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The article focuses on American author Langston Hughes and his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The author argues that Hughes was not interested in the moral failings or bigotry of individual writers, examines his attempt to sociologically map "taste types," and compares the essay to the book "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste," by Pierre Bourdieu.

This essay analyzes Cormac McCarthy's 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road using a pessimistic framework based on the work of philosopher and environmentalist Peter Wessel Zapffe. Zapffe contends that humans make their way in the world only by ignoring, avoiding, or sublimating their existential terror through "repressional mechanisms," or coping strategies. I employ The Road as a case study to examine how repressional mechanisms function within the novel and within society more broadly. Through a deconstruction of the overly optimistic, progress-oriented presumptions made by both characters and readers, I demonstrate how McCarthy's text comments upon the strength of humanity's repressional mechanisms and underscores how these coping strategies have resulted in a collective inability to face our environmental, social, and individual situations. I ultimately assert that a truly pessimistic reading of The Road offers a far more profound (and devastating) critique of today's society than many McCarthy scholars are willing or able to acknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Daniel Kehlmann's Tyll, a historical novel about the legendary jester, Till Eulenspiegel, set in the Thirty Years War. Kehlmann's work is about the making of meaning in an era in flux. He brings a postmodern awareness to the premodern world, infusing ethics and affect into questions about the nature of knowledge and the writing of history. His characters interpret ambiguous evidence and spin truth in tales that have real-life consequences. The result is postmodern melodrama, historical fiction for the age of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the transnational aspects of early modern studies. It mentions the expansion of the English presence in the world, the concept of the Other as a theme in English literature, the relation of early modern history and literature with contemporary society, and presents examples of literature's relation to social conditions.

The article explore American novelist, Theodore Dreiser's interrogation of notions of society and the social as a concept in his literary works. It argues that while Dreiser's novels are often read as cultural histories of American society. It discusses key texts by Dreiser and demonstrates how his writing became a battleground for rival conceptualizations of American society during the 20th century.

Grounded in the belief that storytelling can act as an embodied form of resilience and can bring together voices in collective healing, this study uses general inductive analysis and Baez's Sweetgrass Method to focus on how the Indigenous women contributors of #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women use writing, artwork, and media as a form of healing. Analysis focused on how the contributors described or depicted their strength and opportunities for healing through story (in many creative forms) in this edited collection marketed for young people. Findings reveal that the contributors demonstrate collaboration, introspection, and continuity as forms of healing in their connectedness with others, culture, history, spirituality, and land. The women describe how they confront fear with strength and reposition trauma and adversity using collaboration and introspection to retell histories, challenge dominant narratives, own and signal their pride, and rewrite their stories as activists and as their own heroes. The words and images demonstrate a commitment to themselves and others to share stories of community, culture, and land that show intergenerational and collective approaches to healing within and across tribal nations. This study demonstrates that writing can serve as a form of decolonial resistance and a source of deep understanding, connectivity, and activism in the way that it is strength-centered, power-centered, and healing-centered. The works in the collection speak to each other and together and demonstrate the power of storytelling as testament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on mystery fiction literary tourism and how it has impacted real world spaces. Topics include visits to the homes and haunts of authors, as well as places that fictional characters frequent, the popularity of guidebooks for these endeavors, and a particular focus is placed on the locations within the "Sherlock Holmes" books.

A Literary criticism of "The Liberal Imagination" by Lionel Trilling is presented. Topics discussed include ways in which remains one of the most challenging and durable works of modern literary criticism; and Trilling's confirmation for Reinhold Niebuhr's recognition of the capacity of the human will to commit evil.

This article examines Bosnian participation in Ottoman poetry production in the seventeenth century. It follows the careers and personal lives of thirty seventeenth-century Ottoman-Bosnian poets, and identifies common career trajectories, poetic styles, and relations with other segments of Ottoman society. Since poetry was a central component of Ottoman culture, this analysis of Ottoman-Bosnian poetry production sheds new light on Bosnian cultural integration into the Ottoman Empire, thus adding another layer to our understanding of Bosnian incorporation into the Ottoman Empire. Bosnians’ active participation in Ottoman poetry cycles is a manifestation of Bosnian identification with Ottoman culture more generally. Moreover, this article claims that this cultural identification stood on the basis of Bosnia’s successful political and military integration into the Ottoman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Futurism is often considered a highly masculinized, even misogynistic artistic movement despite the fact that many members of the group were women. In their manifestoes, the Futurists violently rejected the possibility of "the feminine" subsisting in the highly industrialized world of the future; however, they took issue not with women per se, but in the outmoded representations of the feminine in society and literature. A wife, a mother, a femme fatale, or the eternal feminine Sophia no longer satisfied those who looked into a future where the mind dominated and possibly eradicated the body. Because femininity has long been associated with the body and the material, while the mind, the realm of ideas and cerebral creativity, was linked instead to the masculine gender, the obliteration of the feminine from all spheres of life and art seemed to guarantee a simultaneous repudiation of the weak and mortal human body in favor of the mind, capable of achieving the impossible. Ironically, however, instead of moving toward overt masculinity, the Futurist literary and artistic practices suggest very strong ties to the feminine and even to the maternal. Focusing on David Burliuk's poem "Plodonosiashchie" and Vladimir Maiakovskii's play Vladimir Mayakovsky. A Tragedy, my paper explores the paradox of Futurism that on the one hand rejects the female body, and on the other hand engages in literary practices that, according to Julia Kristeva, return the subject to the realm of semiotic chora--a prelingual space associated with femininity and the maternal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article discusses Regina Scheer's novel Machandel (2014) and the approach to personal memory and historical perception that Scheer develops by drawing on Walter Benjamin's famous essay On the Concepts of History, published in 1940. The article examines formal and narrative aspects of the novel, which tells the story of a family and an East German village from the 1930s until the present day, in order to demonstrate how Scheer rejects the possibility of direct access to history and the reconstruction of the past. Special attention is devoted to the specific meanings of different forms of silence and the role of literature in the process of cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the stereotyping and objectifying of Native Americans in American popular culture from the mid 19th century through the early 20th century, including in American newspapers, paintings and literature. An overview of theater company the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company's performing of medicine shows, including in regard to its co-founding by white entrepreneur John C. Healy, is provided.

In this article, the author focusses on the impact of student literary magazines on community healing by student through creative writing and free expression. He discusses the best practices in creative writing, literary magazine policies and efforts of students in the publication of the magazine "Litmag." He highlights the topics discussed in the magazine which include mental health and suicide, religion and domestic violence.

The Bogota company El Áncora Editores was founded by Patricia Hoher and Felipe Escobar in 1980 and is still in operation. The purpose of this text is to present an approach to the history of El Áncora publishing house, analyze its editorial line based on study of the reconstructed catalog and show how the company was inserted into the publishing market of the last decades of the twentieth century and throughout the 21st century; all of this having as a theoretical-methodological framework the sociology of literature and the publishing studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a commonplace to remark that nineteenth-century England was a land without music. Yet French travel writers in the fin de siècle remark again and again on their astonishing, low-brow musical encounters in the nation's capital. The present article examines such experiences in the writing of Jules Vallès and Hector France, as they turn their steps away from the refinement of Covent Garden to seek out more esoteric musical experiences in the music halls, tawdry bars, minor theatres and strip joints of London. These texts present an intriguing and ambivalent textual form to the reader. Though being based on – and structured as – travel anecdotes, they no less insistently reach beyond the anecdotal experience to extrapolate overarching conclusions about the English and their character relative to France. Yet in doing so, their texts reveal inconsistencies and contradictions as they try to reconcile these strange musical experiences with the stereotypes of Englishness that had solidified over the generations; these alien musical experiences resist conceptualization and challenge the tropes that had for so long underwritten French ideas of the English Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses methods of teaching difficult college-level literature. It suggests having students imitate the style of the writer being studied, applying it to contemporary issues in fun or silly ways. It proposes having students do composition exercises dating from the era being studied, for example the "Poetria Nova" of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a rhetoric and composition book of the middle ages. Another example given is the assignment to write what you ate for breakfast in the style of Mary Wallstonecraft using one exceedingly long sentence, then write a reply to Edmund Burke defending constitutional democracy in his style, and then rendering specified sentences from Burke in 21st-century English. The author recounts using these methods to the enthusiastic acceptance of her students.

The critical reception of Daniel Pennac’s novel of 2012, Journal d’un corps, has displayed a surprising blindness to the faecal nature of the text’s originary scene, omitting it in accounts of the work to attend instead to other corporeal phenomena and frame the work as a meditation on mortality. In this article, I examine the disavowed faeces of this originary scene. This faecal matter, rather than something to be sanitized, should be treated as the site of a clear articulation of an excremental poetics, which, in positing writing as excrement, takes up the question of literary representation, informed by the paradoxical relationship of faeces to the propre, in the sense both of cleanliness (proprete´) and of property (proprie´te´). Through attending to the significant scatological dimension of Journal d’un corps, I show how Pennac’s work acts as a call to democratize literature: the universal nature of faecality models the way literature can be transformed from a site of proprie ´te´ and proprete´ into something impropre that belongs to all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a synthetic study on major issues related to the events of 1968 in Poland and their similarity to the atmosphere at the time of the Holocaust. The author presents analogies and differences between the antisemitic campaign of 1968 and the Shoah, analyzing: (1) the rhetoric of journalistic texts and political speeches; (2) works of art; (3) literary representations; and (4) memories of the victims. The main material for the analysis consists of prose texts--novels and short stories--written both in the late 1960s and after the political transformation of 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a response to the article “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion" by Winfried Fluck in this issue. He mentions Fluck's analysis of the work of Rita Felski and Caroline Levine, the role of literature and society, and the nature of modernity in literature.

From the fact that cities are affected by historical, political and social transformations in accordance with the fate of their geography, it is possible to trace their intermittent and continued memories from time to time with various disciplines and sources. The memory of the city, as being the collective memory of society, can be evaluated in the frame of sociological possibilities of literature for the studies of the urban sociology, social structure, sociology of change, sociology of daily life. In this study, the epics of Istanbul which belonged to Istanbul's social structure, history, daily life, places, neighborhood perception, and professions at the end of the nineteenth century, in the first half of the 20th century's that presented them to the present-day researcher were examined in terms of the traces of daily life in social memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the poetry form of light verse, or vers de société, that examines in influences, formation, and adoption. The author argues that light verse contained elements of Enlightenment-era aesthetics on poise, humor and tragedy, and a position of detachment and acceptance on life's suffering. Attention is also given to the process of anthologizing and critiquing light verse in terms of its literary and social history.

This article demonstrates how youth workers in a Dutch city bring together seemingly irreconcilable worlds: the development policies of their organisations and the state on the one hand and the practices, needs and aspirations of young people on the other. Current policies, like much academic literature on street-level professionals, define youth workers as frontline workers, implementing policies as representatives of their organisations. We approach these workers not as representatives but as brokers. Based on detailed ethnographic research with two youth workers and their interactions with so-called high-risk boys, we demonstrate that these workers constantly negotiate boundaries, as they are positioned between the policies and the youth. On a theoretical level, employing the concept of ‘correspondence’, we argue that these brokers bring together different actors, institutions and resources, yet without fully integrating them and without forfeiting their own autonomous position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the state of modern Japanese literary studies. Topics covered include the multiple rises and falls that Japanese literature and Japanese literary studies have experienced, the infiltration by Japan's cell phone novels of mainstream media, with high school girls using their cell phones to transmit original literary works, and the reasons that will lead to the end of literature in Japan, such as the decline in social prestige and the loss of political engagement.

Amid the current crisis in the humanities and the human sciences, researchers should take up the challenge of writing more effectively. Rather than clinging to forms inherited from the nineteenth century, they should invent new ways to captivate readers, while also providing better demonstrations of their research. Defining problems, drawing on a multitude of sources, carrying out investigations, taking journeys in time and space: these methods of inquiry are as much literary opportunities as cognitive tools. They invite experimentation in writing across disciplines, trying out different lines of reasoning, shuttling back and forth between past and present, describing the process of discovery, and using the narrative "I." We can address the public creatively, decompartmentalize disciplines, and encourage encounters between history and literature, sociology and cinema, anthropology and graphic novels--all without compromising intellectual rigor. Now more than ever, the human sciences need to assert their place in the polis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although published in 2014, Jablonka's History is a Contemporary Literature provides important insights into the Trump phenomenon. Why does a significant portion of the American population overlook Trump's litany of lies and falsehoods? Journalist Adam Kirsch argued after the election that popular culture, Reality TV for example, blurred the line between fiction and truth, creating a "post-truth" atmosphere that paved the way for Trump. Kirsch echoes Jablonka, who advocates that historians use literary techniques in the interest of truth. Jablonka insists that history as contemporary literature must rest on historical research and methodology, using good historical story-telling to reach broader audiences, increase knowledge and deepen understanding. Jablonka's manifesto defines writing history as a form of public service and presciently warns of the potentially catastrophic results of relinquishing the quest for historical truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature struggles in South Africa—or, struggles of interpretation?—evince, and continue to evince, a thematic and stylistic impulse to belong to a common society, but, paradoxically, a society that is often more disjunctive than conjunctive. How, then, to belong? I trace the trajectory from the black-and-white voices of the 1970s to a more heterogeneous conception of the society, after apartheid, and particularly over the last decade, or so. What is peculiar about literature struggles is that the heroic mode has played a relatively marginal role in sense-making or imaginative projection; rather, the critical insight ensures that political language—too often crude in its singularities of either/or—has seldom enjoyed the unalloyed assent of literary language. Considerations of nation-building hardly feature alongside the concerns of living in a functioning society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on Russian literature, its influence on society and the role played by it power. Topics discussed include the decline of literature and publishing in Russia; the literary institutions in the country, including the Soros Foundation and the Russian Booker Prize; and the election of Putin as president in 2001.

The author discusses instances where the literary catalogue dramatizes for representation, and mentions its traumatic effect. Topics include the importance of formal capacity for spectrality in confronting destruction, violence, and loss, the comparative readings of several writers showing that the catalogue challenges claims of authority, and the approach of the author to the spectrality of the catalogue.

The article discusses the role of the Australian magazine "Triad" in representing Antipodean Modernity. It states that the magazine attempted to find a place in a cultural field that appeared newly segmented into high, low, and middlebrow strata, and mentions that earlier approaches to modernism in Australia originated from the "Greenwich Meridian" of European and Anglo-American modernism. It notes that modern studies have established the centrality of magazines in modernist movements.

This essay argues that queer experimental literature provides a hermeneutic mode to resist the gentrification of LGBTQ literature in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Queer experimental literature elicits "bad reading," affective relations of reading that disrupt the corporeal norms that fuse readers into the heteronormative public sphere. Bad reading conjures new economies of social and erotic relation in historical moments when queer belonging is foreclosed, stigmatized, or forgotten. Locating bad reading beside paranoid, reparative, and postcritical reading, the essay situates queer reading within the wider social field from which it emerges. To do so, I turn to Samuel Delany's experimental AIDS writing. Delany rewrites academic discourses of deconstruction, forcing critics to confront their affective and historical implication in the AIDS crisis. He uses queer experimental literature to recuperate the radicalism of queer eroticism disavowed by mainstream gay literature and safe-sex discourses alike. The Mad Man (1994) contests the conceit that experimental literature is politically solipsistic and affectively unpleasant by inviting readers into the incipiently social relations of queer eroticism. The novel's provocations of bad reading condense an affective archive of unsanctioned queer hermeneutics, which have been elided in disciplinary debates over critical reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel , as well as the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzuldua, and other queer writers of color in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay orients its readers to the ways that queer reading and queer literature have sustained, shaped, and redefined queer life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do today's global crises shape world literature, and is world literature itself a crisis mode of cultural production? This article addresses these questions through a close engagement with two novels by Abbas Khider, a German-language novelist born in Iraq, where he was a political prisoner. Featuring a migrant who often travels illegally and under invented names, and a travelling letter written by a former political prisoner to someone who meanwhile has become a refugee herself, Der falsche Inder (The Village Indian) and Brief in die Auberginenrepublik (Letter to the Eggplant Republic) dramatize migration as one of the global crises we face today. By situating these novels in a "translation zone," I argue that Khider incorporates movement in their very form, engaging with the complex dimensions of linguistic and cultural translation that accompany movement. They are thus "born-translated novels," belaboring a temporality of precedence characteristic of the refugee experience. By reclaiming agency in the process of translation, however, Khider's novels alter their readers' sense of a world--a worlding (in the sense given this term by Martin Heidegger, and borrowed by Pheng Cheah) that becomes part of an ethics of the migrant, who engages in intentional gestures of mistranslation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books depicting underrepresented racial or cultural groups and the messages they convey offer vehicles for change. But not all messages have the same impact, and thought should be given to which messages are used when and for what purpose. Our research contributes to the national conversation about diverse children's books by illuminating nine themes dominant in fiction and narrative nonfiction picture books (K–3) published between 2008–2015 featuring characters who are Asian/Pacific Islander, black/African/African American, Central and South American (Hispanic/Latinx), Middle Eastern/North African/Arab, First/Native Nations, and bi‐/multiracial. We also provide insight into the messages communicated by the relative prevalence of characters portrayed in each theme from each group. Inviting those who use books with children to turn their attention to overarching messages, we provide a model of how these themes can be used to interrogate a collection and its nuances of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monteiro Lobato is still nowadays considered one of the most important authors of children's literature in our country. During the thirties and fourties of the twentieth century, when he was arguably the most read and admired author for children, he corresponded with countless readers from all over Brazil. Through the letters we perceive many aspects of how reading was done, the daily life of children and young people, their opinions about politics, but what this documentation reveals of most interesting to us is the reception of Lobato's work by his readership. More than that, the epistolographie with children and young people reveals how he was attentive to the reception of his work among them and also how he modified his narratives, having as collaborators his own readers. In this article we intend to analyze a specific set of letters that the writer received from a girl: Maria de Lourdes. The reader not only corresponded with Lobato but also gave so many suggestions for his work that she became one of the characters in the work Reforma da Natureza, where she helped throughout the narrative the character Emília as they modify animals, plants and insects of the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading Fyodor Dostoevsky across the Sea of Marmara, Ottoman-Armenian author, Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), discovered an unprecedented possibility for conceptualizing and representing non-Muslim Ottoman reality. The following discussion presents this possibility as a case of metacommunal pluralism; a pluralism not based on communally differentiated orthodoxies of ethno-national, linguistic, or confessional singularity, but rather, consisting of heterodoxical pluralities. Oshagan deviates from conventional interpretations, both positive and negative, of Ottoman pluralism as a system of communal differentiation comprised of discrete ethno-confessional units. The Dostoevskyan aspects of Oshagan's writing suggest, instead, an "underground" of extensive intersectionality that casts the truth of such conventional interpretations of Ottoman communality into doubt, showing the porousness, tensions, limits, and contradictions endemic to Ottoman minority existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why has world literature been promoted as a discipline outside of Western contexts? Expanding the grounds of comparative literature to include non-Western texts also requires emphasizing the work of non-Western theorists as cultural actors. In an effort to widen the conversation on the early theoretical tenets of the field, this article presents the vision of world literature promoted by one of the foremost Egyptian writers of the twentieth century, Taha Hussein, drawing on his writings in English, Arabic, and French. The article examines Hussein's understanding of why literary comparison was important for developing countries beyond postcolonial paradigms, and specifically what the classical tradition of Arabic education might offer the study of modern world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to clarify how literary and nonliterary narratives function in society and culture. To reach this broad goal, it first presents a general framework inspired by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the American New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt. The framework centers on the notions of circulation and negotiation. Stories circulate from one field to another, thereby transporting and transforming narrative templates that belong to these fields. Stories negotiate these templates and in so doing invite readers to activate and negotiate their own narrative habitus. The second part of the essay compares the proposed theory of narrative in culture to existing narrative theories about circulation and negotiation and to the traditional model of narrative as a form of communication, which it tries to overcome. Finally, the essay offers a detailed analysis of The Lump of Coal (2008) by Lemony Snicket. The analysis shows that stories can be interpreted as ways of circulating and negotiating narrative templates on three levels. First, the plot of the text itself can be read as a circulation of elements taken from various domains mentioned in the story (especially art, nutrition, economy, and religion). Second, there is circulation and negotiation between the text and the paratext (including the blurb and the illustrations on the dust jacket), and third, the text negotiates and circulates contextual elements, more specifically templates, such as generic patterns, ethnic stereotypes, and commonsense morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article which appeared in the Winter 1992 issue is presented in which the author discusses African American literature and criticism. He mentions the question of racial identity of African Americans, the comments of critic Henry Louis Gates on African American identity and literature, and the issue of defining and belonging to specific social groups.

The article presents an interview with African American author Ed Bullins. He discusses the unique identity of African American literature, the influences on his work, and the future of African American literature and its place in society.