Literature Compass最新文献

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.

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.