Article

Ilse Aichingers Poetik des Verschwindens 1

August 2009
Symposium A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 63(3):178-193

DOI:10.1080/00397700903238008

Authors:

In the last sixty years Ilse Aichinger has created a body of work that has only recently been recognized for its original qualities and inner consistency, as the guiding precepts behind German postwar literature have gradually been recanted. The article aims to show that Aichinger makes language the subject matter of her texts, moving beyond the coincidence of narrative history and its discursive contradictions to focus on the imaginative power of words and meaning. Her style of writing proves not to be an example of the absurd but is closely linked to cultural debates in the aftermath of the linguistic turn.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

Thinking Hybridity in the Age of Trump: Obama, Utopia, and Creole Futures Past

January 2019 · Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

Justin Izzo

In 2009, Martinican writers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau published a short address to President Obama, writing his rise and election victory into planetary histories of creolization. This short text appears outdated or even naïve today, since Glissant and Chamoiseau’s reading of Obama seeks to inaugurate new narratives of American historical and political time that seem entirely ... [Show full abstract] foreclosed by the arrival of Donald Trump on the world stage. And yet I argue that we can recuperate and reactivate utopian threads in Glissant and Chamoiseau’s text that provoke us to reread contemporary U.S. politics in the light of these imagined futures that never came about. What appears at first glance to be a fantastical reading of the Obama presidency actually opens up new ways of imagining utopian political strategies today.

Article

Functional profiles of online explanatory art texts

April 2019 · Corpora

Kelly J Cunningham

Writing about art and the teaching of art writing are becoming important issues in the art world. Furthering our understanding of art texts can inform the practice and teaching of art writing. In an effort to expand linguistic understanding of art writing, this study examines a corpus of 180 online explanatory art museum texts from the online collections of nine US museums using a functional ... [Show full abstract] profiles perspective. I use cluster analysis to group the 180 texts into functional profiles based on their use of twenty-one linguistic features. The cluster analysis resulted in five clusters that are interpreted functionally: Cluster 1 (n=56), ‘descriptive information’; Cluster 2 (n=30), ‘expanded form – adding interpretation and process’; Cluster 3 (n=40), ‘contextualising’; Cluster 4 (n=8), ‘process and interpretation with agency’; and Cluster 5 (n=46), ‘narrative focus’. It is posited that this understanding of online explanatory art museum texts can inform the teaching of future museum professionals.

Article

Madame de Maintenon and the Literary Personality of Madame de Genlis: Creating Fictional, Historical...

January 1995 · Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Bonnie Arden Robb

The preoccupation of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis with virtue has earned her scant praise. Genlis's contemporaries, noting a discrepancy between her moralizing writings and her worldly life, saw fit to judge, not only her texts, but her personal characteristics and conduct. While absolving her of hypocrisy, more recent criticism has deemed her moralizing works lacking in creativity. Both ... [Show full abstract] positions misconstrue the relationship between real and fictional virtue that Genlis established, while pointing nevertheless to its importance. Insight into that relationship, crucial to understanding Genlis's literary personality and appreciating her creativity, may be attained by examining her predilection for the historical novel and her cultivation of that genre in Madame de Maintenon.

Article

Institutions had 'established themselves in the landscape like Egyptian pyramids': Volker Braun's li...

January 2012

Heinz-Peter Preußer

The GDR was and is - even two decades after its demise - the fixed point in Volker Braun's life's work. Indeed, his life and work can neither be separated from each other, nor from the East German state. The three reflect each other in Braun's texts as a 'Life/Work/GDR', in a range of dissolves between fiction and reality, including autofiction. His writing is, however, less a fictional ... [Show full abstract] embellishment of biographical experience than an imaginative experimentation with different positions in society. In Hinze-Kunze-Roman, Braun represents the key dilemma of institutional stagnation, presenting it as something which can be overcome by force of will, in the form of a universalised Eros. In contrast, Braun's texts after the Wende seek to come to terms with the loss of this projection, which implies both self-denial and a reduced form of life.

Article

On the concept of evolutionary typology: The example of a typology of classifier systems

December 2012 · Lidil

Colette Grinevald

This paper traces back the steps in the elaboration of a typology of noun classifier systems and classifiers in general, which have been the subject of concerted research but also of some controversy over the last decades. The leading theme of this "narrative" is the contribution of functional-typological linguistics to this debate, in association with a working typology approach and with ... [Show full abstract] illustrations from analyses of classification systems in Amerindian and Australian languages, but also in ancient languages.

Article

Action research and narratives: ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’ 1

June 2007 · Educational Action Research

Melanie Walker

This paper explores the central place of stories and narratives in action research practices and accounts to argue that it is hard to imagine how we might do or write about action research in a non‐storied way. The paper argues that good stories help us to think well and more wisely about ourselves and our practice. An historical example is chosen to illustrate the compelling potential of stories ... [Show full abstract] about real people and real lives, followed by a teasing out of six methodological issues that arise.

Chapter

Contexts

January 2011

Ana Nunes

My interest here is to consider a number of texts that significantly determined the development of twentieth-century African American women’s writing. Issues from the accuracy of portraits of black American experience to the establishment of an exceptional literary tradition are evident in the work published particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth century. My focus is not simply on the ... [Show full abstract] themes addressed but also on the terms of narrative strategies and how literature and politics are closely linked.

Article

A claim on the reader

January 2007 · Proceedings of the British Academy

Greg Currie

Imaginative engagement with a narrative has two aspects. We can ask what it is that we imagine, and we can ask how we imagine it. Answering the second question requires the notion of a point of view; narrative readers imagine the events of the story from a certain point of view, which involves having certain kinds of responses to the events and to the characters who act them out. I argue that ... [Show full abstract] narratives often prescribe a certain point of view for imaginative engagement, just as they prescribe what is to be imagined. They generally do not do this by explicit direction; an imaginative point of view is best understood as something of which the narrative is expressive. Narratives may be expressive in this way without our having to think of them as intended by their authors to be so. How does the narrative's being expressive of a point of view provide the motivation necessary for the reader to adopt that very point of view? The question has no simple answer, and I concentrate on one of many relevant factors: the reader's tendency to respond imitatively to their own imaginative construction of the narrative maker's mind. I embed the discussion within a general view of the relations between language and communication: a view which denies that communicative content can be derived from - or is even systematically related to - the meanings of the words and sentences in a text or utterance.

Chapter

Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Domini...

March 1989

Lynn Hunt

This chapter reviews the work of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, which is most closely linked with literary theory. It also shows clearly how literary approaches have enabled White and LaCapra to expand the boundaries of cultural history, yet it remains sensitive to the reasons for the continued marginalization of such work. It then illustrates the great variety of literary influences at work. ... [Show full abstract] LaCapra stresses (like White) that historians inevitably use narrative structures to define historical knowledge and to separate history from other forms of writing, but he also argues (like White) that these categories must not be taken for the thing itself. Both White and LaCapra indicate that historians might play a greater role in contemporary cultural debates if they opened the discipline to alternative narrative forms. LaCapra wants to connect the historiographical conception of reality with those areas of meaning that literature explores in its greatest works.

Article

Pynchon's dustbin of history: Collecting, collectivity, and care for the past

January 2012

R. Bellin

The almost endless profusion of historically specific detail is central to the historical consciousness enacted in Thomas Pynchon's long novels. With particular attention to Against the Day, Pynchon's longest novel, considered both in the context of his other works and against other American writing of the early 2000s, this paper argues that we should read collecting both as a topos within the ... [Show full abstract] novel and as a description of the novel itself-as Pynchon's way of creating or imagining collectivity. Reading Pynchon's collections as collectivities is a way of foregrounding the historical politics of the novelistic imagination-reading for the pluralism and the radical-democratic imagination at the core of Pynchon's distinctive narrative form.

Article

Full-text available

Una novela oscura : Desplazamientos

May 2016 · Cuadernos LIRICO

Ezequiel De Rosso

With little attention paid to it by the critics but often upheld by its author, the novel Desplazamientos occupies a singular place in Mario Levrero’s output. Belonging to a little commented phase of his work in which Levrero writes other texts of “unstable description” such as Caza de Conejos and Ya que estamos, Desplazamientos stands out as an important text in the levrerian corpus because of ... [Show full abstract] the radical nature of the techniques he employs. In the novel, he deploys a narrative paradigm that allows the imagining of different possibilities of storytelling. This article studies this narrative strategy and its relationship with certain tendencies in contemporary Latin American narrative.

Article

Must We Always Historicise?

December 2008 · Foreign Literature Studies

Terry Eagleton

There is a performative contradiction in Fredric Jameson' s famous "Always historicise!" which is both a trans-historical imperative and a historical act. Another mistake that Jameson and most of the cultural left make is to imagine that there is something inherently radical about historicizing and returning literary texts to their historical contexts. In fact it is a position that the left share ... [Show full abstract] with the right; the quarrel between the two camps is not in the first place over whether to read historically, but over the way one reads history itself. For Marxists, history is a narrative of civilization and barbarism, emancipation and oppression at the same time. The task of literary criticism is to X-ray documents of civilization so as to reveal within them the traces of barbarism. As what Benjamin said, the past is in some sense alterable, as the present and the future come to rewrite it and cast it in a radically new light. This has an application to literary matters as well. Criticism is in one sense part of the work itself. The work is inherently incomplete and it is a never-ending process of supplementing it.