During the early twentieth century – when the United States was receiving an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, and “standardization” was a dominant, yet polarizing, concept – having a single ...national language that unified Americans became a controversial topic in public discourse. In The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Ruth Suckow, like many authors at the time, used immigrant language as a foil for midwestern speech to demonstrate its “standard” Americanness. But, as this essay will show, by using other regional American dialects in a similar manner, she questioned how “Americanness” was being understood and recognized during this period in the United States.
This essay argues for reading parochially to reckon with local specificities of the Left in Anglophone fiction, more commonly studied as a global form. Focusing on Zimbabwean novels set in a ...provincial capital, Bulawayo, I examine how the proverbial second city’s oblique relation to a nominally socialist, centralized state apparatus like Zimbabwe’s, affords an ideal standpoint from which to critique the betrayals of hegemonic nationalist figures. I call for a shift away from persistent ideas of a global periphery and center, to instead argue that the parochial represents the center of a world, one among many.
The introduction places the contributors’ essays in the context of protest movements (such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo) and recent scholarly debates about surface reading, post-critique, and ...weak theory. The literary Left relies on particular generic features—often featuring a manifesto or declaration, cosignatories and signal-boosters, and skeptics and trolls—that repay attention to expressive form as well as political content. In contrast to genres that rely on closure, writing of the Left thrives when arguments spill from page to page, text to text.
In his book on Plutarch's Maxime cum principibus philosopho esse disserendum from 2009, Geert Roskam takes up the question of the genre of the work. Few scholars have approached this question and ...they have had little to say. Hence, Roskam's treatment of the question is much appreciated. Among the suggestions previously put forth is the suggestion by F.H. Sandbach, who argued that the work should be regarded as a treatise, while H.N. Fowler stated in the ‘Introduction’ to the Loeb Classical Library translation that the work is an essay. Other suggestions regarding the genre of Maxime cum principibus include the notion that it is a diatribe and a parva disputatio e magisterio orta. Of course, although all four suggestions have something to say for themselves, they are rather imprecise and not actual genres in a specific sense. The diatribe often surfaces as a convenient label for ancient philosophical discourses, but it is a misleading label, since what it picks out was not recognized as a distinctive form or stylistic level in antiquity. In addition, the technical and literary uses of the Greek word διατριβή were entirely different.
To shed light on questions pertaining to the similarities and differences between kennings in Old English and in the Poetic Edda, a survey is undertaken of the density of kenning use in the two ...corpora. The likeliest conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of findings is that the two poetic traditions are rather similar in regard to kenning use. In both traditions, kennings are notably simpler and less riddle-like than in skaldic poetry, though the
contains a few kennings of sufficient complexity to suggest skaldic influence. Although kennings, on average, occur more frequently in Old English, the incidence is broadly similar to that in the Poetic Edda. Kennings are not uncommonly explained by the use of variation (apposition) in Old English, but less commonly in the
, although the difference does not specifically suggest discrepant attitudes toward kenning use in the two traditions, since variation is rare in the
under all circumstances. Although the possibility of the influence of one tradition upon the other cannot be ruled out, the similarities, in the main, are probably best explained as the result of common inheritance. This explanation garners support from the number of instances in which more or less precise cognate kennings appear in the two bodies of literature.
What would a dystopian version of London look like? How would the architecture of the near future engage with personal and collective memories in order to define, or even transform, the identities of ...the inhabitants? In an attempt to answer these questions, British New Wave science fiction turns its attention to the exploration of urban dwellers in relation to their dystopian surroundings. This article explores the extent to which the novel High-Rise by J.G Ballard highlights the erasure of memories and ultimate mayhem caused by the architectural design, as well as the interplay between identity and architectural identity. I conduct a geocritical analysis, emphasizing the connections between the animate inhabitants and the inanimate building as the main guiding force of the plot. I focus on the importance of both architecture and memory in creating dystopian, alienating urban surroundings which transform and are transformed by the self to the extent that they are both marked by an entropic conception of the future.
"5 Yet the present article considers the insights afforded by doctors who do not merely "intervenir … autour du mourant," but become the "mourant," contemplating and writing about dying from the very ...the hospital bed from which they had sought to distance themselves all their professional lives. In this way, the aim of this study is two-fold: to develop recent consideration of the connections between place, space, and time in exploring the 'worlding' of health, healing, and well-being, begun in a special issue on the neglected theme of social and cultural geographies in the medical humanities, but that concentrated solely on non-clinical settings;6 and to evaluate the broader implications of the language of dying and death by the médecin-écrivain for a more collective understanding, one that bridges the scientific and literary imagination, of the foreboding liminal space where life gives way to death. Threshold of life In his 2014 memoir Being Mortal, American surgeon and writer Atul Gawande reflects on the ways in which modern medical practice and technology have doggedly combined to sustain organs and delay the moment of death. ...extending Sontag's metaphor of the passport, in any departure to what Heidegger would term the "Unheimlich," the primordially estranged state in which we are alienated from our world, and which encompasses the fear, anxiety, and social isolation that illness produces, we live not simply in the "kingdom of the sick," but in the cultural geography of exile, of not belonging.9 Rogers Brubaker, in his article on "The 'Diaspora' Diaspora," has traced the dispersion of the meaning of the term in semantic, conceptual, and disciplinary space.
In what follows, I will reveal, step by step, three parallel narrative movements in Chopin's "A Pair of Silk Stockings," prefacing the analysis with a preliminary discussion of some relevant issues ...and a summary of existing criticisms. Since the story was created "during a period of intense feminist activity in the United States" (Valentine and Palmer 59-60), feminist critics have read Mrs. Summers as struggling to escape the "confining roles of self-sacrificing wifehood and motherhood" (Shurbutt 18-20), as a "form of ideological entrapment" (Papke 65), or as a "patriarchal myth" (Toth 23). Produced in an expanding national economy, with a rapidly growing culture of consumption producing various "personal and social transformations" in America in the late 1890s, the narrative offers "a deceptively simple account of one woman and mother's shopping trip to a downtown department store where she spends on herself money that she had intended to spend on her children" (Arner 123), in order to show the controlling influence of consumerism on individuals, as well as the conflict between old and emerging cultures (Arner 123-24). From the perspective of consumerism, Allen Stein challenges the feminist view that the female protagonist "has developed a feeling of independence and fulfillment in her judicious use of money" (Davis 148) to argue instead that the character, "from the moment she gets the fifteen dollars to the moment that she has spent every bit of it, never has any more autonomy than she has had at any recent point in her married life" because she only experiences a "misdirected" "brief flight into consumerism" (358-59).
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