Title Story Research Articles

Representing the Marginalized Tamang Community in BinaTheeng’s Yaambunera [Near Kathmandu]: A Hallian Analysis

This paper attempts to analyse Bina Theeng’s “Yaambunera”, the title story of the anthology Yaambunera, exploring the lived experiences of ethnic Taman people of Taulung, an ignored and unheard village, which is an adjoined village of the Kathmandu valley. The paper discusses the lifestyles, socio-economic condition, struggles, hardships and sufferings of the illiterate Tamang community that analyses the literary value and purpose of representing this marginalized world of common Tamang people. Stuart Hall’s concept of representation has been applied as a theoretical tool to achieve the set objectives of the study. Hall argues that representations are not independent and innocent reflections of the real but they are cultural constructions which are selected and constituted by power. In this sense, representation is a cultural product rather than an autonomous process of constructing a meaning. From this theoretical stand, the story is analysed as a discursive representation of Tamang people’s marginalized world that produces and defines the overshadowed body of knowledge about ethnic Tamang community and their ways of life. This study, therefore, provides an insight to see and understand the ways of life and sufferings of poor Tamang people of Taulung, an overlooked village though the village is adjoined to the capital city Kathmandu, Nepal.

“The Right Things Came Together in the Right Relation”: Cather and Munro, a Reprise

ABSTRACT This article begins by revisiting a conversation I had with Alice Munro in 1987 in which she named her favorite story by Willa Cather, “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932). After that conversation I went on to analyze Cather’s influence on Munro in her own story, “Dulse” (1980)—where Cather is in effect a character—in my article “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather” (1992). But until now I have not pursued the structural symmetry mentioned in passing there between “Old Mrs. Harris” and Munro’s “The Progress of Love” (1985), the title story of her sixth collection. This article does that, treating the three women in each story—grandmother, daughter, granddaughter—through both their autobiographical underpinnings and the narrative wisdom each story ultimately yields. This comparison is an instance of direct influence, of one great writer modeling for another.

Women's Narrative in Alice Munro's Short Story Runaway

Alice Munro, the contemporary Canadian English-language writer who proved the importance of the short story as a genre by receiving the Nobel Prize in 2013, is undoubtedly an interesting author in terms of researching women's narrative. Although most of Munro's stories are set in the Harron Country, by using those regional features, customs, and traditions, Munro creates universal texts just like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor of his time. Like Faulkner and O'Connor, Munro's characters often confront deep-rooted and time-worn customs or traditions, but Munro's characters' reactions are generally less severe than those of his Southern counterparts. In addition, Munro's male characters are of one type, monotonous and boring, while female characters are more complex, peculiar and distinctive. The present paper analyses Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway (2004), paying particular attention to the title story. The collection consists of eight short stories. The main unifier of the stories about women of seemingly different ages and statuses is the desire to escape, which is caused by various reasons (unhappy marriage, family problems, running away from a provincial town in search of adventure). It is also interesting that the second, third and fourth stories of the collection tell about the same character, Juliet, and different episodes and stages of her life, which Pedro Almadovar even made into a movie in 2016. While Munro divides the story of "Juliet" into three independent stories, but united by the main character, the eighth story of the collection is in five parts and covers the life of the main character, Nancy. This decision of Munro is not accidental, and with this action, he once again emphasizes the innovations he brought to the genre of the story.

County Cork, Mississippi: Elizabeth Bowen, Settler-Colonialism, and Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen"

County Cork, Mississippi:Elizabeth Bowen, Settler-Colonialism, and Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen"1 Mary M. Burke (bio) Eudora Welty's The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, in which over half the narratives are set outside the author's native Mississippi, confounded critics and fans when it was published in 1955. Welty's 1951 title tale was inspired by her stay in the County Cork "Big House" (ancestral mansion) of writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973). As such, rather than lacking a sense of place—as was charged in 1955—the title story's opening evocation of Ireland and America's shared settler-colonial histories suggests that Welty could see her own Deep South in Bowen's County Cork. Nicholas Canny's influential thesis that the colonization of Ireland was the model for that of the "New World" explicates how the plantation system associated with the antebellum South was, in fact, created by seventeenth-century "New English" economic and cultural domination in Ireland (Canny 575, 576). The latter was the Tudor reconquest, England's attempt to reassert control over Ireland centuries after the initial Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, which was spurred in part by the belief that this first "English" cohort had, in effect, "gone native" (Canny 592). In Amy Clukey's formulation, the difference in Irish and American terminology for similar phenomena "obscures" their "commonalities": Irish "landed estates and big houses" equate to "plantations; landlords replace planters; and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy supplants the North American plantocracy" (Clukey 64). "Big House" is an Irish usage for the manor houses of the post-Tudor reconquest Anglo-Protestant elite and is also the name of the Irish literary genre to which such dwellings are central. As such, the [End Page 145] Southern plantation novel and Ireland's Big House narrative emerge as the same genre separated by water. In self-consciously postcolonial iterations such as John Banville's Birchwood (1973), the Big House novel takes a postmodern Gothic turn in order to grapple with its problematic roots in the romanticization of colonial culture. This is paralleled by White American fiction's movement from nineteenth-century celebrations of slave plantation life to its Gothicizing and critique by Welty's Mississippi contemporary, William Faulkner (Clukey 21). Unsurprisingly, then, the southern writer is sensitive to the ghosts of the mirror settler-colonial culture. My book, Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History, argues that Faulkner's implicitly Irish- and Scottish-American characters are haunted by the trauma that they carry to the Americas and unthinkingly revisit upon the marginalized. Welty, who seldom used non-southern settings, likewise simultaneously summons up unfinished American and Irish history in "The Bride of the Innisfallen." First published in the New Yorker in 1951, the story was inspired by Welty's visit during the previous year to Bowen's Court, the ancestral County Cork mansion of Anglo-Irish modernist Elizabeth Bowen whose antecedents came to Ireland with the reconquest campaign of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the collection in which that story was republished in 1955, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, was dedicated to Bowen. Dawn Trouard notes that Welty's recall of her trip to Bowen's southern Irish manse consciously conflates the landscapes and terminologies of Ireland and the American South: the fuchsia hedges of Bowen's Court remind the American author of Savannah, while the Irish novelist's hospitality is ambiguously ascribed to her "Southerner" identity (Welty, qtd. in Trouard 258; the emphasis is Welty's). Bowen's Gothicizing of the Big House in her 1929 novel The Last September emerges from self-awareness regarding her family's settler-colonial origins. Taking its cue from the sentient house of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1840), the novel's manse in the twilight of the colonial presence in Ireland is described from a distance: "It seemed to huddle its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set" (Bowen, Last September 92). The Bowens descended from a Welsh ancestor who was granted confiscated land in Ireland because he had fought with...

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

Reviewed by: The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques Jacques Pothier (bio) The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques "Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless …" Eudora Welty, "The Wanderers" Danièle Pitavy-Souques needs no introduction to the readers of this journal. An internationally famous Welty scholar, she is the author of two books in French, La mort de Méduse: L'art de la nouvelle chez Eudora Welty (The Death of Medusa: The Art of the Story by Eudora Welty, 1991) and Eudora Welty: Les Sortilèges du conteur (Eudora Welty: The Witchcraft of Storytelling, 1999) and is well known for dozens of articles. Some of the chapters of the present book were originally contributions to this journal. When she died in 2019, she was working on a book-length collection of eight of her essays on Welty published between 1979 and 2014, with the addition of a new essay on "Flowers for Marjorie" and a short general introduction entitled "The Eye That Is Language." Pearl McHaney can be credited with completing this project in record time as a superb homage to her friend Danièle's labor of love and mind—McHaney's Preface begins with an overview of a career centrally devoted to Welty studies, but also to promoting the study of Northern American women writers—a scholarly powerhouse who also worked hard to empower women. It is common enough to praise Eudora Welty's visual talent and to refer to her experience as a photographer, as this title does. It is less common to point to Welty's training as a painter and to compare her approach with that of Matisse, told by his art professor Gustave Moreau to go into the streets and who remembered: "We were forcing ourselves to discover quickly what was characteristic in a gesture, in an attitude" (qtd. in Pitavy-Souques [End Page 165] 67–68). Pitavy-Souques points out that Welty's approach to photography was just the same: to catch "the moment in which people reveal themselves" (Welty, qtd. in Pitavy-Souques 68). Pitavy-Souques similarly trains her eye, and teaches the readers to train theirs, on the details of Welty's stories that she identifies as keystones to her modernist constructions. She does not explore the stories with a privileged theoretical approach but with a discipline, an ethic—close reading (39, 42, 140) as a way to face the challenges of a demanding art: "Welty's fiction, with unusually strong and complex texts that require close reading to apprehend their richness and endless narrative experimentation" (4); the text's "narrative functioning deserves the closest attention" (7); "a close study of the narration shows that it is just the reverse" (14); "Let us look closely at 'A Memory'" (22); "the contents are manifestly transgressive and as such deserve close attention" (40); "Close analysis reveals the working of Welty's creative imagination" (96); "Close reading invites one to read 'Flowers for Marjorie' as the bold dramatization of self-begetting" (119; all emphases added). This story, she explains in the last essay written with the present volume on her mind, along "with the title story, is the most intriguing text of A Curtain of Green" (39). Close analysis is indeed necessary to catch what makes Welty's writing tick. In this collection, Danièle Pitavy-Souques pays special attention to the volume The Golden Apples, "that great book about writing" (125). The first and seventh chapters ("Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" and "Eudora Welty and the Merlin Principle: Aspects of Story-Telling in The Golden Apples") explicitly deal with the story cycle, but in her quest for metafiction, she makes extended references to the rest of Welty's abundant oeuvre: her novels, photographs, and essays. What Pitavy-Souques particularly enjoys is unpacking the most challenging narrative structures in Welty. Although not indebted to a school of criticism, she draws extensively on an exceptionally wide intellectual background, just as she convinces the reader that Welty, a southerner by biography, trained in the North and an active traveler, was widely open...

Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Reviewed by: Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug Lanie Tankard GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG Evil Flowers: Stories Trans. Kari Dickson. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 128 pages. NORWEGIAN WRITER Gunnhild Øyehaug plumbs her psyche in a newly translated work, putting a twenty-first-century spin on nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The compelling result teems with candor, wit, anxious obsession, and the merest touch of schadenfreude—or what Baudelaire might have termed joie malicieuse. As in her earlier collection of stories, Wait, Blink (see WLT, July 2018), Øyehaug again explores inner life. The opening presentation, "Birds," doesn't waste any time. In the very first sentence, a large chunk of an ornithologist's brain falls into the toilet as she's preparing to defend her PhD thesis. Oh, her mind still works, except she's forgotten everything about birds—can't even recognize one. Seeking refuge at her parents' house, memories emerge, coalescing into twenty-four short tales. Øyehaug shakes crumbs out of the pockets of her mind, wringing them for all they're worth to repel their power over her. Pieces range from one to eleven pages, plus two of notes. A wordless one-pager, "A Bit Like This," is a sole black-and-white photo—that of Baudelaire glaring at the preceding title story, "Evil Flowers." Øyehaug stares him down in the succeeding "Protest" by calling on American writer Richard Brautigan. She says Baudelaire's greatest poem is "The Swan" (Le Cygne), whose lines perhaps echo her own theme here: "dear memories … heavier than rocks" by "those who've lost what they cannot recover." Her narrations delve into the loss of a mother as well as past loves. Whereas Baudelaire engaged with Victor Hugo in "Le Cygne" or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in "Le Calumet de Paix," Øyehaug nods to, say, Virginia Woolf or Henrik Ibsen. In one plot, she sets up an imaginative excursion to Monk's House, the Woolf cottage in East Sussex, without ever actually venturing there. "The Nordics Seen from the Outside" ponders the cold blue hues typically used to depict Nordic and Scandinavian countries on maps. The essay becomes a thought-provoking rumination on how those populations see themselves as well as how the rest of the world might view them, based on pictorial color selection alone. Hmm, what if they were portrayed in a warmer pink, she wonders, examining herself in the context of her society. When contemplations occasionally float off-course in various streams of consciousness, she steadfastly recenters her craft, murmuring, "I'll soon get to the point" or "but back to the subject." She's reminiscent there of others who don't always follow a pattern: Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk talking to herself (as in Flights) or Croatian author Daša Drndić (as in Belladonna). In one account, Øyehaug notices a growing tendency to disguise guns as "cell pistols." Such smartphone protection cases appear harmless yet can actually perform as guns. Then she digresses charmingly into ornamental grass, hosta plants, and bocce balls. An older woman in "The Thread" dreams from her hospital bed about her daughter in Denmark, recalling how she took umbrage at her name as a child and its connection to "wicked Queen Gunnhild," lamenting she wasn't named after "a good queen." Gunnhild Øyehaug expects readers to defamiliarize themselves with traditional literary shapes and risk charting new territory with her in Evil Flowers. As Baudelaire wrote in "I" at his journey's end: "We've been around the world; and this is our report." [End Page 75] Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Implementation of The Direct Reading Thinking Activity Model on The Short Story Reading Skills of Fourth Grade Students at Elementary School

This study aimed to analyze the implementation of the direct reading thinking activity (DRTA) in the short story reading skills of fourth grade elementary school students. This research uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive research type. Data collected by interview, observation, and documentation. The results showed that the implementation of the direct reading thinking activity (DRTA) model was carried out through three stages, namely pre-reading activities, reading activities and post-reading activities. In pre-reading activities, the teacher provides a stimulus by showing pictures and giving clues to the title of short story, so that students can be directly oriented in predicting. In reading activities, the teacher gives freedom to students to read the text and begins to equate with the results of student predictions. In post-reading activities the teacher gives freedom to students to convey the results of predictions about the contents of short story that have been made orally.

The Blondes of Wisconsin

The Blondes of Wisconsin

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Purple Perilla by Can Xue

Reviewed by: Purple Perilla by Can Xue Siyu Cao Can Xue Purple Perilla Trans. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping. New York. Common Era. 2020. 148 pages. CAN XUE’S Purple Perilla includes three short stories that immerse readers in a world where reality and absurdity collide. In “An Affair,” the peaceful yet bland life of a primary school teacher in her midthirties [End Page 65] is suddenly disrupted by an anonymous love letter, and her ensuing adventure turns out to be both physical and spiritual. While the teenage boy in “Mountain Ants” is entrusted by an old beggar to retrieve and safeguard a lost world where humans and ants can live together, the kid in “Purple Perilla,” the title story, encounters five wolves in hallucinations and decides to live in the hills permanently. With Can Xue’s concise, energetic narrative, and the excellent translation by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, these stories, in spite of their totally different settings and plots, constitute a relay of spiritual rebellions allowing all the protagonists to reconsider the meaning of life and the possibility of self-redemption. For many commentators, it is almost irresistible to compare the style of Can Xue’s fiction with the works of Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. In this collection of short stories, readers can still identify some fundamental themes recurring in modern-ist literatures: alienation, the separation between nature and the civilized world, and the lingering confusion about the meaning of existence. A revisit to these ahistorical, universalist questions in the (post)pandemic era seems timely, for Can Xue adds a touch of idealistic optimism to her characters’ seemingly irrational adventure. The sense of absurdity oozing from all the stories does not imply a total surrender to loneliness and meaninglessness. On the contrary, a quiet stream of energy to undertake “little revolutions” in everyday life, though presented in a self-restrained tone, can be clearly detected in all three protagonists’ internal monologues. Can Xue’s works are well known for their obscurity, and this Isolarii collection is no exception. While the language is simple and straightforward, its multilayered narrative structure poses a challenge to prospective readers. As a work of translation, elements of Chinese tradition and mythology occasionally pop up in its settings and plots but prove to be no cultural obstacle for international readers to empathize with the characters throughout their adventures. Still, readers may benefit from rereadings of the texts, for these stories, in a sense, can be seen as a literary experiment. After witnessing the characters’ “accidental” involvement in the confrontation between human and nature, readers are encouraged to ask themselves: after absorption into an endless monotonousness and loneliness, is it still possible for them to invoke the impulsion to break away, even just temporarily, from the repetition of sameness in daily life? Siyu Cao Shanghai International Studies University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Reading Hoda Hadadi in Tehran: The Implicit Articulation of Lesbian Identity in Iranian Children’s Literature

Reading Hoda Hadadi in Tehran: The Implicit Articulation of Lesbian Identity in Iranian Children’s Literature Massih Zekavat (bio) Sexuality in its full diversity has been expressed in Iranian lore and literature both explicitly and implicitly (Alfiyah and Shalfiyah, Astarābādī, Floor, Khānsārī, Najmabadi, Nakhshabī, Shamisa). Yet, as the modern notion of childhood and children’s literature emerged at roughly the same time as the heterosexual/homosexual divide consolidated, sexuality also receded from Iranian children’s literature.1 Besides religious considerations, censorship is another important reason. Publications are subject to censorship both before and after their release in Iran. For a book to be published, the manuscript must be licensed by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which often involves demands for modifications to ensure compliance with the law and sharia, yet this does not immunize the author and publisher against further liability in case authorities later find traces of transgression even in a licensed publication that might lead to a ban on the book and potential punishment for the parties involved. While unashamedly and avowedly heteronormative, Iranian children’s literature frequently attempts to eschew sexuality. Nonetheless, we seem to have both a pattern of slow emergence in the face of hostility and heteronormativity (as in the West in the 1960s) and a particularly pronounced version of those things due to religious beliefs and the political situation in Iran. Examples of this slow emergence include Azadeh Mohseni’s title story in Born in the Owl Month, Nooshin Zargari in Woody, and, in particular, Hoda Hadadi in children’s and young adult literature. Hadadi, writer, poet, and illustrator, was born in 1977 in Tehran. She has so far created almost sixty titles as author, illustrator, and author/illustrator and has won several distinctions and awards. Her books My Day with the Clouds, Deep in the Sahara (written by Kelly Cunnane and illustrated by Hadadi), Drummer Girl (with Hiba Masood), and Rainbow in My Pocket (written by Ali Seidabadi and illustrated by Hadadi) are available in English.2 [End Page 283] Responding to Caitlin L. Ryan and Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth’s call for queer readings of the works that are already on the shelf in hopes of advocating diversity and inclusiveness, I argue that Hadadi repudiates heteropatriarchy and subtly depicts an alternative paradigm of lesbian rapport in three of her books. Specifically, in her picturebook Goli and Zebra (2007) Hadadi censures the institution of heterosexual marriage, and in her young adult novel The Clown (2012/2013) she explores the joys of a homosocial bonding of characters in an unsympathetic and repressive context. Hadadi further depicts the jouissance of a lesbian rapport in her picturebook Two Friends through drawing on nature, investigating the philosophical, emotional, and ethical implications of lesbian sexual performance and creating a dialogic, rather than imitative, relationship between the text and illustrations. Taken together, these moves demonstrate a daring transgression that is even more impressive in an Islamic context where male homosexual practices are still subject to corporal punishment or even execution, and lesbianism is almost inconceivable. These three books fit different categories and genres and use different modes of expression. Their intended readers and arguably their social functions are also different. Hadadi starts with criticizing heteropatriarchy and exposing the devastating effects of a heterosexual marriage for women in her animal fable Goli and Zebra, where marriage does not lead to the realization of the protagonist’s self and her dreams. Her realist novel The Clown uses meticulous characterization and a socially located setting to offer a more pragmatic attitude to exploring resistance at a social level. Meanwhile, the picturebook Two Friends features unnamed protagonists in a natural setting not bound by time or place; it adopts an open-ended, psychological and individual perspective in order to address fundamental and philosophical questions. Reading these works together, I argue, sheds light on Hadadi’s revisionary project through which she attempts to break with the tradition, open a space for and give voice to the peripheries, and destabilize the ideology propagated by the repressive regime. The supposed asexual nature of children and the necessity of guarding their innocence postponed homosexual representations in children’s literature. At...

Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales”

395 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE in unlikely places, as in the early days of a genre once thought to be the domain of men, and in research and teaching both the history of science fiction and the interrelations between feminism and popular culture. The collection reprints “Letter of the Twenty Fourth Century” (1929), “Men with Wings (1929), “Women with Wings” (1930), “The Conquest of Gola” (1931), “The Fall of Mercury” (1935), “The Human Pets of Mars” (1936), and Stone’s speech from Balticon, “The Day of the Pulps” (1974). I could not have completed the collection without the cooperation and support of the author’s surviving family members, particularly her son Donald Silberberg, whose test of me as a researcher required explaining how I had used his mother’s role-reversal title story in teaching College Writing. 80% of the male students had argued that the author was a woman, while an equal percentage of the female students had argued just as persuasively that the author must have been a man. “My mother would have liked that,” he said, and our collaborative relationship began (5). As a Jewish scholar and multiculturalist researching in the field of ethnic literatures of the United States, I became interested in the work of this Jewish American writer, who lived between 1905 and 1991. Her work appeared with no ethnic markings, as did work of other Jewish sf writers, such as Judith Merril. Born a Rubenstein and living her adult married life as a Silberberg, Stone created characters who were non-Jewish and lived completely Gentile lives. Like Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Ham Hammond in “Parasite Planet” and “The Lotus Eaters,” Dr. Daniel Scott in “The Adaptive Ultimate,” and Captain Harrison and Dick Jarvis in “Valley of Dreams,” Stone’s characters were consistently identified by Gentile, non-Jewish names. For example, in “Men with Wings,” Kennedy is the narrating character. Nevertheless, many issues presented and themes discussed had to do with concerns facing Jews at the time, such as breeding the Aryan superior race, and the questioning of the dual loyalty of a race that had a national identity elsewhere but took posts in American government. The latter could have been an imaginary extrapolation from the known (the Gentile fear of employing Jews in the civil service) to the unknown (what would happen if somebody bred a superior race on earth). By the 1920s, Jewish immigration had slowed down enough for a generation to have established roots in America, but it was clear some were still feeling alien, even having engaged in the struggle for Americanization reflected in earlier Jewish-American literature such as Anzia’s Bread Givers (1925). Although Stone’s work on a story-by-story basis has entered the debates concerning gender in the field, perhaps this collection will diversify that dimension into considering the Jewish impact.—Batya Weinbaum, Editor, Femspec, Faculty of English, American Public University Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales.” Our special issue invites full-research articles (4000–5000 words), visual essays (1000–2500 words with emphasis on visual evidence), research reports (2500–4000 words), analyses of research documents, and ‘in- 396 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) conversations’ with artists, designers, or scholars (2000–4000 words), as well as reviews of events and new publications. While the relationship between fashion and the fairy tale has been examined in the fields of fashion studies and fairy-tale criticism, the concept of costume in the fairy tale has not yet been sufficiently explored. We believe that an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to this topic will offer fresh insight into the fields of costume studies, fairy-tale studies, performance studies, and (more broadly) studies of art, narrative, and culture across time, space, and discipline. Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms: theatre, ballet, opera, and musicals, and also film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the storyworld, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. The ubiquitous persistence of...

Mia CoutoSea Loves Me: Selected Stories by David Brookshaw Eric M.B. Becker

Mia Couto Sea Loves Me: Selected Stories Trans. David Brookshaw with Eric M.B. Becker. Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2021. 399 pages. “SEA LOVES ME,” the title story of Mia Couto’s latest collection, brims with secrets, seduction, and the wisdom of ancestors. Zeca Perpétuo, the widowed narrator, is pining for his voluptuous neighbor, Dona Luarmina, daughter of a Greek sailor and Mozambican mother. But before she’ll succumb to his charms, Luarmina insists Zeca divulge his most private memories. And so, he begins to weave together tales—of his fisherman father, who dove into the sea to rescue his mistress and resurfaced with the eyes of a shark; of his wayward wife, Henriquinha, who mysteriously vanished off a cliff; and Maria Ballerina, the whirling dervish of a dancer who caught fire one night and was turned to ashes. The more Zeca recalls, the weepier he gets. “A tear is the sea caressing your soul,” Luarmina explains. “That little speck of water is us as we return to the womb we came from.” Mia Couto, winner of the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and author, most recently, of the novel The Sword and the Spear (WLT, Autumn 2020, 90), has been writing bewitching tales like this his entire career. Sea Loves Me, in fact, includes work from two previous collections, The Fire and The Waters of Time, as well as thirty -six stories that appear in English for the first time. (Eric M.B. Becker has translated the stories of The Waters of Time; the rest are by David Brookshaw, Couto’s longtime translator. Both have done masterful jobs rendering Couto’s inventive language and imagery into English.) Taken as a whole, the stories offer a kaleidoscopic vision of Couto’s world, deeply rooted in Mozambique but imbued with an ethereal, otherworldly quality. Often in just a few pages, Couto is able to breathe life into a variety of characters that range from war refugees, witch doctors, and cross-dressing apparitions to birddreaming baobab trees and blind fishermen . Rural villagers, stuck in time, jostle with newly arrived city dwellers. Africans, Portuguese, Indians—and combinations of the three—fall in love across communities, even species. In “Bartolominha and the Pelican,” a lonely woman shares her bed with a pelican, hugging its wings so that “her body would learn to fly”; while in “So You Haven’t Flown Yet, Carlota Gentina?” a condemned man confesses, “Inside me, I’m not alone. I’m many. . . . That’s why, when I tell my story, I mix myself up, a mulata not of races but of existences.” Sea Loves Me is a thrilling addition to Couto’s extraordinary body of work, bringing together new and old stories that evoke past and present Mozambique, memories and dreamscapes, natural and spirit worlds. War, race, sky and sea, death and desire—these are just a few of the eternal elements Couto uses to mold his wise, enchanting fiction. “As I rowed a long return,” thinks the solitary boatman in “The Waters of Time,” “the old words of my grandfather came to mind: Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die.” Anderson Tepper New York Mieko Kawakami Heaven: A Novel Trans. Sam Bett & David Boyd. New York. Europa Editions. 2021. 192 pages. FORTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD Mieko Kawakami refuses to trivialize the agony of adolescence ; instead she bears witness to it. She has described her own childhood in Osaka, Japan, as a hellish experience. Her father often went missing, and she was forced to find work in a factory to help support her family. She pursued adulthood with a gritty determination. She tried singing but gave it up when she was told she couldn’t write her own lyrics. She turned to writing, and her novels and poems, which often play fast and loose with experimental bursts of prose, have catapulted her into international fame. Kawakami concedes, “I try to write from the child’s perspective—how they see the world. Coming to the realization you’re alive is such a shock. One day, BOOKS IN REVIEW 80 WLT SPRING 2021 ...

Plights of Marginalised Limbu Community in Subba’s “Laato Pahaada” [Dumb Hill

The title story “Laato Pahaada” [“Dumb Hill”] selected from Upendra Subba’
 s anthology of stories Laato Pahaada [Dumb Hill] represents plights – pains, sufferings, tortures and difficulties – of ethnic Limbu community at the margin under the dominance of mainstream culture and various forms of repressive and ideological state apparatuses. So, this study aims to find out the responsible factors that compel the ethnic Limbu community to remain illiterate and go through numerous pains, sufferings, tortures and humiliation. Similarly, it aims to analyse how the illiterate and poor Limbu people suffer and get tortured by the cultural practices and apparatuses of the state power. In order to achieve the designed objectives and reach to a conclusion, Cultural Studies has been used as an overall theoretical approach. Particularly, Althusser’s concepts of ideology – repressive and ideological state apparatuses, and Michel Foucault’s idea of discourse and power have been used as theoretical tools for the analysis of the text. This study provides a new insight to see and understand the plights of the people at the margin from a new perspective; and to realize about the importance of marginalized cultures. Innocent Limbu people go through sufferings of illiteracy, poverty and difficulties due to the mono-cultural values and mono-lingual education system of state power which are effectively practiced by the means of both repressive and ideological apparatuses.

Hope Beyond Disappointment: A Reparative Reading of Charlson Ong’s Of That Other Country We Now Speak

The practice of depicting ancestral homeland as a mythical and ideal place where the diasporic subjects will eventually return has been problematized and contested in diasporic studies. Seemingly pioneering, such an approach perpetuates a paranoid reading of homecoming and return as an experience of disappointment, confusion, and conflict, which in turn bolsters the sense of alienation of diasporic subjects. Despite the contentions, the idea of home still has its hold on diasporic subjects. Considering the complexity and significance of the notion of home in diasporic studies, I argue that the homecoming journey could also create positive impacts on healing the wound inflicted by diasporic experience. Employing Eve Sedgwick’s theory of reparative reading, which empowers generative mode of analysis that explores alternatives through textual critique, I offer a reparative reading of the title story in Of that Other Country We Now Speak and Other Stories, a recent collection of short stories by the award-winning Chinese Filipino writer Charlson Ong. I focus especially on the experience of the protagonist Jeffrey and examine how his adversity is complicated by the diasporic experience, the symbolic meaning of his homecoming trip as well as how his narration of a mythological story parallels with and symbolizes his endeavors to heal the misfortune. In doing so, this essay hopes to provide an alternative perspective on the often negatively-perceived homecoming experience.

Feministic Analysis of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s selected stories in English Lessons and Other Stories

The present paper aims at exploration of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s specific technique implemented to present women predicament in selected stories from feministic point of view. The feministic point of view has developed out of a movement for equal rights and chances for women society. The present search is based on analytical and interpretative methods. Shauna Singh Baldwin is a writer of short fiction, poetry, novels and essays. Her ‘English Lessons and Other Stories’ explores the predicament of earlier neglected women of Sikh community by putting them in the context of globalization, immigration to West and consumerism at Indian modern society. “Montreal 1962” presents a Sikh wife’s attachment, love, determination, struggles and readiness to do anything for survival in Canada where her husband is threatened to remove his turban and cut his hair short to get the job. “Simran” presents the story of sacrifice of individual desire by a young Sikh girl because of her mother’s fundamentalist attitude. The title of story “English Lessons” presents injustice to an Indian woman who has married to an American, who compels her to become a prostitute and a source of his earnings in the States. The fourth selected story “Jassie” tells us about the timely need of religious tolerance in the file of an Indian immigrant old woman. Being a feminist writer, though Baldwin has never claimed directly to be, she has very skillfully presented the issues of feminism through her own technique of presentation. She has used technique of presenting absence or opposite to highlight it indirectly. Thus, true to her technique, though not explicitly declared, Baldwin is one of the feminist writers who skillfully deals with feminine concerns.

Why Enghien? A Note on Cortázar and Proust

The few studies which have examined the influence of Proust on the fiction of Julio Cortázar have, understandably, focused on his novels, and in particular Rayuela (1963). Yet when he relocated to Paris in 1951 the first literary works he produced were the cuentos that would eventually make up Las armas secretas (1959). Those stories were written in the wake of a careful re-reading of À la recherche du temps perdu, and in this essay I argue that the title story in particular is a considered, creative response to that reading.

Kırk Vezir Hikâyeleri Minyatürleri Üzerine Bir Inceleme

This article aims to introduce two illustrated copies of an Ottoman manuscript under the title Stories of Forty Viziers. One of these copies is now registered in the Istanbul University Library [IU T. 7415]. It has twelve miniatures and no colophone. The other copy is among the Turkish Manuscripts of Uppsala University’s Carolina Rediviva Library [UUL Vet. 38]. The colophone date is 1586-1587 (H.995) and it has seventeen miniatures. Stories of Forty Viziers was one of the books read in the Ottoman Palace. Although there are studies on the text and copies of the book in the field of Turkish literature, there is no study about the iconographies of the miniatures in them. The miniatures in the two copies of Stories of Forty Viziers are in Ottoman Classical Painting Style. The undated Istanbul manuscript [IU T. 7415] could be estimated to the 1580s and the colophon date of the Uppsala copy of the manuscript of 1586-1587 is already in the culmination of the classical painting style which is the period of Ottoman Sultan Murad III (1574-1595).The painters of the two copies had clearly worked in the way of Nakkash Osman who was the leading painter of Ottoman classical painting. The miniatures of Stories of Forty Viziers represent the Otttoman advice letters iconography and with the exception of two, all the other miniatures are unique iconographically. One of two is about the combat between the prophet Moses and Giant Og and the other is from Ottoman Sinbad-nama. In the miniatures the stories depict the struggle between characters representing wisdom (forty viziers) and deception (wife). Additionally the miniatures about Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, Ishraqi Philosopher Suhrawardi al-Maqtul and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) represent new images and new iconographies.

Animal Farm Antecedent?

I came across a children’s book that appears to me to contain nascent elements of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. This is: The Animals on Strike & Other Tales arranged by Edith Carrington illustrated by F. M Cooper (London, 1895), 184. I presume Carrington is also the author of the little story. Cooper’s initials appear on most of the engravings, which are excellent; but the flyleaf conflictingly claims the noted Harrison Weir as illustrator. The title story describes an ill-run farm with cruel farmer John Shane who regularly abuses his animals. They join in rebellion, meeting and discussing their issues and tactics in open assembly. Shane’s son Tom follows his father’s behaviour, who is seriously injured when an abused horse runs away with him; his suffering and the counsel of kindly women reform him. It occurs to me that Orwell (Eric Blair) might well have seen this book in his youth and recast its basic theme for his superb satire against corrupted Marxism. Can anyone carry this discussion further?

"Confusion of Tongues": Language, Trauma, and Transformation in Ingeborg Bachmann's "Simultan"

The protagonist of the title story in Bachmann's last collection Simultan is arguably at least as much language itself as it is the simultaneous translator Nadja. In the course of the narrative, Nadja experiences various kinds of danger associated with signification, from its suffocating presence to its terrifying absence. Readers, too, find themselves alternately drawn in, carried away, or completely shut out by the uniquely potent combination of interior monologue, third-person narration, indirect discourse, and the occasional moment of direct dialogue. The paper enlists the theories of Sándor Ferenczi, notably his late paper on "Sprachverwirrung zwischen den Erwachsensen und dem Kind," to illuminate how the linguistic impasses in Bachmann's story function both as trauma and as catalysts to transformation.