Literature Compass最新文献

Music collecting in the late eighteenth century was as much an intellectual practice as a practical one, therefore, the organization of tunes in manuscript tunebooks gives us insight into the worldviews of tunebook compilers. This article introduces some of the literature on tune collecting and categorization, and describes attempts by music historians in the twentieth century to categorize tunebooks. It shows that considering the categorization of tunes only as a practical matter ignores the intellectual function of categorization. It argues that to understand manuscript tunebooks better these sources should be approached as the product of collecting activity and not just as a by-product of music making. An expanded methodological approach, incorporating the history of collecting, biographical methods, and material culture studies, can provide insight into how tunebook compilers used their collections to order their worlds.

This article seeks to account for the phenomenon where cultural productions are able to transcend different chronotopes and masquerade in myriad forms while sustaining an illusion of itself as a text. Using the Barthian distinction between work and Text as its framework, the article argues that multimodal semiotics offers a theoretically viable perspective on the global circulation of cultural artifacts by way of the concepts of memes, distribution, resemiotization, and assemblage. The central argument is this: what we call a text in common parlance is in fact a node within a networked assemblage of individually constituted works loosely connected through a substrate recognizability of memes. Operating at the level of this network is the Barthian Text that is always in-progress and can never really be completed. The article concludes by proposing that with the imminence of Web 5.0 and in light of the ever-pervasive influence of artificial intelligence in cultural production, it is imperative that we adopt nonlinear thinking to understand the shifting semioscapes in digital space and their impact on contemporary textuality.

Social network analysis that draws upon the correspondence of writers has the potential to indicate aspects of the writers' habitus, that is, the economic, social and cultural capital represented by the relations between authors, poets and dramatists, and their correspondents. Social network analysis can visualise and reveal otherwise covert aspects of the field of literary activity. In particular, it can show the flow of cultural, symbolic, social and economic capital through the literary ecosystem. The article presents an introduction to social network analysis, describes a modest case study, and identifies possible future research directions.

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close-ups of expressive faces vis-à-vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face-screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

A brief examination of the history of English as an academic subject in China is given, with focus on the paramount importance China attaches to the teaching and learning of foreign languages and literatures in general and of English language and literature in particular. It is argued that China presents a unique case in human history in which an immense sovereign state has put systematic and sustained efforts into learning a foreign language, formulating unified linguistic policies and enforcing them in a potent manner; and by so doing, has made the external world relatively transparent in a short time, integrating all kinds of new knowledge into its cognitive system and transforming the minds of its population, thus effecting an overall civilizational transformation.

This article examines David Lodge's novel Deaf Sentence (2008), which focuses on the life of Desmond, a retired professor of linguistics. I argue that this text offers a standpoint through which readers can visualise the global phenomenon of population ageing and address the question of global responsibility. I look at Deaf Sentence within the tradition of the Bakhtinian polyphonic novel and through the lens of the campus novel that Lodge discusses in his critical writing. The analysis of dialogism and self-reflexivity illuminates the reverberations of global ageing on the life of Desmond, situating questions of wellbeing and demography within a narrative perspective. Detailing their struggles with isolation, incontinence and erectile dysfunction, the narration of Desmond and his father growing older sheds light on the limitations of biomedical scripts for older men based on bodily control and sexual performativity. Considering the tension of biomedical discourses and gender expectations informing the cultural construction of ageing in the global North, I contend that Lodge's writing exposes the limits of the neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency and individual responsibility at the heart of the notion of successful ageing. Echoing Desmond's self-reflection, Deaf Sentence offers its reader a standpoint through which to reflect on his problematic participation in the neoliberal, patriarchal regimes that marginalise him. Interpreting the novel as a space for deconstructing the ideal of an autonomous and independent subject postulated by neoliberal discourses, I read Deaf Sentence as an invitation to its readers to embrace their own vulnerability, fostering ethics of care towards themselves and the other.

This essay argues that English departments in India have had two advantages that their counterparts in the west lack. First, the ability to speak and write correctly in English is understood as a social and professional resource and this prompts large numbers of college students to opt for an English major. Second, English literature has unfolded, historically among several highly developed literatures in our regional languages and this, in conjuction with post-colonial theory, has opened up vast new fields of research for English professors in India. Improved salaries and research facilities after the mid-eighties began attracting excellent faculty to our best English departments and, by the end of the twentieth century, some of these were poised to compete with the best departments of the world. Despite this, Indian universities are perenially plagued by political interference and corruption and this has made it impossible for several excellent departments and indeed entire universities to sustain excellence.

This article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation.