Pub Date : 2023-06-30DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2023.2221904
Theodore Galanis
ABSTRACT Deep beneath the surface of the continent, memories of the ancient Eromanga Sea are retained in subterranean aquifers and the veins of opal that flash above them in lithic fissures. The excavation of these hidden resources has been critical to the advancement of establishing the settler-colony, Australia, and in perpetuating the ongoing violence of Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, I examine the entangled subterranean figures of aquifers and opals as they surface in the Australian literary archive. I read early twentieth century representations of groundwater usage and opal mining communities in works by Banjo Paterson and Katharine Suzannah Prichard against contemporary evocations of these themes in novels by Janette Turner Hospital (Oyster) and Tara June Winch (Swallow the Air). In doing so, I explore the challenges of representing, reading and interpreting deep watery spaces.*
{"title":"Beneath the Sea, Inland: Reading Aquifers and Opals in Australian Literature","authors":"Theodore Galanis","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2023.2221904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2023.2221904","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Deep beneath the surface of the continent, memories of the ancient Eromanga Sea are retained in subterranean aquifers and the veins of opal that flash above them in lithic fissures. The excavation of these hidden resources has been critical to the advancement of establishing the settler-colony, Australia, and in perpetuating the ongoing violence of Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, I examine the entangled subterranean figures of aquifers and opals as they surface in the Australian literary archive. I read early twentieth century representations of groundwater usage and opal mining communities in works by Banjo Paterson and Katharine Suzannah Prichard against contemporary evocations of these themes in novels by Janette Turner Hospital (Oyster) and Tara June Winch (Swallow the Air). In doing so, I explore the challenges of representing, reading and interpreting deep watery spaces.*","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41286247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-27DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2023.2221964
J. Justin, Nirmala Menon
ABSTRACT The study involves close readings of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock 1 and its visual adaptations from a postcolonial feminist and geocritical theoretical framework to analyse how the space operate as a hegemonic tool in reproducing dominance based on gender, race, caste, class, and ethnicity. The comparative study will help to understand the ways in which adaptations of a source narrative to different media modify the landscape and space thereby shifting the gender equations as well. Lindsay’s novel has adaptations (all eponymous) produced during different time periods. The narratives, however, focus on the ‘white vanishing’ trope 2 and fail to acknowledge the Aboriginal significance and sacredness of the space (Ngannelong). By focusing on such fictional disappearances, the trauma of real displacement of the First People got overlooked. This has even resulted in organised campaigns like ‘Miranda Must Go’, 3 against publicising Ngannelong based on the fictional narratives and to restore the Aboriginal sanctity and relevance of the space. Through geocritical approach, the study aims to highlight this manipulation of history with special emphasis on gender and social location by paying attention to the ways in which space and place influence the story, characters and incidents.
{"title":"Decolonising Ngannelong: A Geocritical Approach to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Its Visual Adaptations","authors":"J. Justin, Nirmala Menon","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2023.2221964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2023.2221964","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The study involves close readings of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock 1 and its visual adaptations from a postcolonial feminist and geocritical theoretical framework to analyse how the space operate as a hegemonic tool in reproducing dominance based on gender, race, caste, class, and ethnicity. The comparative study will help to understand the ways in which adaptations of a source narrative to different media modify the landscape and space thereby shifting the gender equations as well. Lindsay’s novel has adaptations (all eponymous) produced during different time periods. The narratives, however, focus on the ‘white vanishing’ trope 2 and fail to acknowledge the Aboriginal significance and sacredness of the space (Ngannelong). By focusing on such fictional disappearances, the trauma of real displacement of the First People got overlooked. This has even resulted in organised campaigns like ‘Miranda Must Go’, 3 against publicising Ngannelong based on the fictional narratives and to restore the Aboriginal sanctity and relevance of the space. Through geocritical approach, the study aims to highlight this manipulation of history with special emphasis on gender and social location by paying attention to the ways in which space and place influence the story, characters and incidents.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49112186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2023.2225005
N. Jayendran
ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the value of silence, located within liminal spaces in Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019). Structured as an informal graphic essay, Doab Dil proffers ironic commentaries on nature, culture, cities, the countryside, history, fiction, work, sleep, insomnia, popular culture, and the quest for meaning in life. In the process, Doab Dil combines text and drawing to construct a postmodernist intertextual mural of juxtaposed quotations, descriptions, and metaphysical reflection on the values of contemporary culture. At the points of these juxtapositions, liminal spaces are created that are characterised by a dense silence. The centrality of the liminal in the creative imagination of Doab Dil is evident in the title that signposts the fertile tract of land found at the confluence of two rivers. Recollecting Homi Bhabha on the liminal as a horizon of possibilities, this paper explores the ways in which the poetic representation of liminality constructs political spaces of critique, which draw on the silence between confluent thoughts on diverse themes for critical reflection. Through literary criticism, the paper investigates the poetics and politics of possibilities in Doab Dil positioned within liminal spaces, and the role of silence as a representational strategy for a metaphysical commentary on reality.
{"title":"Liminality, Representation, Silence: The Poetics and Politics of Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019)","authors":"N. Jayendran","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2023.2225005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2023.2225005","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the value of silence, located within liminal spaces in Sarnath Banerjee’s Doab Dil (2019). Structured as an informal graphic essay, Doab Dil proffers ironic commentaries on nature, culture, cities, the countryside, history, fiction, work, sleep, insomnia, popular culture, and the quest for meaning in life. In the process, Doab Dil combines text and drawing to construct a postmodernist intertextual mural of juxtaposed quotations, descriptions, and metaphysical reflection on the values of contemporary culture. At the points of these juxtapositions, liminal spaces are created that are characterised by a dense silence. The centrality of the liminal in the creative imagination of Doab Dil is evident in the title that signposts the fertile tract of land found at the confluence of two rivers. Recollecting Homi Bhabha on the liminal as a horizon of possibilities, this paper explores the ways in which the poetic representation of liminality constructs political spaces of critique, which draw on the silence between confluent thoughts on diverse themes for critical reflection. Through literary criticism, the paper investigates the poetics and politics of possibilities in Doab Dil positioned within liminal spaces, and the role of silence as a representational strategy for a metaphysical commentary on reality.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46259372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2159712
Paddy Gordon
ABSTRACT Using a method informed by hauntology, this article reads the discourse produced by two activist-influencers – Jordan Peterson and Clementine Ford – who currently define the liberal tradition’s reactionary and progressive boundaries. Locating consistent elisions of a rich concept of labour in the work of these representatives of contemporary liberalism, this article contends that a rich and multifaceted concept of human labour has historically been absent in liberal discourses. Indeed, it claims that it is by eliding labour’s conceptual plurality and political possibility that liberal discourses proceed and proliferate. Contemporary discursive ecologies contain multiple sites of reception, and the textual logic of social media often structures more traditional liberal texts. Despite this, long-standing structural elisions continue to constrain what liberal discourses can express. These elisions explain the inability of liberal discourses to adequately account for our current social conditions. Nor can these discourses imagine a future in which we achieve collective emancipation from the intersecting economic, environmental and epidemiological crises that haunt the present. This article argues that human labour – including and even especially the labour of care – is the liberal tradition’s foundational elision.
{"title":"The Haunting of Flat Texts: Liberal Discourse and the Elision of Labour","authors":"Paddy Gordon","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2159712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2159712","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using a method informed by hauntology, this article reads the discourse produced by two activist-influencers – Jordan Peterson and Clementine Ford – who currently define the liberal tradition’s reactionary and progressive boundaries. Locating consistent elisions of a rich concept of labour in the work of these representatives of contemporary liberalism, this article contends that a rich and multifaceted concept of human labour has historically been absent in liberal discourses. Indeed, it claims that it is by eliding labour’s conceptual plurality and political possibility that liberal discourses proceed and proliferate. Contemporary discursive ecologies contain multiple sites of reception, and the textual logic of social media often structures more traditional liberal texts. Despite this, long-standing structural elisions continue to constrain what liberal discourses can express. These elisions explain the inability of liberal discourses to adequately account for our current social conditions. Nor can these discourses imagine a future in which we achieve collective emancipation from the intersecting economic, environmental and epidemiological crises that haunt the present. This article argues that human labour – including and even especially the labour of care – is the liberal tradition’s foundational elision.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42654749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2157646
P. Mitchell
ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss two recent films, Frankenstein (Kevin Connor 2004) and Victor Frankenstein (Paul McGuigan 2015), in terms of how they represent disability for mainstream television and cinema spectators. Using a critical framework that blends disability and adaptation studies, I analyse both films from a ‘crip’ perspective – that is, by interpreting how they propagate or resist the able-bodied assumptions upon which many Frankenstein narratives are based. As screen readaptations, I explore how Connor’s Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein reflexively engage with this historical legacy, whilst providing textually ‘deformed’ versions of the story for contemporary audiences. More specifically, my analysis illustrates how the visual depiction of the Creature in Connor’s Frankenstein serves to maintain a non-disabled gaze. Although the film subverts the typical conflation of a character’s atypical body with a malevolent disposition, it does not, in fact, disrupt the longstanding ableist paradigm that views disability as monstrous. In contrast, Victor Frankenstein, although witness to the visual erasure of Igor’s physical deformity from the cinema screen, nevertheless provides a critical exploration of the disabled individual’s social exclusion and oppression by foregrounding Igor’s subjective voice.
{"title":"Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny:’ Readaptation and (Textual) Deformity in Two Recent Frankenstein Films","authors":"P. Mitchell","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2157646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2157646","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss two recent films, Frankenstein (Kevin Connor 2004) and Victor Frankenstein (Paul McGuigan 2015), in terms of how they represent disability for mainstream television and cinema spectators. Using a critical framework that blends disability and adaptation studies, I analyse both films from a ‘crip’ perspective – that is, by interpreting how they propagate or resist the able-bodied assumptions upon which many Frankenstein narratives are based. As screen readaptations, I explore how Connor’s Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein reflexively engage with this historical legacy, whilst providing textually ‘deformed’ versions of the story for contemporary audiences. More specifically, my analysis illustrates how the visual depiction of the Creature in Connor’s Frankenstein serves to maintain a non-disabled gaze. Although the film subverts the typical conflation of a character’s atypical body with a malevolent disposition, it does not, in fact, disrupt the longstanding ableist paradigm that views disability as monstrous. In contrast, Victor Frankenstein, although witness to the visual erasure of Igor’s physical deformity from the cinema screen, nevertheless provides a critical exploration of the disabled individual’s social exclusion and oppression by foregrounding Igor’s subjective voice.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41304607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2161042
C. Thakur
ABSTRACT In three of the nine novels that David Malouf has produced to date, problems of literature are figured in important ways at the level of narrative. Practices of literary culture and scenes of reading, writing and representation feature particularly prominently in Child's Play (1982), Johnno (1975), and The Great World (1990). This article examines the configurations of the literary in these three novels. It argues that even as the literary may be evoked, referred to, and analysed in the three narratives thematically, it still retains its event-like character, its secret way of exceeding the various contexts of its production, reception, and circulation. The novels can then be read as explorations of the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the way the literary does not make itself completely available to understanding and analysis.
{"title":"David Malouf and the Secret of Literature","authors":"C. Thakur","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2161042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2161042","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In three of the nine novels that David Malouf has produced to date, problems of literature are figured in important ways at the level of narrative. Practices of literary culture and scenes of reading, writing and representation feature particularly prominently in Child's Play (1982), Johnno (1975), and The Great World (1990). This article examines the configurations of the literary in these three novels. It argues that even as the literary may be evoked, referred to, and analysed in the three narratives thematically, it still retains its event-like character, its secret way of exceeding the various contexts of its production, reception, and circulation. The novels can then be read as explorations of the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the way the literary does not make itself completely available to understanding and analysis.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45579768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2160250
Natalie Kon-yu, Emily Booth
ABSTRACT The Australian Publishing Industry has long been critiqued for its lack of diverse voices. In Australia movements such as Voices From the Intersection and The Stella Diversity Survey have been aimed at bringing an awareness of this lack to a larger audience, while festivals such as Blak and Bright, and awards such as The Next Chapter, have sought to highlight the works of authors who identify as First Nations or as Writers of Colour. The study discussed in this paper is the first large-scale study that sought to identify how culturally diverse the author cohort was in the study year of 2018. The First Nations and People of Colour Writers Count (henceforth FNPOC Writers Count) sought to identify the publication rate of books in 2018 that were by Australian authors who publicly identified as First Nations people or People of Colour. The purpose of the project was to develop the first large-scale numerical dataset that illustrated the inequity in Australia’s publishing industry that has been anecdotally observed for many years.
{"title":"Who is Telling ‘Australian’ Stories? The Results from the First Nations and People of Colour Writers Count","authors":"Natalie Kon-yu, Emily Booth","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2160250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2160250","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Australian Publishing Industry has long been critiqued for its lack of diverse voices. In Australia movements such as Voices From the Intersection and The Stella Diversity Survey have been aimed at bringing an awareness of this lack to a larger audience, while festivals such as Blak and Bright, and awards such as The Next Chapter, have sought to highlight the works of authors who identify as First Nations or as Writers of Colour. The study discussed in this paper is the first large-scale study that sought to identify how culturally diverse the author cohort was in the study year of 2018. The First Nations and People of Colour Writers Count (henceforth FNPOC Writers Count) sought to identify the publication rate of books in 2018 that were by Australian authors who publicly identified as First Nations people or People of Colour. The purpose of the project was to develop the first large-scale numerical dataset that illustrated the inequity in Australia’s publishing industry that has been anecdotally observed for many years.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47163993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2157647
Xiaohu Jiang
ABSTRACT Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) dedicated himself to reviving the reputation of ancient Chinese literature. To this end, one of his methods was to draw upon an astonishingly large number of Western sources and illuminate the commonality between Chinese and Western literature. However, no efficient analysis has been undertaken to explore the intertextual link between Qian Zhongshu and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929). Through a comparative reading of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’ and Der Schwierige, and Qian’s Fortress Besieged, this essay argues that Qian proposes foreign language and literature as a solution to the crisis of language and its corresponding problems of misunderstanding and identity that Hofmannsthal raises in his works. Qian and Hofmannsthal also resemble each other in terms of borrowing foreign cultures, which provide them with new perspectives to diagnose and reevaluate their native literature and society.
{"title":"Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Language Crisis and Qian Zhongshu’s Solution","authors":"Xiaohu Jiang","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2157647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2157647","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) dedicated himself to reviving the reputation of ancient Chinese literature. To this end, one of his methods was to draw upon an astonishingly large number of Western sources and illuminate the commonality between Chinese and Western literature. However, no efficient analysis has been undertaken to explore the intertextual link between Qian Zhongshu and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929). Through a comparative reading of Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’ and Der Schwierige, and Qian’s Fortress Besieged, this essay argues that Qian proposes foreign language and literature as a solution to the crisis of language and its corresponding problems of misunderstanding and identity that Hofmannsthal raises in his works. Qian and Hofmannsthal also resemble each other in terms of borrowing foreign cultures, which provide them with new perspectives to diagnose and reevaluate their native literature and society.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46752227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2157648
K. Igbaria, S. A. Jaber
ABSTRACT The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, brought occupation to the Palestinian people and caused oppression and suffering. This study examines the novel Ḥikāyat Ṣābir [Ṣābir’s Story] by Maḥmūd Isā (born in 1967) as a sample of contemporary Palestinian prison literature. The novel’s social and political resonances pushed Al-Jazeera television to turn it into a documentary film. Because the novel has received no prior scholarly attention, this article relies on the techniques and narrative structure of the novel. This paper examines the documentary values of the novel, its literary contributions, and its narrative manner, styles, and techniques. We use literary narrative analysis methodology, which draws upon Mieke Bal’s approach to narratology, as the theoretical basis for this. This article confirms that Ḥikāyat Ṣābir has a unique narrative-structural-fictional overlap; the novel includes a short story within the novel that is narrated by the protagonist, and the narrator is all-knowing, dominant, and omniscient. Furthermore, the novel features multiple narrative techniques and styles that occupy a great deal of space in the novel, rendering it a deeply polyphonic text.
{"title":"Contemporary Palestinian Prison Literature: Ḥikāyat Ṣābir (Ṣābir's Story) by Maḥmūd Isā as a Case Study","authors":"K. Igbaria, S. A. Jaber","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2157648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2157648","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the first half of the nineteenth century, brought occupation to the Palestinian people and caused oppression and suffering. This study examines the novel Ḥikāyat Ṣābir [Ṣābir’s Story] by Maḥmūd Isā (born in 1967) as a sample of contemporary Palestinian prison literature. The novel’s social and political resonances pushed Al-Jazeera television to turn it into a documentary film. Because the novel has received no prior scholarly attention, this article relies on the techniques and narrative structure of the novel. This paper examines the documentary values of the novel, its literary contributions, and its narrative manner, styles, and techniques. We use literary narrative analysis methodology, which draws upon Mieke Bal’s approach to narratology, as the theoretical basis for this. This article confirms that Ḥikāyat Ṣābir has a unique narrative-structural-fictional overlap; the novel includes a short story within the novel that is narrated by the protagonist, and the narrator is all-knowing, dominant, and omniscient. Furthermore, the novel features multiple narrative techniques and styles that occupy a great deal of space in the novel, rendering it a deeply polyphonic text.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42549293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2022.2071812
Qiping Liu, Quan Zhou
ABSTRACT In The Valley of Amazement, Amy Tan readdresses the mother-daughter relation through depicting a story about courtesans at the turn of twentieth century. In the novel, Tan designs different styles of garments for her characters and explores the significance of clothes. More than quotidian objects, the garments in the novel can exhibit agency on both social and individual levels. Using new materialism’s concept of matter as vibrant and agentic, I argue that clothing as one element of the narrative diffuses its materiality through its colour, style and texture and acts in assemblages. Like the new materialist Jane Bennett, who considers things in terms of the sociopolitical, I also question how clothing functions in a social context, specifically in exploring how it encodes social conventions and social changes at the turn of twentieth century in Old China and how it reveals cultural differences and acculturalisation in Tan’s novels. Furthermore, I examine how it intra-acts with the heroine, Violet so as to reveal the bi-culturality and indeterminacy of Chinese Americans.
{"title":"The Agentic Force of Clothing in Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement","authors":"Qiping Liu, Quan Zhou","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2022.2071812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2022.2071812","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In The Valley of Amazement, Amy Tan readdresses the mother-daughter relation through depicting a story about courtesans at the turn of twentieth century. In the novel, Tan designs different styles of garments for her characters and explores the significance of clothes. More than quotidian objects, the garments in the novel can exhibit agency on both social and individual levels. Using new materialism’s concept of matter as vibrant and agentic, I argue that clothing as one element of the narrative diffuses its materiality through its colour, style and texture and acts in assemblages. Like the new materialist Jane Bennett, who considers things in terms of the sociopolitical, I also question how clothing functions in a social context, specifically in exploring how it encodes social conventions and social changes at the turn of twentieth century in Old China and how it reveals cultural differences and acculturalisation in Tan’s novels. Furthermore, I examine how it intra-acts with the heroine, Violet so as to reveal the bi-culturality and indeterminacy of Chinese Americans.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45959063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：