Role Of Writer Research Articles

The Question of Socialist Writing and Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Thirties

This essay was runner-up in the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Twentieth Century & Contemporary Section. The 1930s was a time of crisis, ideological extremism and impending war. Few writers remained untouched by the political turmoil following the Great Depression in the West and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The impulse of authors to involve themselves in politics at this time is suggested by the high number of radical and conservative periodicals flourishing in the 1930s. There also emerged divisive debate on the role of writers in shaping contemporary politics, battled out in a steady stream of international conferences. This article introduces one such controversy: the hostile debate between proponents of socialist writing and modernism culminating in the notorious Writers’ Congress in Moscow in 1934. I then look in more detail at how one Communist writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, negotiated such debate in her journalism and literary writing: a regular contributor to the left-wing journal Left Review, Warner provides an illustrative example of a writer who bridged the gulf between ideas of writing as a purely political or aesthetic form of expression.

THE FORTUNES OF MARY: AUTHENTICITY, NOTORIETY AND THE CRIME-WRITING LIFE1

Mary Helena Fortune wrote “The Detective's Album”, the longest-running early detective serial, published for over 40 years in the Australian Journal. She was probably the first woman to write from the viewpoint of a police detective, and certainly the first to specialize in the nascent genre of crime fiction. Yet during her lifetime, and for decades afterwards, her identity was a mystery. This article will examine the sensational life and writing of Fortune. She was a hybrid colonial, born in Ireland, of Scottish ancestry, emigrating to Canada and then to Australia. Her crime writing was informed by bitter personal experience: on the lawless Australian goldfields; a bigamous marriage to a policeman; a son who spent over 20 years in jail. At times she was homeless, living in de facto relationships, and wanted by the police. Yet she was continually writing—her bibliography comprises over 500 items. The article will consider Fortune as an example of transgressive femininity, whose literary anonymity gave her both the freedom to write, and also protected her from the censorious gaze of the colonial Mrs Grundy. But she never progressed beyond colonial publication, despite producing one book, The Detective's Album (1871). Moreover, evidence exists that she was exploited and underpaid. Even during her lifetime it was commented that had she gone to England or America “where literary talent is properly appreciated”, she would have become “a leading novelist”. Few nineteenth-century crime writers had personal experience of their low-life subject matter. Even fewer female authors of the era could publicly assume the role of writer manqué. The irony with Fortune is that it is precisely this knowledge which both gave her the authority to write crime and sentenced her to anonymous literary drudgery.

The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (review)

Reviewed by: The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America patricia p. chu (bio) The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. By Rajini Srikanth. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). In The World Next Door, Rajini Srikanth has kneaded together two different kinds of study. Not content to survey and describe an emerging literature, the author has folded readings of mostly fresh, mostly undiscussed South Asian North American texts into a sustained five-part essay on the roles of writers, readers, scholars, and activists in the current political situation. For her, this new literature requires readers to reconsider their reading habits and to reflect on the habits of Americans in "reading" their nation and others' as texts; such scrutiny is most urgent in the wake of U.S. government responses to the events of September 11. Thus, she engages with debates about the profiling of Muslims, Arabs, and others portrayed as terrorism suspects and about ideas of America and its place in the world. In Asian American studies, she responds to debates about the relative merits of demanding social justice for Asian Americans in the U.S. vs. the task of understanding Asian Americans as global citizens negotiating with racial projections emerging from the nation's rise as a global power. The book does introduce contemporary South Asian cultural texts, but it's not organized around these texts so much as issues raised in reading them. The author questions most of the assumptions that have framed Asian American literary studies, leaving readers with new questions to explore and define this changing terrain. Bibliophiles will rejoice in the dozens of titles, including fiction, poetry, performance art, and plays that Srikanth discusses, including underrepresented Muslim voices. For scholars of Asian American culture "East of California," Srikanth resituates South Asian literature with neither a center nor a margin, but a global web of diasporic communities that touch such places as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Trinidad, Canada, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. Finally, [End Page 207] for scholars of American culture and womens' studies, Srikanth's book proposes broad questions useful for considering American culture as the U.S. attempts to redefine its role abroad. After explaining her use of the contingent categories, "South Asian American writing" and "North America," Srikanth shifts focus from single sites to the "interconnectedness among nations and peoples," and the interaction between acts of literary writing and reading and transforming the realms of "politics and civic behavior." Quickly sketching the emergence of American awareness of India and the emergence of South Asian America literary texts, Srikanth establishes that her primary focus will be on texts published after Salman Rushdie's watershed novel Midnight's Children (1980). Inveighing against "partial" (biased, incomplete) readings, the author offers two suggestions for "just" readings: a caution against bipolar thinking, and a demand to read "as foreigners to the text," acknowledging our limited knowledge of other cultures. Srikanth cites Bapsi Sidhwa, Tony Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy as writers who explore and appreciate the defining traumas of other nations, a task she feels Americans must undertake if we seek other nations' support. For Srikanth, the prevailing "idea of America" is based on John Winthrop's view, in 1630, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on the hill" for the world to emulate; she quotes his words as definitive of the future nation's self-image as uniquely favored by God, driven by the desire for religious freedom, equality, and democratic values rather than mere material prosperity, and therefore justified in such acts as massacring "four hundred Pequots during the Pequot War of 1637" (35). Economic motives are typically muted by such ideologues, but, through Benjamin Franklin, are recast as the secular business values of "reason, industry, . . . an eye for the practical," and personal and national self-sufficiency (35), setting the stage for U.S. exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. Srikanth then contrasts this image of America's uniqueness with the complex webs of connection in Amitav Ghosh's memoir/history/novel, In an Antique Land, which links twelfth- and twentieth-century exchanges between Egypt and India with Iraq's 1990 invasion of...

Ostdeutsche Intellektuelle und der gesellschaftliche Umbruch der DDR

Abstract The text starts with the discussion of the concept of intellectuals, followed by a typology of East German intellectuals. It also deals with the role of writers who considered themselves socialist intellectuals and that of intellectual critics and civil rights activists who acted under the umbrella of the Protestant church. The text focuses on East German scholars in the humanities and social sciences, who in 1989/90 came under pressure from the civil rights movement, and from the unification scenario that made them face in many respects superior competitors in the academic fields from the West.

The Technical Writer's Role in Preserving Intellectual Property Rights Outside the United States Tutorial

This tutorial introduces issues regarding dissemination of information and texts that can affect international intellectual property rights. Four areas of concern for technical communicators include: (1) US and international rules about the disclosure of ideas and inventions; (2) corporate policies about confidentiality; (3) the complexities of international enforcement of intellectual property; and (4) principles of keeping records, including laboratory notebooks, that show ownership (including ownership of business methods). The training approach stresses a multipart program that includes understanding the patenting process; understanding and supporting corporate policies; and participating in dialogue about situations involving dissemination of information. This training should prepare technical communicators to evaluate or to recognize when to seek help from counsel in evaluating whether information should be disseminated.

The struggle for the silents: The British screenwriter from 1910 to 1930

For about 15 years, from c. 1918, British screenwriters wrote scripts in a style which allowed them — indeed encouraged them — to express their screen idea in a comprehensive fashion, including specifying shots and instructing actors. Early examples of a writers draft and a shooting script suggest British practice used both at appropriate stages in production, but that the writer's role in silent films encouraged the development of the writer's draft style into a comprehensive document from which the director took instruction. This is different from current conventions. The assumption that the writer ‘picturised’ the film on the page, as well as structuring it dramatically, persisted until the 1930s, with what appears to be a low-level struggle for control of both the visual style of the film and (eventually) the main credit for that being won by the director. The script for The Bachelors Club (1921) was written by Eliot Stannard, who wrote for Hitchcock later in the 1920s. Although primary sources for British silent screenplays are very scarce, both a writer's draft and a shooting script exists for this film; and comparison of the two accords with the view that the writer presented a complete visual concept of the film from the initial script. The industrial practices of the time had not yet rationalised the growing dominance of the director into something more than the person who ‘realised’ what the writer had ‘picturised’, but this raises questions about how far we should study British silent films through the lens of the auteur theory. The conclusions reached here are tentative. While they are not just speculation, neither is there sufficient primary evidence yet to provide more than a very patchy picture about early screenwriting practice in Britain.

Story of transition to school.

This article discusses and reflects on some issues that may arise when a child with special needs and their family transition from an early childhood setting into their chosen school. In this instance, the author examines the case of "Aroha", and considers specifics such as the writer's ethical and professional role as an early childhood teacher, valuable strategies for a successful transition, relevant theories, the influences of relationships with significant people whosupport Aroha in her differing environments, and the concerns teachers and parents have relating to Aroha's diagnosis of attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Using Contrastive Rhetoric in Legal Writing Pedagogy

The paper focuses on the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic challenges for ESL students using contrastive rhetoric theory, a growing and evolving field of study, which focuses on the relationship of culture, language, logic, and rhetoric. The underlying assumption to contrastive rhetoric theory is that language and writing are cultural phenomena with culturally defined conventions and specific rhetorical expectations. Contrastive rhetoric focuses on making students aware of the different writing conventions, different roles of writers, and different audience expectations across language, culture, and even specific discourse communities, such as the legal discourse community in the U.S. Contrastive rhetoric today has taken on a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing the fields of applied linguistics, linguistic relativity, rhetoric, text linguistics, discourse type, literacy, and translation. It has expanded to many English for Specific Purposes (ESP) discourse communities, such as business and technical writing. Unfortunately, contrastive rhetoric has received little attention in the legal writing community despite concerns and observations by those within the legal writing community about the increasingly globalized legal writing classroom.

:Beware the British Serpent: The Role of Writers in British Propaganda in the United States 1939–1945.

:Beware the British Serpent: The Role of Writers in British Propaganda in the United States 1939–1945.

Navigating Turbulence: The Dramaturg in Physical Theatre

Navigating Turbulence:The Dramaturg in Physical Theatre Bruce Barton (bio) Certainly, it is a familiar observation that few theatrical terms are more fluidly evocative or problematic than "dramaturgy." The range of possible definitions of the term is practically as broad as the number of its practitioners is great, and most contemporary discussion on this topic has productively moved beyond attempts to categorically determine and fix its "correct" objectives and/or techniques into a consideration of its effective variety and potential. Yet most understandings of the concept include two basic characteristics of sound practice: 1) an effort to establish and maintain a degree of critical objectivity; and 2) a deep commitment to the creator(s) involved, the project, and the art and craft of theatre. Further, while highly elastic in terms of specific strategies, a central role of dramaturgy is to question habit, to complicate unreflective expediency, and to dig beneath the surface of unearned presumption. In terms of developmental dramaturgy, while these seemingly simple precepts are considerably more complex in application, the situation becomes even more complicated when the role of writer is fragmented and dispersed among a collaborative body of creator/performers utilizing found, adapted, and invented text within a physically-based devised process of discovery. The role of text in a creative process that foregrounds what Eugenio Barba has described as a "dramaturgy of changing states" is charged with anxiety and ambivalence, as inherently ambiguous and instinctual physical movement wrestles with the conventionally delimiting constraints of symbolic language, generating what Barba effectively calls "turbulence." Within the context of this increased level of indeterminacy, it is not surprising that the role of developmental dramaturgy is an elusive and mobile target. Is it, in fact, possible to distill a specific aspect or set of activities out of the development of new physical work which can confidently be called dramaturgy? Or is physical theatre creation not, perhaps, itself the most explicit expression of dramaturgy (developmental and production) possible? My attempt in this article to come to terms with these questions will proceed through a series of related considerations. In the first section I address the general context of inquiry—in this instance, Canadian theatre—through a brief description of common dramaturgical objectives and practices employed in this country. In the second section I consider the specific context of this study: the influences, motivations, and strategies of the Toronto-based devised theatre troupe, Number Eleven, with which I have worked as a dramaturg on multiple occasions. In the third section I narrow the focus still further through the depiction of my experience as dramaturg on Number Eleven's creation/production of The Prague Visitor. In the article's conclusion, I attempt to summarize and generalize [End Page 103] my observations to this point and consider the implications therein for the broader context of developmental dramaturgy—both physical and text-based. Are there lessons to be learned from the experience of physically-based developmental dramaturgy that can be capitalized on generally in a variety of developmental contexts? A "Developing" Nation While the strategies employed and objectives pursued by Canadian dramaturges are similar to those practiced within many other nations (particularly the US), the relative amount of developmental as opposed to production dramaturgy is uncommonly disproportionate—to a degree that conspicuously underscores a disconnect between these two spheres. Influenced by a broad cross-section of factors ranging from a historic national inferiority complex to unrealistically truncated contemporary production schedules and budgets,1 the vast majority of dramaturgical activity in this country concerns itself with new play text development.2 The effect of this situation has been both positive and negative: while there are currently an unprecedented number of professional productions of Canadian plays (albeit most of them clustered in Toronto and, to a lesser degree, Vancouver), this focus on development has also resulted in what playwright Elliot Hayes described, as early as 1986, as "The Workshop Syndrome." A survey of the pages of Canadian Theatre Review across the nearly two decades since Hayes proposed his pessimistic definition of "[w]orkshopitis" (36) yields a remarkable (and depressing) consistency of tone and position. Playwrights of highly diverse backgrounds, orientations, and reputation equally lament a near automatic...

The book at the outskirts of culture: Cortázar's first almanac

The notion of intersemiosis suggests the game relationships between the multiple interacting signifying spheres of culture, but the term can also be fitly applied to the study of certain extraordinary artistic texts. This study makes use of one such book, Julio Cortazar's Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, to show how the sui generis interplay of the book's semantic spheres simultaneously models and renews the complex cultural processes of the production of meaning. This often reprinted and hard-tocategorize book that for years has remained at the outskirts of Latin American culture is also an ideal example to explore the dynamics between the center and periphery of culture as well as the writer's role in the creative renewal of cultural repertoires. By drawing a bridge over the apparent gap between the semiotics of culture and the semiotics of the artistic text, the present study attempts to approximate the critical-creative spirit of the late great theoretician Yurij Lutman.

The Freelance Nurse Writer Role

Freelance nurse writers are skilled in facilitating a dialogue and writing from the perspective of the group. This article, written by an experienced freelance author, describes efficient methods to incorporate information gleaned from group interviews. The author provides tips on what type of projects to look for, how to develop the role, and even how to charge.

On the Margins: Theorizing the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home

This article examines some of the theoretical questions posedfor design historians studying the ways in which working-class women made and designed clothes at home. In particular the article deals with issues relating to feminist histories of design which seek to locate women within a historical narrative as subjects, but which also try to acknowledge the 'situated' and 'specific' nature of their subjectivity. At the same time the article foregrounds the writer's role in constructing historical accounts which connect with her own identity and experience by drawing on oral sources, individual life histories, memory and family photographs. Dress-making at home provides an excellentfocusfor such a theoretical exploration because it connects the personal and the political. It is an arena in which mothers, daughters and sisters learn and acquire theirfeminine identities, and yet it is also a skill which enabled women to redefine their sense of self through design.

A Critical Context for the Carver Chronotope

Raymond Carver (1938-88) is often credited with single-handedly inspiring a renaissance of the short story in America, and with giving voice to a submerged population, who before his time had not been adequately recognized in the cultural space of American literature.1 Carver devoted his whole career as a writer to working within two genres—the short story and the lyric poem—both of which are, within the context of late twentieth- century literature and culture, assuredly minor artistic genres. And yet, in spite of working within these marginal genres, Carver somehow managed to create some major artistic and cultural effects. His writing has the ability to affect individual readers, including many who do not usually read literature,2 and is a lightning rod for cultural and aesthetic debate surrounding issues of the writer's role in contemporary North American life.

"A Silence between Us like a Language": The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek

scribe as the antagonistic yet potentially positive relationship of minority to dominant linguistic and cultural codes (153), are critical matters in Woman Hollering Creek. The text includes frequent references to the specificity and difference coded into any and all languages; to the violence of inadequacy of translation and interpretation; to the translator's and, by extension, the writer's unfaithful role as betrayer of the culture's inside secrets; and to the existence of encoded messages, which are more accessible to readers familiar with various insider codes and cryptographic devices deployed in the text. These attributes Cisneros's text shares with texts by other Chicano, Latino, and minority writers, who implicitly or explicitly refer to their own ambiguous relationships to both dominant and subordi

The Role of the Writer in Today's Singapore: Voice of the Nation?

Maintaining that the creative writer in society is an important voice in shaping and defining national identity-or indeed in challenging that identity-is an ancient tradition, going back in the West, at least, to Plato's Republic. For developing nations, the writer's role is of special concern. It may reinforce, articulate, or repress concepts that are part of an evolving political ideology.' For Malaysia and Singapore, such a role was recognized along with independence. Even before Singaporean independence in 1965, George Thomson put it succinctly in a report for the Malayan Writers' Conference of 1962, when he said:

The politics of literature: Writers, intellectuals and German unity

The relationship between politics and literature is beset by tensions and difficulties. The traditional dichotomy in Germany between ’Geist’ and ‘Macht’ has come to the fore again in debates about unity. The events of 1989/90 provoked a fierce controversy over the role of writers and intellectuals in both German states. This article chronicles the debate and seeks to place it in its socio‐political context: the alleged role of GDR writers as loyal supporters of their state, alleged complicity with the Stasi, and the supposed indifference of western writers to the German Question.

The role of writers

The role of writers

Edward Allworth: Cultural Revival and the Role of Writers

We have come to the human dimension in this discussion. It would, therefore, be useful for us to consider two different ways of approaching this. One is talking about people at arm's length, in the way we have been doing most of the day; to a certain extent we have had to do so, as social scientists or even as humanists. I am going to try the other approach, namely, to talk about a few individuals to see if there is anything there that might help us in understanding the nationality question. My subject is literature and language. First, I will cover literature as an instrument, as something of interest to social scientists; and then I will discuss certain important individuals. As far as the nationality question is concerned, the individual does matter, although, it seems, the Party places that aspect at the bottom of its list of nationality concerns deemed important.

A Social-Interactive Model of Writing

In this decade, writing researchers have shown increasing interest in the social aspects of written communication. This interest has largely been stimulated by interest in writing-across-the-curriculum programs and dialogue journal keeping, as well as such pressing issues as the relationships of process to text and to the social contexts of writing, and the problem of genre. This article outlines a social-interactive model of written communication, highlighting the writer's role in negotiations with readers in the medium of text. Formalist theories of text meaning (meaning is in the text) and idealist theories of meaning (meaning in the reader) are reviewed and challenged. In social-interactive theories of discourse, which are proposed as an alternative to formalist and idealist theories, meaning is said to be a social construct negotiated by writer and reader through the medium of text, which uniquely configures their respective purposes. In the process of communicating, writers and readers may be said to make various “moves,” which achieve progressive and sequential “states” of understanding between them. Writers make three essential kinds of moves: They (1) initiate and (2) sustain written discourse, which they accomplish by means of (3) text elaboration. The rules for writers' moves are spelled out in a fundamental axiom and seven corollaries.