Literary Theory

The article is an introductory paper to a Special Issue in Moderna Språk that collects eight contributions focusing on demythologizations of cultural politics. Using Deleuzian concepts of minorization and delirium, the paper attempts to frame cultural difference in a new open terrain where all forms of localisms and regimes of identifications are seen as frames of capture that subjugate rather than emancipate difference. The measure of a culture’s health, I argue, does not reside in atrophy of its self-identity but in its dispersion of atoms everywhere, its schizoid states of intensities and deterritorializations where thresholds of self-consistency are surpassed and zones of indiscernibility entered. In this context, cultural difference could be seen as a permanent disjunction of territoriality, body or code, that which escapes capture to disrupt the self-valorizing forces of its enunciation, a kind of counter-pressure of synchrony in diachrony, a black body within the white imaginary that produces lesions and lines of escape in airtight regimes of definition and multiplies narrative ruptures in every narrative of constitution. With this mind, the paper then proceeds to introduce and analyze eight contributions to the volume that articulate cultural difference in a variety of contexts including translation, cuisine, media, water writing, punk literature, history, urban studies and protest art as well as more theoretically focused deconstructions of territorial fictions that cultural imaginaries rely on.

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects,  or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

The subject of semiotics is not to answer the questions such as what does the text says, who says the text, or what are the possible external— societal, individual, and historical—effects on the text. Instead, it is mainly interested in how signs are created, how they are articulated with each other to create the meaning in the text, and in what ways the meaning is created in different semantic layers within its system. The study necessitates focusing on the relations of the formative elements in the text which leads us to reach the narrative syntax that makes it possible to observe the underlying structures in different semantic strata of the text. Moreover, the approach helps us to analyze the meaning production process, as well as to observe the ways of the articulation process of meaningful items with each other to create the whole text.  The main purpose of this study is to figure out the semantic organization of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four narrative within the scope of Greimas's semiotic trajectory.

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.

“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University

“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin

What we know today as literature began as oral tales told in small hunter-gatherer bands. Several lines of evidence indicate that storytelling has long been an integral part of human experience. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged around 200,000 years ago, at which point language was firmly in place. The recent finding that 85% of nighttime conversation among San foragers is dedicated to the recounting of stories and myths attests to the prominence of this activity in modern and—by implication--ancestral hunter-gatherer life. Unfortunately, behavior doesn’t fossilize, so we don’t have access to the stories told by our ancestors. However, thanks to texts collected by early anthropologists and extant oral traditions kept alive by dedicated tribal elders, we have a good sense of what storytelling was like in recent foraging groups. Due to contact with industrialized state societies and access to Western goods, recent forager life differs somewhat from that of our ancestors; however, their story traditions date to a time when they lived in small, nomadic or semi-nomadic bands and made their living by hunting and gathering. Thus, these traditions are the product of an existence that was very similar to that of early humans—a life without agriculture, social stratification, economic specialization, motorized transport, telecommunication, or modern medicine. For this reason, research on modern foraging peoples is seen as a valuable tool for reconstructing the hominid past. Similarly, the oral traditions of ethnographically documented foragers provide a model of storytelling in ancient environments....

Procopius's Secret History has attracted the attention of a generation of social historians. Yet, the significant, albeit subtler ways, in which gender colors Procopius’s most significant work, the Wars, has received far less notice. Seeking to address this imbalance, the present study examines how gender shapes Procopius’s presentation of the Goths, East Romans, and Italo-Romans in his Wars. Rather than uncovering the Goths, East Romans, and Italians “as they really were,” this paper seeks to unearth some of the purpose and reasoning behind Procopius’s gendered depictions and ethnicizing worldview. A careful investigation of Procopius’s discussions about the manly and unmanly provides crucial insights into not just the larger narrative but also the historian’s knotty authorial agenda. Despite the Gothic War’s reliance on classical ethnic and gender patterns, Procopius did not compose his history in a vacuum. Indeed, the gendered discourse, which undergirds much of the Wars, must be understood within the broader context of the political debates reverberating around the late antique Mediterranean at a time when control of Italy from Constantinople was contested.

Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.

SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular success with an evolutionary book in the humanities. The Gottschall and Wilson collection The Literary Animal (2005) was a success with critics outside the postmodern establishment—in scientific journals and the lay press—but was not a blockbuster at the box office.

Essay detailing some of Titian's most famous works, looking at self-expression through painting,  memento mori, emotion, as well as topics of mortality and death. The focus of this paper is to shed light on aspects of symbolism found in some of the artist's later pieces in order to determine why his style changed so drastically over time.

Quentin Meillassoux, "Metafísica y ficción extracientífica, seguido de "La bola de billar" de I. Asimov. Santiago: Roneo, 2020. Traducción y notas de Meillassoux por Jean-Paul Grasset B. Prólogo de Jean-Paul Grasset B. y Mario Teodoro Ramírez.
Traducción de 'La bola de billar" por Cristóbal Carrasco y Nicolás Vargas.

The author studies a period that constitutes the height of the art critic Clement Greenberg’s engagement with the New Criticism. The essay offers a snapshot view of a larger transition that marks Greenberg’s shift from Marxist criticism in the late 1930s to a kind of formalism by 1960. Steiner argues that at the crux of Greenberg’s trajectory is an intense dialogue with a complex set of arguments with T.S. Eliot. If the Anglo-American tradition of the symbol and in particular Eliot’s notion of the aesthetic as both act and fact are particularly central to understanding the poet’s influence on the critic as well as his notion of expression, then Steiner also argues that Greenberg takes his distance from Eliot as representative of the New Critic’s on questions impacted by tradition, modernism, democracy and liberalism. At issue are the changes representative of American capitalism over and above the British model, the shift in the American economy toward work and away from leisure, and finally the emergence of middle-brow culture—all positive moments of transformation that Eliot was reluctant to champion. Along the way the argument traces a cluster of words that crop up in the critic’s vocabulary and that circle around the notion of the pastoral, materialism and expression. With these positions staked out, the essay looks at a number of key painters championed by Greenberg whose work is similarly impacted by the New Criticism.

Este ensaio pretende reavaliar a crítica de Machado de Assis a O Primo Basílio, de Eça de Queirós. Nesta releitura, o ano de 1878 é considerado crucial na internacionalização do sistema literário lusófono. Assim, propõe-se a releitura da dura crítica de Machado ao romance de Eça a partir dessa premissa. A consequência principal da crítica machadiana teria sido o resgate, deliberadamente anacrônico, da técnica clássica da aemulatio, reinventada sob a forma de uma "poética da emulação".

This paper aims to concretize this notion of literary theories being in dialogue by exploring the intertwining of the Marxist theory, mainly depending on Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin’s theories, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, based on Sigmund Freud’s writings, in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” with focus on Reverand Parris as a representative of the Bourgoise and John Proctor, Abigail Williams and the people of Salem as representatives of the Proletariats. “The Crucible” portrays the Marxist ideology of class division, yet more importantly, it traces religion, a concept long debated among the Marxists, as the trigger to the class struggle. The characters in the play have taken to 2 extreme measures for power attainment; Hysteria, triggered by the Id, and revolution, triggered by the Superego. This is what this paper aims to explore further with taking

Perché il teatro occupa una posizione centrale nella civiltà letteraria inglese? Come nasce il romanzo e quali forme specifiche assume nell’isola? Come evolve la poesia inglese da quando gli elisabettiani importano il sonetto dall’Italia? Il volume fornisce una risposta a queste e altre domande, proponendosi come utile avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario inglese e offrendo una panoramica dello sviluppo dei principali generi: poesia, romanzo e teatro. Ogni capitolo è corredato di numerosi esempi distribuiti su un arco temporale che va dal Cinquecento al secondo Novecento. Insieme al tradizionale manuale di storia letteraria, questa guida presenta gli strumenti critico-metodologici indispensabili e le coordinate essenziali per lo studio della letteratura inglese.

Resumen. El fenómeno Booktube se configu-ra en un claro ejemplo de la cultura parti-cipativa, donde los usuarios toman las rien-das de los medios para aportar sus propias ideas, en este caso referidas a la literatura. En este trabajo se analiza el carácter que toman las producciones audiovisuales de los booktubers, intentando dilucidar si se trata de un fenómeno fandom que además puede ser evaluado como crítica literaria. Tras revisar algunas ideas en torno a la crí-tica, estaríamos dentro de la categoría en la que Edward W. Said incluye a las reseñas de libros o al periodismo literario, aunque teniendo en cuenta su carácter amateur. También se resalta el que se opte por for-mas de literatura que no forman parte del canon central del sistema cultural, lo que dota de una gran originalidad a la selección de los títulos propuestos. Dada la impronta entre el público juvenil, se recomienda em-prender estudios que aborden la eficacia de este tipo de prácticas en la promoción de la lectura, especialmente en el ámbito universitario. Palabras clave: Booktube; crítica literaria; redes sociales; participación cultural; promoción de la lectura. Abstract. The booktube phenomenon is configured as a clear example of partici-patory culture, where users take control of media offering their own ideas, in this case referred to literature. This article discusses the character of audiovisual productions created by booktubers. Additionally, it tries to resolve if these cases are a fandom phenomenon that also can be considered as literary criticism. After reviewing some ideas towards the criticism, these videos are found to be in the category established by Edward W. Said composed by reviews and literary journalism, although taking into account their amateur nature. Also, it is remarked that the booktubers selection of literary forms do not take part in the central canon of the cultural system. This situation provides the selection of the titles with a great originality. Because of the importance of Booktube among the young audience of readers, new research is recommended in this area for reading promotion , especially at the university level.

Menschliche Kulturen befinden sich in einem Prozess beständiger Umgestaltung und unterliegen mitunter radikalen Veränderungen. In diesem Band werden mit den Mitteln und Methoden der Geschichtsphilosophie, der Soziologie, der Handlungstheorie und der Kulturwissenschaften die grundlegenden Mechanismen und Logiken kultureller Transformationsprozesse herausgearbeitet. Ein interdisziplinäres Spektrum von Perspektiven – u.a. auf die philosophische Ästhetik, die politische Philosophie und die Wissenschaftsgeschichte – zeigt darüber hinaus die Verschiedenartigkeit des Wandels in unterschiedlichen Bereichen der Kultur auf.

(mit Beiträgen von Emil Angehrn, Stefan Deines, Daniel M. Feige, Astrid Erll, Doris Gerber, Oliver Marchard, Johannes Rohbeck, Hartmut Rosa, Martin Seel und Mario Wenning).

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

La critica letteraria è una materia in cui “parole e cose” sono strettamente intrecciate le une alle altre, e in cui tra i componenti materiali dei testi e le categorie che li classificano esiste un intricato rapporto di individuazione reciproca: non c’è termine, nel lessico della teoria letteraria, che non sia nato da un dato testuale, un caso particolare che ne ha influenzato natura e confini con le proprie caratteristiche specifiche, e allo stesso tempo non si dà dato testuale che possa essere identificato come tale in mancanza di una categoria che gli preesiste, di uno spazio teorico che lo fa esistere in quanto oggetto e ne garantisce la riconoscibilità. Partendo da questo doppio presupposto, questo libro si offre come strumento di partenza per lo studio della narrativa, occasione per riepilogare i concetti fondamentali della critica riportandoli – per quanto possibile – ai loro contesti di origine, così da coniugare nozione ed evoluzione, significato e storia.

This paper uses Plato and Aristotle's concept of censorhip in discussing the novel titled The Last Duty by Isidore Okpewho. The novel upon reading has explicit profane expressions and other immoral acts which do not help in nurturing of an African Child and thus go contrary to the concept of censorship propounded by Plato and Aristotle. The author therefore uses this concept of Censorship developed by Plato and Aristotle as a guide for the youth in reading of the novel.

From the ancient times onwards, the definition and the concept of dreams have always been open to discussions and various interpretations. They have been defined as the messages we receive from the macrocosms(heavens or the forces warning us from up above) until Freud disbanded their stereotypical perception by which they were considered as the reflection of individual's hidden self and all undisclosed desires. Before that time of the crucial breakdown about dreams, the approach towards it was a way more primitive and metaphysical one, leading the individual to observe them as a message, a lesson to be learned, and a more meaningful term rather than a flash memory card which is to reveal our obscurity, as some of us still utilize them with that manner. Until this shift of perception, dreams have also been the indispensible element for literature, guiding the characters to recognitions or simply affecting them in all terms, especially in Shakespeare's plays. So this paper is going to extend the title and analize the "dream" as a vital element by means of Shakespearean drama, with regards to Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Biography: Sena Hilal Zaganor is a third-grade student at the department of Western Languages and Literatures at Kocaeli University. She participated in the 5 th Student Conference at Karadeniz Technical University in May 18, 2016 with a paper titled "Romanticism and Christianity in Rime of the Ancient Mariner". She is one of the board members of the English Language and Literature Club at Kocaeli University. Her literary concerns are poetry, drama, English Romantic Poetry, English Gothic Literature, Renaissance art and subconscious through poetry and she also studies works of Shakespeare as an undergraduate student this year, which has a significant impact on her to attend the conference which will be held this year.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a. new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift, Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry's most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination in genius, inspiration and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones.

We are pleased to announce that submissions are now open for LEA 11 (2022).
CfP: Conflict and contrast in language and literature

LEA also accepts contributions that are not related to the topic proposed in the CfP: for more information, please visit our website:
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea

L’esperienza di Calvino comprende lo studio della fiaba e l’analisi critica di molti scrittori. L’articolo offre l’analisi dell’angolazione teorica e pratica di Calvino verso la fiaba, i classici cioè l’antologia scolastica e l’antologia personale. Nella fiaba Calvino individua gli elementi costituenti gli oneri dell’insegnare e del divertire, e la definisce come una lezione sulla vita pratica, ma anche indicazione sull’ordine sociale, sulla mentalità, e sulla cultura del popolo che l’ha creata e rimandata. Il problema principale delle antologie scolastiche è la non-lettura condizionata dall’imposizione delle opere scelte. Il caso più felice, secondo Calvino, è quello dell’antologia personale basata sulle scelte e sugli interessi individuali, nell’ambito della quale un’opera classica assume il proprio significato perché letta, riletta e amata per tutta la vita.

За науковою редакцією Т. І. Гундорової
та Г. М. Сиваченко

Упорядкування О. В. Брайка
Макет Т. Г. Свербілової

      Збірник є наслідком зацікавлень українських вчених питаннями інтермедіальності і містить ряд статей, присвячених різним аспектам інтермедіальності: електронній інтертекстуальності, різним видам екфразису, відеопоезії, екранізації літератури, співвідношенню синтезу та диференціації мистецтв.  В центрі досліджень – література на полі медій і, навпаки,  медії на полі літератури. Мова про інтермедіальні адаптації, трансформації, інсценізації літератури на полі інших медій, але також і про місце та роль інших медій в художньому просторі літературного тексту.
Для літературознавців, студентів-філологів, викладачів історії літератури і компаративістики, для всіх, хто цікавиться проблемами інтермедіальних студій.