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Abstract
This article examines the ways in which racial patriarchal tropes from E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States (1939) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's public-policy report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) have been reconstructed for the present via relationship-advice literature marketed to heterosexual black women under the guise of love and increasing the rate of black marriage. A close analysis of the connection between historic pathological narratives of the black family and the current self-help genre exposes racial and gendered politics, concessions, and negotiations within the black community. Utilizing popular relationship-advice literature that achieved New York Times bestseller list status—Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (2009), Tyrese Gibson and Rev. Run's Manology: Secrets of Your Man's Mind Revealed (2013)—this article focuses on the culturally embedded linkages among the concepts of worthiness for respect, sexual propriety (chiefly in heterosexist terms), and behavioral decorum—especially when directed at women. It also looks at the gate-keeping function these norms serve in regulating and limiting black women's right to full political and social recognition. In so doing, this article reveals the ways in which relationship-advice literature maintains black women's subordinate position within the black community, as well as within the dominant white society.

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of ... an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics. -- Description from http://search.barnesandnoble.com (Nov. 29, 2011)

"Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und dem Zusammenbruch der europäischen Gesellschaft machte Lateinamerika, das sich bis dahin traditionelle an Europa orientiert hatte, eine Orientierungskrise durch. Zu jener Zeit da die Vereinigten Staaten sich zur Weltmacht entwickelten, stellten lateinamerikanische Intellektuelle Überlegungen nach möglichen Alternativen an. Octavio Paz El Laberinto de la soledad und Alejo Carpentiers Los pasos perdidos sind repräsentativ für dieses Entwicklungsstadium. Nimmt man diese Werke als Rahmen, dann kann man typische Themen der lateinamerikanischen Literatur verfolgen: Die Erfahrung des Exils, die Notwendigkeit, eine authentische Geschichte Lateinamerikas zu entdecken, die Entfremdung des Künstlers von der Gesellschaft, das Fortdauern des Mythos und des Übersinnlichen, die Suche nach erotischer Erfahrung. Seit den fünfziger Jahren hat sich der soziologische Kontext geändert, doch in wichtigen Gebieten sind keine Verbesserungen der Situation der Künstler eingetreten. Im gleichen Zeitraum schwang unter Intellektuellen das politische Pendel von einer Position kritischer Distanz und Entfremdung zu einer Position der positiven Erwartung und aktiven Unterstützung für linke und liberale Bewegungen und nach den Enttäuschungen der späten sechziger und siebziger Jahre wieder zurück zu kritischer Distanz, diesmal jedoch stärker zynisch akzentuiert. Dennoch gibt es heute ein größeres und besser ausgebildetes Reservoir an Schriftstellern, die sich ihrer Kunst als Hauptanliegen widmen, und dieser Umstand ist für die große Qualität der gegenwärtigen lateinamerikanischen Literatur verantwortlich." (Autorenreferat)

Dalit Literature serves as a point of departure to the established meta-narratives of religion, myth and history. Dalit literature distinguishes itself by resistance to the mythic Indian subconscious. Writers like Om Prakash Valmiki, Ram Lalayee Periyar Singh and Sharankumar Limbale seek an alternative construction of Dalit identity. Their texts respond to the monolithic one-sided discursive renderings of Dalits in the religious epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. Through testimonios and historical booklets these critique religious ideologies premised on a casteist politics of marginalization and consistent 'othering'.

"Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities"--