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.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-21DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1979736
C. Schwab
ABSTRACT Around the mid-nineteenth century, the investigative reportage consolidated as a journalistic genre that introduced early social debates into the commercial periodical. This article analyzes how John Hollingshead's series ‘London Horrors’ (1861) and comparable journalistic reports such as ‘Labour and the Poor’ (1849–1850) produced testimonials on the housing and working conditions of the underprivileged urbanites. It shows how social reporters like Hollingshead made an unknown social sphere understandable to a growing middle-class audience of newspapers by using the narrative strategies of reformist surveys and political tracts on the one hand, and the semi-fictional, audience-oriented sketch on the other. This kind of writing entailed combining particularising, at times sensationalist accounts of social situations with large-scale analyses, the presentation of diverse types of data (demographic numbers, inventories, eyewitness testimonies, biographic stories), and political commentary. Examining ‘London Horrors’ from the perspectives of social science history and literary/media studies, the article contends that investigative journalism on an expanding print market acted as an intermediary between literary entertainment, public engagement, and social research.
{"title":"Between Literary Entertainment, Public Engagement, and Social Research: Nineteenth-Century Investigative Reporting and the Case of ‘London Horrors’ (1861) by John Hollingshead","authors":"C. Schwab","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.1979736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1979736","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Around the mid-nineteenth century, the investigative reportage consolidated as a journalistic genre that introduced early social debates into the commercial periodical. This article analyzes how John Hollingshead's series ‘London Horrors’ (1861) and comparable journalistic reports such as ‘Labour and the Poor’ (1849–1850) produced testimonials on the housing and working conditions of the underprivileged urbanites. It shows how social reporters like Hollingshead made an unknown social sphere understandable to a growing middle-class audience of newspapers by using the narrative strategies of reformist surveys and political tracts on the one hand, and the semi-fictional, audience-oriented sketch on the other. This kind of writing entailed combining particularising, at times sensationalist accounts of social situations with large-scale analyses, the presentation of diverse types of data (demographic numbers, inventories, eyewitness testimonies, biographic stories), and political commentary. Examining ‘London Horrors’ from the perspectives of social science history and literary/media studies, the article contends that investigative journalism on an expanding print market acted as an intermediary between literary entertainment, public engagement, and social research.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"69 1","pages":"1 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41998230","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 : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.2001153
Sohini Bera, Rajni Singh
Subhash Vyam’s Water revolves around the life-sustaining natural resource, water, and its kinship with the Gond communities that live simple yet sustainable lives in close proximity to nature. Water adumbrates the social and environmental aftermaths of dam building and documents modern development’s impacts on the lives of Gond villagers, on the ecosystem they inhabit, and on their intimate relationship with nature and its vital resources such as water. This article attempts to demonstrate how Water employs traditional Gond artistic forms to portray two contrasting worldviews regarding the consumption of natural resources – the first being a developmentalist world view and the second an alternate indigenous perspective based on ideals of water democracy. This article also investigates how Water offers an imaginative dimension to maldevelopment’s aftermaths, both social and ecological, and thereby might potentially raise readers’ consciousness. Furthermore, it discusses how the narrative acts as a medium of protest by presenting a warning against nature’s wrath and a plea for embracing sustainable alternatives.
{"title":"Water and its Kinship with Communities in Subhash Vyam’s Water","authors":"Sohini Bera, Rajni Singh","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.2001153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.2001153","url":null,"abstract":"Subhash Vyam’s Water revolves around the life-sustaining natural resource, water, and its kinship with the Gond communities that live simple yet sustainable lives in close proximity to nature. Water adumbrates the social and environmental aftermaths of dam building and documents modern development’s impacts on the lives of Gond villagers, on the ecosystem they inhabit, and on their intimate relationship with nature and its vital resources such as water. This article attempts to demonstrate how Water employs traditional Gond artistic forms to portray two contrasting worldviews regarding the consumption of natural resources – the first being a developmentalist world view and the second an alternate indigenous perspective based on ideals of water democracy. This article also investigates how Water offers an imaginative dimension to maldevelopment’s aftermaths, both social and ecological, and thereby might potentially raise readers’ consciousness. Furthermore, it discusses how the narrative acts as a medium of protest by presenting a warning against nature’s wrath and a plea for embracing sustainable alternatives.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60021574","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1985705
Yi Yang, Kuan-Yu Ko
ABSTRACT This study aims to present a sociocultural analysis of the linguistic experience of South Asian women who immigrate to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men. In Taiwan, foreign wives and their husbands and children have gradually become a new multicultural, multi-ethnic social group. We argue that because of the power gap between the narrators (who write in Chinese) and the narrative subjects (who are unable to ‘write back' in Chinese), language has powerfully impacted the patterns of prejudice and the construction of subjects’ identities. Marriage immigrants are often subjected to the negative stereotypes created and exaggerated by language standardisation within a dominant ideology. Learning Chinese empowers them to gradually engage in social participation outside of their families in the public space. Written in Chinese, their nonfiction works represent a narrative turn in Taiwan. In this manner, a range of voices are actively resisting discriminatory acts. The foreign wives ask not only for basic rights such as legal residency and work permits but also for the right to enjoy equal and shared cultural interaction in Taiwan. This study shows that language acquisition and writing is an effective means of promoting equal exchange and dialogue between cultures within the broader transformations of globalisation.
{"title":"Silence, Empowerment, and Speaking Up: A Transcultural Analysis of Southeast Asian Female Marriage Immigrants’ Nonfiction Writing in Taiwan","authors":"Yi Yang, Kuan-Yu Ko","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.1985705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1985705","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study aims to present a sociocultural analysis of the linguistic experience of South Asian women who immigrate to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men. In Taiwan, foreign wives and their husbands and children have gradually become a new multicultural, multi-ethnic social group. We argue that because of the power gap between the narrators (who write in Chinese) and the narrative subjects (who are unable to ‘write back' in Chinese), language has powerfully impacted the patterns of prejudice and the construction of subjects’ identities. Marriage immigrants are often subjected to the negative stereotypes created and exaggerated by language standardisation within a dominant ideology. Learning Chinese empowers them to gradually engage in social participation outside of their families in the public space. Written in Chinese, their nonfiction works represent a narrative turn in Taiwan. In this manner, a range of voices are actively resisting discriminatory acts. The foreign wives ask not only for basic rights such as legal residency and work permits but also for the right to enjoy equal and shared cultural interaction in Taiwan. This study shows that language acquisition and writing is an effective means of promoting equal exchange and dialogue between cultures within the broader transformations of globalisation.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"139 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47944147","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1992819
G. Alhasan, Dina Salman
ABSTRACT This paper explores the intersection between posthumanism and ecological thought in Beckett’s Endgame. Based on a reception-informed approach, this article revisits Beckett’s Endgame with a special focus on how the recent context of pandemic affects our reading of the human in his work. Building on the existing body of critical response to Beckett’s re-evaluation of the human, we particularly contend that Beckett’s conception of the (post)human as a molecular being overcomes the humanist notion of human sovereignty and affirms, instead, continuity and relatedness of all lifeforms. We further want to argue that the metaphor of molecular (d)evolution evoked in Endgame undermines the unity of the self-contained subject and serves as a basis for an ethical response to the human and nonhuman other. To explicate this molecular vision, we examine how the play’s metaphorical engagement with cross-species contagion undermines humans’ claims to species exceptionalism and allows for inter-species connections. In this connection, we seek to align Beckett’s apocalypse in Endgame with Colebrook’s conception of the apocalypse as an ‘inhuman event,’ with ‘a sense of a certain mode of humanity reaching its end and giving way to other forms.’
{"title":"Cross-Species Contagion in Beckett’s Endgame: A Posthumanist (Re)reading","authors":"G. Alhasan, Dina Salman","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.1992819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1992819","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores the intersection between posthumanism and ecological thought in Beckett’s Endgame. Based on a reception-informed approach, this article revisits Beckett’s Endgame with a special focus on how the recent context of pandemic affects our reading of the human in his work. Building on the existing body of critical response to Beckett’s re-evaluation of the human, we particularly contend that Beckett’s conception of the (post)human as a molecular being overcomes the humanist notion of human sovereignty and affirms, instead, continuity and relatedness of all lifeforms. We further want to argue that the metaphor of molecular (d)evolution evoked in Endgame undermines the unity of the self-contained subject and serves as a basis for an ethical response to the human and nonhuman other. To explicate this molecular vision, we examine how the play’s metaphorical engagement with cross-species contagion undermines humans’ claims to species exceptionalism and allows for inter-species connections. In this connection, we seek to align Beckett’s apocalypse in Endgame with Colebrook’s conception of the apocalypse as an ‘inhuman event,’ with ‘a sense of a certain mode of humanity reaching its end and giving way to other forms.’","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"154 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49651499","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 : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1935497
Prity Barnwal, Rajni Singh
ABSTRACT The paper explores the politics of silence as a language of resistance through the prism of feminist discourse in Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed (1993). Silence marks an essential presence in Sontag’s writings ranging from her essays to her creative oeuvres. Sontag’s initial approach to silence has been that of a modernist aesthete where she understood silence as an aesthetic prospect in art. However, her unwavering belief in the ‘aesthetics of silence’, that came out as a theme of whatever she has written after her 1967 essay of the same name, led Sontag to explore first the moral response (as seen in her essays like Bergman’s Persona and Fascinating Fascism) and ultimately the political strategy behind the use of silence. The politics of silence in the play Alice in Bed becomes quite elusive and strategic. The imperative of silence as a performative aesthetics is recognised in the exemplary decisions of the women characters in the play that choose silence to reflect the abuses and deceptions of patriarchal language and resist the patriarchal disservices inflicted upon women’s intelligibility and emotionality.
{"title":"Silence as Political Strategy in Art: A Study of Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed","authors":"Prity Barnwal, Rajni Singh","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.1935497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1935497","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper explores the politics of silence as a language of resistance through the prism of feminist discourse in Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed (1993). Silence marks an essential presence in Sontag’s writings ranging from her essays to her creative oeuvres. Sontag’s initial approach to silence has been that of a modernist aesthete where she understood silence as an aesthetic prospect in art. However, her unwavering belief in the ‘aesthetics of silence’, that came out as a theme of whatever she has written after her 1967 essay of the same name, led Sontag to explore first the moral response (as seen in her essays like Bergman’s Persona and Fascinating Fascism) and ultimately the political strategy behind the use of silence. The politics of silence in the play Alice in Bed becomes quite elusive and strategic. The imperative of silence as a performative aesthetics is recognised in the exemplary decisions of the women characters in the play that choose silence to reflect the abuses and deceptions of patriarchal language and resist the patriarchal disservices inflicted upon women’s intelligibility and emotionality.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"101 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2021.1935497","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44101270","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 : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1938955
Aljawharah A. Aziz Alfuhayd
ABSTRACT This article examines the efficacy of various interdisciplinary methods in creating more effectively developed teaching and learning of English poetry. Worldwide, poetry’s prestige in academia within the humanities curriculum has declined. In Saudi universities, poetry is one of the most difficult literary courses taught in English departments, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University is no exception. For these reasons, there is a need to explore new pedagogies in poetry teaching. This article introduces a new intersection of verbal and visual arts contexts in female basic- and advanced-level classrooms. This paper focuses on twofold approaches, first is the theoretical (verbal) where the overall artistic evaluation is delineated. Second is the empirical approach (visual) when the concrete pictures of the poems are made. Next, the paper analyses the pictures through the lens of multimodal theory highlighting the learning outcomes and skills the arts-based classroom generates, amongst which are creative thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving.
{"title":"Verbal and Visual Arts Engagement in University Classrooms","authors":"Aljawharah A. Aziz Alfuhayd","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2021.1938955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2021.1938955","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the efficacy of various interdisciplinary methods in creating more effectively developed teaching and learning of English poetry. Worldwide, poetry’s prestige in academia within the humanities curriculum has declined. In Saudi universities, poetry is one of the most difficult literary courses taught in English departments, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University is no exception. For these reasons, there is a need to explore new pedagogies in poetry teaching. This article introduces a new intersection of verbal and visual arts contexts in female basic- and advanced-level classrooms. This paper focuses on twofold approaches, first is the theoretical (verbal) where the overall artistic evaluation is delineated. Second is the empirical approach (visual) when the concrete pictures of the poems are made. Next, the paper analyses the pictures through the lens of multimodal theory highlighting the learning outcomes and skills the arts-based classroom generates, amongst which are creative thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"84 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2021.1938955","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47173913","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 : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1940757
W. Patton
ABSTRACT For decades critics have categorised John Gay's Trivia: or The Art of Walking the Streets of London as a mock Georgic deriving its main characteristics and themes from Juvenal's Third Satire and Virgil's Georgics. Many readers have been perplexed by the ambiguities and dissonance between the Walker's/Author's observations, advice, and actions and the characteristics of those classical genres. This article discusses the additional influences of civility books, especially Dedekind's German satiric civility book, Grobianus, on Trivia. Those literary lineages place in context the Walker's inconsistently ironic advice and explain how Gay uses the distinction between the Walker's advice and his contrary behaviour to describe the psychological and pragmatic complexities of a shift from rural to urban lifestyles.
摘要几十年来，评论家们一直将约翰·盖伊的《Trivia:或The Art of Walking The Streets of London》归类为一部模仿乔治的作品，其主要特征和主题来源于朱维纳尔的《第三讽刺》和维吉尔的《乔治》。许多读者对沃克/作者的观察、建议和行动与这些经典流派的特征之间的模糊和不和谐感到困惑。本文讨论了文明书籍，特别是德金的德国讽刺文明书籍《Grobianus》对《Trivia》的额外影响。这些文学谱系将沃克前后矛盾的讽刺性建议置于背景中，并解释了盖伊如何利用沃克的建议和他相反的行为之间的区别来描述从农村到城市生活方式转变的心理和语用复杂性。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1935492
Elham Mohammadi Achachelooei, C. Leon
ABSTRACT This article employs feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s notion of ‘discontinuity in religion’ to explore the concept of the past in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (2007) and Parable of the Talents (2007). Focusing on the activities of a black heroine who appears as a reformer who revives her dead society, this article argues that the novels reflect a posthuman, post-Biblical aspect of renovation by discarding the past which is envisioned as a paralysing obsession in these texts. The renovation in the novels is done through a kind of discontinuity in particular Christian principles, substituting them with a new doctrine of thought. The introduction of this new belief called Earthseed, confronts those principles that render Christianity a religion with roots in the past, and offers a way of being and thinking which goes against the religious, sexual, racial and classist dimensions of life founded on exclusively Christian doctrine. The aim of this article is to investigate the new social order emerging from this alternative system of belief. This is important because it brings to the fore a constructive and liberating concept of change which, challenging Butler’s negative view, reveals the capacity of the new system to create a utopian world.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2021.1882025
Srirupa Chatterjee, N. Ghosal
ABSTRACT This article reads how obesity in Sapphire’s Push (1996) becomes a composite cultural metaphor for Gothic excesses. By critically analysing Claireece Precious Jones – the adolescent overweight African American protagonist of Push – with the help of contemporary Gothic theories of horror and excess this article makes a case for interpreting her fat body as a repository of cultural hatred, anxieties, and violence characterising the intersectional oppressions of appearance, gender, class, and race. Further, with the help of critical race theories, fat studies scholarship, and social studies research on poor black populations it reads how Precious’ obesity is not merely a physical condition but also a symbol of wasteful excesses that is vilified and abused, both sexually and otherwise, by her own family as well as the society at large. Appropriately, it suggests that Precious’ obesity coupled with her mental derangement becomes symptomatic of a Gothicized world which belies promises of progressivism and harbours uncontrollably violent forces against disenfranchised fat black women. This article, accordingly, focuses on Precious’s overweight body as a site and symptom of Gothic excesses that provides a vocabulary for examining the horrific rationalities celebrated by contemporary America.
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