Search results for " Literary Studies"
showing 10 items of 54 documents
“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie and the Ambiguous Afterlife of the History of the Acadians”
2018
Abstract Longfellow’s Evangeline was hailed as a great and distinctively American work when it appeared in 1847, and the poem’s use of North American history was a key element in its favourable reception. This use of history, however, is ambiguous and complex. The epic continues, first of all, in a long tradition of romanticized retellings of the heart-rending story of the Acadians. But the work also engages in a dual-level dialogue with both the mid-eighteenth-century history of the Acadians, who are pitied, without inciting indignation, and the contemporary history of midnineteenth-century America, whose expansionism it both implicitly celebrates and criticizes. Resume Evangeline, le poem…
Diversitate identitară în romanul românesc (1844-1932)
2020
This study explores, using intersectionality and quantitative analysis, several axes that help shape the identity of the characters in the fictional worlds from a corpus of approximately 500 Romanian novels published between 1844 and 1932. They are gender, ethnicity/nationality, and class/work. It also briefly analyzes the gender gap in the production of the novel and examines the dynamics between the gender of the authors and the gender of the main character(s) and the person of the narration, by using metadata compiled by our research team and complex searches in the digital corpus.
Out of Life: Routes, Refuge, Rescue
2017
Migrations of people have influenced the history of humankind from early on. Today, we are experiencing an exodus of people from misery and war-torn regions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to ...
Critica ideologică în epoca limbajului administrativ de stânga: o istorie New Left a literaturii române contemporane
2021
As Teodora Dumitru (2016) has convincingly argued in the case of Romanian literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, the evaluation of literature he proposed along his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature (1926-1929) was guided by a solid liberal and bourgeois drive. Claiming the autonomy of the aesthetics, Lovinescu actually built an urban bourgeois literary canon in his effort to systematize the local literary material. Almost 100 years later, Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 (2021) proceeds to a similar effort, but through the lens of New Left critical theory. Both Lovinescu and Iovănel use what I call the administrative language of their time: Lovinesc…
"Mettre le soleil en bouteille" : les appareils de Mouchot et l'imaginaire solaire au début de la troisième République
2010
International audience; Dans l’imaginaire commun, le XIXe siècle reste associé au charbon. Le mineur incarne la figure du prolétaire et la machine à vapeur symbolise la révolution industrielle. Pourtant, on sait que cette prépondérance du charbon ne fut jamais totale, l’énergie hydraulique subsiste durablement et de multiples autres trajectoires technologiques et énergétiques ont été expérimentées. Au début de la Troisième République, alors que le régime s’appuie sur la science et la technique, un bref moment d’exaltation de l’énergie solaire et de ses possibilités d’avenir voit ainsi le jour. Devant la crainte de l’épuisement des gisements de houille, face à l’expansion impériale et aux né…
Enjoying sameness and difference – competition and convergence of Latin American telenovelas and Swahili video films in Tanzania
2018
Since the early 2000s Latin American telenovelas have become a very popular and widely received genre in Tanzania. At the same time, a huge video film industry has developed with local films made i...
“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)
2017
The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscap…
Visualising political thinking on the screen : a dialogue between von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt and its protagonist
2016
This article analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt: The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil through its protagonist’s own writings on visual culture, visibility and invisibility in the context of political thinking. We start by clarifying Arendt’s understanding of political theory as an activity aiming to provoke thinking. We then discuss systematically the visual language of the film and offer a typology of its representations of political thinking, subdivided into a part on internalisation and one on externalisation (dialogue). We emphasise von Trotta’s reliance on a negative approach, i.e. the representation of thinking through the absence of any other activity while thinking, c…
Spaces of Identity: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Quicksand (1928)
2018
Abstract The 1920s marked a fervent time for artistic and literary expression in the United States. Besides the famous authors of the decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen, among other female writers, also managed to carve “a literary space” for their stories. Yezierska and Larsen depicted the struggles and tribulations of minority women during the fermenting 1920s, with a view to illustrating the impact of ethnicity and race on the individual female identity. Yezierska, a Jewish-American immigrant, and Larsen, a biracial American woman, share an interest in capturing the nuances of belonging to a particular community…
The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality
2016
This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, …