Contemporary Literary Studies Research Articles

From Representation to Participation: Rethinking the Intercultural Educational Approach to Folktales

In multi- or intercultural educational contexts, folktales from around the world are often approached as representative of diverse cultures and used to transmit knowledge and understanding of the literary, social and cultural heritage of those cultures to children. In this article, I present contemporary critical literary, folklore and cultural studies’ perspectives to argue that this approach is conceptually problematic, risks reifying reductive notions of cultural difference, and does not take into account children’s active role in meaning-making processes. As an alternative, I suggest an understanding of the potential intercultural educational benefits of folktales from diverse cultural traditions in terms of children’s intercultural participation. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from a large-scale reading intervention program in Dutch kindergarten and second grade groups, this article illustrates how children from diverse cultural backgrounds use their diversity of knowledge and experience to interpret folktales from diverse cultural traditions. Based on these preliminary findings, I identify several possible intercultural benefits to be gained from valuing children’s culturally diverse contributions in today’s culturally diverse classrooms. While several limitations need to be taken into account, I argue that further research into the potential intercultural benefits of folktales should not only focus on issues of textual representation, but also on children’s active intercultural participation.

The Song of Songs as a Hebrew “Counterweight” to Hellenistic Drama

In recent exegesis, the Song of Songs has commonly been held not to be dramatic at all. This view stands in line with the notion that there is no drama in the Hebrew Bible. However, the concept of “drama” in literary and performance studies has evolved considerably in the past decades. As a consequence, the key question must be asked again: How can we identify a text as dramatic or oriented towards performance? To answer this, a threefold criteriology taken from contemporary literary studies is presented: Lexis, Opsis and Plot. These useful and rather universal criteria lead to a differentiated look at the “performance potential” of the book – and to the conclusion that the Song basically matches this criteriology. Furthermore, various clues are given that the book was indeed performed, at least from the Hellenistic period onward, to which the final redaction should be dated. As the collection of the biblical Writings needs to be understood against the background of a struggle with the predominant Alexandrian culture, the Song might represent a piece of Jewish dramatic or performance literature, or in other words, a Hebrew “counterweight” to Hellenistic drama in the Jewish literary canon of the Writings.

The Problem of Over-Interpretation in Literary Studies

The article discusses the functions of over-interpretation in contemporary literary studies, beginning with an attempt to defi ne the principal epistemological positions in the debate on the ways of establishing literary meanings. The understanding of the role of interpretation depends on the choice of a given position. Over-interpretation has several homonymic meanings. The article highlights the differences between interpretation in literary studies and colloquial or artistic interpretation. It identifi es fi fteen types of over-interpretation and their implications in literary studies.

The Problem of Over-Interpretation: „The Tender Offer of Literature” and the Answer

The article shows a paradoxical status of over-interpretation in contemporary literary studies. This category is still very important in literary and cultural research. However, questions arise regarding the limits of interpretation. Maurice Blanchot’s metaphor of „the tender offer of literature” is evoked so as to express this dilemma and to suggest a return to the old-fashioned categories of the intentions of reading and the intentions of the text.

Психоаналітичний наратив у прозі О. Забужко

The article deals with the research importance of Oksana Zabuzhko’s works. Particularly, the necessity of studying the works of the contemporary Ukrainian writer in the psychoanalytic sense is proved. An attempt to consider the author’s prose as psychoanalytic narrative is made. Stages of the writer’s evolution from a theorist to a practicalworker, from a researcher to a writer are traced. An attempt to examine Zabuzhko as an experienced analyst is accomplished. The analysis of the novel in the context of Oksana Zabuzhko’s works is envisaged. Its narrative structure and psychoanalytic base are proved. The direct connection between a literary narrative and a psychoanalysis is highlighted with the aim of underlining the feasibility of studying works of the fi ction literature, written in the style of Freud’s disease stories as psychoanalytic narratives. On the basis of the above basis, the expediency of using the psychoanalytic method in researches of the works of modern literature and the urgency of researching the interaction of a narrative and a psychoanalysis in contemporary literary studies are established.

Ekphrasis and the writing process

ABSTRACTIn contemporary literary studies, the term ekphrasis refers almost exclusively to a poem created by a poet looking at a painting. In the visual arts and music it is used more broadly to describe intermedial creative processes where, for example, a painting is inspired by a piece of music, or the composition of a piece of music is inspired by a poem. The ekphrasis concept is based on the ancient Greek ἔκϕρασις, which were rhetorical ‘description’ exercises considered important for developing written and perceptual skills. This article considers the gradual recognition by creative writers, and especially novelists, that ekphrasis is a key aspect of their practice. It examines the original purpose of ekphrasis as a rhetorical exercise, then considers how this was interpreted in the time of the first novel writers. It assesses how a technology that changed the way we see – photography – influenced prose writing in the modern era. It looks at how neuroscience and cognitive psychology have attempted to explain what goes on in our minds when we do ekphrasis. And it reports on what writers themselves have said about their visualising techniques. Overall, this article analyses ekphrasis as a key element in the creative writing process.

From Samuel Beckett to Nancy Huston: a poetics of self-translation

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p103Este artigo enfoca a autotradução e o bilinguismo como uma característica essencial para compreender as obras de Samuel Beckett e Nancy Huston e seus projetos literários. Esta análise nos leva a pensar em termos de uma perspectiva mais ampla do termo tradução, que a psicanálise e os estudos literários contemporâneos abordaram. Beckett tinha um projeto literário, que incluía uma subversão da linguagem através do processo de autotradução. Mais do que uma atividade, o processo de tradução e manipulação de duas línguas faz parte de sua inspiração poética. Quando Huston faz uma homenagem explícita a Beckett e se coloca na mesma experiência de escrever em uma língua estrangeira e traduzir seus próprios textos, ela dá um testemunho e também fornece uma chave para a leitura de Beckett de uma perspectiva contemporânea. Apesar das notáveis diferenças entre esses dois autores, afirmamos que a autotradução é parte de seu projeto literário, e é mais do que um evento aleatório para ambos.

Medio-translatology: New Perspectives on Comparative Literature and Translation Studies

ABSTRACTMedio-translatology (译介学) is a young discipline that has added to the scope of comparative literature, translation studies, and even China’s modern and contemporary literary studies. As one of the few original translation theories proposed by Chinese academics, it is shaping and changing the course of translation studies in China and holds great potential for further academic research. In this paper, Professor Xie Tianzhen, founder of Medio-translatology, elaborates on the theoretical basis and essential concepts of this new discipline and provides an in-depth analysis of the nature of translated literature, as well as the relationship between literary translation and translated literature, and between the history of translated literature and that of literary translation.

Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen, and Working-Class Representation

The literary encounter between Tillie Olsen and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, which Olsen rediscovered in her 1972 Feminist Press edition of Davis's work, is a landmark event in working-class studies. Olsen's criticism of Davis's work resists the ghettoization and dismissal of working-class literature that still persists in contemporary literary studies, balancing concerns of class and of gender without devaluing either. Historical scholarship demonstrates that Davis mischaracterized the working-class culture of iron workers and other skilled workers, failing to understand the pride and strong sense of autonomy those workers maintained; Davis often represents workers as victims and uses racial metaphors to describe oppression. Olsen also misread some aspects of nineteenth-century working-class culture as represented in Davis's work. Nevertheless, Life in the Iron Mills is, as Olsen claimed, an important critique of the ideology of capitalist America.

Romantic imagination in a comparative perspective: English and Slovak Romantic literature

Abstract The paper discusses Romantic imagination in two, relatively distant, national literatures. The first part is concerned with the problems comparative literature has faced in recent decades. In the second part, the work of two Slovak Romantic writers, Ján Kollár and Janko Kráľ, is compared to the poetry of Lord Gordon Byron and William Wordsworth. By identifying certain affinities between the discussed literary works, the authors point to the importance of the concept of national literature which has not lost its role even in contemporary literary studies.

Literatura - kultura - dialog. Problemy i dylematy współczesnej komparatystyki literackiej

Artykuł jest próbą rekonstrukcji i charakterystyki dyskursów w komparatystyce literackiej w XX i XXI wieku. Wychodząc od zaprezentowania metodologii badań po-równawczych w latach pięćdziesiątych XX wieku, Autorka podejmuje ocenę strategii, modeli i koncepcji badawczych w kolejnych dziesięcioleciach. Przedmiotem kontrowersji i sporów komparatystów, podkreśla, były trudności związane z określeniem tożsamości rozwijającej się dyscypliny, jej instrumentarium i miejsca we współczesnych, ponowoczesnych kierunkach literaturoznawstwa. Przywołując i komentując wypowiedzi polskich i zagranicznych uczonych, wskazuje na metodologiczne zawiłości towarzyszące próbie uściślenia celów i zadań badawczych komparatystyki w okresie tzw. zwrotu kulturowego. W tym kontekście rozważa także kategorię dialogu i dialogowości, interkulturowości i transkulturowości oraz zagadnienie przekładu i jego rolę w procesie międzykulturowej komunikacji.

“Formalituri te salutant!” 100 lat formalizmu rosyjskiego (1913– 2013)

This paper focuses on reconstructing the history of the so-called Russian Formalism and the avantgarde context of OPOYAZ’s inception in Petersburg in 1914. Victor Shklovsky’s lecture-manifesto titled “The resurrection of the word”, which he presented in the cafe “Brodyacha Sobaka” (“The Stray Dog”) in Petersburg, marked the symbolic beginning of this movement. The anniversary of the foundation of the Russian Formal School as well as the international congress commemorating this anniversary, which was organized in Moscow in 2013 (titled “The 100th Anniversary of Russian Formalism: 1913–2013”) provide a starting point for discussing the legacy and topicality of the Russian Formalism in contemporary literary studies.

Building reading resilience: re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the concept of ‘reading resilience’: students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: ‘setting the scene’ for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students’ demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.

The Mississippi of the North: Trailer Park Boys and Race in Contemporary Nova Scotia

Critics often read Trailer Park Boys’s presentation of white trash images as evidence of its rejection of traditional markers of Nova Scotian identity. This essay examines the way in which the work of contemporary literary, historical, and cultural studies scholars on white trash interacts with some of the themes and images present in Trailer Park Boys; this essay focusses on understanding how these ideas circulate in contemporary Nova Scotia. With anxieties surrounding race in Halifax and Nova Scotia as a backdrop, Trailer Park Boys constructs an organic community rooted in images of white trash culture.

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

The Force of the Everyday

The Force of the Everyday Nicole Rizzuto (bio) Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 248 pp. $40.00 In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, Saikat Majumdar presents a timely contribution to global modernist and contemporary Anglophone literary studies. Through its provocative analyses of how banality, boredom, and the quotidian shape twentieth-century literature, the book enriches a growing body of criticism that foregrounds the effects of coloniality on the narratives of British modernism, while tracing modernist afterlives in contemporary writing. Long overlooked as motifs and formal elements in canonical literature of the first half of the twentieth century, representations of the ordinary and the ethnographic have begun to attract interest in recent years. The former is the subject of Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary, the latter the topic of Carey J. Snyder’s British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters.1 How the ordinary and seemingly uneventful function in postcolonial writing has likewise been neglected, largely, Majumdar contends, because so much literature of the global South has favored dramatic, spectacular narratives that portray eventful moments tied to anti-colonial politics. Treating works situated in the colonial periphery and postcolony that both long for and ironize the longing for an [End Page 421] excitement projected onto the metropole, Prose of the World participates in practices of new, globalized modernist studies. Majumdar examines how modernism is constituted in locales outside of imperial centers and how it extends beyond the traditionally defined terminus of World War II. Because the book places into conversation modernist and postcolonial writing, it also forwards a critical trajectory in studies of contemporary literature that began in the 1990s with Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness and has gained momentum through such publications as Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island, Nicholas Brown’s Utopian Generations, and Christopher GoGwilt’s The Passage of Literature.2 Majumdar discovers in the banal a narrative logic bound to conditions of late-colonial and postcolonial modernity that ties together the fiction of James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Zoë Wicomb, and Amit Chaudhuri. Drawing in original ways on theories of the everyday in literary criticism and cultural anthropology, Majumdar recuperates the negative, devalued aesthetic category of the banal and its corollary affect, boredom, arguing that they drive modernist innovations in literature across the twentieth century. The staging of this aesthetic and affect creates what he calls a “radical” politics. The carefully argued introduction engages theoretical work by Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Thomas Dumm, James Clifford, and Njabulo Ndebele, among others, to elaborate a critical framework that enables its author to account for the book’s “chronological leap” (35) of several decades and analysis of Anglophone writings situated around the globe—Dublin, suburban New Zealand, Cape Town, Namaqualand, Calcutta, Bombay, London, Oxford. What connects high modernism and this late-twentieth-century literature is the central role that the metropolis-periphery dyad plays in generating textual innovation with the banal. Here, Majumdar counters John Marx’s argument that the globalization of English has produced a decentering [End Page 422] that displaces the metropolis-periphery relation held to be a primary source of modernist experimentation. Majumdar establishes a link between contemporary and high-modernist writing by citing Pascale Casanova’s model of world literature, which maintains that global Anglophone fiction retains as a structuring component the metropolis-periphery relation that inhabits literatures of the colonial era. Proposing that “the embodiment of the banal as a narrative instinct ironizes the binary of the metropolis and the periphery” (30), Majumdar asserts that these writings disclose a diasporic, cosmopolitan sensibility in their “covert critique of the relation of the metropolitan and the peripheral as it has evolved within the global history of empire,” a relation whose “historical reality . . . creates realms of possibility and fulfillment beyond the reach of the immediate, which invests the banality of local life with a subtle narrative energy” (32). Majumdar maintains that rather than operating as conditions of privilege, boredom and concern with the quotidian serve a textual politics of resistance, whether by exposing oppressive effects of empire in the colony or by revealing the exclusions and marginalizations produced by...

Women and Intertextuality: On the Example of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

The aim of the study is to consider feminist retellings of myths and legends. As an example, Margaret Atwood’s book The Penelopiad is analyzed. The interpretation is situated in a broader context of intertextual practices characteristic of the feminist vision of literature. I present the ideas which Atwood shares with authors engaged in women’s movement. Among these there is Atwood’s understanding of intertextuality (noticeable especially in The Penelopiad). Bibliographical basis of the study comprises books which are fundamental to feminist and gender criticism (e.g. Poetics of Gender, ed. by N. Miller, New York 1986; S. M. Gilbert, S. Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London 1984). What is more, the study refers to the books which allow considering the notion of intertextuality (G. Allen, Intertextuality, London and New York 2010, J. Clayton. E. Rothstein (eds.), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Wisconsin 1991) and connecting the interpretation with the problems crucial to contemporary literary studies (L. Hutcheon L. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction, New York and London 1988, B. Johnson, A World of Difference, Baltimore and London 1989).

Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov by Martin Hägglund (review)

HAGGLUND, MARTIN. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 197 pp. $49.95. To begin, Dying For Time; Proust, Woolf, Nabokov is a crucial follow up to Martin Hagglund's first book published in English, Radical Atheism: Derrida and Time of Life (2008). In Radical Atheism, Hagglund masterfully rethinks philosophy of Jacques Derrida in order to posit his theory of radical atheism, which disavows traditional atheism by refuting very desire for immortality, existence of divine, and so forth that traditional atheism aims to reject in first place. As Adrian Johnston and others like Michael Naas make clear in their trenchant responses to Radical Atheism, theory of radical atheism hinges upon a theory of desire that is not yet fully developed in early text. In part then, Dying for Time consolidates Hagglund's response to his critics who have challenged theory of radical atheism on question of desire. But as Hagglund takes on a more sustained engagement with psychoanalysis--in addition to his philosophical and literary investments--in order to develop his theory of chronolibido (the central theory of desire that drives text) it quickly becomes clear that Dying for Time is a tremendous philosophical achievement that will make it hard to understand desire without turning to arguments Hagglund makes in his book. Hagglund introduces notion of chronolibido through a scene in Plato's Republic in which Socrates proclaims his frustration with tendency of Homer's writings to make even most keen of philosophical minds fall prey to dramatic pathos of Iliad and become victim to grip of desire for mortal (1). The problem for Socrates, in Hagglund's reading, is that philosopher is precisely figure who should otherwise remain immune to the loss of mortal beings; he should rather turn his desire toward immutable presence of eternal (2). Socrates, in other words, discovers himself at a remarkable impasse in which task of philosopher--understood as converting the desire for mortal into a desire for immortal that can never be lost (2)--is challenged by fact that poetry both conjures and inspires a desire for a mortal life that is threatened by possibility of its own loss. Hagglund sets up scene of Socrates's discontent in order to elucidate how desire, in tradition of western philosophy, is predicated on a constitutive difference between what one is and what one is not, and who one really wants to be and who one actually is. Hagglund also deftly deploys scene of Socrates's polemical response to Homer's writings as an allegorical frame for establishing that desire has heretofore been erringly conceived--in psychoanalytic theory, contemporary literary studies, and in tradition of western philosophy--as always therefore testifying to an ontological lack. Although Hagglund is careful to point out that pervasive tendency to read difference in desire as affirming a fundamental lack of being does not indicate an inherent failure in logic, he does insist that this line of thinking fails to account for very structural logic of difference in first place. In Dying For Time, Hagglund thus pursues a new account of constitutive difference of desire that is not read as an ontological lack. To do so, Hagglund begins by tracing the constitutive difference of desire to condition of (3). Without spending too much time recapitulating main tenets of Derridean-inspired, Hagglundian logic of time that governs chronolibidinal argument, it will suffice to say that Hagglund posits that present is constituted by simultaneous passing away of past and anticipation of a future that is yet to come. The present (and thus everything thought on basis of presence), in other words, is not intrinsic itself; it is instead characterized by an infinite splitting between past and future. …

Television Is Not Radio with Pictures

Television Is Not Radio with Pictures Holly Cowan Shulman (bio) The Three Essays that Follow Originally were given in abbreviated form in a session at the National Council on Public History meeting that took place in Ottawa, Canada, April 17-20, 2013. The title of the first essay gave the session its name. The authors are, or until recently were, editors of digital editions of notable 18th- and 19th-century writers of letters, diaries, or belles lettres, working at the University of Virginia and the University of South Carolina. The earliest of these editions is the Dolley Madison Papers Digital Edition. The essay on it is first. Following it is an essay on the papers of a mother and daughter, South Carolina planters Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry. The Pinckney/Horry papers built on the pioneering work of the Dolley Madison project. The third paper treats the digital edition of the writings of a man who was a generation younger than Horry: noted author and editor William Gilmore Simms. Like Pinckney and Horry, he was a Charlestonian, but with broad national connections. As his papers have an audience of literary scholars as well as historians, the digital edition of his works raises other questions about the uses of digital versus printed editions. When we invent a new medium of communications, we tend to view it in terms of the forms with which we are already comfortable. The typewritten letter continued to express a dateline, a greeting, and a salutation. Early film, albeit hampered by the lack of sound, rendered drama and comedy as influenced by staged theater. Early television was influenced by film, live theater, and radio. Accordingly, the documentary editing community, at least in the field of history, tends to view digital editions as old wine in new bottles. Within this framework, the goal is to reproduce the book as closely as possible in a new medium. Perhaps the most compelling reason to retain the format of a printed book is to mirror an already existing documentary letterpress series as it is republished on line. This was, for example, the goal behind the Papers of George Washington, which was the first of the founding fathers series to appear on line through Rotunda, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press. If you take a close look, you will see that as you navigate content through the book’s index, every electronic page is closely keyed to the original book’s page, and that annotation is neither expanded, contracted, changed, nor reformatted.1 This is a terrific publication—as are all the founding fathers publications. So this observation is in no way meant to comment on its brilliance as a reference work. Rather, it is simply to say that the concept behind this kind of publication rests on an assumption that it should simulate a book as it had appeared in print. It is my belief, however, that each medium has its own internal structure, and each, in turn, can best express the old through newly imagined forms. Put metaphorically, television is not radio with pictures. Click for larger view View full resolution It is against this background that I want to explain my ideas about how to create a born-digital documentary edition in the field of history. These ideas guided me as editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition.2 I am excluding most editions in the field of literature from my comments because the expectations of and uses for them differ, and I am a historian. The field of history, unlike contemporary literary studies, remains rooted in empiricism: in the discovery and narration of facts and events within the framework of chronology. On the whole, historians are less interested than are literary critics in the number of times certain words are used, the transition in the shape of paragraphs, or the idiosyncrasies of individual expression as measured by some computationally enabled calculation. Historians are more interested in a newly discovered letter, or the re-evaluation of the meaning of a letter, than in an analysis of literary form or reader-response theory, and thus historians frame their discourse differently. This has an impact on...

Ґерда: “статево дозріваючий німецький дух” (типологія архетипних стереотипів

The purpose of the proposed article is to highlight the shaping of the archetypal stereotypes in terms of contemporary literary studies, their genesis according to the peculiarities of the psychological type of characters, and therefore produce “individual” stereotype. Appropriate ways to solve this problem is narrowing the chain of archetypal stereotypes at the level of Robert Musil’s paradigm creativity, which is referred to as female. In particular, we looked at the character of Gerda from the novel by Robert Musil “The Man Without Properties”. The analysis is focused on the androgynous aspect and mythical purity by means of which the narrative situation around Gerda is outlined, and this figure becomes more versatile in perspective. The emphasis is on the “triple negative connotation” of the character: sensory underdeveloped in terms of senses, raised in a Jewish nationalist family, used as an object in family conflicts of her own parents. All this suggests that Gerda represents the archetypal stereotype of “femme fatale” in the novel with the corresponding variable semantic load. As a result, we identified the following dominants: excessive childishness in actions and deeds, the desire to overcome the “Oedipus complex”, Hermaphroditismus, primary desire as a sign of hysterical physicality, immaturity and weakness of mind, indecision and frustration in sexual terms, which she tries to compensate by using the potential spiritual and creative (read – perverted sexual) energy to promote the national-socialist ideas. Theoretical and methodological basis of the article are Ukrainian and European scientists working on the problems of gender studies and feminist criticism (I. Zherebkina, Yu. Kristyeva, Z. Hedok). Significance of our study is in virtually grounded thesis on the impact of the archetypal unconscious on personality formation, which opens new perspectives for further research of female (stereotypical?) figures in Musil's texts.