Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Cultural criticism necessitates not only an examination of the context of the writer but also a broader understanding of the ways in which text and context are integrally interrelated. For pursuing these intersections, Tillie Olsen's short fiction in Tell Me a Riddle is particularly exemplary because of its textual richness and its distinctive ways of drawing on historical context. Interviews with Olsen heighten the significance of her particular context in the 1950s and emphasize the shaping effect that circumstances had on her choices in language and form as she wrote this fiction. Two concerns surface as particularly impor-tant: family life and political activism. An inquiry into these two concerns then suggests the complexity of how voice and circumstance, language and social forces, interact—in the writer, in the text, in the reader, and finally in the choices we might make for shaping alternative understandings of cultural change. (Cultural criticism; literary criticism)

This paper examines how written research accounts based on ethnography appeal to readers to find them convincing. In particular, it highlights the role of rhetoric in the readers' interaction with and interpretation of the accounts. Extending relevant work in the literatures of organization studies, anthropology and literary criticism, the paper develops three dimensions—authenticity, plausibility and criticality—central to the process of convincing. Further, through the analysis of a sample of ethnographic articles, it discloses the particular writing practices and more general strategies that make claims on readers to engage the texts and to accept that these three dimensions have been achieved. Through authenticity, ethnographic texts appeal to readers to accept that the researcher was indeed present in the field and grasped how the members understood their world. Strategies to achieve authenticity include: particularizing everyday life, delineating the relationship between the researcher and organization members, depicting the disciplined pursuit and analysis of data, and qualifying personal biases. Through plausibility, ethnographic texts make claims on readers to accept that the findings make a distinctive contribution to issues of common concern. Plausibility is accomplished by strategies that normalize unorthodox methodologies, recruit the reader, legitimate atypical situations, smooth contestable assertions, build dramatic anticipation, and differentiate the findings. Finally, through criticality, ethnographic texts endeavor to probe readers to re-examine the taken-for-granted assumptions that underly their work. Strategies to achieve criticality include: carving out room to reflect, provoking the recognition and examination of differences, and enabling readers to imagine new possibilities. The empirical analyses, which highlight both the rhetorical and substantive aspects of convincing, suggest that at a minimum ethnographic texts must achieve both authenticity and plausibility—that is, they must convey the vitality and uniqueness of the field situation and also build their case for the particular contribution of the findings to a disciplinary area of common interest. These analyses also suggest that the most provocative task and promising potential of ethnography is the use of richly-grounded data to not only reflect on the members' world, but more importantly to provoke an examination of the readers' prevailing assumptions and beliefs.

When a historian decides to use literary texts to help construct a past, these texts can present some interesting theoretical and methodological problems. One theoretical question that concerns both historians and literary scholars is that of genre. Generic considerations are of primary importance for the historian as he or she sifts through such diverse kinds of material as personal diaries, government documents, field reports of inspection teams, and books of doctrine or practice. The historian knows what to expect of each sort of document and by virtue of this familiarity is able to notice, for example, unexpected additions, omissions, or subtle deviations from the expected norms. This awareness of generic considerations often becomes second nature to us as we work with familiar types of material.But, alas, the specialized fields and disciplinary training of historians and literary scholars can obscure for them the generic characteristics of texts that they do not ordinarily work with.

"How ludicrous these efforts to translate Into one's private tongue a public fate!"Pale Fire, lines 231-232It is becoming apparent as research sets out the points of contact among Vladimir Nabokov's works that Nabokov deliberately designed his total oeuvre as a spiral that finds ever-widening patterns in the weave of the universe. We are beginning to see how Nabokov combines the passion of natural scientific investigation and the cool distance of literary creation in his art; from reading his commentaries to Pushkin's Eugene Oneginand The Song of Igor's Campaign,we understand how he interprets literary texts through the accumulation of precise detail anchored in fact. Just as the evolution of natural species involves tracing migration and patterns of mimicry, a literary work may be investigated through the evolution of its cultural history.

Feminist studies in the history and philosophy of science have suggested that supposedly neutral and objective discourses are shaped by pairs of dualisms, which though value-laden are assumed to inhere in the order of nature. These hierarchical pairs devalue women, particularly their bodies and their labor, as they sanction the domination of nature. Readers of literature can draw on these studies to address texts and genres which do not thematize gender but rather purport to portray "the human condition." Samuel Beckett's Molloy, with its clear structure of Cartesian divisions, provides a dramatic example of how an examination of dualisms reveals the presence of a language of gender informing a minimalist literary text.

The Canaanites, active during the years following the establishment of the State of Israel, were a small group of young writers, many of them former members of the Etzel and Lehi underground organizations. The group, led by the poet Yonathan Ratosh, had a political ideology involving clear demands upon Hebrew literature and culture, as spelled out in its official organ, Aleph. Canaanite ideology posited a Hebrew rather than a Jewish identity, and sought to create a new Hebrew culture. This article analyses the relations between the group's ideology, the demands it directed at literature, and the literary texts it actually produced. (DÜI-Hns)

A reassessment of post-1945 German literary production in the East & West. Socialist realism is historically located & successive movements in its transformation are analyzed: the committed literature characteristics of the end of the Weimar Republic & on the eve of the Linkskurve debates; the critical literature written & against the Socialist United Party (SED) debates in the first decade of the German Democratic Republic; & the wavering literature of the 1960s, written on the eve of the reemergence of a critical socialist realism that would openly borrow from Weimar realism. The newly fashionable & elitist aestheticism of Bohrer & Ulrich Greiner are opposed with a conception of German studies that investigates cultural practices by focusing on the interplay of literary text, politics, & history by appropriating the most advanced formalist reading strategies. The approach employed refuses to consider the dominant Western notions of literary excellence as well as the SED's definition of socialist realism as a closed artistic system. It is concluded that current West German condemnations of East German intellectuals has reinvigorated the melodramatic conflict characteristics of Cold war discourse. D. Schwartz

The background to the past & present practice of apartheid in South Africa is investigated, based on various studies & literary texts. Emphasis is on some aspects of the Boers' social psychology & history, which tend to bias their ideas of reality & hamper them in action adapted to reality. This psychology revolves around a Calvinistic notion of predestination, linked with an idealized picture of historical turning points such as the Great Trek & the Boer Wars. At present, the Boers perceive themselves as surrounded by enemies; but they themselves are creating the dangers, & their defensive measures reinforce what they are meant to contain -- resistance & fear. Current "reforms" of apartheid disguise the entrenchment of basic apartheid structures, above all, the territorial separation of racial groups. The Boers' racist attitudes are combined with obstinacy, which can only be understood as an outflow of fear. 29 References. Modified AA

Abstract
This article investigates gender stereotyping in the Hebrew literature in Palestine during the 1930s in order to find out the extent to which a new ideology effects linguistic and narrative changes. On the assumption that the foundation of the new society was motivated by an egalitarian ideology, the article examines the ideology's reflection in the literature of the period. To this end, three types of analysis were performed: an analysis of the linguistic devices for the introduction of female and male characters, a content analysis of the literary texts, and a quantitative analysis of the personal traits characteristic of women and men. Results support recent claims that the revolutionary ideology of the time hardly applied to women. The results further show that both male and female authors treat women stereotypically, though female authors are significantly less male biased than male authors. The female authors of the 1930s introduced androgy-nous characters, although those authors remained quite conservative at the linguistic level. We attempt to account for the inability of female authors to exercise a complete breakthrough. (Linguistics)

Barbara Watterson, Women in Ancient EgyptKirby Farrell, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds) Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary RenaissanceHeather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart EpithalamiumConstance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political ModelsKaren Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance DramaMaryanne Cline Horowitz (ed.) Race, Gender and Rank: Early Modem Ideas of HumanityMargaret Brabant (ed.) Politics, Gender & Genre: the Political Thought of Christine de PizanPamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: the Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and EnglandJacques Gélls, History of Childbirth. Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern EuropeMargaret Felling and Richard M. Smith (eds) Life, Death, and the Elderly. Historical PerspectivesClare Brant and Diane Purkiss (eds) Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds) Women, Writing, History 1640–1740Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian EnglandAlan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households. Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin‐de‐Siècle RussiaEve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics': Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin AmericaAva Baron (ed.) Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American LaborNancy F. Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and TheatreSandra Schackel, Social Housekeepers: Women Shaping Public Policy in New Mexico, 1920–1940Alison Light, Forever England. Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the WarsAntonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British CinemaPeter Burke (ed.) Mew Perspectives on Historical Writing

All literature can be understood as text; it can be interpreted, but not all literature asks to be. Text describes a literary work as it moves within and between cultures; it implies interpretation and the readers' active participation. To use the termtextis to make assumptions that are not universal. While literature can bridge the many cultures that create and read it, it can also be confined to a specific frame within its own culture. It can resist bridging, just as it resists independent interpretation. Literature as performance, as an example, is intended for one time and one place. Performance looks at the literary work inside its intended environment. The meaning of the work is predicated by the occasion and conventions of its reading; the audience is asked not to insinuate its own interpretation but to participate in the one provided. Performance can be a physical realization of text in time and space; and, even when an actual performance does not take place, the term suggests an important way of reading.

Abstract
This article raises issues of rendering oral narratives as text, the different needs of audiences in oral and literate settings, and how the relationship of narrator and collaborator influences the information and its presentation. Successfully addressing these issues demands that the anthropologist also consider the literary impact of the work. I conclude that the literary consideration raised in this genre of writing is basic to the most important of anthropological concerns, the cross-cultural communication of understandings. (Participant observation; life-history interviewing, editing, and narrative construction; cultural representation; writing for culturally diverse audiences)

Les discussions au sujet des méthodes littéraires en recherche sociale ont échoué jusqu'ici, à souligner les spécificites des manières sociales (en opposition à littéraires) de lire les textes ou en général, d'analyser les systémes de signifiants. Il n'existe pas de discours sociaux comme il en existe des littéraires, mais cet article argumente le fait qu'il y à des manières différentes de considérer la multiplicité des discours autour de nous. Alors que des modes littéraires de lecture cherchent à découvrir le fonctionnement interne des discours, l'analyse sociale est caractérisee par le probleme de la formation ou de la re‐formation à la subjectivité sociale. On argumente le fait que le caractere politique de la subjectivité sociale donne un tour spécifique à la tâche de l'analyse du discours social et nous aide à choisir parmi une pléthore de techniques littéraires. En conséquence, déconstruction, science de la narration et analyse de tournures rhétoriques sont évaluées dans cette optique.Debates about literary methods in social research have thus far failed to highlight the specificities of social (as opposed to literary) ways of reading texts or, in general, analysing systems of signifiers. There are no social as opposed to literary discourses, but this article argues that there are different ways of considering the multiplicity of discourses around us. While literary modes of reading seek to uncover the internal workings of discourses, social analysis is characterized by a concern for the formation and re‐formation of social subjectivity. It is argued that the practice‐oriented character of social subjectivity gives a specific twist to the task of social discourse analysis, and helps us to choose among a potential plethora of literary techniques. Accordingly, deconstruction, narratology, and the analysis of rhetorical tropes are evaluated in this light.

Adopting an approach that situates texts in their historical, political and cultural contexts, this discussion suggests that a strictly literary estimate of Singapore novels in English is an unrewarding, debunking exercise which prevents more appropriately serious considerations that can yield insights about class, contemporary values and society in Singapore. (DÜI-Sen)