1,721,116 research outputs found
Fluid Texts
Full text linkA “model of world literature that does not include orality is comparable to an act of self-amputation: it entails the excision of a huge field of human cultural endeavour”, argues Liz Gunner. As “verbal art, it belongs to a universal practice of making or creating in language” (116). And yet, many have noted, it has been enduringly difficult to include orature, “the great unwritten” (Levine), within models of world literature. Although the ubiquity, portability and power of orature on digital and live platforms are undeniable in our contemporary globalising moment, so little of it seems to qualify as “literature”, even in the most capacious sense of world literature. So much contemporary orature is worldly and travels “outside its culture and language of origin”, and thus qualifies as world literature according to David Damrosch’s circulation-based definition, but is it “read as literature”? Here the ball seems to drop. In this chapter I argue that a located (or multi-located), multilingual and ground-up approach to world literature, such as that of our MULOSIGE project, can help us out of this conundrum, as the work of Karin Barber and Liz Gunner has already shown. Barber and Gunner have studied the entextualisation of verbal arts and have compared forms of oral praise poetry and epic across African languages and traditions to show the enduring vitality of orature. My chapter will not compare across languages and traditions but takes one example, that of Bhojpuri songs in India and in Mauritius, which have been studied in great depth by Catherine Servan-Schreiber. Bhojpuri, spoken in eastern north India and with a rich tradition of oral epics and songs, was carried far and wide by migrant labourers and traders in India and beyond, most notably across the oceans along the coolie diaspora. In Mauritius, Bhojpuri became one of the linguae francae of the island alongside Creole, particularly in the agricultural inland, and the most recognised among the Indian languages there. It has acquired a status there that it has never quite managed to acquire in India. Over time, the position of Bhojpuri in Mauritius, and its relationship with Hindi and Creole, have changed, and the traditional (folkloric) repertoire of songs and performance style have been enriched and transformed through the encounters with Creole Séga, Western music, and Hindi film songs. If, as Servan-Schreiber notes, the history of Mauritian Chutney music and songs is tied to a great extent to the evolution in the status of Bhojpuri, this relationship is now reversed and it is the success of Chutney music that supports the status of Bhojpuri on the island. My presentation will reflect on the “footprint” of Bhojpuri song orature in India and Mauritius and its parallel lives and meanings in verse and prose genres within different languages (Bhojpuri, Hindi, Creole, English). In many cases Bhojpuri orature embodies an attachment to or longing for a rural identity, but in others it also imagines new presents and futures. Does this extensive footprint count as world literature
Introduction
Full text linkThis introduction sets the agenda for the volume by arguing for a closer look at fifteenth-century north India, a period of multilingualism, vernacularization, the evolution of script conventions, and the emergence of specialist literary and cultural producers who served new patrons. It charts the changing political landscape of the period, with its new towns and regional polities, showing how the new contenders for power from upwardly mobile martial groups were gradually brought under more settled, bureaucratizing regimes. Against prevailing wisdom, it argues for a continuum between oral and literary cultures, and for recovering histories embedded in texts and images generally dismissed as mythic or religious. It delinks religion from script while drawing attention to the proliferation of religious groups and vocabularies in the period
12. Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Full text linkWrestlers, mimics, actors perform, pandits recite the scriptures. Songs, sounds, stories full of rasa, it’s a good pastime, The fort people are happy and give handsome rewards. In the ecology of performance genres in early modern India, kathas or stories are pretty much ubiquitous. We find them recited at courts and in village assemblies, at the foot of citadels and in courtyards, in temples and sufi assemblies, even occasionally from the pulpits of mosques — and they are also one of the stan..
Traces of a multilingual world: Hindavi in Persian texts
No full textThis chapter offers an analysis of multilingualism and vernacularization in north Indian literary culture in the fifteenth century. Asking why there are few traces of Hindavi in Persian writings of the period, and similarly, little recognition of the large Hindavi Sufi corpus in Persian Sufi writings, the chapter problematizes questions of genre, translation, and recording; questions that cannot be understood through the histories of present-day Hindi and Urdu that have been split on community lines. Through an analysis of ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi’s Rushdnāma (ca. 1490), it points to the widespread oral practice of multilingualism that did not, however, often translate into textual traces. The chapter serves to pull together some of the dominant themes in the volume: of language use and the production of literature in the long fifteenth century
Il Mediterraneo dopo le primavere arabe. Alcune riflessioni sulle trasformazioni sociali, politiche, istituzionali
No full textIntroduction: Written and Unwritten Literary Geographies
Full text linkWorld literature as the new discipline of global literary and comparative studies has been focusing almost exclusively on written literatures, and specifically on the novel. Orature plays a determinant role in literary expression around the world, yet unwritten verbal arts have been explicitly excluded from definitions of world literature. This introduction discusses key terms like orature, oral literatures and oral traditions, and outlines how a focus on oral texts and performances enriches our understanding of literature, and of world literature.</p
Appetite Control and Glycaemia reduction in Overweight Subjects treated with a Combination of Two Highly Standardized Extracts from Phaseolus vulgaris and Cynara scolymus
No full textThe management of overweight may include the use of dietary supplements targeted to favor
the increase of the satiation associated with decrease in blood glucose and lipid levels.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of a dietary supplementation with an extract from Phaseolus vulgaris and Cynara scolymus, on the satiation, the glucose and lipid pattern.
A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial was performed in 39 overweight subjects (20 supplemented group, 19 placebo group) for 2 months. The modification of satiation, by Haber’s scale, was the primary end-point, and the variation of the glucose and lipid pattern, of the anthropometric parameters and of the psychodynamic tests score were the secondary end-points. At the end of treatment, the net change of the Haber’s mean score significantly increased in the intervention group. The net change of the glycemia and of the dietary restriction score of Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ), were significantly reduced just in the intervention group. Moreover, in the supplemented group, the Homeostasis Model Assessment, the Body Mass Index and the susceptibility-to-hunger score of the TFEQ, decreased significantly after intervention; these parameters did not change in the controls. This treatment appears potentially useful in the management of overweight and dysglycemia
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