Towards a GIS Analysis of Literary Cultures: The Making of the Slovenian Ethnoscape Through Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-218
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan ◽  
Joh Dokler

This article presents methodological starting points, heuristics and the results of a GIS-based analysis of the history of Slovenian literary culture from the 1780s to 1941. The ethnically Slovenian territory was multilingual and multicultural; it belonged to different state entities with distant capitals, which was reflected in the spatial dynamic of literary culture. The research results have confirmed the hypotheses of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture,’ which were based on postulates of the spatial turn: the socio-geographical space influenced the development of literature and its media, whereas literature itself, through its discourse, practices and institutions, had a reciprocal influence on the apprehension and structuring of that space, as well as on its connection with the broader region. Slovenian literary discourse was able to manifest itself in public predominantly through the history of spatial factors: (a) the formation, territorial expansion and concentration of the social network of literary actors and media; (b) the persistent references of literary texts to places that were recognized by addressees as Slovenian, thereby grounding a national ideology. Taking all of this into account, and based on meta-theoretical reflection, the project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities and spatial literary studies.

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.


Author(s):  
Michel Biron

L’écrivain devient rarement écrivain par les voies traditionnelles de l’école. En ce sens, il constitue toujours à quelque degré un autodidacte. Toutefois, la valeur sociale d’une telle figure, qu’il s’agisse de l’écrivain lui-même ou d’un personnage de fiction, varie considérablement selon les cultures et les époques. Dans La Nausée de Jean-Paul Sartre, l’Autodidacte est un personnage complexé qui envie le savoir et la culture de Roquentin. À l’inverse, on trouve nombre de textes littéraires où la figure de l’autodidacte est valorisée. C’est particulièrement vrai dans l’histoire de la littérature québécoise, depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Cet article propose d’en faire la démonstration à travers une série d’exemples tirés de chacune des périodes, mais en insistant sur la figure de « l’autodidacte exemplaire » propre à la Révolution tranquille, qui oppose la culture comme désir à la culture comme héritage scolaire. Abstract A writer becomes rarely a writer through studying at school. Speaking of a self-made writer would seem tautological since every writer could pretend to be one at some extent. Nevertheless, the social value of the self-made writer and of it’s literary representations vary a lot from a country to another, and from a period of time to another. In La Nausée from Jean-Paul Sartre, the character of “L’Autodidacte” envy Roquentin’s background and try to walk in his step. At the opposite, there are many examples of literary texts where the self-made is appreciated, if not admired as the true possessor of culture. It’s often the case in the history of Quebec’s literature, from 19th century up to now. This article try to demonstrate such fortune of the self-made by studying examples of Quebec literature chosen in each of the main periods, but especially during the “Révolution tranquille” around the “autodidacte exemplaire” who refuse the culture as inheritance and worship culture as personal desire.


Author(s):  
Abigail Williams

Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. This history explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the time, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part that they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, the book offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Orsini

Tales are ubiquitous in the literary culture of pre-modern North India, as elsewhere, and they come in all shapes, languages and inflections. For this reason, tracking them allows us to travel into and across most of the milieux of this multilingual literary culture. But precisely because of their ubiquity, when we move from the micro level of individual texts to the macro level of literary culture and historical processes, it becomes difficult to say anything more than ‘they were there, they circulated, they usually retold the same stories in new ways or mixed familiar elements to produce new narratives’. Yet if we pay precise attention to their articulation and re-articulation of cultural and social imaginaries, the particular linguistic textures and aesthetic emphasis, material form and evidence of patronage, the shifting extent of circulation and popularity, we can use the longuedurée history of the katha genre to illuminate the historical dynamics of cultural and aesthetic change in the region in ways that intersect, connect and question macro-historical narratives of dynastic and epochal change.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Juvan

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-65
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson

This article highlights Sylvia Lynd (1888–1952) as an important interwar ‘middlewoman’, arguing that Lynd's professional work and identity as book club judge, reviewer, publisher's reader and literary hostess, had a significant impact on contemporary print culture. It argues that the networks around the Lynds’ set in Hampstead are an important, if overlooked, part of ‘the social spaces and staging venues’ where literary modernism happened (in Lawrence Rainey's influential terms). With a methodology grounded in feminist research and recoveries of early twentieth-century women's diverse contributions to print culture, the core of the essay considers Lynd's work for the Book Society selection committee and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglais. Making use of publisher's records and other archival sources, including Lynd's unpublished diaries and correspondence, the article sets out Lynd's shared reading and decision-making with Hugh Walpole on manuscripts for the Book Society as a dialogic, collaborative reading practice, placing her work as book club judge as part of a long history of sociable reading practices. The article further explores the textual implications of Lynd's work as book club judge and shows how her editorial interventions made a tangible, documented impact on the pre-publication history of literary texts, in this case George Blake's The Shipbuilders (1935) and Eric Linklater's Juan in America (1931). This work of editorial revisions/censorship is an aspect of the textual interventions of celebrity book club judges that is not well known, and that archival research gives us unique access to.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-146
Author(s):  
Lü Pan

After decades of fierce political struggles in the Mao era, the People’s Republic of China has strived economically under the open-door policy since the end of the 1970s. However, the still firm national monuments that weathered the social vicissitudes are left open to the question of how they could be incorporated into the new national ideology. In comparison to Beijing, Shanghai’s overwhelmingly predominant image centers on its role as the economic dragonhead of China. This article argues that Shanghai, exactly because of this ostensibly apolitical profile, provides a rarely discussed but highly meaningful approach to examining the dynamics between contemporary Chinese commemorative culture and the postsocialist urban spatial order. Unlike the East European cases, the “critical juncture” of ideology in China is invisible in the official narratives of the monuments. In some circumstances, the renovation of old memorials seem to fulfill the task of glorifying a certain past but in effect, it leaves the place a self-enclosed venue that sheds the rest of the city from the ideological burden. In other cases, some monuments of the seemingly core nationalistic narratives are marginalized. What’s more, new attentions are now drawn to the memorials for the history of “others” in the name of cosmopolitanism. The invisibility of the commemorative narratives speaks directly to the perplexity of assuming national identity in contemporary China. In the light of Prasenjit Duara’s idea of “bifurcated history”, national memory culture in Shanghai suggests the multiple possibilities of deciphering the city’s past and its future.


2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Corse ◽  
Saundra Davis Westervelt

We use the reception history of Kate Chopin's The Awakening to study the social context in which and processes through which literary texts are evaluated. We explain The Awakening‘s ascendancy from an initial negative critical position in 1899 to its current canonical status by the emergence of new “interpretive strategies” for understanding and evaluating texts. The dominant interpretive strategies of nineteenth-century reviewers sentimentalized women as selfless wives and mothers responsible for moral purity, making it difficult to construct a valued or fruitful narrative from The Awakening. Late-twentieth-century feminist interpretive strategies, however, were highly productive tools for rereading The Awakening, generating a socially resonant narrative focused on the search for an independent female self. Most important, we show that analytic attention to interpretive strategies allows sociologists to analyze both the meanings constructed from texts and the differential judgments attached to them under varying interpretive strategies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Parehau Richards

<p>Throughout the twentieth century Te Whānau-a-Apanui scholars continued to assert distinctive features of Te Whānau-a-Apanui identity through both literary and non-literary texts. Roka Pahewa Paora contributed to this important work by producing Māori texts for Māori language students and the community. Those texts became well-known in the field of Māori education for asserting distinctive features of te reo o Te Whānau-a-Apanui. This thesis explores a selection of tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui, kōrero tuku iho and taonga tuku iho, to illustrate how Roka and other Te Whānau-a-Apanui scholars before and after her have embraced and passed down tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui by renewing or extending core elements, otherwise referred to in this thesis as the iho, of earlier tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui.   Specifically, this thesis examines Roka’s published writings ‘Ka Haere a Hata Mā Ki te Hī Moki’ (Paora, 1971) and ‘He Kōrero Mō te Mahi Wēra i Te Whānau-a-Apanui’ (Paora in Moorfield, 1992) as extensions of earlier tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui about moki and whales. My analysis focuses on how Roka applied the knowledge, language and history of earlier tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui to her writings to assert te reo o Te Whānau-a-Apanui. Therefore, this thesis uses a tukunga iho framework to illustrate familial and intellectual connections between and across a selection of tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui and the tribal scholars that produced them. Roka’s writings and archive are repositories of important tukunga iho and provide connections to tribal, Māori and non-Māori scholars who offer insights and interpretations of mātauranga Māori that have been applied to Māori studies paradigms and kaupapa Māori. This wider range of knowledge, language and historical sources also help me to show how tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui contain important insights into the social, cultural and economic contexts in which my ancestors embraced, extended and passed down tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui. Overall, this thesis offers twenty-first century interpretations of tukunga iho a Te Whānau-a-Apanui and how they assert te reo o Te Whānau-a-Apanui.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-314
Author(s):  
Manish Kumar

In Hindi literature, 'Padmavat' is Daidipyaman Nakshatra. Jayasi created this epic in the 16th century in the typical Awadhi language. The sweetness, emotional beauty, Sufi spirituality and historicity of its language is not seen. The poet has created this epic with the sum of folk, imagination and history. Jayasi has created the 'Padmavat' by combining the legend of Jauhar of Padmini, the queen of Choudaur, in the legend of the popular queen and Sugge of Awadh province. This epic is a mirror of medieval India. It shows the social, cultural, political and historical splendor of erstwhile Indian society. Various scholars of Hindi literature have examined the historicity of 'Padmavat' in their own way. It is possible to test its historicity with important historical sources such as archaeological remains, inscriptions, contemporary literary texts and history books. Before examining the historicity of this work, it is mandatory to get information about the history of its creator. हिन्दी साहित्याकाश में ‘पद्मावत’ दैदिप्यमान् नक्षत्र है। जायसी ने 16 वीं सदी में ठेठ अवधी भाषा में इस महाकाव्य का सृजन किया था। इसकी भाषा की मिठास, भाव सौंदर्य, सूफी अध्यात्म और ऐतिहासिकता देखते नहीं बन पड़ती है। कवि ने इस महाकाव्य का सृजन लोक, कल्पना और इतिहास के योग से की है। जायसी ने अवध प्रांत की लोकप्रचलित रानी और सुग्गे की कथा में चिŸाौड़ की रानी पद्मिनी के जौहर की कथा का सम्मिश्रण कर, ‘पद्मावत’ का सृजन किया है। यह महाकाव्य मध्यकालीन भारतवर्ष का दर्पण है। इसमें तत्कालीन भारतीय समाज की सामाजिक, सांस्कृतिक, राजनीतिक और ऐतिहासिक वैभव दिखाई देता है। हिन्दी साहित्य के विभिन्न विद्वानों ने ‘पद्मावत’ की ऐतिहासिकता की परीक्षा अपने-अपने ढंग से की है। महत्वपूर्ण ऐतिहासिक स्त्रोत जैसे- पुरातात्विक अवशेष, शिलालेख, समकालीन साहित्यक ग्रंथ एवं इतिहास की पुस्तकों से इसकी ऐतिहासिकता की परीक्षा संभव है। इस रचना की ऐतिहासिकता की परीक्षा से पूर्व इसके रचनाकार के इतिहास के विषय में जानकारी प्राप्त करना अनिवार्य है।


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