Production Of Literary Works Research Articles

The view of intertextuality in graphic design

This study aims to reveal the existence of the concept of intertextuality in the field of graphic design. No product produced by humans can be considered independent of previous products; this situation demonstrates that past experiences and social interactions play an inevitable role in product creation. Especially in the production of literary works, individuals create new works influenced by previous ones. This interaction is defined by the concept of "intertextuality." The initial studies on intertextuality began within the framework of Bakhtin's "Conversationalism" theory and were later developed by theorists such as Kristeva, Barthes, Jenny, and Genette. With Genette's classification, the concept of intertextuality has become multidimensional. It has been found that this concept is not limited to literary products but also exists in fields such as music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and moving media. In this context, the special day designs shared by non-governmental organizations operating in Turkey on the Instagram platform were examined using visual intertextuality methods developed by Werne. The results showed that methods such as "Attaching to Image," "Framing Image and Text," and "Encouraging Thought in Image" were actively used. Additionally, it was determined that "Visual Citation" and "Clustering" methods were also employed, although less frequently.

Al-Ibda’at fi Intaji al-A’mal al-Adabiyyah al-Arabiyyah Khilala ‘Ashri at-Tssaurah as-Shina’iyyah ar-Rabi’ah

Abstract: This study discusses and studies creativity in the production of literary works during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The purpose of this research is to find and explain the forms of creations, their causes and their impact on the production of literary works during the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Creativity as something sure in every time has a different form. Not only with innovation, creativity must also have value. And the reason is for the evolving demands of time. This creativity has a real impact on all fields of human life, including literature as a product of human action. This type of research is included in the qualitative qualitative category. The techniques used to collect data are watching, reading, and taking notes. And the technique used to analyze data is an interactive analysis model that includes data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results of this research show that creativity in literary works is in the form of videos and pictures. The reason for creativity is the low interest in reading and the tendency to easy and not time consuming things. Existing effects from creations are divided into 3 positive effects and 5 negative effects.
 

Spotify Application Training in Making Radio Dramas as Extracurricular Activities for Literary Studios at Schools

The extracurricular presence of literature has a role as part of literature learning in schools. Its existence provides extra space for students to deepen their insights into theory, appreciation and production of literary works as they can in the classroom. The purpose of this community service activity that is integrated with the Real Work Lecture is to provide solutions offered to overcome a problem. The solution carried out is by Training the Spotify Application in Making Radio Dramas as Extracurricular Activities for Literary Studios in Schools. The results of the activities of this community service activity program are: 1) Profiles of target groups that are able to self-help products as activities that encourage discipline, independence and knowledge; 2) Knowledge of the steps of making a radio drama which includes dubbing, script surgery, sound editing process, and uploading to the Spotify application; 3) Increase cooperation between the university and the school; 4) The creation of student discipline in spotify application training.

Ressocialização de Presos pela Produção Literária

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a ressocialização de presos através de produção literária. A crise populacional que assola o sistema penitenciário brasileiro é uma realidade. Um dos principais fatores a contribuir para a alta taxa de ocupação dos presídios é o alto índice de reincidência. Essa situação denota a falha das atuais políticas públicas de ressocialização dos apenados, que não cumprem, a contento, a sua missão. Nesse contexto, merece destaque a falta de incentivos por parte da nossa legislação, e das autoridades públicas, à produção literária por parte daqueles que estão recolhidos ao cárcere. A atividade intelectual promovida pela produção de obras literárias exige, em suas mais variadas nuances, um nível de conhecimento e consciência por parte do autor, o que, por si só, exige maior engajamento por parte daquele que se põe a externar os pensamentos. Por exigir mais comprometimento, é natural que a propensão dessas pessoas à vida intelectual se torne mais natural. Justamente por isso, a hipótese levantada neste trabalho é que o incentivo à produção literária, nos cárceres brasileiros, ajudaria na ressocialização dos presos. Na busca por respostas para a hipótese formulada adotou-se a pesquisa bibliográfica como método de pesquisa. Os resultados encontrados confirmaram a hipótese levantada, demonstrando que o correto incentivo à produção literária poderia ser um agente de transformação no cárcere, promovendo a adequada ressocialização dos presos através da produção intelectual.

Acting natural: television and David Foster Wallace's metaffective fiction

ABSTRACT This article looks at three important early works about television by David Foster Wallace that are not often studied in tandem: the stories ‘Little Expressionless Animals’ (1988) and ‘My Appearance’ (1988), and the long essay on television and American fiction, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and Contemporary U.S. Fiction’ (1993). The analysis attempts to show how Wallace's ‘metaffective fiction’ (Clare 2018) explores important assumptions about the role of emotions and affect in the production of literary works. Relying chiefly on affect theory, I study these early works’ depiction of television (i.e. the shows ‘Jeopardy’ and ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ respectively) as a world of hyper-self-consciousness that nevertheless possess the potential for authentic emotional response and adjustment. The article also tries to assess how Wallace's writing emphasises the relationship between affective writing's potential and the ways in which popular culture enables or disables our capacity for emotional responsiveness. Moreover, it also claims that in these works Wallace goes beyond the postmodern notion of a ‘waning of affect’ (Jameson 1990) under late capitalism to imagine a post-postmodernist fiction driven instead by an ‘intensification of affect’; that is, in the distorting imaginative space of television Wallace discovers how metaffective fiction (Clare 2019) can enable a suspension of disbelief that disrupts hyper-ironic postmodern self-consciousness and enables more authentic modes of expression and acting to emerge.

The Clash of Rural and Urban Values in the Comic Books Budak Kampung and Mat Som

Lat, whose real name is Mohammad Nor Khalid, is a distinguished and versatile figure among cartoonists in Malaysia. His comic books tend to record sociocultural issues in Malaysia and often show the realities of Malaysian life, especially that of the rural Malay community. Comics are not just reading material for entertainment but are also an important medium for conveying ideas, criticisms and insights as well as having the ability to expose various disparities in local communities. This paper will look into the clash of rural and urban values in two of Lat's comic books entitled Budak Kampung (1979) and Mat Som (1989). The objective of this paper is to analyse the clash of values between rural and urban communities and explain the use of comic elements in conveying meanings in both comics. This paper will use the theory of sociology of literature developed by Alan Swingewood (1972), which is a sociocultural approach to the production of literary works. The findings of this study show that Lat's childhood experiences influenced the creation of Budak Kampung, while his young adulthood experiences influenced the creation of Mat Som. The clash of rural and urban values are tremendously significant in both works, as depicted by the entry of tin mining companies, selling of land, choosing a spouse, clothing styles and way of thinking.

Texto, imagem e visualidade na literatura contemporânea brasileira

O aumento significativo, nas últimas décadas, da produção de obras literárias fortemente marcadas pela inclusão de fotografias, pela apropriação e colagem de documentos, e por manipulações gráficas e tipográficas, dentre outras operações realizadas nos níveis textual, paratextual e perigráfico, tem exigido um reexame do modo como nos aproximamos analiticamente das mesmas. Se pensar na relação literatura e imagem significava, predominantemente, refletir sobre a produção de imagens poéticas por meio de tropos linguísticos, os processos crescentes de fixação de imagens e outras formas de visualidade na página impressa exige hoje, do leitor, a consideração da literatura como um objeto complexo, marcado pelo trânsito de linguagens e por modos técnicos de articulação do sentido. É dentro dessa perspectiva que este artigo buscará mapear as condições de emergência desse fenômeno no âmbito da literatura contemporânea brasileira e propor algumas formas de articulação analítica entre literatura, imagem e visualidade hoje.

Texts, Manuscripts, Versions, Canon

Texts, Manuscripts, Versions, Canon William J. Urbrock, Christopher T. Begg, and Andrew E. Steinmann 51. [OG Lev 16:1] Mark A. Awabdy, "Did Nadab and Abihu Draw Near before Yhwh? The Old Greek among the Witnesses of Leviticus 16:1," CBQ 79 (2017) 580-92. Lev 16:1 raises the literary question: Did Nadab and Abihu draw near before Yhwh (so MT, SP) or only offer strange fire before Yhwh (so OG, Tgs., Syr., Vg. and possibly [End Page 17] 11Q1=11QpaleoLeva)? A. explores the internal evidence of the OG reading, assesses the targumic evidence, and gives particular attention to reevaluating the fragmentary evidence from Qumran. He concludes that the failure of the OG translators to harmonize Lev 16:1 cleanly to Lev 10:1, the contextual suitability of OG Lev 16:1, and the external witnesses suggest that the translators, in keeping with their conservative style, translated an alternative Hebrew source text identical to what one reads in Num 3:4 and 26:61. Evidently, the Hebrew Vorlage of the OG, not the OG itself, was a harmonization to Lev 10:1 or to either of the Numbers texts. Also, although this conclusion is not definitive, it appears possible that Lev 16:1 in 11Q1 once supplied another parallel to the OG reading against MT and SP. This reading nuances the danger of the Yom Kippur ritual according to chap. 16: Aaron does not die for drawing near before Yhwh, since the altar fire he presented (Lev 16:12-13) was not strange fire presented by his sons (16:1).—W.J.U. 52. George J. Brooke, "What Is Editing? What Is an Edition? Towards a Taxonomy for Late Second Temple Jewish Literature," Insights into Editing, 23-39 [see #706]. In this short essay, I have tried to lay out some of the issues as I see them in understanding what was taking place in the case of the Jewish scribal practices of the Second Temple period. I have argued that editing is not just a matter of handling authoritative received scriptural tradition in various ways, but rather involves any re-presentation of earlier tradition, such that most compositions and literary works are the product of editing. Editing is not just something that belongs to a secondary stage after a literary work is supposedly "complete," but was rather present at most stages in the production of literary works, though it might assume particular characteristics at certain stages in the process. Taxonomically, there are macro- and micro-processes to be distinguished: the former tend toward the creation of new compositions, the latter toward the better description of the ongoing transmission of such compositions, though macro- and micro-editing processes can indeed be present in the same literary work. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 53. [LXX] Johann Cook, "A Theology of the Septuagint?" OTE 30 (2017) 265-82. In this contribution, C. addresses the question of whether it is appropriate and even possible to formulate the/a theology of the LXX in a way that would generalize his own endeavors to develop theologies of the individual LXX Books of Proverbs and the Old Greek of Job. As C. notes, there is no current scholarly consensus on the question posed in his title, with views on the matter ranging from "minimalistic" to "maximalistic." Against this background, C. devotes his paper to presenting the scholarly dissensus on the matter and to commenting on the diverse perspectives that have emerged regarding it, taking the "minimalist" and "maximalist" viewpoints in turn. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 54. [LXX Proverbs] Johann Cook, "The Septuagint of LXX Proverbs," Law, Prophets, and Wisdom, 87-174 [see #689]. Recognizing the Greek-language competence of the translator of LXX Proverbs, C. looks to content factors "gleaned from the content of the proverbs themselves" as a way of determining the provenance of the version. As for the ideology of the translation, the following features are of significance for the provenance issue: the figure of the strange woman as a symbol of foreign wisdom, the "Law" in LXX Proverbs, the topic of kings/kingship, and finally, elements suggestive of...

La sociologie de la littérature par Gisèle Sapiro

of a reader’s complicity in a perpetrator narrative.Yet Sanyal is also willing to recognize where literary figuration falls short: while Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand productively uses irony to underscore the French Republic’s problematic uses of Holocaust memory (à la Sarkozy), the novel’s unwillingness to interrogate France’s colonial legacy undermines its engagement with comparative histories.While offering fresh insight on a number of canonical texts, Memory and Complicity is timely, provocative , and relevant well beyond the French example: the plasticity of Sanyal’s framework, like the rhetorical figures she assesses, suggests the possibility of new crosspollinations across a range of linguistic and historical contexts. Trinity College (CT) Sara Kippur Sapiro, Gisèle. La sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-27071 -6574-9. Pp. 125. 10 a. As Sapiro explains in her detailed and judiciously conceived survey, the field of studies and research known as the sociology of literature was constituted in the second half of the twentieth century. This new approach to literature originated at a time when literary theory, under the influence of new criticism and structuralism, was increasingly focused on the internal analysis of literary works. In contrast, a sociological perspective developed in the context of Marxist theory and of work done in the field of cultural studies. The fundamental assumption governing a sociological approach is that the meaning of a literary work vastly overflows the boundaries of an authorial intention—not only taking on a significance provided by the context in which the work is created—but also having the potential of acquiring inflections and emphases according to subsequent configurations of social or cultural developments. In this sense, literature appears as“une institution, un champ, un monde ou un réseau de relations, elle est médiatisée par l’univers social dont elle est le produit” (34). Accordingly, Sapiro proceeds to outline three particular levels on which these processes of mediation take place, namely, the conditions surrounding the production of works of literature, the sociology of these works, and the sociology of their reception. Thus the production of literary works is subject to external factors such as economic, political, and religious pressures as well as to internalized ethical and aesthetic conventions or convictions. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as it locates the production of literay works at the intersection of a habitus and a champ or field, has been particularly useful in this regard. Such an approach helps avoid what Bourdieu has termed “l’illusion biographique” informing traditional studies that typically conflate an author’s life and work. The author’s role is to be understood instead in terms of “un travail de mise en forme,” a process defined as a “transubstantiation de la matière vécue, imaginée ou empruntée à des sources extérieures et leur amalgame, dont le 268 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and...

UMANESIMO MODERNO E CULTURA PRODUTTIVA

Thanks to its wealth and to its proactive role in the modernization of book culture, Milan has been the main hub in processes of cultural integration as well as the undisputed capital of the Italian publishing industry. In fact, it was in the metropolis of Lombardy that major transformations in consumption and production of literary works took place, which led to the predominance of the prose fiction over poetry within the Italian literary system. A key event in this perspective was the 1827 publication of the very bourgeois novel I promessi sposi. In recent times, Milan has been reasserting its hegemonic role as the main site for the production of literary and audio-visual entertainment.

Representation of Gender Ideology in Indonesia Novels: A Study of The Reformation Era Novel

This research was based on a phenomenon that gender ideology practiced by a society might be reflected in the production of literary work. Thus, even though a novel is known as an imaginative work, its content and gender ideology could not be detached from social reality. The aims of this research were describing the role and gender identity, the types of gender ideology, and the gender relationship issues in the Indonesia novel written during reformation era. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and gender perspective helped to describe the problems presented in this article. The formal object of this research was elaborating gender ideology presented in four novels written by Indonesian authors during reformation era, namely Saman by Ayu Utami, GeniJora by Abidah El Khalieqy, Nayla by Djenar Maesa Ayu, and Tanah Tabu by Anindita S. Tayf. The research method implemented was library research. This research showed the variety of ideologies that occupy literature as the site of struggle among ideologies. The results of the research are the four novels represent the patriarchal ideology, familialism ideology, ibuism ideology, and general gender ideology. The four gender ideologies create domestication of the position and the role of women. The existence and the organization of the gender ideology are supported by masculine hegemony in Indonesian culture.

Coleridge, Revision, and Public Self-Fashioning: Versioning the Poems of “Lyric Improvisation”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge`s poems of imaginative failure lay thematic emphasis on the immediacy of emotional response; but an examination of their publishing history and the author`s conflicting motives for rewriting them challenges the received accounts of the poems as a deeply meditative genre in which Coleridge describes a moment of personal crisis confessing private, lyrical impulses at the breakdown of creative power. Employing a biblio-textual method focusing on the production of literary works and the process (rather than end product) of writing, this article compares multiple authoritative versions of Coleridge`s poems of “lyric improvisation.” The essay reads Coleridge`s tropes of containment and lyric failure as a vehicle for not merely subjective, aesthetic affairs, but also pragmatic and social ones, illustrating discontinuities in the Romantic poet`s social circumstances figured prominently in the revising process of his metapoetic discourse.

Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) by Krista Van Fleit Hang (review)

Reviewed by: Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) by Krista Van Fleit Hang Bonnie S. McDougall (bio) Krista Van Fleit Hang. Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966). Chinese Literature and Culture in the World Series, edited by Ban Wang. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xi, 193 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-1-137-30698-2. This short book begins with a brief account of revisions made to the first and second editions of Yang Mo’s famous novel Qingchun zhi ge [Song of youth; 1958, rev. ed. 1960] that “symbolize one path of literature from the beginning of the twentieth century into the Maoist period” (p. 1). Two pages later, she describes the revisions as a process that “mirrors the path of literature in the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 3). The discrepancy between “one path” and “the path” in these two statements introduces a note of uncertainty that may be due to the author’s mission: her wish to achieve a kind of balance she finds absent in academic scholarship on modern Chinese literature, as summarized in her concluding sentences: “Literature the People Love is part of the project of understanding China’s experience in the Maoist period outside of a Cold War lens that requires either an affirmation or negation of the communist project. Appreciating the utopian vision of authors of the early Maoist period … is one way to approach this question. Engaging with these stories reveals many ways in which the ideals they present fit neither the CCP’s rigid narrative of state-bestowed liberation, nor the Western narrative of insurmountable repression in the communist system, allowing for the discovery of a relevance in that surpasses either of these narratives” (p. 158). In characterizing the writers’ vision of literature as utopian in the 1950s and early 1960s, Van Fleit Hang demonstrates both a generous sympathy for these writers and a troubling failure to understand the constraints under which they were operating and the actual social and political history of the period. Following the introduction, chapter 2 gives an account of the first volume of the magazine Renmin wenxue (People’s literature) in 1949–1950, with background information on its contributors; summaries of its theoretical and ideological articles; discussions of controversial stories by Qin Zhaoyang, Fang Ji, and Xiao Yemu; and finally analyses of two stories by actual workers in the last issue of this volume. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Li Zhun’s short story “Li Shuangshuang xiaozhuan” (The story of Li Shuangshuang, 1960), the novel Linhai xueyuan (Tracks in the snowy forest, 1957), and their transformations into other genres. Chapter 5 looks at two films made in 1959 and 1961 (although no mention of film is made in the book’s title). The final chapter uses the example of building the Ming Tombs Reservoir to symbolize the different paths of Maoist culture. There is much to be praised in the author’s statement in chapter 3: “I will not assume that a tightening of the political landscape leads to a less successful story. Using a relaxed political tone of the works as the sole standard of evaluation clouds our vision, preventing us from seeing different ways various artists negotiated policy and social change … My goal in this section is not to make a [End Page 206] value judgment, coming out in favor of the artistic merits of one version over the others, but rather to understand the complex factors that went into the production of literary works during the seventeen years” (pp. 62–63). It is true that many works on modern Chinese literature published during the 1970s took a narrow view of both politics and literature in China. A better understanding of the relationship between these two disciplines only began to flourish (mainly in studies published outside China) in the last thirty years. One of the issues, for example, that Van Fleit Hang brings to her analysis of Tracks in the Snowy Forest is changing attitudes toward gender roles. What is problematic about her approach, on the other hand, is its tendency to diminish the...

‘Critical And Curious Learning’

During the Long Restoration a new type of literary criticism emerged out of an intellectual milieu in which both neoclassicism and the new science were becoming dominant discourses. Both were profoundly influential in this development because of their intense interest in the issue of how the mind produced words and the language that they generated. In this light, the paper argues that the new scientists were not hostile to rhetoric or eloquence, seeing these as vital to their attempts to formulate a code of scientific language, and illustrations of the new-science attitude to rhetoric and eloquence are drawn from Bacon, Sprat, and Wilkins. The neoclassical concern that literature both instruct and delight, that it be lively and just, leads critical theorists during the Restoration to consider how a writer can produce writings which fulfil these two aims, and in doing so they rely on new-science insights into mental processes and language to investigate the operations of dispositio and inventio in the production of literary works. Analysis of the anonymous ‘An Apology for Poetry, in an Essay directed to Walter Moil Esq.’ and Thomas Rymer'sAn Essay, Concerning Critical and Curious Learning illustrates how new theorizing that was motivated by a desire to understand the role of imagination in the writing process created a new criticism.

The Duchess of Malfi and El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi revisited: some differences in literary convention and cultural horizon

From the large bulk of national English and Spanish drama, those plays which happen to coincide in dealing with the same subject offer themselves as a privileged domain where a fruitful contrastive analysis can be carried out with a view to eliciting the divergent conventions and ideological values which rule in different and even opposing ways the production of literary works in seventeenth century England and Spain. To analyse and contrast some of those elements in The Duchess of Malfi and El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi and put them in relation with their social, ideological and canonical context is the aim of this paper as a way of showing not only the literary practice in different societies, but how the notion of value in its Bakhtinian sense must be taken into account when assaying the appreciation of literary works stemming from divergent backgrounds.

Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout's L'invention du desert)

Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert) Réda Bensmaïa (bio) Translated by Denise Davis (bio) Elsewhere, history crumbled in its course; it arrives to us in scraps. —Tahar Djaout, L’invention du désert (82) At a time when studies termed “postcolonial” were still in their first stages of theoretical elaboration, the article published by Fredric Jameson in Social Text on “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” immediately sparked an outcry perfectly indicative of what the future would hold for the project of postcolonial theory. 1 Jameson’s thesis formulated the relationship of the literary text to political and historical reality in what could not have been more pointed terms: “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69; emphasis added). A little farther down on the same page, Jameson lays out his thesis even more exactly. He writes: “Third-World texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69; emphasis in original). As Ahmad Aïjaz pointed out in his own essay in Social Text, the generalization made by Jameson in formulating his thesis could easily lead to confusion and, what is more, imply a process of essentializing and/or “reduction to the one” that could not but provoke a rebuttal on the part of the reader who had a specific cultural and historical register in mind. From this reader’s point of view, for example, which is to say, that of a postcolonial Algerian, the attempt to inscribe “all third-world texts” under the same regime or Genre of signification can only raise doubt and suspicion: doubt as to the meaning of the totality aimed at (“all texts”); but also suspicion as to the texts’ nature and place of origin or transmission: is it principally a matter of works of fiction, and consequently of novels, or should poetic texts, dramatic plays, critical essays, and more generally all texts understood as “literary” be included in this undetermined “totality”? And if this were the case, what would the “limits” of the literary in question be? Knowing the importance both of writing called “poetic” to the Maghreb, as well as of the diversity of literary genres mobilized in the production of literary works in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, such an assertion kindles even greater reservations and confusion. 2 If it is true that an “allegorical” dimension 3 persists in most [End Page 151] so called postcolonial, this is clearly never the primary or singular “ambition” of the writers in question. When such is the case, experience shows that we often find ourselves before texts that could be called “didactic,” the artistic or literary value of which is slight or nil. This is true of literature proper—as in novels and poetry—but also of cinematic production: films. Legion are the novels and films produced by postcolonial writers and filmmakers “read” as “allegories,” though not so much as “allegories of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” as self-righteous and predetermined discourses on good and evil, on the pure and the impure, on true and false identity, on the glorious past scorned by colonialism, and so on. In short, as Roland Barthes would say of the pensum: the message can be made out from the first sentences, postures, and sequences! With this in view, it becomes clear that when speaking of literatures called postcolonial, Jameson’s thesis is rendered problematic less by the idea that the allegorical is in postcolonial texts, 4 than by the absence of any reference to or problematization of the matter of the languages concerned. Indeed, one of the conditions that enables the critic to inscribe...

The dates of Procopius’ works

The writings of Procopius have long been a subject of controversy. First there were disputes over the authorship of the Anecdota, which finally was assigned to Procopius. Then arose the question of when his various works were written, sparking a debate which still attracts scholarly attention; this paper aims to contribute to this debate, while extending the scope of the discussion to cover all Procopius’ later works. It may be noted further that the discussions over the dating of Procopius’ works takes place against the background of continuing reassessments of the latter half of Justinian’s reign: it has been argued that a fusion of classical and Christian culture took place in the sixth century, but the processes of this transition remain unclear. A key element in this discussion is the production of literary works, which appears to have tailed off markedly towards the end of the reign of Justinian; hence whether Procopius’ works should be placed in the early or the late 550s is of import to this wider field of discussion.

Six constraints on the production of literary works

It has long been recognized that the form and content of cultural works such as literature are profoundly influenced by the milieux in which they are produced. Only recently, however, has the production of culture perspective begun to be systematically codified in an effort both to clarify what is known and to identify what is problematic in cultural production. This article is a part of that process. Six constraints including law, technology, industry structure, organizational structure, occupational careers, and market are identified. The distinctive influence of each is illustrated with examples drawn from the research of a wide range of scholars interested in many different literary forms. The final section of the article focuses on the golden era (1880–1960) of the short story in the United States. The influence of the six constraints working in concert is shown to have produced four distinct types of magazines that fostered the development of alternative forms of short story fiction.