Literature

25 pages, 362 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Artificial Flesh: Rights and New Technologies of the Human in Contemporary Cultural Texts

by Samir Dayal

Literature 2023, 3(2), 253-277; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020018 - 12 Jun 2023

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My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me [...] Read more.

My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works share a concern with the implications of a relationship, a shared or co-produced world, in which both humans and nonhumans have agency. I conclude by revisiting the bifurcated discourses of antihumanism, especially through a brief consideration of an Afropessimist critique of the category of “Man”, to ask: What status, affordances, and rights, should be extended to nonhumans: robots, anthropomorphized commodities, humanoids, AIs, or human adjacents, or to those excluded or abjected from the category of “the fully human”? Full article

11 pages, 285 KiB

Open AccessArticle

From Havana to Cádiz in the Imaginary of Women Writers of the Last Decades

by María del Mar López-Cabrales and Inmaculada Rodríguez-Cunill

Literature 2023, 3(2), 242-252; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020017 - 15 May 2023

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Abstract

In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena Lucía Portela, and [...] Read more.

In this essay, we intend to demonstrate how the cities of Havana and Cádiz became mutable literary subjects that accompany the female characters of the narratives of female writers of the past decades from Havana (Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Ena Lucía Portela, and Mylene Fernández Pintado) and Cádiz (Ana Rossetti and Pilar Paz Pasamar). The ironic and delusional visions of a ruined life due to the special period, economic crisis, and political xenophobia in Cádiz will be illustrated by Cuban-Spanish mapping of the analyzed authors’ works. Our hypothesis stems from the idea that there is a clear relation between the representation of the city and political, cultural, and patriarchal transgression that is quoted in these texts (Bataille), which relates to the experience of scarcity/poverty lived on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Our bibliographic search has focused on the literary expression of the experience of these cities from the point of view of female writers and protagonists. We concluded with a universal understanding of the experience of the space marked by literature and the gaze of women. Full article

11 pages, 292 KiB

Open AccessArticle

New Paradigms in French Historiography, or the Same Old Ones?

by Monica Martinat

Literature 2023, 3(2), 231-241; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020016 - 26 Apr 2023

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Abstract

This article presents some recent trends in French historiography that concern the relationship between history and literature. Among the recent developments are “experiments” carried out by a few historians, which are characterized by an explicit determination to focus on narrative, along with a [...] Read more.

This article presents some recent trends in French historiography that concern the relationship between history and literature. Among the recent developments are “experiments” carried out by a few historians, which are characterized by an explicit determination to focus on narrative, along with a willingness to share one’s own historical subjectivity. By going through some of the examples from this approach, this article highlights how these literary reflexes make important contributions. However, it also points out the weakness of this proposed method of making history on epistemological grounds. That is, it abandons the form of historical writing that requires distance and an appreciation that history’s vocation is to propose solid but uncertain propositions (to paraphrase Zemon Davis). By insisting on emotional and sensitive understanding, the knowledge gained from these experiments only questions the scientific aspects of history and history itself. This recent trend is not exactly new, as it evidently links up with some of the consequences generated by the linguistic turn. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemologies in 20th Century French Literature and Thought)

14 pages, 257 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Dirty Windows and Troublesome Things: The Problem of Object-Orientation in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie

by Andy Zuliani

Literature 2023, 3(2), 217-230; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020015 - 17 Apr 2023

Viewed by 1254

Abstract

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, [...] Read more.

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemologies in 20th Century French Literature and Thought)

16 pages, 1947 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Books to the Masses! An Investigation of Russian WWI ‘Dime Stories’

by Luca Cortesi

Literature 2023, 3(2), 201-216; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020014 - 08 Apr 2023

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Abstract

The impact of WWI on Russian society was immediately disruptive. This effect affected every sphere of social and cultural environs. Although previous research has established that WWI was a major topic of the cultural discourse of that time, the way in which WWI [...] Read more.

The impact of WWI on Russian society was immediately disruptive. This effect affected every sphere of social and cultural environs. Although previous research has established that WWI was a major topic of the cultural discourse of that time, the way in which WWI literature, and in particular consumer literature, contributed to the representation of war among the mass population deserves further research. By drawing a parallel with the phenomenon of the American dime novel, this study is grounded on the analysis of the style, content, structure, and even of the ‘mere’ appearance of some 1914–1916 ‘mass’ publications aimed at the broader public. The goal of this article, therefore, is to stimulate a consistent re-evaluation of this strand of ‘consumer’ war literature and to focus on its importance as a culturological tool to have a better understanding of the cultural environment of that time. Full article

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42 pages, 813 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Codex Visionum and the Uses of Greek Christian Poetry

by Laura Miguélez-Cavero

Literature 2023, 3(2), 159-200; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020013 - 23 Mar 2023

Viewed by 2573

Abstract

A systematic socio-cultural study of the uses of Christian poetry in the late antique Greek-speaking Mediterranean is still lacking. Most literary overviews restrict themselves to an overview of the extant texts and some programmatic reflections in the poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus. This [...] Read more.

A systematic socio-cultural study of the uses of Christian poetry in the late antique Greek-speaking Mediterranean is still lacking. Most literary overviews restrict themselves to an overview of the extant texts and some programmatic reflections in the poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus. This paper seeks to address this matter by a combined reading of the best-known poetic forms (including the programmatic reflections by Gregory) and the poems copied in the Codex Visionum (now in the Bodmer Collection). Since the edition of the latter was completed in 1999, they have often featured in studies on the origin of monasticism and are well known in papyrological circles, but have received insufficient attention from literature and cultural historians. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Greek Literature and Society in Late Antiquity)

14 pages, 341 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Crisscrossed Identities and Black Feminist Perspectives in Lucía Mbomío’s Novel Hija del camino (2019)

by Betsabé Navarro

Literature 2023, 3(2), 145-158; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3020012 - 23 Mar 2023

Viewed by 1365

Abstract

Some claim there is a lack of attention to black studies in current literary and academic fields in Spain. Even though there is an emerging wave of Afro-Spanish writers in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, many of them denounce the struggle [...] Read more.

Some claim there is a lack of attention to black studies in current literary and academic fields in Spain. Even though there is an emerging wave of Afro-Spanish writers in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, many of them denounce the struggle they experienced to see their stories published and state that Afro-Spanish literature is absent from Spanish universities’ curricula. Among the recent black voices that have achieved recognition in Spain is journalist and writer Lucía Mbomío, who condemns, in her debut novel Hija del camino (2019), the traumatic experiences that black women undergo with racism and sexism in Spain. With the aim of giving representation to the literature of Afro-Spanish women writers, the present article analyzes Mbomío’s novel from the perspective of black studies, black feminism, and cultural studies. Full article

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Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2 (June 2023) – 7 articles

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