Jamie McKendrick (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) Ada Negri, Songs of the Island and The Book of Mara, tr. Peter Robinson (Oneworld Classics, 2011) memoir Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist ...Harvard Univ.
...whether nostalgic or not, this implies that 'classic' status is frequently articulated with a notion of shared culture (the totemic TV show which one should know), whereas 'cult' status appears ...closer to factional, sub-cultural TV appreciated by a distinct fandom or niche audience. Whereas Hunt makes theorising cult status a key part of his approach, also productively analysing the cultural capital and horror film referencing of the series, Ina Rae Hark rather leaves cult to one side when tackling Star Trek (1966-69; but also including Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987-94; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1993-99; Star Trek: Voyager, 1995-2001; and Enterprise, 2001-5). Hark asserts near the beginning of her Star Trek volume that: the original series is the true television classic, the one that made cultural icons of Kirk and Spock, taught generations about Klingons, warp speed, beaming up and raising shields, inspired the look of mobile phones, PDAs and floppy disks, and provided the template for most of the manifestations of media fandom (p. 7). There is scope here to radically problematise the industrial unit of meaning - the brand of Trek - in favour of fine-grained analytical distinctions and it is a project that Hark profitably initiates, resulting in the rather welcome paradox of a 'BFI TV Classics' volume which spends much of its time arguing that certain among its objects of study are not TV classics.
A Song of Ice and Fire, de George R. R. Martin, juntamente com a sua adaptação televisiva por parte do canal HBO Game of Thrones (2011-2019), afigura-se como um dos principais fenómenos culturais do ...século XXI, questionando as estratégias narrativas convencionais da Fantasia1, bem como a representação da Idade Média na contemporaneidade. A sua popularidade deu origem a convenções de fãs, conferências académicas, cursos universitários e a toda uma panóplia de discussões e teorias sobre a narrativa e as suas personagens. A obra de Martin suscita debates e polémicas em diversas áreas da sociedade, onde a sua presença é visível, desde a publicidade, à política e ao humor, provando ser uma obra socialmente agregadora, ainda que advenha de um género que foi, durante muito tempo, considerado como tendo pouca credibilidade. De facto, o género da Fantasia tem sido, tradicionalmente, associado a um baixo valor literário, mais virado para o sucesso comercial. Tem sido, além disso, considerado demasiado escapista e pouco sério. No entanto, Ice and Fire e Game of Thrones receberam aclamação crítica, provando que a Fantasia pode debruçar-se sobre temáticas relevantes para a sociedade e a cultura dos dias de hoje, oferecendo um meio de reflexão sobre o mundo do leitor, ou espectador, num espaço disruptivo e com características diferentes desse mesmo mundo, que permitem um certo distanciamento.Assim, torna-se importante o estudo de Ice and Fire, enquanto obra em que se discorre sobre muitos dos problemas que afectam a sociedade contemporânea. O género em que se enquadra, embora considerado marginal e ainda pouco analisado no âmbito académico nacional, não deixa de ser um dos mais consumidos nas suas várias formas (literatura, televisão, cinema, videojogos), mostrando que se torna relevante estudar este tipo de temáticas. Neste sentido, a obra é particularmente significativa, uma vez que nela está presente o uso de heranças culturais do passado, nomeadamente a Idade Média europeia, que são continuamente revisitadas, moldadas e transformadas. Esta constante revisitação do passado espelha uma sociedade que enfrenta uma crise de valores – com a UE a enfrentar desafios geopolíticos que ameaçam a sua desagregação – e que encontra, na Fantasia, uma forma de lidar com essa crise e de contribuir, internamente, para a resolução dos problemas do mundo no contexto actual. Assim, a presente tese torna-se inovadora, uma vez que são raras ou inexistentes as reflexões sobre o porquê desta apropriação e adopção do período medieval na contemporaneidade, e de como Fantasia e realidade se espelham mutuamente e moldam o nosso entendimento do passado, do presente e colocam questões pertinentes para o futuro. Desta forma, os principais objectivos desta tese são: contribuir para a compreensão da presença da cultura medieval na literatura de Fantasia, em especial na forma como ela é utilizada na construção do mundo de Ice and Fire de Martin, bem como analisar de que forma e com que propósitos o autor adopta e subverte estruturas narrativas tradicionais da Fantasia e da representação de elementos medievais.As primeiras formas de ficção escrita que existem contêm elementos que podem ser entendidos como fantásticos, ainda que não se possa considerar que sejam obras de Fantasia.
The Common Core State Standards prompted particularly vigorous debate and handwringing around the role (and future) of literature in the US secondary English classroom. The rise of the knowledge ...economy in secondary English, along with an increasing obsession with scientific measurement, resulted in the marginalization of literature, which has and continues to be instrumentalized to the myriad other aims of English teaching: to improve morality, cultivate a productive workforce and intelligent citizenry, perpetuate an elite class, and counteract social inequality. Put differently, literariness has little do with these justifications and so with literature’s place in the secondary English curriculum, though literature—for now—does. In this study I turn away from the familiar literature and towards the strange literariness in order to think about what the latter may offer secondary English teaching and scholarship. I understand literariness as a question of texts’ value, how they come to matter (and not) in persons’ lives. Each of the chapters in this study takes up literariness in order to think and write about English teaching in ways that embrace the aesthetic and relational potential of the work. The dissertation opens with an introduction to literariness, situating the project within broader conversations of English teaching and scholarship. The second chapter examines how literariness emerges through a close reading of a single text and my own experience with it as a teacher, student, reader and writer. I analyze the implications of this approach to a more ethical close reading – how it animates literariness in the context of a life – and advance literary resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers. The next chapter moves beyond my experience to examine literariness in the lives of four practicing secondary English teachers. The text is comprised of a series of vignettes which literarily weave together interview data, participant-authored essays, and language drawn from fiction and poetry. I read across the four stories to considering literary possibilities that emerge for teaching life; the complicated intersections of teachers’ experiences as students, readers and writers; the political obligations of English teachers in the classroom, and the role literary writing can play in “singing” the lives of teachers and their students. The fourth chapter turns towards the writing of scholarship, considering the (un)literariness of English teaching research and in the process addressing two crucial questions: Literary for whom? By whom? As the story of the chapter’s writing unfolds, I reveal the problematics of a literary framing: how the frame may reflect less the literary value of scholars’ writing than my own particular positioning. The chapter concludes pointing to the limitations of a too-formalist literariness for achieving the varied goals of education researchers. The dissertation’s final chapter plays with the notion that the failures of English teaching and research create conditions by which we might envision and enact more beautiful, just, human and humane English teaching going forward. Reading across chapters and implicating them within major conversations in the field, I offer insights into how literariness helps educators and researchers position themselves usefully for the future unknown.
This paper argues that Pynchon may allude to Marcel Proust through the character Marcel in Part 4 of Gravity's Rainbow and, if so, what that could mean. I trace the textual clues that relate to ...Proust and analyze what Pynchon may be saying about a fellow great experimental writer.
Las historias tradicionales de la literatura privilegian la información, las taxonomías, el autobiografismo, el nacionalismo, no así el diálogo entre los textos y lo que esto supone: la ...interpretación de los mundos posibles que se representan en la escritura poético-literaria. Hay una pretensión de cientificidad en las historias de la literatura, pero paradójicamente hay también ligereza y superficialidad en los juicios. Estas historias constituyen la base para la elaboración de los libros de texto, cuyos contenidos, en lugar de animar hacia la interpretación de los textos literarios, convergen en confusiones y en desidia hacia la literatura.
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