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Literary Representations (literary + representation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

Book-History Approaches to India: Representations of the Subcontinent in the Novel and Verse, 1780,1823

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2010
Ashok Malhotra
Literary representations of India in verse and novels written by British authors during the period 1780,1823 have been approached by contemporary scholars either from the postcolonial perspective of relating the fiction to the shifting relationship between colonizer or colonized, or to correlating portrayals to elitist political debates taking place within the metropole. The argument proposes that forthcoming scholarship should adopt a book-history approach to the topic which would add an important contextual dimension to the readings of fictional texts and understanding of a whole set of British cultural attitudes towards Indians. To this end, it proposes that further critical analysis of British India fictions could situate recurring tropes about India in relation to the demands and prevailing fashions of the literary marketplace, and determine how the varying perceived cultural status and the internal development of the two literary modes affect portrayals of the subcontinent. [source]

August 1961: Christa Wolf and the Politics of Disavowal

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2002
Charity Scribner
Throughout her career Christa Wolf has circumvented any explicit reference to the Berlin Wall. Although Der geteilte Himmel reaches its climax in the summer of 1961, the Wall does not figure in this novel. None the less it provides a framework for the narrative through its absence. Wolf's latest novel, Medea, also organises itself around the tropes of walls and borders. Today, forty years after Berlin's division, one could easily dismiss Wolf's writing because of her ,blind spot'vis-á-vis the Wall. But to do so would forfeit Wolf's subtle handling of literary representation, prohibition, and disavowal. This essay argues that Wolf's elaborations of disavowal play a critical (but as yet unexamined) role in the continuing debate over the politics of memory that has come to define German studies. Freudian theories of repression and fetishism are engaged to discern the structures of disavowal that give form not only to Der geteilte Himmel and Medea, but also to Wolf's most important writings on ethics, ,Selbstanzeige' and ,Nagelprobe'. The essay concludes that authentic memory does not reconstitute a homogeneous image of the past. Rather, as Wolf demonstrates, it reawakens the antagonisms that forever thwart the resolution of and in any narrative. [source]

Access and Agency in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam: Early Modern Closet Drama and the Spatialization of Power1

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2006
Carol Mejia-LaPerle
This essay was runner-up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. Numerous critics have explored the stoic sentiments in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), especially the ways in which female characters negotiate the demands of patriarchal force, while expressing a conscience contrary to those demands. However, this essay examines the material conditions necessary for pursuing stoic ideals, prompted by the fact that Cary uniquely depicts female resistance of tyrannical conditions in distinctly spatial terms. Her closet drama consistently deploys literary representations of space to ask important questions about gendered subjects: How is space an expression and enforcement of power upon women? How can spatial configurations be manipulated to alter or circumvent the effects of tyranny? This essay argues that Cary's closet drama depicts power as a force that organizes environments; that is, spatial arrangements that regulate characters' behaviors are also the material manifestations of authority through which the discourses expressing female agency are constructed and contained. Since closet dramas were not written for public performance but for consumption within a domestic setting, spatial arrangements are apprehended through, indeed are never prior to, the act of reading. The reader perceives the play's landscape , the play's space , through the characters' language. This study tests the reciprocity between space and words, specifically the way spatialization in the play facilitates the processes and practices of female speech. [source]

Literature, Pornography, and Libertine Education

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 1 2004
Jørgen Dines Johansen
The objective of this article is not to write an apology for pornography, not because it is impossible to defend, but rather because it has been done so brilliantly by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay ,,The Pornographic Imagination''.1 The objective is to analyze a certain kind of literary pornography from both literary and psychological, here psychoanalytic, points of view. The term covers, basically, pictorial and literary representations of sexual activities. Literary pornography has been cultivated in drama, poetry, and prose fiction, whether short stories or novels. Furthermore, there are representations of sexual activities in the visual arts and literature considered great by any artistic standard, and then there is a tremendous lot of mere trash. Finally, pornography is not something given once and for all, but a designation used relative to the norms of a given group at a given time. Much of what our great-grandparents, grandparents, and even our parents considered pornographic, seems to most of us today endowed with a certain innocence and sentimentality. To encompass all the facets of this subject in a single article is impossible. This essay considers a certain aspect of genre convention: pornography presented in a framework of education. [source]

Diminished men and dangerous women: representations of gender and learning disability in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Britain

BRITISH JOURNAL OF LEARNING DISABILITIES, Issue 2 2000
Patrick McDonagh
Summary The present article explores the relationship of gender and learning disabilities in early- and mid-nineteenth-century literary representations of people with learning disabilities. Literary texts are useful historical documents because these often foreground how learning disabilities worked symbolically in a social context and enable us to examine the ideological forces shaping notions of learning disabilities. The images explored in the present study suggest some common cultural themes. Men with learning disabilities were understood as being diminished, somehow lacking an essential component of masculine identity. Women, on the other hand, were often reduced to the essential, yet disruptive element of feminine sexuality, or later in the century, were conceived as deviant from the feminine norm in their carnality. [source]