Professors Of Literature Research Articles

The Personal and the Political: Azar Nafisi’s Memoir as a Feminist Lens into Iranian Society

This paper highlights the points that Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books brings out the social and political life of people in Iran. It is a memoir by Azar Nafisi that explores the intersection of literature, personal freedom, and the oppressive political climate in Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a poignant memoir that takes readers on a journey into the heart of post-revolutionary Iran, where Azar Nafisi, a literature professor, forms a secret reading group with her female students. Against the backdrop of a repressive regime, Nafisi uses the works of Western literary classics, particularly Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, to examine the complexities of personal and intellectual freedom. Through the lens of literature, Nafisi explores the lives of her students and delves into the power of literature to challenge societal norms. The narrative weaves together the personal struggles of the women in the group with a broader commentary on the impact of political upheaval on individual lives. Nafisi's courageous exploration of the transformative power of literature serves as a testament to the enduring human spirit and the pursuit of intellectual freedom in the face of adversity.

Who Does English? Learning from Youth and Professional Literarian Communities

Two teacher educators explore how youth and literary professionals engage in the creation of new literary knowledge as a form of social justice.

A Comparative analysis between the level of literary interest area of vocation and linguistic intelligence of undergraduate students

This paper focuses on the requirement of a comparative analysis between the level of literary interest area of vocation and linguistic intelligence of undergraduate (UG) students in order to demonstrate the student’s connection between literary area of vocation and linguistic intelligence can have practical implications for education, career development, and curriculum design while also adding to our understanding of how language and literature shape cognitive development and career choice. For this purpose, the researcher used a survey method along with two standardized tools: the Multiple Intelligence Inventory (MIS-ASPS) provided by Surabhi Agarwal and Dr. Suraksha Pal for testing linguistic intelligence, and the Vocational Interest Record (VIR-K) provided by Dr. S. P. Kulshrestha for assessing literary interest levels. 200 undergraduate students, 100 of whom were male and 100 of whom were female, made up the sample for the current study. They were selected using the random sampling method from five different colleges in the city of Aurangabad. The analysis of statistical data uses the statistical metrics mean, S.D., and t-test. In the same field, male students’ mean values are 8 and SD is 4.4, compared to female UG students’ mean values of 7.82 and 4.4 for the literary vocational interest area. As a result, using these numbers as a benchmark, it is evident that male undergraduate students have greater interest in the literary profession than female students. At the 0.05 level of significance, the resulting t value for the male and female groups is 0.29, which is lower than the table value of 1.96. As a result, there is little variation in literary careers between men and women. As a result, the null hypothesis is accepted. The obtain result in terms of linguistic intelligence, female UG students scored an average of 21.41 and a standard deviation of 22.74, whereas male students scored an average of 4.52 and a standard deviation of 5.97. At a significance level of 0.05, the obtained t value for both the male and female groups is 1.77, which is lower than the table value of 1.97. Therefore, there is no discernible difference in verbal intelligence between males and females. The null hypothesis is therefore accepted. The calculated average for the career interest area in literature is 7.91, with a standard deviation of 4.42. The average language intelligence score is 22.07, while the standard deviation is 5.52. When compared to the table value of 1.96 at the 0.05 level of significance, the derived t value of both the literary interest area of occupation and the level of linguistic intelligence of UG students is 29.5. As a result, the study found a clear disparity between UG students’ levels of linguistic ability and literary interest. This rules out the null hypothesis.

World Literature: An Indian Way of Thinking

The idea of the world is a dynamic phenomenon, and the development of world literature is tied to both literary and extra-literary events. Worldwide literary centers can be found in many locations spanning both time and space. The concept of the world, or Visva (Sanskrit), is considerably older even if world literature has been a discursive framework that has affected the literary structures of many languages around the world since the 19th century. “Vasudhaiba Kutumbakam,” or the universal neighborhood, is a term from ancient Indian literature that attests to the age of the concept of Vasudha, or the world. As a result of numerous trade routes, cultural interactions, the expansion of ancient and medieval kingdoms, and the transit of literary writings, cosmopolitan literary spaces were created in various parts of t8he world. Additionally, the absence of modern cartography and the sovereign state system enabled constant changes in the borders of the empires, resulting in spaces with many languages. India has connections to several Asian nations dating back to ancient times, as well as to Europe since the medieval period. The diverse traditions of human thought from various parts of the world are carried in Indian literature. Significant literary contacts and the ongoing formation of new literary legacies were witnessed in the East, Middle East, South East, and South Asia of the present. The Sufi and Bhakti traditions, the reception of Indian epics as oral, written, and performative texts in South-East Asia, and the role of the royal courts as multilingual literary spaces continue to broaden the intellectual traditions of Bharat (India). Thus, the pre-modern development of world literature seemed intriguing and a subject worth exploring for literary professionals. This essay contends that ancient and medieval India and Bengal, particularly their languages, continually bargained to expand their intellectual frontiers.

The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name

This essay asks, when does our effort to avoid offending students interfere with our ability to teach them? Rehearsing conflicts over language and terminology, over who can speak and what can be said, from my four-decade career as a literature professor, critical theorist, and gender scholar, I confront contemporary efforts to censor certain words, to prohibit certain kinds of inquiry, and to limit who can speak about certain subjects by placing recent incidents in relation to previous debates in academia and the public sphere. The university classroom and scholarly peer-reviewed journals have long served as spaces where established viewpoints can be questioned, knowledge can be challenged, and identities can be probed. Increasingly, however, we see classroom curricula under attack, books banned, language policed, and viewpoints prohibited, with teachers, students, and scholars self-censoring as a result. What happens when words are prohibited, and research subjects are deemed off limit, because some fear they may harm fragile young students or readers? Refusing to have that conversation, to allow scholars and teachers to debate controversial positions openly, itself does the harm. Through examples drawn from my teaching and scholarship, and drawing on newspaper editorials and academic publications, I model a means for working through this seeming impasse encapsulated by the title phrase, “the word that dare not speak its name.”

“Fact” versus “Fancy” among Victorian Professionals in Hard Times

Abstract: Mid-19th-century England saw the expansion and growth of professionalism. Read in this context, Hard Times (1854) can be construed as a critique of both Victorian professionals in general and literary professionals in particular, specifically novelists. Thomas Gradgrind emerges as a representative of contemporary fact-oriented professionals, and fiction writers turn out to be their antithesis. The novel defines fiction writers as both agents of morality and informants of essential facts necessary to the social reform of Victorian society, while disqualifying other factualist professionals from such roles. These views imply that Dickens believed his profession had special merits and advantages compared to others. However, they also reflect his anxieties about the unstable and increasingly feminized condition of novelists; in other words, the threat to his own professional and masculine identity. In Hard Times , Dickens was attempting to enhance the respectability of his profession and legitimize its masculinity.

Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor by Matthew Wickman (review)

Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor by Matthew Wickman (review)

:Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850

:<i>Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850</i>

Good

Good

The Life and Death of the Red Prince

This article reviews Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a book by M. V. Efimov and G. Smith published by Molodaya gvardiya in the Lives of Remarkable People series (2021). It was written by the oldest English specialist in Russian literature Professor G. S. Smith and a well-known Russian researcher of the literature and culture of Russia abroad M. V. Efimov. Both have studied the life and literary legacy of the character of their book for many years. For the first time in Russia, using the Russian and European tradition of biographical studies and historical-literary, cultural, and textual practices, the authors have carried out a full-scale reconstruction of the biography of one of the most striking and enigmatic figures of the first wave of the Russian emigration. The authors of the book introduce a significant scope of archival materials and memories of contemporaries, hard-to-access English and émigré periodicals, and other sources into scholarly circulation. It makes it possible to create a detailed account of the main events of prince D. P. Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s life – from his childhood to his tragic death in the Magadan camp, dramatic twists of fate and the reasons behind them, his close circle and distant environment, the political, historical, cultural, and literary context of the events described. The biographers’ interest in the inner world and the psychology of Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s actions is combined with a subtle philological analysis of his literary criticism and studies. According to the reviewers, the book is a major event in the Russian literary, political, and cultural history of the 1920s–1930s.

Afterword

Afterword

The Politics and Psychology of the Literary Field: Revisiting Cultural Capital

Abstract This article explores the importance of psychoanalysis to John Guillory's literary sociology. The failure of scholars to recognize the canon wars as a symptom of the increasing institutional marginality of literary studies derives from their commitment to what Guillory calls an “ego-ideal” of the profession. In particular, the psychic investments of literary critics account, on the one hand, for their inflated claims to political relevance and, on the other, for the ability of professors of literature to strike an anti-institutional pose from within the privileged space of the university. The essay turns to recent developments in the field to consider how Guillory's analysis might respond to our present moment. If his sociological method neatly describes the failures of self-understanding among scholars with respect to the canon wars and the politics of literary criticism, it nonetheless fails to capture the importance of recent work in a more affirmative key, where ideology critique is joined to the study of lived experience.

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss

Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss Matt Weir (bio) Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. by Sean Cotter Deep Vellum, 2022, 672 pp. We are living in a golden era of publishing. Bowker, the company that assigns ISBN numbers to all new books, calculated that in the United States in 2018 there were 1,677,781 new self-published works. Much of this output is enabled by Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform, on which anyone can upload a Word document and turn it into an e-book. The literary theorist Mark McGurl has argued that a significant percentage of these e-books are novels that nobody has ever read. (Judging by the typos and formatting errors he discovered in his research, many may not have been read even by their authors.) These thousands upon thousands of unopened mysteries, romances, and post-apocalyptic fantasies surely hold secrets of contemporary life—maybe even more so because they haven't been read. "Doesn't the very uselessness of the great unread of contemporary fiction bring it into ironic alignment with the work of genius in the great tradition of aesthetic theory?" McGurl asks in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. "The latter's power has always been understood to be a function of its transcendence of mere utility." McGurl is right that what ideological power literature still retains is directly related to the contradictory [End Page 112] uselessness and necessity of its great works. But he misses a point of contrast that is worth noting: whereas the author of I Married a Billionaire Zombie 6 rushes work into a marketplace where it finds no takers, some of the most celebrated and influential literary practitioners have been those whose process has included an aversion to publication. Emily Dickinson died with the bulk of her oeuvre locked in her room. Fernando Pessoa, who published only one book in his lifetime, left behind more than 25,000 pages. Franz Kafka asked for his unfinished work to be incinerated. After Kafka's death, his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, found two separate undated letters expressing this wish. The burnt offerings would have included, among so much else, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Just as literature's time-consuming uselessness represents to some a problem in need of a solution (reading is therapeutic, educational, etc.), so do Kafka's request and Brod's denial of it. Who was right? Or, does Brod's gesture, as Elif Batuman wrote while covering a trial involving disputed papers from Kafka's estate, confirm "that Kafka's works weren't even Kafka's private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?" For many, the situation of the publication-averse masterpiece-generator escapes—and exposes—the gravity of market logic in everyday life. Mircea Cărtărescu, perhaps the most acclaimed Romanian writer alive, boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. And yet, in his anti-realistic fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition. In the first story he ever wrote, "The Roulette Player," which opens the collection Nostalgia, an aging writer of some renown denigrates his previous work as mere "powder and dust." In contrast, the story we're reading, "these ten, fifteen pages, they are a different matter, a different game," because no one other than the author will read them. In Cărtărescu's second story ever written, "Mentardy," the narrator interrupts the tale of a supernaturally strange child to note, "I am not so sure I wish to read this text in our literary circle. It is not really literature, and it's becoming too much of something else." Cărtărescu, a literature professor in Bucharest, has been, since his youth, an enthusiastic reader of Pynchon, and, like Pynchon, he has a knack for hallucinatory tension. When his conceit is that the story will never be read, the reader evaporates into a fantastical vacuum. Additionally, Cărtărescu has claimed to have an unusual, almost anti-professional writing process, one that flouts the conventions of readying-for-publication: he composes his novels and stories longhand, and he doesn't edit...

Viper on the Hearth's Unfinished Business: Anti-Mormonism and Mormon Studies

<i>Viper on the Hearth</i>'s Unfinished Business: Anti-Mormonism and Mormon Studies

Ricordo di Mario Pozzi

Mario Pozzi (1939-2022), Italian Literature professor at the University of Turin and editor in chief of the Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, was one of the foremost scholars on Renaissance language debates and treatises. He conducted research and edited works that were pivotal in the field of artistic literature and travel writings of the 16th century. He explored the developments in the field of Italian Studies over time and conducted various studies on Benedetto Croce and on post-World War II scholars of Italian literature (Dionisotti, Fubini and Bonora). His compassion and generosity enabled many young scholars to further their research endeavours.

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair

Reviewed by: How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair Emad Mirmotahari (bio) how to fight islamist terror from the missionary position Tabish Khair Interlink Books https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Fight-Islamist-Terror-from-the-Missionary-Position/Tabish-Khair/9781566569705 224 pages; Print, $15.00 Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position imposes itself on the genre of the academic novel—insofar as there is agreement that there is such a genre—in an idiosyncratic way. Eschewing easy parody and satire, it thematizes some of the most pressing challenges and conditions that confront higher education in the second decade of the twenty first century and especially in the humanities and liberal arts. Though the novel is set in Århus, Denmark, circa 2005, the themes, tropes, and sources of conflict it engages resemble the professional and institutional conversations that characterize US higher education. This suggests that there is some international dimension to the "crisis of the humanities." The novel speaks to the dilemmas of tenure and what one must endure and demonstrate to earn it, unethical labor practices, as well as the suspicion that multicultural initiatives, and postcolonial studies in English departments in particular, are largely additive, perfunctory, and unlikely to really decolonize the curriculum and decenter Eurocentric principles, perspectives, and canons. As a literature professor, Khair's narrator is keenly aware of language itself, various genres of writing, and the discourse communities that cohere around them. He is also aware of the processes that shape his own narrative, something he communicates to the reader through his annotating commentary about the pitfalls of journalism and "MFA creative writing techniques," for example. The narrator also makes metafictional gestures about the narrative's place in the tradition of Anglo-Indian writing, which includes Rushdie, Ghosh, and Naipaul. Written as a mystery, the novel's unnamed narrator—a Pakistani-born academic who teaches literature at the university in Århus—regularly comments on the various genres of writing and the kinds [End Page 38] of meanings they produce and withhold. Leery of the flourishes and clichés of "university MFA creative writing," and equally of the sensationalism and hyperbole of mainstream news journalism as he sees it, the narrator tasks himself with chronologically piecing together the events that led up to the "Islamic axe plot" in what he sees as an impartial and clear-eyed way. It is in the unraveling of this "Islamic axe plot"—a plot to kill the cartoonist of irreverent and insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad (no doubt a reference to the Jyllands-Posten images published in 2005)—that the novel's intervention in critical conversations about academe is laid bare. Broadly speaking, How to Fight Islamist Terror is concerned with alterity in academic spaces and institutions. In this capacity it is a distant relative of novels like Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998) and Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993). And while it engages race, immigration, gender, and other categories of difference, its principal contribution to its readers' understanding of alterity and marginality in academe lies elsewhere. Khair's novel probes what it represents as the default secular underpinning of humanistic academia and how secularism shapes a scholar's beliefs and commitments. While How to Fight Islamist Terror renders differing manifestations and intensities of secularism, it largely leaves the reader with the conclusion that faith communities and the sacred have little legitimacy as vehicles of meaning-making and knowledge production as far as academics are concerned. This is not to say that the narrative endorses religion and religious worldviews as necessarily desirable or necessarily "thick" and considered in their explication of historical conditions. Nor does the novel suggest that secularism is flawed, or that it is some inert and monolithic ideological formation. Rather, Khair's novel proffers to show how secularism has produced certain patterned intellectual and political dispositions and how these dispositions act in particularly strong—and sometimes harmful—ways on Muslim or nominally Muslim academics who live in the post-9/11 West. The narrator's account yields a generous amount of narrative space to his two roommates—Ravi, a Hindu Indian doctoral...

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

Studies on Arabic Literature by Chinese Scholars: From Edge of China to the Center of Arab

Abstract Chinese scholars just began to study Arabic literature since Reform and Opening-up of China in 1979, though Arabic language began to be taught in Peking University since 1951. Chinese scholars’ studies on Arabic literature studies at that time were at the edge of studies of world literature. Articles on Arabic literature just issued on Arab World. It was still difficult for professors of Arabic literature to issue their articles at the journals such as Foreign Literature Review, Literature Abroad, Foreign Literature Studies, Foreign Literature and Contemporary Foreign Literature in 1980s. These journals preferred to issue papers on western literature and Russian literature during that period. In recent years, studies on Arabic literature developed rapidly in China. The Chinese intellectuals do not study on ancient Arabic literature only, but study on modern and contemporary Arabic literature also. They published books on Arabic literature such as On Arabian Nights: Mythology and Reality,Singing for Love: A Study on Kuwait Poetess Souad al-Sabah,Sufism in Modern Arabic Literature, Modern Arabic Literature During the Cultural Changes,Arabic Poetry in the Context of Globalization: A Study on Egyptian Poet Farouk Guweidah, and Comparative Study of Chinese and Arabic Literature. They also wrote histories of Arabic literature, for example, History of Arabic Literature, History of Modern Arabic Literature and General History of Arabic Literature are available in Chinese book market in these years. Professor Zhong Jikun won Appreciation Award of Egypt Ministry of Higher Education in 2005, won Sheikh Zayed Book Award’s Cultural Personality of the Year in 2011 and in the same year won King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Translation. These prizes and awards show us that studies on Arabic literature have moved from the edge of China to the center of Arab world.

A Critical Review on Steps Applied to Conduct Activities in Reading Classes to Improve Students’ Vocabulary Development and Expand Vocabulary Use

A majority of people consider intense reading as a great strategy to improve competence in vocabulary and language skills. However, educators believe that the time commitment required to use the intensive reading technique is a major barrier to its adoption. In order to teach students about short stories, novels, poems, and other types of creative writing, literature professors frequently use the intense reading method. The value of the intensive reading technique is a topic of much investigation. This study compared reading to intensive reading and considered how the two could be integrated. The primary objective of this study is to determine whether the Intensive Reading Method works well for teaching new vocabulary words utilizing its suggested procedures. In order to explore the intensive reading approach to improve language proficiency in writing, reading comprehension, and vocabulary, a systematic literature review was used. The results showed that the procedures taken in 70% of the studies were acknowledged as essential for carrying out the intensive reading approach. The Intensive Reading Method was employed in 14 out of 20 research studies, and it was proven to be successful in assisting learners in acquiring new vocabulary. Keywords: Vocabulary learning; Vocabulary Development; Intensive Reading Method