scholarly journals Agents of Secularisation—Ibsen and the Narrative of Secular Modernity

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Joachim Schiedermair
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Secular Modernity ◽  
The Creation ◽  
History Books

In sociology, modernisation is often identified with secularisation. How can secularisation in the texts of modernism around 1900 be analysed? Literary history books tell us that the modernist authors were lucid analysts of their time who portrayed the process of secularisation going on around them in their dramas, novels or short stories. The article tries out a different approach: By conceptualizing secularisation as a cultural narrative, the perspective on the literary material changes fundamentally. The modernist authors were involved in shaping the idea of secularisation in the first place, in propagating it and in working on its implementation. They did not react to the process of secularisation with their texts. Instead, they were involved in the creation and shaping of the interpretative category ‘secularisation’. The article exemplifies this change in approach using a pivotal text of Nordic literary modernism, Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.

‘For I have fed on foreign bread’: Modernism, Colonial Education and Fijian Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-398
Author(s):  
Maebh Long ◽  
Matthew Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Education System ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Colonial Education ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Future Needs ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
New Literature

This article examines the ways in which the Fijian authors Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, and Subramani revised and reworked modernist texts in their construction of a local postcolonial literature. These writers were schooled in a colonial education system that was, by the 1950s and 60s, in ideological disarray, as the jingoistic, imperial texts of the English syllabus began to give way to the crisis and self-interrogation of literary modernism. The students who graduated from these classes went on to create a first wave of Fijian creative writing in English. As this article shows, Griffen, Manoa, and Subramani carried into their writing fragments and forms of the texts they had been required to learn by rote, and they refashioned these into new wholes. In their short stories and poems of the late 1960s and early 70s, these writers turned the literature of past imperial breakdown towards present and future needs, adapting fragmentary, perspectival and multivocal texts towards a postcolonial independence still riven by colonially introduced problems. Ultimately, we argue, the creation of this new literature denotes the failure of the education system to impress British superiority upon its colonial subjects, and the success of the subaltern in reclaiming the means of expression.

Finding Work: James Agee in the Office

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-781
Author(s):  
Donal Harris
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Institutional Affiliation ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Epistemological Question ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
American Media ◽  
Media Corporations

James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) might be the best-known literary product of Agee's uneven career and of Time Inc.‘s golden days at the top of periodical culture. This convergence of author, institution, and text presents a case study for two undertheorized aspects of mid-century American literary history: how the rise of American media corporations, of which Time Inc. is the most successful, provides economic patronage and massive readerships for a generation of writers raised on the tenets of literary modernism and how the “corporate voice” and collective editorial model at these institutions alter conceptions of authorial production. This essay tracks how competing definitions of writing as work—either “for oneself” or “on the clock”—emerge from the context of institutional affiliation. It then shows how the epistemological question of writing as work can be read into the “mental discipline” of Time Inc. magazines’ corporate style (referred to as Time style) and into the recursive elision of authorial control in Famous Men.

J. G. Ballard

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Harlan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
The Sun ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
The 1960S

This biocritical study of J. G. Ballard is the first book to account for the entire life and work of the eccentric, prolific SF author. Ballard began his career publishing short stories in SF magazines. Rather than explore outer space, his fiction explores “inner space,” drawing on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1960s, he became associated with the New Wave movement in SF, which eschewed the principles of pulp SF in favor of literary modernism. Ballard’s oeuvre maps the unfolding of the mediapocalypse from the dawn of the Space Age into the 21st century; pathologized by the technology of electronic media, his characters are chronically harrowed by an implosion of real and cinematic landscapes as they struggle to find agency from the “death of affect” incited by the forces of late capitalism. Some scholarship has tried to remove Ballard from SF, arguing that he abandoned the genre halfway through his career, especially after publishing the fictional autobiography Empire of the Sun. As this book avows, however, Ballard began as, and always remained, a SF writer.

scholarly journals An Exploration of Canadian Identity in Recent Literary Narratives of the Franklin Expeditions

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-200
Author(s):  
Victor Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
High Arctic ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Canadian Identity ◽  
Northwest Passage ◽  
History Books

Sir John Franklin’s three expeditions to the high Arctic in 1819, 1825, and 1845 have become the stuff of Canadian legend, enshrined in history books, songs, short stories, novels, and web sites. Franklin set out in 1845 to discover the Northwest Passage with the most advanced technology the British Empire could muster, and disappeared forever. Many rescue explorations found only scant evidence of the Expedition, and the mystery was finally solved only recently. This paper will explore four recent fictional works on Franklin’s expeditions, Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage”, Margaret Atwood’s short story “The Age of Lead”, Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers, and John Wilson’s North with Franklin: the Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, to see how Franklin’s ghost has haunted the hopes and values of nineteenth-century, as well as modern, Canada.

scholarly journals J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Margaret Michael
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
Second World

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence.  The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer.  I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society.  Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society.  Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history.  In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>

scholarly journals Developing Middlebrow Culture in Fascist Italy: The Case of Rizzoli’s Illustrated Magazines

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Guidali
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Middlebrow Culture ◽  
Fascist Regime ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Selection Of

Angelo Rizzoli was one of Italy’s leading publishers in the interwar period and beyond, thanks to his business intuition and daring investments in the popular periodicals sector. In the 1920s and 1930s he published a galaxy of illustrated magazines aimed at the urban middle classes, that prove paradigmatic of a new form of Italian weeklies. The article posits that Rizzoli’s rotocalchi, based on entertaining content and photojournalism, weremediators par excellence in three areas. First, in publishing middlebrow fiction. Second, in translating short stories from linguistic and cultural milieus with a deliberate selection of specific literary genres, settings, and character types — a branding that emerges from investigating the weeklies Novella and Lei. Third, in the creation of a platform for interchange between literature, photography and cinema, mainly in Cinema Illustrazione Presenta. Notwithstanding the obstacles put in their way by the Fascist regime and the censorship system, Rizzoli’s illustrated magazines introduced and spread models of female conduct that did not coincide with those proposed by the Fascists, while adapting them to common Italian cultural values and exploiting them for commercial purposes. As a typical expression of middlebrow culture based on leisure, respectability, and consumption, they repurposed messages from other media and foreign contexts, facilitating the penetration of modern behaviour patterns in Italy.

scholarly journals Self- Liberation and National Struggle in Yemeni Women's Early Short Stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Antelak Mh'd Abdulmalek Al - Mutawakil* Tomar
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
Yemen Arab Republic

The first women's short story in the Yemen was published in the South in the 1960 at the beginning of the decade that was to witness national liberation movements in both the South and the North. In the South independence was gained from British colonial control in the 1967 when the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was formed. During this decade women from the South began to publish short stories. In the North the revolution of 1962 led to the creation of the Yemen Arab Republic, ending the rule of the Imams. But for most of the rest of the decade there was instability and fighting between republican and loyalist forces. Women from the North started to publish short stories in the 1970's . Since then Yemeni women have continued to write and publish their stories in newspaper, magazines and in anthologies1

scholarly journals The And of Modernism: On New Periodizations

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-468
Author(s):  
Niall Gildea ◽  
David Wylot
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Present Understanding

The study of literary modernism is in the ascendant in the academy. From alternate modernisms, to neomodernisms, to metamodernism and global modernisms, modernism scholarship has evolved through a configuration of modernism into a cross-cultural and inter-generational aesthetic practice. This article critically examines the periodizing logic implicit in this new modernism scholarship, specifically as it pertains to the study of what is loosely called ‘neomodernism’, which we suggest presents a notable development in literary history for accounts of contemporary fiction and postmodern culture. We are principally interested in a recent trend we observe in modernism literary criticism concerning the futurization of the object (literary modernism), and of critical work thereupon. This work, which specifically addresses developments in contemporary Western Anglophone literature, seeks to extend the project of modernism (sometimes called its ‘promise’) into the present, understanding it as the principal agency in literary distinction and merit. We examine this criticism through a series of case studies, and discern three interconnecting strands in neomodernist criticism – three ways of futurizing modernism, and of self-futurizing modernism criticism.

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