Nostalgic Readings Research Articles

Towards Nostalgic Reading of Children’s Literature in Academic Teaching

Towards Nostalgic Reading of Children’s Literature in Academic Teaching

The Word, Prophecy, Time, Blessing: A Thematic Itinerary through Genesis 1

The article proposes a thematic reading of the first chapter of Genesis, through the analysis of three words: Word, Time, and Blessing. The aim is to show how the narrative, located in the period of the Babylonian exile, was not intended to offer a nostalgic reading of the origins, but to offer meaning to the present, a complex present, difficult but open to God's surprises. Because of this dynamism, the text also speaks to our contemporaneity, often steeped in sadness and lack of meaning, offering our generation the image of the divine dream of a world governed by the gentleness of the 'word.’

Remaking the People’s Park: Heritage Renewal Troubled by Past Political Struggles?

This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People’s Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People’s Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park’s past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process.
 Established by the city’s social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People’s Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People’s Park’s past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.

The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan: Histories and Cultures of the Book by Sari Kawana

Reviewed by: The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan: Histories and Cultures of the Book by Sari Kawana Jonathan E. Abel The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan: Histories and Cultures of the Book. By Sari Kawana. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 288 pages. Hardcover, £85.00/$114.00; softcover, £28.99/$39.95. Context matters. The historical, sociological, and mediated contexts for the content of culture have become important foci of study in recent years. In literary and cultural studies, this scholarly shift from structuralist and poststructuralist close readings to [End Page 307] cultural materialist, new historicist, and new materialist approaches over the past three decades has rendered the historicization of cultural material paramount—witness not only the rise in the study of book history but also the shift from film to media and screen studies. In the field of Japanese studies as well, the trend is evident in work by a range of innovative scholars.1 Sari Kawana draws on many of these insights and approaches to articulate a clear, compelling argument about the "use value" of modern literature and its place in a wider media ecology. The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan is a synthetic, unifying narrative of twentieth-century cultural production that provides nothing less than a phenomenology of modern Japanese literature—less a history or sociology of literature's everyday existence than a study of its everyday existence as an object in our world. Ultimately, the book continues the trend toward a general destabilizing of a specific canon, here by showing us the contingency of such canons upon the context of use and users, dependent as they are on generous authors, interested publishers, creative readers, curious literary tourists, and unexpected understandings of copyright. Each chapter describes and explains aspects of the being of literature in modern Japan—the way literature exists in daily life. Chapter 1, "Mass-Produced Must-Haves: The 'Enpon' Boom, Cultural Inflation, and Advertising Battles," covers the cultivated spectacle around books, specifically in terms of the publishing practice of producing "complete series" (zenshū). In Kawana's explication, though kashihon'ya (lending libraries) had long fulfilled the wish to borrow books, and though publishers had cultivated readerly desire to own books from at least the Meiji period, only with the advent of mass culture in the early twentieth century did they succeed on a large scale with the launch of anthologies advertised as "complete." Paying significant homage to Edward Mack's work on the Kaizōsha collection and its famed "books for a bookshelf' marketing scheme, Kawana shows how the devastation of the 1923 earthquake, along with the rise of a new middle class and its concomitant demographic shift to urban apartment and/or small(er) home living, was deeply correlated with a desire for full bookshelves. The effect of "tireless advertising campaigns" by "publishers who connected the idea of book ownership with other political, intellectual, and cultural fantasies that were prevalent" ultimately explains why readers bought books that they neither needed nor could afford (p. 15), bringing the theme of "use value" to bear on the question of the series. Chapter 2, "Reading Beyond the Lines: Young Readers and Wartime Reading Practices," assesses the afterlives of literature through an analysis of reading practices in wartime and the reception of the speculative fiction of Unno Jūza. Dissatisfied with the draconian depiction of the "dark valley" of wartime culture, Kawana illuminates the historical practice of a "repetitive and nostalgic reading" (p. 52) of extant volumes during that time of paper shortages and censorship, unveiling many richly creative reading experiences. She points out that even though literature in that period was stipulated to be "both entertaining and useful" (p. 81), "books were being bought and read even during the war, but often not for the reasons—the original 'uses'—that their producers (or their authorizers) envisioned" (p. 14). The chapter [End Page 308] challenges the notion that "art and entertainment took a backseat to political utility" (p. 52), and its focus on the wartime popularity of Unno succeeds in showing how readers, particularly younger shōkokumin ("little national subjects"), could find a myriad of possibilities even within otherwise nationalistic discourses. In short, Kawana argues...

Filming Shakespeare's Rome:

Abstract Despite dramatically different approaches to mise-en-scène, Julie Taymor's Titus (1999) and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus (2011) both use Rome in a way reminiscent of what Susan Bennett and Pascale Aebischer term the ‘contemporary Jacobean.’ The films locate the violence, pain, and politics of the Shakespearean texts simultaneously in an ancient past and a vaguely timeless present, creating a preposterous contemporary Rome. In Taymor's Titus, even scenes filmed off-location are designed to play to audiences’ preconceived notions of Rome through references to history, literature, and pop culture. While the production is site-specific, the time period is both universal and conflated; every historical or fictional Rome seems to exist in the same moment in the film. Fiennes establishes a Rome that is more time-specific by making costumes and setting distinctly contemporary, but the site of the Roman setting becomes universal, suggesting that the Rome of Shakespeare's Coriolanus can be anywhere and everywhere. The disordered Romes presented by Taymor and Fiennes suggest that Shakespeare can be understood through a reading of contemporary warfare, and contemporary civil strife can be understood and even predicted through Shakespeare's Rome. This cyclical reading of human brutality establishes both films as nostalgic readings of Shakespearean texts.

Ruins of the Present: Yaakov Shabtai's Anti-Nostalgia

Yaakov Shabtai’s novel Past Continuous is often considered one of the greatest achievements of Israeli fiction, earning Shabtai a prominent place in Hebrew literature and potential canonization as part of world literature. Often compared to the work of Marcel Proust, the novel, with its difficult style and sentence structure, is viewed as a work of complex reflective nostalgia, articulating a post-Zionist lament for a society that did not live up to its original ideological goals. Past Continuous has been read as a positive contribution to the wave of nostalgia that many argue characterizes Israeli culture of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the comparison to Proust allowed such a project also to appear universal to world audiences. However, as compelling as this nostalgic reading is and as much as it reflects the novel’s reception history, it greatly simplifies the politics of memory that determine the very building blocks of Shabtai’s prose. The associative leaps and breathless rhythm of Shabtai’s writing do not merely lead the reader into a reconstructed past, but also compel the reader to never dwell there and, in anticipation of the next comma or period, to be pushed ever-forward into the present. This article argues that a reexamination of Shabtai’s prose style in Past Continuous can reveal a current in the text that is antipodal to a nostalgic reading. In opposition to an idealized return to a forgotten past, the novel also demonstrates how the past, with all its monumental and ineluctable traumas, constantly presses into the living present.

Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (review)

Reviewed by: Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism Aldon L Nielsen Madhu Dubey. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. ix + 284 pp. Dubey begins by noting that while "we would expect African-American literature to form a vital resource for debates about postmodernism, it is conspicuously missing, even when these debates are launched in the name of racial difference" (2). Too often, when African-American literature is invoked in such discussions, it is in an effort to separate African-American writing from any association with the postmodern. Still, the gap Dubey offers to fill is not quite as wide as the publishers suggest on the book's cover, where they tout Signs and Cities as "the first book to consider what it means to speak of a post-modern moment in African-American literature." The fact that Dubey's own text makes reference to earlier books that undertake just such a consideration should serve to remind us that marketing departments are generally the final arbiters of jacket copy. Dubey's concentration on fiction brings about a further elision of preceding books on the subject, but Signs and Cities will be recognized, most particularly by its grateful predecessors, as a major statement on the subject as well as an invaluable addition to fiction studies, offering both broader and more acute comprehensions of postmodern moments. [End Page 767] Dubey follows Wahneema Lubiano in pointing out that the "decentering of Western cultural authority" should hardly be regarded as a crisis for African-American cultural studies (21), pointing to a long-standing black skepticism regarding Western metanarratives of the modern. Black critics raised telling questions about traditional views of agency and subjectivity in the West long before other black critics raised suspicions about the timing of poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity, and Dubey's acknowledgment of Toni Morrison's assertion that New World Africans faced the dilemmas of postmodern existence long before those dilemmas were named such by philosophers points in its turn to a long history of writings, most notably by W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James, asserting the modernity of African peoples and the contributions of New World Africans to emergent modernism. I find especially useful the ways in which Dubey addresses issues of the urban, anatomizing at the same time the curious turn toward the rural South and the past that has marked the growing popularity of a certain nostalgic reading of African-American culture in the years following the revolutionary 1960s. Dubey traces some of this to "the desire for a mystical encounter with the 'nonrepresentable' or 'naked' face of the other," which is but "the inverse side of claims about the decline of reality in postmodern times" (193). She effectively ties these phenomena to a mode of privileging of the voice that proceeds under the demonstrably false assumption that vocal signs are somehow less mediated, not in need of interpretation in the same way that is required by technologies of writing. Sutton E. Griggs, though he appears on few syllabi of postmodernity, cautioned as early as 1916 in Life's Demands that African Americans "must move up out of the age of the voice" into succeeding technologies, and succeeding generations of black technophiles have been not only "early adopters" but major innovators. This is part of what Dubey is getting at in her discussion of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, a novel that "undertakes a critical excavation, revealing African Americans to be the hidden architects of modern cities" (238). The critical assertion that black culture is in so many ways the hidden architect of the modern is, of course, an assertion that can only be made from the standpoint of a post in the after-modern, and Dubey's book is a veritable blueprint of the contemporary racial spaces of the cityscape. There are occasional oversights due to the exclusive focus on fiction. Dubey's masterful discussion of John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire usefully locates a real-life model for the character of Richard Corey, but shows no awareness of the character's literary model. While it could be that readers of Wideman's generation may know the character...

Time and the Politics of Nostalgia

This article engages with the temporal and spatial features of nostalgic discourse in general, and `The Journey' (a British Conservative Party election broadcast employed in the 1992 general election) in particular, in order to illustrate several ways in which `the past' may be re-articulated so as to legitimize a politicized configuration of the present. The form of this article is as follows: first, `nostalgia' as a conceptual problematic is set in relation to questions concerning discourses of self-identity, community and nation. Next, the historical specificity of party election broadcasts is discussed, as is the production and reception of `The Journey'. A critical analysis of `The Journey' is then provided, with special attention given to its construction of a nostalgic reading of PM Major's personal biography consistent with the ideological imperatives of conservatism as a political philosophy.