Article

Culture and memory in cormac mccarthy's the road

January 2015
Knjizevna Smotra 47(1):63-74

Authors:

Novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy represents a post-apocalyptic state and a world in which, by losing culture, the safety for those who managed to survive the catastrophe disappeared. Resorting to cannibalism and aggression, where the last remaining people destroy each other, the novel brings up a pessimistic vision of the destruction of mankind. The novel's protagonists, a man and a child the father and the son represent those rare examples that try to preserve cultural values and, therefore, their humanity. The aim of the essay is to examine and problematize the concept of memory in post-apocalyptic narratives, where memory represents the way in which protagonists try to preserve and reconstruct culture, its values and ideals. [GRAPHICS] .

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

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

Chapter

Humankind Must Know Itself

January 2015

Peishu Liang

In this essay, I try to summarize what I understand to be my father’s core message. I concentrate on his last book, published in 1984, which was his last systematic philosophical utterance and final advice to humankind. It urges humanity to work toward self-understanding.

Article

"Road of giants": Nostalgia and the ruins of the superhighway in Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Califo...

January 2006

H.J. Burgess

In this essay I look at two novels in Kim Stanley Robinson's THREE CALIFORNIAS TRILOGY, The Gold Coast (1988) and The Wild Shore (1984), in which the image of the superhighway represents a site for the tension between progress and nostalgia and plays a key role as marker of future human survival. These books, as alternative futures, provide us with a choice: will we continue to create the ... [Show full abstract] conditions that will lead to our destruction, a highway to a future of ruins? Or will we try to harness the best of what technology has to offer in order to avert such a catastrophe? I argue that a focusing point for these debates is the superhighway, as a representation both of the "road to the future" and a road to nowhere. The THREE CALIFORNIA novels are concerned with finding a way to develop a balance between technological progress and the need for sustainable resource consumption. But both The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore also engage critically with the narratives of past and future expansion so evident in highway literature of the twentieth century. It is these narratives, embodied in the ruins of the superhighway, that I believe are important.

Article

Ironia della sorte: Paolo monelli davanti e dietro la Grande Guerra

January 2018 · Italianistica

Fabrizio Scrivano

The essay reviews the Paolo Monelli's writings dedicated to the First World War, integrating the reading of the published writings with the examination of the manuscripts and typescripts conserved in 'Fondo Monelli', at the Biblioteca Statale 'Antonio Baldini' of Rome. In this way it's possible an overall view (from 1917 to 1968) of the different ways and the different attitudes that the writer ... [Show full abstract] and publicist Monelli assumed with respect to the task of telling the war experience. Inter alia, the examination of the papers (the unpublished notebook and the intermediate notes and drafts) allows us to reconstruct some fundamental aspects to understand the genesis of his most successful text, Le scarpe al sole, which deserves to be placed alongside the greatest narratives of the Great War, and to appreciate the peculiar ironic style of the author.

Book

Reconstructing Historical Memories

November 2018

Esmaeil Zeiny

This book focuses on Reconstructing Historical Memories of critical historical occurrences that have had a dramatic impact upon the development of human history. While the essays in this book analyze a range of circumstances that foreground issues of memory, history and narrative, this book offers primary approaches to understanding the reconstruction of historical memories. Moving across ... [Show full abstract] geographical borders and political boundaries, this book seeks to link the past with the present as this linkage is essential for a good understanding of the condition of being human. It also highlights that reconstructing historical memory, which redefines the past and national identity, significantly affects the interpretation of the present and the perspective about future. This book increases public consciousness in changing the narratives around what reconstruction of historical memories means and what we can learn from it. There is much in the book that has never been explored in books of this ilk. As such this book offers a wide range of arguments and approaches and provides a powerful case for the importance of reconstruction of historical memories.

Article

"A Whole Other Story": The Electronic Narrative of Illness

February 1997 · Literature and Medicine

Faith McLellan

Faith McLellan studies a cyberspace narrative of illness that grew out of a father's anguish after his son was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The essay discloses ways in which illness narratives on the Internet challenge our conceptions of authorship, readership, and closure. In these narratives, argues McLellan, communication is often spontaneous, yet the text still achieves cohesion ... [Show full abstract] despite, or perhaps because of, its multiple and sometimes chaotic voices.

Article

Full-text available

Once again Sérgio and Gilberto Debates on Essayism in the Literary Supplement of Diário de Notícias...

September 2018 · Varia Historia

This article deals with the debate between Sérgio Buarque and Gilberto Freyre - authors recognized as essayists in the 1930s - and the way they positioned themselves about this question in the literary supplement of Diário de Notícias. Holanda reverberates debates developed in the university circles and aligns himself in defense of academic studies, arguing that they could renew the intellectual ... [Show full abstract] life of the country and rupture with essayism. On the other hand, defending his intellectual project that began with Casa Grande & Senzala, Freyre held the essay to be a legitimate scientific form. He also suggested that it could renew academic studies carried out in other countries. The article investigates the debate to reconstruct the forms that it gained when it was produced, seeking to elaborate a genealogical reconstruction of the essay category at the moment in which it was constituted as a negative evaluation of the narratives about Brazil. © 2018 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. All rights reserved.

Article

Full-text available

Literature and National Redemption in W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction

January 2009

Peter Morgan

W.G. Sebald's critique of the state of post-war German literature in his essay On the Natural History of Destruction reflects the author's preoccupation with questions of national identity in the wake of Auschwitz. Had German writers created in literature a record of their human suffering and self-reconstruction, Sebald implies, the nation would have redeemed itself in human terms, rather than ... [Show full abstract] repressing its humanity in favour of the inhuman and uncultured efficiency and productivity of the West German Leistungsgesellschaft. The essay thus reproduces deeply entrenched associations of literature, the ideal, and redemption in the German tradition. It reiterates in academic and historical language the nostalgia, Weltschmerz, and displaced sense of loss that similarly characterise Sebald's prose narratives.

Article

D’un ton anti-apocalyptique : Après la fin du monde de Michaël Foessel et Récit d’un désastre de Mic...

October 2015 · Écrire l histoire

Catherine Coquio

This text discusses the importance and the limits of contemporary anti-apocalypticism, while reading Michaël Foessel’s book Après la fin du monde [After the End of the World], inspired by Kant, in counterpoint to that of Michaël Ferrier, Fukushima. Récit d’un désastre [Fukushima. Narrative of a Disaster], which is literary essay and testimony. With these two works, there are two very different ... [Show full abstract] critiques of an apocalyptic culture which reached a peak in 2012, the year these two books were published. This counterpoint captures the aporias of philosophical anti-apocalypticism from the perspective of certain events experienced from within or from as close as possible, more specifically, nuclear and ecological catastrophes, which involve another way of writing history and another relationship to time.

Article

Full-text available

Conceptualizing cultures of violence and cultural change

January 2007

John Carter Wood

The historiography of violence has undergone a distinct cultural turn as attention has shifted from examining violence as a clearly defined (and countable) social problem to analysing its historically defined 'social meaning'. Nevertheless, the precise nature of the relationship between 'violence' and 'culture' is still being established. How are 'cultures of violence' formed? What impact do they ... [Show full abstract] have on violent behaviour? How do they change? This essay examines some of the conceptual aspects of the relationship between culture and violence. It brings together empirical research into nineteenth-century England with recent research results from other European contexts to examine three aspects of the relationship between culture and violence. These are organised under the labels 'seeing violence', 'identifying the violent' and 'changing violence'. Within a particular society, narratives regarding particular kinds of behaviour shape cultural attitudes. The notion 'violence' is thus defined in relation to physically aggressive acts as well as by being connected to other kinds of attitudes and contexts. As a result, the boundaries between physical aggression which is legitimate and that which is illegitimate (and thus 'violence') are set. Once 'violence' is defined, particular cultures form ideas about who is responsible for it: reactions to violence become associated with social arrangements such as class and gender as well as to attitudes toward the self. Finally, cultures of violence make efforts to tame or eradicate illegitimate forms of physical aggression. This process is not only connected to the development of new forms of power (e.g., new policing or punishment strategies) but also to less tangible cultural influences which aim at changing the behaviour defined as violence (in particular among the social groups identified as violent). Even if successful, this three-tiered process of seeing violence, identifying the violent and changing violence continues anew, emphasising the ways that cultures of violence develop through a continuous process of reevaluation and reinvention.

Article

Full-text available

Crossing Borders, Changing Places: Immigrant America In A World On The Move

January 2014 · SSRN Electronic Journal

Ruben G. Rumbaut

The world is increasingly on the move. In 2013, the United Nations reported that there were 232 million international migrants worldwide, most of whom were born in the global South and migrated to the global North, reflecting widening global inequalities and intractable conflicts. These largely self-selected border crossers represent 3% of humanity; the other 97% are stayers, living in the ... [Show full abstract] countries where they were born. Their “changing places” are sites not only of cultural and demographic transformations, but also of social and political collisions that predictably elicit a range of nativist and exclusionary responses. More immigrants—a fifth of the world’s total—go to the United States than to any other country. This essay focuses on the story of “Immigrant America” over the past half century—from its historic nadir in 1970 to its resurgence as a Nation of Immigrants and now to Deportation Nation—from the Great Inclusion to the Great Expulsion. I examine the historic transformation of the U.S. into a new nation of immigrants along two narrative axes—diversity and inequality. The subtitle is a double entendre, referring at once to the country and to our book Immigrant America—new editions of which have been written and published in each of the past four decades as we seek continuously to grapple with a vertiginously changing world and with this “permanently unfinished” moving target of a society.

Article

Reinterpreting the Inner Self in Global India:‘Malevolent Mothers’, ‘Distant Fathers’ and the Develo...

September 2006 · Culture & Psychology

Sunil Bhatia

This essay provides an analysis and review of Dinesh Sharma's edited collection Childhood, Family, and Sociocultural Change in India: Reinterpreting The Inner World. The authors in this book provide a retrospective critique of Sudhir Kakar's grand narrative on Hindu psychology and childhood. While recognizing the tremendous intellectual significance of Kakar's book The InnerWorld: A ... [Show full abstract] Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, the authors in this collected volume make a case for reanalyzing and rereading this classic work within the contemporary cultural context of India. The review essay is organized around three significant themes of this book: (1) re-imagining the self in global India; (2) mothers, fathers and the development of self in Indian children; and (3) colonization, postcolonial identity and Indian psychology.

Article

Full-text available

Literary Journalism in Poland. The difficult legacy of Ryszard Kapuscinski's books

January 2013

Mateusz Zimnoch

The essay tries to draw out the origins of Ryszard Kapuściński’s narratives as well as to outline Melchior Wańkowicz’s (so called “The Father of the Polish Reportage”) heritage that is still visible in Polish contemporary nonfiction.