Interpretive Context Matters: Isaiah and the African Context in African Study Bibles

The chapter analyzes three examples of the genre Study Bible in Africa, discussing how they express African contextual concerns in their respective interpretations of Isaiah. The three include a Roman Catholic one (characterized by Catholic inculturation theology), a mainstream Protestant one (characterized by conservative evangelical theology), and a Pentecostal one (characterized by concepts of prosperity gospel and spiritual warfare). Three conclusions are reached. First, that the genre should attend more to definitions of context, not only cultural but also denominational and ideological aspects. Second, the purpose of the comparison of ancient text and contemporary, interpretive context should be clarified. And third, as far as content is concerned, readers of a Study Bible should expect to find information about literary and historical questions.

Troubling Masculinities

The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil. The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

From the Ground Up

The first chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “From the Ground Up: Thinking about Location and Literature.” It discusses concepts of region in everyday discourse and in scholarship. It reviews past studies of literary regionalism, and tests received opinion against available empirical evidence about the circulation of regional writing. Polarized critical views can be incorporated into an account that attends to both the substantive and the relational aspects of place and regional writing. The notion of the chronotope, originated by Mikhail Bahktin, enables an understanding of the centrality of time in narratives about particular places. The opposition between the country and the city (as analyzed by Raymond Williams), and the powerful racialized notion of civilization, provide necessary groundwork for understanding the form. The chapter ends with an explanation of why the book has been framed as a genre study.

Persuasiveness in Political Discourse on Twitter

The article focuses on the question of new communication form appearance – the internet communication, namely political internet communication, that furthermore influenced the appearance of the new genres, among which we can find twitting. The active twitting usage with the communicative aim in political sphere puts the question about language learning namely about the means of expression of the persuasive language influence in the analyzed genre, as the persuasive language influence function is one of the most important functions in political internet-communication from psycholinguistic point of view. The research process found out the range of verbal expression meanings of explicit and implicit persuasiveness. To the verbal meanings of implicit persuasiveness, we can refer the usage of imperatives and imperative constructions, explicit performatives, constructions with modal verbs, short sentences, and slogans. The verbal meanings of implicit persuasiveness include rhetorical questions, affirmative sentences, and famous people’s citations. To the special language meanings, which encourage the influence on the addressee we also refer the usage of elliptical sentences, parcelation, repetition. The mostly used lexical and stylistic meanings, that encourage the fulfillment of the main purposes of political discourse is the usage of metaphor, metonymy, irony, personification and oxymoron. The research allowed us to come to conclusion, that the English-speaking political internet-communication is characterized with the usage of the same verbal appellation meanings as traditional communication. But we can also outline the meanings peculiar only to the internet communication and especially the twitting genre. For the research methodology we took out modern scientific conceptions. The research methodology was developed according the framework of genre study, psycholinguistics, 2.0, virtual genre study. According to the aim and tasks, general and linguistic research methods were used.

The Two cines con niño

The Two cines con niño is the first genre study of Spanish-language child-starred cinemas. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of cinema from Spain and how the child-starred genres use the concept of childhood to define the nation’s past, present, and future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Latin American cinema, this monograph examines dialogism in aesthetics, narratives, and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina. In-depth inquiry within its pages examines films by Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio del Amo, Montxo Armendáriz, Benjamín Ávila, Juan Antonio Bayona, José Luis Cuerda, Guillermo del Toro, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Arantxa Lazkano, Luis Lucía, Paula Markovtich, Javier Ruiz Caldera, Carlos Saura, Imanol Uribe, Ladislao Vajda, Agustí Villaronga, and Andrés Wood.

In the Land of Buried Tongues

This work treats the events of 1971 in East Pakistan as a liberation war in order to contend with its memories, inheritances, and silences. Delving primarily into literature from Bangladesh, it also considers the tripartite site of history by bringing in responses in fiction from India and Pakistan. In addition to history and testimonial writing, fictional narratives are critical to understand the complex traces of those intense nine months in the history of the subcontinent. To facilitate this, the book takes stock of memoirs and testimonies of women and men in separate sections in order to underline the gendered nature of war. It then moves to fiction from Bangladesh and in the final chapter from Pakistan and India as well. Since the memories and representation of war is inseparable from its aftermath, these works clearly hint towards the unfinished task of memorialization, which is a process that cannot be reduced to monuments commemorating victory or rationalizing of defeat/loss. It is true that 1971 has been a casualty to nationalist historiography in all three countries. But as this reading of memoirs, testimonies, and fiction will demonstrate, it is possible to listen to the buried voices of 1971 as much in nationalist accounts as in less compliant ones. If we are to appreciate the violent, traumatic legacies of 1971 and its continued relevance to our lives, a multi-genre study involving victims of wartime rape, memoirs by combatant and non- combatant men, military accounts, and fiction from transnational sites might add to our current understanding of 1971.