Literature Compass最新文献

Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde offers many rhetorical lessons and models in how to speak and behave well according to the mediaeval conventions of fin'amor. The first three books of the poem are especially concerned with the best ways to control and express deep feeling. The two lovers prepare nervously for their first meeting at the beginning of Book III. Troilus, in particular, rehearses and seeks to memorise the best words, gestures, and facial expressions to use when he first speaks with Criseyde. In Book V, Diomede enacts very similar practices in his seduction of Criseyde, but the reader is encouraged to read this as a different kind of deliberate performance. Using the work of Monique Scheer and other theorists of emotional practice and the history of emotions, this essay explores the ambiguity of performance as both a rehearsed theatrical mode; and as the practice and affirmation of conventional forms of emotional expression. It concludes by proposing that Thomas Hoccleve's ‘mirror scene’ in his Compleinte draws on Troilus's rehearsals, adopting the performance anxiety associated with romantic love for his own more social and public concerns.

Set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring uprisings, Jihadist extremism, and the neoliberal exploitation of the Global South, Mathias Énard's 2012 novel Street of Thieves (Rue des voleurs) follows the fortunes of Lakhdar, a young man from Tangier who finds himself living as an undocumented migrant in Barcelona's notorious Carrer d’En Robador, the Street of Thieves. Lakhdar's misadventures are shaped by regional and global forces which have compelled Moroccan nationals to seek political and economic asylum in Mediterranean Europe. Although Street of Thieves is strikingly contemporary, this essay explores the novel's medievalism: its contrasting of the grim present with the premodern Islamic world as an era of sophistication, mobility and cultural exchange. The essay focuses on Lakhdar's preoccupation with his fellow Tangier native Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century traveler and writer whose life becomes a frame through which Lakhdar views his own. It argues that contrary to the current tendency to view Ibn Battuta's world as a precursor to modern globalised culture, Énard's novel invokes cosmopolitan Islamic premodernity to comment on the turmoil of the modern Islamosphere and the harm done to the Islamicate world by Western neo-colonialism and neoliberalism.

This article explores the ways in which the Arabic sīra a genre loosely akin to the romance or chivalric epic can be incorporated into undergraduate teaching on medieval romance. Drawing on my own pedagogical experience and guided by ongoing critical work on decolonising and diversifying the curriculum, I demonstrate the values and challenges of bringing Arabic texts, read in translation, into modules that configure English literature degrees in UK higher education. I focus on Sīrat Sayf bin Dhī Yazan a dynamic sīra available in Lena Jayyusi's lively English translation (‘Adventures of Sayf ben Dhi Yazan’), that contains folkloric and chivalric motifs and themes recognisable to readers of western romances, including adventuring heroes, disguise and recognition, magic and the supernatural, and love. Here, I aim to show that comparative familiarity is an ideal tool to de-familiarise and reorient perspectives on ‘romance’ (in the broadest sense) in the classroom. Sīrat Sayf opens up a gateway to another geographical location, both historical and imaginative, another cultural and religious context, and another literary and linguistic tradition. I show the importance of multilingualism in teaching romance on ‘English’ degrees and the broader questions this raises about the stakes of reading in translation while also opening up ways of understanding—and steps to undoing—the structures that create and uphold canons, including medieval romance.

Pictures have always been one of the fundamental tools for storytelling that serve as a spigot for folk narratives and performances. Although in India, folk art styles feature stories from the traditional repertoire, increasing focus on use of folk and tribal art in graphic novels and innovation in esthetic strategies problematize the perceived fixity and primitivity associated with “folk.” To accommodate different stories and audiences, Patachitra (folk) and Pardhan-Gond (tribal) art forms undergo stylistic changes in storytelling. The paper explores the organic and reflexive nature of these two narrative art forms, focusing particularly on two contemporary manifestations: I See the Promised Land (2013) and Bhimayana (2011).

Mental healthcare facilities in hospitals and rehabilitation centres are crucial for providing medical treatment and care. These therapeutic environments manifest as both fulfilled, empathetic spaces of care and as sites tainted by denial of care and exploitation. This article utilises illness memoirs or ‘pathographies’ as an entry point to understand the intricacies of experiential facets of caregiving within mental healthcare spaces. Set against the backdrop of the evolving landscape of psychiatric facilities in India, transitioning from asylums in the pre-independent era to mental hospitals in the post-independent era and rehabilitation centres in the 1990s, this article analyses two important postcolonial Indian pathographies: Swadesh Deepak's Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha: Khandit Jeevan ka Collage, 2003 (I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir, 2021), translated by Jerry Pinto and Shreevatsa Nevatia's How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia (2017). These memoirs allow us to explore the dynamics of caregiving practices within the evolving spatial modalities of mental healthcare spaces in India. Drawing on insights from theorists such as Anne H Hawkins, Sarah Ann Pinto, Arthur Kleinman, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman and others, the article examines the complex dynamics and ambivalence inherent in the practices of care and denial within mental healthcare spaces. This nuanced analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the experiential reality of care within distinct mental healthcare spaces of hospitals and rehabilitation centres in India, shedding light on the intricate interplay between individual narratives and broader sociocultural contexts.