EDITOR'S NOTE Simon, Daniel
World literature today,
07/2023, Letnik:
97, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the midst of such a contested landscape and against the grain of isolationism, Dr. House, chair of the University of Oklahoma's Department of Modern Languages, thought that launching a literary ...periodical on the Southern Plains might "begin fostering contributions to the scholarly and cultural activities of the nation," as he wrote in a letter to the university's president, William Bennett Bizzell (October 21, 1926). ...in January 1927, just twenty years after statehood and with a startup budget of $150, House launched his venture, dubbed Books Abroad, as a modest thirty-twopage pamphlet. ...Books Abroad (1927-76) and its successor, World Literature Today (1977-present), have epitomized House's motto of Lux a Peregre (Light from Abroad) as a metaphorical lighthouse or "inland harbor" equidistant from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (Ivar Ivask, BA, Winter 1976).
Much has been written on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but critics have largely ignored how 1920s consumer culture contributes to the novel's philosophical themes. Viewing the novel through ...Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", this article argues that 1920s consumer society-and the popularisation of mechanically reproduced consumer goods-deconstructs the metaphysical underpinnings of upperclass privilege modelled by Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby strives to imitate an aristocratic identity but is eventually found out by Tom, who exposes Gatsby's social performance as an inauthentic forgery. But, as Benjamin argues, mechanical reproduction results in a diminished aura, the originary ontology that authorises a metaphysics of substance and, with it, a social order governed by the logic of authenticity. So, while the American aristocracy is successful in its condemnation of Gatsby's inauthentic social performance, the novel deconstructs a metaphysics of substance and thereby critiques the ontological authority of the ruling class. Gatsby may have been born into the working class but his upper-class simulation, like all simulations, is no more or less authentic than those of the American aristocracy.
Este trabalho visa realizar uma leitura da adaptação cinematografica de O grande Gatsby, romance de F. Scott Fitzgerald, realizada pelo diretor Baz Luhrmann em 2013 e estrelada por Leonardo DiCaprio. ...A analise esta ancorada em teorias de adaptação, intertextualidade e literatura comparada. O objetivo é explorar como a obra cinematografica traduz e interpreta o romance de Fitzgerald, que é um marco da literatura estadunidense e um retrato icônico da década de 1920, conhecida por seu materialismo desenfreado, glamour e moralidade questionavel. O romance, lançado em 1925, não foi imediatamente aclamado como uma obra-prima, apesar de seu foco nos ‘anos loucos’ pos-Primeira Guerra Mundial, e sua critica ao excesso materialista da época é algo que Luhrmann busca capturar visual e tematicamente em sua adaptação. O filme, com seu uso extravagante de luzes, cores e sons, reflete o estilo de vida opulento e a decadência moral da era, ao mesmo tempo em que traça paralelos com a sociedade contemporânea. A pesquisa analisa a fidelidade e as liberdades tomadas por Luhrmann em relação ao texto original, focando em como elementos, como a narrativa de Nick Carraway e a representação simbolica do sonho americano, são adaptados para o cinema. Também são examinadas as escolhas estilisticas de Luhrmann, incluindo o uso de 3D, e como estas dialogam com a interpretação do romance. Os resultados indicam que a adaptação de Luhrmann oferece uma perspectiva única sobre o romance, destacando suas tematicas centrais, enquanto introduz novas camadas de interpretação e ressalta a complexidade da adaptação cinematografica como um processo criativo que, embora baseado em uma obra literaria preexistente, resulta em uma produção autônoma, com suas proprias qualidades e significados. A analise sublinha a importância de entender adaptações cinematograficas não como meras traduções, mas como reinterpretações significativas que contribuem para o dialogo entre literatura e cinema.
“Fitzgerald’s work has always deeply moved me,” writes John T. Irwin. “And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions ...when I first read each of his novels; remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to something going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be so many similarities in our backgrounds, his work always possessed for me a special, personal authority; it became a form of wisdom, a way of knowing the world, its types, its classes, its individuals.”
In his personal tribute to Fitzgerald's novels and short stories, Irwin offers an intricate vision of one of the most important writers in the American canon. The third in Irwin's trilogy of works on American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction resonates back through all of his previous writings, both scholarly and poetic, returning to Fitzgerald's ongoing theme of the twentieth-century American protagonist's conflict between his work and his personal life. This conflict is played out against the typically American imaginative activity of self-creation, an activity that involves a degree of theatrical ability on the protagonist's part as he must first enact the role imagined for himself, which is to say, the self he means to invent.
Irwin claims that Fitzgerald, because he was on the side of good breeding and lost causes, should be considered a Southern writer. It also includes a reading of The Great Gatsby that centers on the notion of desire, one that suggests, paradoxically, that the true object of desire is its lack of fulfillment. The work is suffused with elements of both Fitzgerald's and Irwin's biographies, and Irwin's immense erudition is on display throughout. Irwin seamlessly ties together details from Fitzgerald's life with elements from his entire body of work and considers central themes connected to wealth, class, work, love, jazz, acceptance, family, disillusionment, and life as theatrical performance.
Kundu examines author F. Scott Fitzgerald's development as a novelist and his possible literary indebtedness to Willa Cather based on their correspondence. Critics have focused on Fitzgerald's ...emerging consciousness of form and his artistic need for selectivity and shaping his novels. Commentators have also noted the recurring themes and narrative styles shared by Cather and Fitzgerald, as well as the echoes in tone and phrasing from Cather's works found in "The Great Gatsby." Fitzgerald himself acknowledged his admiration for and indebtedness to Cather's art during the composition of "Gatsby" and in the months following its publication. His correspondence with Cather further illuminates their relationship and broadens our understanding of the Cather-Fitzgerald connection. He also considers the professional and psychological implications of Fitzgerald's views on Cather and suggests a re-consideration of their connection through the lens of Influence Studies proposed by Harold Bloom.
Despite the extensive literature investigating stylometry analysis in authorship attribution research, translator stylometry is an understudied research area. The identification of translator ...stylometry contributes to many fields including education, intellectual property rights and forensic linguistics. In a two stage process, this paper first evaluates the use of existing lexical measures for the translator stylometry problem. Similar to previous research we found that using vocabulary richness in its traditional form as it has been used in the literature could not identify translator stylometry. This encouraged us to design an approach with the aim of identifying the distinctive patterns of a translator by employing network-motifs. Networks motifs are small sub-graphs which aim at capturing the local structure of a complex network. The proposed approach achieved an average accuracy of 83% in three-way classification. These results demonstrate that classic tools based on lexical features can be used for identifying translator stylometry if they get augmented with appropriate non-parametric scaling. Moreover, the use of complex network analysis and network motifs mining provided made it possible to design features that can solve translator stylometry analysis problems.
This paper explores how ideas about gender are captured in literary works, and how such ideas are reinforced, revised or rejected in (re)translation. It does so by examining the two Dutch ...translations of The Great Gatsby, focusing on the characterization of Daisy Buchanan. The analysis draws attention to the influence that translators may - either consciously or unwittingly - have on gender stereotyping. By cataloguing the differences in the portrayal of Daisy Buchanan between the first translation and the retranslation, this paper sheds light on the ideological implications of translation choices and the way they affect how readers perceive characters and their gender roles. The analysis shows that both translations, but the older translation in particular, paint a more negative picture of Daisy than the original does: both make Daisy more manipulative and emphasize her perceived seductiveness. The comparison shows that translation decisions may have serious impact on the way in which female characters are portrayed, and how preconceived ideas about gender may be reinforced as a result of a (mis)reading of the original.
This article is intended to suggest an approach to the global history of the First World War that can provide a method of managing the potentially unwieldy concept of global conflict by understanding ...it through the war's impact on localities. By concentrating on four relatively small but significant cities; Oxford in England, Halifax in Nova Scotia, Jerusalem in Palestine and Verdun in eastern France, which experienced the war in very different ways, it looks at both the movement of people and things and the symbolic interconnectivities that made the war a ‘world war’. This local focus helps challenge both the primacy of self-contained national history and the focus on the violent interaction of the opposing sides which are the more normal ways of narrating the war. It does not deny the usefulness of these traditional structures of narration and explanation but suggests that there are different and complementary ways the war can be viewed, which create different emphasis and chronologies.
PurposeThis paper addresses decision-making for commercial real estate (CRE) firms and professionals within the context of rapid technological innovations capable of business model disruption. It ...considers the paradoxical notion of the need for CRE firms to become ambidextrous by simultaneously exploiting their existing business model and exploring possible opportunities and threats. The paper develops a practical approach, the paradox map, for dealing with this paradoxical problem.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative research draws on work from organizational management, leadership, social sciences and technology. This research frames the definition and development of an ambidextrous mindset and its components. Paradox management is explored as a possible source of useful tools.FindingsThe ambidextrous mindset is a paradox in that exploit and explore are ongoing interrelated opposing forces. Further, the mindset is the product of a number of sub-paradoxes that act as levers for its development and adjustment. The paradox map is developed to facilitate dealing with numerous paradoxes.Practical implicationsThe paradox map is a useful tool for commercial real-estate firms to understand and develop an ambidextrous mindset.Originality/valueCommercial real estate is experiencing a wave of substantive technological disruption in the proptech marketplace and beyond. This paper attempts to clarify the paradox of innovation and its underlying sub-paradoxes to help professionals navigate the interrelated landscape of exploiting past products and exploring innovations.
A study of the philosophical, intellectual, and political influences on the artistic creations of Fitzgerald and key early American modernist writers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Scene ...continues Ronald Berman’s lifelong study of the philosophical, intellectual, and political influences on the artistic creations of key early American modernist writers. Each chapter in this volume elaborates on a crucial aspect of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depiction of American society, specifically through the lens of the social sciences that most influenced his writing and thinking.
Berman addresses, among other subjects, Fitzgerald’s use of philosophy, cultural analyses, and sociology—all enriched by the insights of his own experience living an American life. He was especially interested in how life had changed from 1910 to 1920. Many Americans were unable to navigate between the 1920s and their own memories of a very different world before the Great War; especially Daisy Buchanan who evolves from girlhood (as typified in sentimental novels of the time) to wifehood (as actually experienced in the new decade). There is a profound similarity between what happens to Fitzgerald’s characters and what happened to the nation.
Berman revisits classics like The Great Gatsby but also looks carefully at Fitzgerald’s shorter fictions, analyzing a stimulating spectrum of scholars from more contemporary critics like Thomas Piketty to George Santayana, John Maynard Keynes, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann. This fascinating addition to F. Scott Fitzgerald scholarship, although broad in its content, is accessible to a wide audience. Scholars and students of Fitzgerald and twentieth-century American literature, as well as dedicated Fitzgerald readers, will enjoy Berman’s take on a long-debated and celebrated author.
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