These seven conversations between writer Wang Anyi (laureate of the fifth Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Dai Jinhua (professor at Peking University), Wang Ban (professor at Stanford ...University), and Ping Zhu (associate professor at the University of Oklahoma) are selected and transcribed from the interviews conducted during the Newman week (March 2-3, 2017) at the University of Oklahoma. They offer in-depth glimpses of Wang Anyi's literary works, contemporary Chinese literature and culture, as well as their position in the world.
Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved-and is still ...evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the "environment of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, he looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, Baker takes joy in reading individual poems-from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.
From Ad Hoc to Universal Ben-Nun, Gilad
Refugee survey quarterly,
06/2015, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article examines the scope of international instruments providing refugee protection, from the League of Nations, through the 1951 Refugee Convention, up to the 1954 Convention Relating to ...Stateless Persons. While the nature of the early instruments was ad hoc and tailored for specific refugee groups in geographically limited areas, the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees marked a shift towards a global refugee regime, applicable the world over. The fundamental caveat in the Refugee Convention being the exclusion of Stateless Persons from its scope, was rejected by France in its 1952 creation of the Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides as she opted to include stateless persons under her purview. Using hitherto unpublished sources from Belgian, British, Israeli, and French archives, the author argues that the Eurocentric vision of the delegates at the League of Nations corresponded to the ad hoc nature of the refugee instruments they designed. The United Nations’notion of Universalism corresponded to the lifting of the geographical and ethnic boundaries of refugee protections. France, wishing to shift the debate to the Council of Europe, opted for her own Universalist vision, voluntarily extending the scope of refugee protections so as to include stateless persons.
Besides being one of Ireland's best-known and eminent writers, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is also a professional and recognised folklorist and researcher, whose work covers a diversity of topics and subjects, ...mostly in the area of the tradition of oral storytelling and urban folklore. Besides being one of Ireland's best-known and eminent writers, Ní Dhuibhne is also a professional and recognised folklorist and researcher, whose work covers a diversity of topics and subjects, from the analysis of folklore texts and medieval literary sources, to the presence of folklore in Anglo-Irish literature, to Synge's use of popular material, to the collection and study of urban folklore (A. O'Connor 267-75). The midwife later discovers the baby girl she has helped to be born has been abandoned and has died. ...Ní Dhuibhne links "an old traditional legend to a contemporary event", in this case newspaper reports of a case of infanticide (St. Peter 68). ...in the late 1970s she developed an interest in the folklore of urban areas, something that had "been largely neglected by the Irish Folklore Commission, and ... by the Department of Irish Folklore" whose main emphasis had been "almost totally rural oriented" (Mc Clafferty 60).
In his article "The Maze of Shanghai Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans" Biwu Shang analyzes the memory writing of the novel by combining current memory studies with narratology. The ...paper pursues three major goals. First, it delves into the maze of Shanghai memory embedded in this novel, which is typically formulated by two contrasting aspects: Christopher Banks's naïve and beautiful childhood memory of Shanghai, and his unhappy adulthood memory of it. Second, it explores how memory plays a dual function of deception and decoration. That is to say, Christopher deliberately uses his memory to create positive images of female characters and to build up negative images of male characters, which makes both of them look deceptively true. Third, it proceeds to discuss the central issue of "orphanhood" suggested by the title of novel, specifically considering how the notion "orphan" is reconfigured by both Christopher's memory and Ishiguro's conception of "unprotectedness."
There has been little research on the lasting impact of the violence of Second and Third Indochina Wars on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, ...Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences).
While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.
Neo-Victorian Hillard, Molly Clark
Victorian literature and culture,
2018, Letnik:
46, Številka:
3-4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
...recently, twenty-first century critical study has broadened the definition of neo-Victorian: now virtually any literary, filmic, or cultural text may signal our contemporary investment in ...Victorian modes, ideologies, and problems. 10 More specifically reflecting on Victorian literature, Kate Flint sees periodization not as static knowledge formation, but rather as “a malleable instrument at our disposal,” and argues that “the importance of the Victorian period lies in the extent to which it is still contiguous … with the formation of our own world and in the development … of a number of different modernities.” ...works that are still, rather than newly, Victorian, might embed specific Victorian literary texts directly into their frameworks (like Ian McEwan's Saturday).12 They might affiliate with Victorian modes, narrative styles, plots, and characters (like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go).13 They may be saturated more generally in Victorian literary and cultural history (like Zadie Smith's White Teeth).14 In all cases, novels like these take on explicitly Victorian questions of community, authority, self-possession, and the nature and purpose of artistic production. 20 And if we do define it in this way, we are apt to associate literary subjectivity with, at best, an embarrassing lack of critical distance, and, at worst, a dangerous political and social myopia. What if we were to dilate more precisely on “subjectivity,” taking it not merely in the sense of “perceptible only to the individual,” “absorbed in one's personal feelings,” etc. that we have tended to mean by this term, but also in the philosophical or metaphysical sense of “conscious being” and “relating to the thinking mind,” and in the geopolitical sense of being “under the influence of” or pledging “obedience or allegiance to” that it also means?
This article is a critical engagement with the theoretical entailments of post-modernism and the implications for a more sophisticated historical-critical method. Topics include the distinction ...between strong and weak versions of postmodernism, the conceptual and ethical problems of the strong version in biblical scholarship, and the relationship between the modern history of biblical studies and the Enlightenment project (in dialogue with recent postmodern scholarship). A rapprochement between a viable postmodernism and an enlightened modernism is desirable, despite entrenched ideologies and institutional constraints.
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