1,721,016 research outputs found
Moreau > Morel > Marienbad? From Beast Folk to Apparitions of the Living in H.G. Wells, Adolfo Bioy Casares and the Cinema
No full textThis chapter proposes an alternative derivation for the “meta-cinematic” theme and form of Alain Resnais’s enigmatic masterpiece, L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), Last Year in Marienbad, which reflects on the ontology of the medium itself. It traces them to a rather unexpected source—H. G. Wells’s scientific romances and short stories
Homage and Revision: Zadie Smith’s Use of E.M. Forster in On Beauty
No full textThis paper aims to assess the transformative use that Zadie Smith makes of E.M. Forster’s classic Howards End in her latest novel, analysing the convergences and divergences between both works. The key to Smith’s transformation of her intertext lies not only in the formal and thematic surplus of her work, but also in the connections that she makes with social comedies other than Forster’s. The essay demonstrates that On Beauty pays homage to an admired author, but also to the literary tradition of the English novel in which Smith inscribes her work. The analysis will also show how On Beauty throws light on aspects of its intertext and of Forster’s own politics which remain critically under-examined
Remembering Jonestown through the camp and the postcolony: A multidirectional reading of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise
Full text linkThis article explores the contribution of Fred D’Aguiar’s 2014 novel Children of Paradise to the conflicted memorialization of the 1978 Jonestown tragedy, where over 900 American citizens lost their lives in the Amazonian interior of Guyana. It argues that in his fictional revisitation of the massacre, D’Aguiar explores Jonestown as a multidirectional site of memory. By placing the tragedy in a historical and conceptual continuum that encompasses different forms of subjugation, including colonialism and its legacy in the post-independence Caribbean, but also totalitarianism and Nazi rule, the author gives Jonestown a global resonance that enlarges its significance, challenges understandings of it as a historical anomaly and enhances the humanity of its victims, revealing linkages between seemingly disparate developments and memories. The discussion draws on the theoretical insights provided by Michael Rothberg, Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others
Revisiting The War of the Worlds in Australian '(R)econciliatory' Times: Claire G. Coleman's Terra Nullius
No full textScience fiction offers unique imaginative spaces onto which to project and examine contemporary tendencies, problems and anxieties. In Darko Suvin’s words, it facilitates “a reflecting of but also on reality” (10). This chapter aims to discuss the various ways in which H. G. Wells’s iconic invasion narrative The War of the Worlds (1898), which famously references the Tasmanian Aboriginals, resonates in Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2017), a novel that offers a commentary on relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Australia.When Wells published his story in serialized form in the Pearson’s Magazine, he may have felt the need to rescue his readers, who probably feared that the Martians would win and colonize England, from this fatal denouement. But Coleman felt compelled not to spare them. She allows her aliens to win and to keep inflicting pain, in the hope that this exposure may move her non-Indigenous readers towards more empathetic positions regarding their Indigenous countrymen. War ends on a note of victory and regeneration. The narrator announces that healing will soon begin, and London will be great again. Coleman’s novel is ambiguously pessimistic. Imperial rule remains undefeated, natives and settlers remain two worlds apart. And yet, through small acts of human bonding, reconciliation 'writ small', the author points the way in the struggle for Indigenous reconciliation in Australia
“Our Landscape Is Its Own Monument”: Using “Muscle Memory” to Make Home Space in Alien Environments in the Work of Jade de Montserrat: Spaces in Transit
No full textVernacular black culture is often an unwritten one. Contemporary Black British artist Jade de Montserrat uses her own body in movement or stasis as cipher for personal and communal memory, to inhabit the gestures of her ancestors. She employs “muscle memory” to embody earlier black presences in her performances, and as a feminist artist, articulates the context of exploitative patriarchal relationships that have spectacularised and objectified the Black female body over the centuries. Her non-metropolitan British background, being brought up in rural Yorkshire, is an anomaly in a context where the urban and London-centric nature of debates about Blackness continue to have hegemonic power. In 2015 she made a film triptych, Clay, Peat, Cage, in collaboration with fellow Yorkshire filmmakers Webb-Ellis. In these films, she references and artistically reimagines her upbringing, narrating a rural and Northern Black culture in Britain and showing its connection to Black Atlantic dynamics to be as vibrant as in the metropole. Each film demonstrates different aspects of embodied Black history, from fugitivity to imprisonment, from violence to homemaking and from alienation to panoptical surveillance. Also fundamental to her praxis is her text-based watercolour Her Movement Creates a Muscle Memory (2016–2017), which etches out the words against a painterly background and indicates her belief that bodies carry traumatic histories so that memory is as much physical as mental. Her image of the “stripped migrant” illustrates the problematics of transporting diasporic cultures across geographies in the context of enslavement. For African Atlantic people, spaces in transit / spaces in stasis are often one and the same, confining and limiting freedom of expression and unhoming black presence. Montserrat’s work explores performative ownership of land that was unequally distributed and denied to black, female and working-class people, and invokes routes through its mobile mode, featuring her African diasporan body moving through the landscape—conjuring such black vernacular haunters of the British landscape as the itinerant fugitive slave James Johnson. This chapter investigates how Montserrat’s praxis uses her body to remember and conjure black presence in British landscapes where it has been hitherto marginalised and sometimes completely forgotten
“Perimeters of Grief”: los límites de la elegía en la poesía memorial de Fred D’Aguiar
Full text linkWhile Fred D’Aguiar’s preoccupation with acknowledging the dead and honoring their memory gives his work an idiosyncratic elegiac quality, it is with the publication of the poetic sequence “Elegies”, from the collection Continental Shelf (2009), that the author overtly pitches himself in the traditional terrain of the elegy as a poetic genre. This sequence, a response to the Virginia Tech shootings (April 16, 2007), the deadliest gun rampage in US history to date, invites critical attention not only because it remains critically unexamined, but also because through its title it presents itself as an elegy when an anti-elegiac turn has been identified in modern poetry. This paper will explore D’Aguiar’s intervention in the debate surrounding elegy’s contemporary function as a genre which oscillates between the poles of melancholia and consolation, thus contributing to shaping the contours of an ancient but conflicted poetic form for the 21st century. I will be arguing that D’Aguiar’s poem suggests that for elegy to serve the troubled present it may benefit from the cultivation of an unembarrassed attachment to the deceased, from avoiding depoliticizing tragedy and from the exposure of its socio-historical underpinnings. In sum, it should be open to engaging with such critical issues as the struggles of collective memory, or the turning of grief into mass-mediated spectacle.Si bien la preocupación de Fred D’Aguiar por el reconocimiento y memoria de las víctimas de la historia le otorga a su trabajo un idiosincrático carácter elegíaco, es en su publicación de la secuencia poética “Elegies”, de la colección Continental Shelf (2009), donde el autor se sitúa en el tradicional terreno de la elegía como género poético. Esta secuencia, una respuesta a la masacre de Virginia Tech, el tiroteo más letal de la historia de los Estados Unidos, invita un análisis crítico no sólo porque no ha sido objeto de estudio sino también porque, a través de su título, se presenta al lector como una elegía, cuando un giro anti-elegíaco ha sido identificado en la poesía moderna. Este artículo pretende explorar la intervención de D’Aguiar en el debate en torno a la función contemporánea de la elegía como un género que oscila entre los polos de la melancolía y la consolación, contribuyendo así a perfilar el contorno de una forma poética antigua pero controvertida en el siglo veintiuno. Argumentaré que el poema de D’Aguiar sugiere que para que la elegía se adapte a las necesidades del presente se puede beneficiar del cultivo de un vínculo melancólico con los fallecidos, debe evitar despolitizar la tragedia e intentar exponer sus raíces socio-históricas y, en resumen, debe estar abierta a tratar temas fundamentales como los conflictos de la memoria colectiva, o la conversión del dolor en espectáculo mediático
Multicultural children's literature and values education
Full text linkEste trabajo se centra en la noción de educación en valores y la urgente necesidad que tienen los profesores y educadores de promover valores democráticos dada la creciente diversidad de las sociedades contemporáneas. Pretendo hacer hincapié en las oportunidades que ofrece la literatura multicultural para niños para trabajar temas transversales tales como la educación en diversidad, para la tolerancia y la paz. Tras explorar los temas de la educación en valores, el potencial cívico de la literatura y el desarrollo de la literatura multicultural para niños, se analizarán cuatro textos publicados en los Estados Unidos. Tres de estos textos son libros ilustrados, lomás and the Library Lady (1997) de Pat Mora, Sittis Secrets (1994) de Naomi Nye e Hiroshima No Pika (1980) de Toshi Maruki; Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004) es un foto-ensayo de la autora Toni Morrison.This paper brings to the forefront the notion of values education and the pressing need for teachers and educators to enforce democratic values in our This paper brings to the forefront the notion of values education and the pressing need for teachers and educators to enforce democratic values in our[Archivio: /home/kike/Descargas/ailij/2009.pdf] increasingly diverse contemporary societies. I intend to emphasize the opportunities that children's multicultural literature offers for promoting such cross-curricular topics as education for diversity, tolerance or peace. After addressing the issues of values education, the civic potential of literature and the development of multicultural literature for children, four multicultural texts published in the United States will be presented as case studies. These include three picture books, Pat Moras Tomás and the Library Lady (1997), Naomi Nye's Sittis Secrets (1994), Toshi Marukis Hiroshima No Pika (1980), and Toni Morrison's photo-essay Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004). I will show how these texts promote positive images of minority children, cross-cultural understanding and habits of empathy
- …
