer rural heritage, counter-pastoralism, or the presence of the auto(eco)theoretical impulse.

SURVEYING TIME: HANNAH DUSTON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE IN THE WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU

During the turbulent times of Colonial America, skirmishes between European settlers and Native Americans were frequent and in one such incident Hannah Duston was taken captive. Duston and two other captives, Mary Neff, the wetnurse of Duston’s late newborn, and 14year-old Samuel Lennarson, made their escape by murdering and scalping their captors. With hatchet and scalps in her hands, Duston later became a symbol of Puritan America and famous nineteenth-century writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry D. Thoreau told her story both as a cautionary tale and as a fictional reimagination of Early American life. This article focuses on the ways in which Thoreau, as a travel and nature writer and as a land surveyor, uses Duston’s captivity narrative to reinscribe violent deeds within the realm of natural history.

The Sentimentalist Terrain of Ora V. Eddleman Reed’s Twin Territories Fiction

This article grapples with the messy legacy of Ora V. Eddleman Reed, editor of Twin Territories magazine in the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory, at the turn of the twentieth century. Twin Territories vocally opposed US statehood in Indian Territory and furthered the literary careers of many Native writers. It was an important and influential venue of Native literary expression in the early twentieth century that deserves greater attention from Indigenous literary and print culture studies. However, the magazine’s ambitions and how we make sense of its legacy are complicated by Eddleman Reed’s racial politics, her own (non)citizenship, and the contents of her short sentimental fiction, all of which did as much to reinscribe racialized notions of Indigeneity as they did to challenge prevailing settler assumptions about Native people. Reed has been hailed as a recovered Cherokee writer, but her family’s rejected Cherokee Nation enrollment applications and recent genealogical research raise critical questions about framing her in this way.

A New Lexicon for the Anthropocene: The Words of the Pandemic

The term “Anthropocene”, introduced by Crutzen and Stoermer in 2000, describes the massive impact of human activities able to influence geological processes: humans are a force of nature in a geological sense. The recognition of a close interdependence between man and nature has been consciously elaborated only since the late 1960s and early 1970s, thanks to publications in scientific environmentalism. It is indeed valuable to note that literary texts discuss these issues much earlier. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), in his essay Walking back in 1861 introduces the idea of preserving nature when it was unknown and unpredictable. A few years later, another author, John Muir (1838–1914), supports the interpretation of nature as worthy of intrinsic value and contributes to the creation of the Yosemite Park in California. What these texts have in common is that they belong to the genre “nature writing”, which is capable of putting itself at the service of the natural environment and to which Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012) by American nature writer, David Quammen, also belongs. Spillover fits perfectly into this literary tradition, embodying the main characteristics of the genre. Moreover, it shows some optimism towards the future, offering the possibility of redemption to our species. The redemption of literature in the context of environmental narration is solidified not only through nature writing. Spillover proves to be prophetic like its classical ancestors, also through the introduction of a new terminology that contributes to developing a new lexicon, that of the Anthropocene.

Phrase Frame Use in EFL Learners’ Argumentative Essays: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the features and development of multi-word formulaic sequences for foreign language learners in the field of second language acquisition. While considerable amount of research has been conducted on continuous formulaic sequences both domestically and abroad, scant attention has been rendered to discontinuous phrase frames. Adopting a corpus linguistic perspective, the current study compares and analyses second language learners from different backgrounds with native speakers, focusing on the phrase frame features identified in the argumentative essays written by Chinese and German EFL learners. With a corpus-based approach, the four-word phrase frames are extracted from the English TOEFL essay texts of Chinese and German students using AntConc 4.1.4 corpus analysis software. The top 100 most frequently occurring phrase frames are manually filtered and then classified according to their structural and functional features to identify similarities and differences in terms of overall frequency, structure, and function features of phrase frames between two groups of learners and with those of native writers. The findings reveal that L2 learners significantly employ more fixed and predictable phrase frames than their native writers, with German L2 learners using more phrase frames than their Chinese L2 counterparts. In terms of functional features, German L2 learners use more stance and discourse organizing expressions than Chinese L2 learners. Awareness of the essay genre, English proficiency, and the time-limited writing environment are contributing factors to these features. Therefore, the study suggests that the accuracy and variety of phrase frame usage are more representative of L2 learners’ acquisition and writing quality than their quantity of use. This study facilitates an understanding of different EFL learners’ phraseological competence through the lens of their p-frame use and provides pedagogical insights accordingly into teaching and learning argumentative essays in EFL contexts.

New German-language Nature Writing and the Language of Resonance and Reflection

Nature writing is traditionally a genre of non-fictional, essayistic writing which combines vivid natural descriptions, profound introspection and ethical musings. Since 2000, the New Nature Writing (NNW) has emerged in Europe rejecting the escapist, heroic and sometimes nationalist conventions of the original American genre. This article analyses three examples from German New Nature Writing (NNW) from the early 2000s: Laubwerk. Zur Poetik des Stadtbaums (‘The Poetics of the Urban Tree’) by Marion Poschmann (2018), Hafen von Greifswald (‘Port of Greifswald’) by Judith Schalansky (2018), and Wurzelstudien (‘Root Studies’) by Anna Ospelt (2020). As with its British counterpart, German NNW is characterised by ‘an attitude of mindfulness’ (Goldstein 2018) and a poetic perception of nature, and is filled with ‘protest energy’ (Fischer 2019). Our paper will argue that, despite the very distinct approaches of the authors, these texts demonstrate an astonishing similarity in their quest for a ‘language of resonance’ between humans and the plant co-world and in their creation of new spaces of nature-cultural resonances.

The Ethics of Local Belonging: A Theology of Naming Place

This article offers a theological description of one practice necessary for good local belonging: the creative practice of naming local creatures, both human and non-human. I explore the practice of naming as forming local belonging in dialogue with new nature writers in the British Isles and Jean-Louis Chrétien. I offer a brief review of the scope of theologies of place in the United Kingdom before turning to the themes of displacement and naming in new British nature writing. Finally, I use Jean-Louis Chrétien's theological accounts of naming and corporate prayer, to examine the effect of naming in transforming one's relation to one's locality, and propose that the Church's creative participation in local naming—especially in prayer—offers a transforming narrative as to the kinds of local belonging which ought to be pursued.

Deep learning-based digitization of Kurdish text handwritten in the e-government system

Many government institutions in developing countries such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) keep a variety of paper-based records that are available in printed or handwritten format. The need for technology that turns handwritten writing into digital text is therefore highly demanded. E-government in developed and developing countries is a crucial facilitator for the provision of such services. This paper aims to develop a deep learning model based on the mask region convolutional neural network (mask-RCNN) to effectively digitize kurdish handwritten text recognition (KHTR). In this research, typical datasets, which includes the isolated handwritten Central Kurdish character images, an extensive database of 40,410 images, and 390 native writers have been produced to determine the developed approach’s performance in terms of identification rates. This approach achieves adequate outcomes in terms of training time and accuracy. The proposed model gives higher performance for detection, localization, and recognition when using a dataset containing many challenges, the results were 80%, 96%, and 87.6 for precision, recall, and F-score respectively. The findings revealed that the proposed model obtained better results compared to other similar works. The accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) is more than 99%.

Characteristics of the Arctic nature in the perception of a child in the children's prose written by Semyon Tumat

Significant interest in the Arctic zone of Yakutia emerged at the end of the 20th century, when alluvial diamond deposits were discovered and began to be developed. The Arctic also has great prospects for hydrocarbons. At the present time there is a struggle for the development of natural resources of the Arctic, in this connection the relevance of the Arctic theme in Yakut literature as a whole increases. The Arctic is a mysterious, harsh northern land, which at the same time is very beautiful and dangerous. The land of White Silence fascinated and attracted explorers, travellers and romantics. Not only masters of words, but also artists, pedagogues, philosophers turned their eyes to the world of childhood as an integral part of people's life. Memories of childhood spent in the harsh northern land, of its courageous inhabitants - reindeer herders, hunters, fishermen - became the material for the literary works of the national writer of Yakutia, poet, prose writer Semyon Andreevich Popov-Tumat. In the works of the writer we get acquainted with the difficult life of the indigenous people of the North with their traditions, ways of life, with their feelings and dreams. We have analysed cycles of children's proses written by Semyon Tumat. In the stories of the writer contains a lot of cognitive information about the life of a simple man, a northerner, a master, transforming this harsh land and the amazing country of snow, endless sky, illuminated by the polar lights, the wonderful world of the Arctic. S. Tumat's prose does not glorify tenderness or mercy. In the works of the writer the most important themes are: the theme of childhood, upbringing, family, faith, willpower, the theme of nature, friendship and love. However, love for his native northern land, parents, the world of the Arctic appears in the works of a strong feeling, imprinted forever on the heroes. Semyon Andreevich approached to the disclosure of this issue individually; thinking over the style and details of the narrative, composition of the works, character and psychology of the heroes.

The myth of Russia in “Dialogues of the Dead” by Mikhail Muraviev

This article focuses on the processes of development and change in the philosophical and rhetorical genre of “Dialogues...” in Russian literature of the last quarter of the 18th century. A given phenomenon goes back as far as the heritage of ancient thinkers; for instance, “Parallel Lives” by Plutarch was relevant to Russian writers of the years 1700-1800. Initially, under new conditions, the national writers were mostly interested in this genre by reason of the general problems of knowledge distribution as a metaphysical beginning of existence (A. Belobotsky, V. Tatitshev). By the last quarter of the 18th century, a key aspect of consideration had been shifted to the issues of a new personal education and the state and moral doctrine of Russia. Mikhail Muraviev (1757 - 1807) was a famous Russian literary man and enlightener, the founder of sentimentalism and pre-romanticism in national literary culture, a philosopher and historian. In the years 1780-1790, on a personal invitation of Empress Catherine the Second, he taught moral philosophy and history to her grandchildren – tsesareviches Alexander and Constantine. It was the period when “Dialogues of the Dead” were contemplated as part of the writer’s teaching activities. M. Muraviev’s central goal was to show two key ideas: the development of Russia in Modern Period and the development of a new educated person.Using a well-known allusion technique, the writer chose symbolic figures of the world history and culture, transferred two contrasting characters to one period of time and turned them into interlocutors, holding a discussion. Moreover, Russian public figures of different epochs could meet both the leaders of the world historical and cultural process and each other. So far, “Dialogues of the Dead” by M. Muraviev have been studied fragmentarily in scientific research. The researchers’ attention has been focused mainly on the range of sources used by the writer, as well as on some language features, style and general moral ideas of the outstanding Russian enlightener. According to our hypothesis, the original “myth of Russia” is in the centre of this work. The distinguishing features of this phenomenon are: firstly, the synthesis of various spheres of socio-cultural life, from policy to literary culture; secondly, a clear correlation of “the state glory” phenomenon with conceptions of the internal moral creed both of the ruler of the state and every man in the country.

Native American History as Counter-Discourse in James Welch’s Narratives: The Examples of “Fools Crow” and “Killing Custer”.

A peculiar dimension in the Native American writing is the documentation of the history of the Native Americans’ traditional lives before, during and after their encounter with the white settlers. It is a development that is essentially explicable within the purview of postcolonial discourse, given that, in some contexts, historical distortions from the perspective of the ‘other’ have been asserted as the rationale for such creative explorations on the part of the Native writers. In the context of this study, such a dimension, with particular reference to James Welch’s novels, is considered as, indeed, counter-discursive. Two of his novels, Fools Crow and Killing Custer, are selected with a view to assessing how the historical documentations in the texts translate to counter-discourses in the context of the Native Americans’ historical evolution. The study reveals that, while the Native American histories in the texts dovetail into each other, they are largely inspired by the Native Americans’ colonial experience vis-à-vis the need to represent their history from the perspective of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘other’. It concludes that the narratives have, in a significant way, performed the allegorical configuration function, as a counter-discourse strategy described by Slemon (1987). This holds in that they have conceivably assumed ‘readings’ and ‘contestations’ of the previously textualised colonial experience of the Native Americans from the perspective of the ‘other’.

Anthropomorphizing Animals: Foxhunting Stories and the Nature Faker Controversy

Abstract This paper uses a selection of foxhunting stories to explore the way in which anthropomorphized foxes were used to communicate pro-hunting messages to their mostly young readers. These justifications also appeared in nonfictional foxhunting sporting literature. Indeed, this literature included some of the same incredible anecdotes that also appeared in the work of nature writers at the turn of the twentieth century such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton working in a new sympathetic genre called the “animal story.” These writers found themselves under attack because naturalists like John Burroughs, and hunters, including President Theodore Roosevelt, found their stories to be inaccurate and anthropocentric. Roosevelt dubbed them the “nature fakers.” Foxhunting “histories” employed imaginative material and much anthropomorphism but were not attacked for doing so. This tends to indicate that anthropomorphisms were more acceptable when they were facilitating animal exploitation than when they were used to promote the perspective of nonhuman animals.

New British Nature Writing, or an Emergent Hope

Abstract Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, Britain has witnessed the emergence of a new literary movement called “new nature writing.” This paper aims to call attention to new British nature writing as an emergent genre marked by its practitioners’ will to replace anthropocentrism with ecocentrism, present an all-embracing understanding of nature, and interweave the personal with the ecocritical. To this end, it offers insights into selected memoirs of contemporary British writers, including Kathleen Jamie’s essay trilogy Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing; Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun; and Carol Donaldson’s On the Marshes: A Journey into England’s Waterlands. Such non-fiction first person narratives, labeled as eco-memoirs, may provide an eco-centered approach to the natural world in the Anthropocene, and thus cherish hopes for a livable future for our planet. (HBM)

Lucien Descaves on Trial: Naturalism, Sexual Politics and Patriotism in the Third Republic

Abstract: This article examines the 1890 trial of young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves, in which he was charged with, and later acquitted for, "injures à l'armée" and "outrages aux bonnes mœurs" following the publication of his antimilitary novel Sous-Offs (1889). I argue that literary style dominates the trial, not least because one of its key figures was an Idealist novelist with a fervent hatred of Naturalism. The article situates the trial in the context of debates about the social function of literature in the Third Republic and, crucially, anxieties about the reading habits of the peuple . I show that the trial offers a privileged lens for understanding the pressure Naturalism was under at this point in the century, insofar as it brings together, and then stages in the form of debate, the many social and cultural flashpoints touched on by the novel and how they might be represented in fiction.

Due North? British Nature Writing Prizes: Reworking Cardinal Points in Contemporary British Nature Writing

Recent publications belonging to British nature writing have been marked by an evolution in the representation of space and geography. Some authors have focused on reworking boundaries and direction, for instance in 2012 Poet Laureate Simon Armitage insisted in Walking Home that he should walk “in the wrong direction”, or Robert Macfarlane, who in 2012 partly structured The Old Ways according to the cardinal points which directed his walking explorations. Other authors choose to rework tropes belonging to the use of fixed points of reference in space by exploring directions as set markers, like Melissa Harrison with All Among the Barley (2018), which is set in East Anglia, or Sarah Hall in The Wolf Border (2015). As stressed by Abberley et al. in Land Lines it cannot be assumed that nature and nature writing work as markers for conservative ideals either, and it can be argued that such recent works have done much to reinvent nature writing as a genre which can exist with a strong sense of directional markers and cardinal points and a distinct aesthetics which points at connectedness. To examine the representation of such directions, we will pay particular attention to recent publications, and more specifically to two texts which were each awarded a recent literary prize (given the prolific quality of the field, readers have required an increase in orientation themselves): Uprooting (Marchelle Farrell 2023), which won the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2021, and English Pastoral (James Rebanks 2021), which won the Wainwright Prize the same year. We will then endeavour to observe the structuring role of cardinal points in these texts and their place in a quickly-evolving literary field.

Anita Heiss’ Tiddas – A Story of True Friendship and Sisterhood: A Critical Study

Dr Anita Heiss’ Tiddas (2014) is one of the best chick lit novels ever written by any Aboriginal writer in Australia. The very name “tiddas” is an Aboriginal term which is used specially by the Northern Australians. So it is a general term used among the Aboriginal people which meant sisters or exceptional women in life. As a grammatical particle the word “tiddas” is the plural form of “tidda”. In most of the novels, written by Dr Anita Heiss, women are the major protagonists. In Avoiding Mr Right (2006) Alice Aigner is the main protagonist who represents the whole Aboriginal society and the condition of the Aboriginal women in the White centric culture. In Not Meeting Mr Right (2007) she confirms that because of the contemporary cultural miserliness and social degradation the Aboriginal women were absolutely exploited. Even they were unable to choose a Mr Right as their permanent life partner in their real life situation. Even the novel Tiddas acclaimed a huge popularity which the author herself admitted in the Author Note of the novel that she was extraordinarily energized about the edition of Tiddas which corresponds with the premiere of the stage adaption of the novel. Even she herself admits that I've still got lots of friends there and family. I've never had a bad time in Canberra, I love it there. It even featured in one of my books, Manhattan Dreaming." However, as far as the name of the novel Tiddas (2024) is concerned it absolutely a story of true friendship and sisterhood. It is the most enjoyable and human story dealing with historical and contemporary Aboriginal issues.

«ВЕСТИ ИЗ ЛЕСА» — СОВЕТСКИЙ РАДИОПРОЕКТ И ПРОГРАММА ЖИЗНИ

The Leningrad radio programme “Vesti iz Lesa” (News from the Forest), broadcast on All-Union Radio from 1956 to 1970, was a successful Soviet radio project for children. Despite its narrow target audience (young children) and limited content focused on forest themes, the programme attracted a wide range of listeners of different ages (“from pioneers to pensioners”, according to Nikolai Sladkov). This is evidenced by the hundreds of letters received by the editorial office “Leningrad, radio ‘Vesti iz Lesa’” every month. The research material for this article includes a corpus of letters stored in the archive of the writer and “nature writer” Nikolay Sladkov (the compiler of the scripts), as well as microphone cards from “Vesti iz Lesa” in the archive of the Gosteleradio St. Petersburg – 5 channel. The subject of the study is the reception of the nature science programme by different age groups of radio listeners. Analysis of the editorial mail reveals that for many thousands of listeners, the programme “Vesti iz Lesa” legitimized the human right to perceive nature without regard to economic benefits, cultural standards, or ideological and patriotic dogma. The editorial board’s position diverged from the ideological mainstream that dominated Soviet radio in the late 1950s-1960s, but resonated with the radio listeners of the time. This perception of nature, transcending ideological and cultural barriers, contributed to the creation of an “emotional community” around the programme founded by Vitaliy Bianki and his associates.