FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures

Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer addresses the multifaceted concept of cultural transfer through travel writing, with the aim of expanding our knowledge of modes of travel in the past and present and how they developed, as did the way in which travel was reported.
Travel as both factual and fictional— with authors and narratives moving between different worlds— is one of the many devices that demonstrate the fluidity of the genre. This fluidity accounts for the manifold and powerful influence of travel writing on processes of cultural transfer. This volume also illustrates that cultural transfer is frequently linked to issues of power, colonialism and politics. The various chapters investigate the transmission of other cultures, ideas and ideologies to the writer’s own cultural sphere and consider how the processes of cultural transfer interact with the forms and functions of travel writing.

At a time when we have all lived through profound and unexpected disruptions to our shared spaces, routines, economies, societies, and work-lives, this book considers the nature and implications of rupture, the commons, and their conjoining. Addressing rupture and disruption through the lens of literary and cultural studies, this volume traverses genres — film, fiction, theatre, poetry, and the graphic novel — and continents, and addresses histories and identities as ecologies. The focus is resolutely contemporary, with nearly all of the texts being analyzed produced within the last decade. Beginning with the history of, and debates about, Garrett Hardin’s famous “tragedy of the commons,” Ruptured Commons engages with texts and cultures of disaster wherein artistic expression becomes a form of protest and a path to change. This collection both critically examines our arrival at and understanding of this moment, and explores diverse, and hopeful, visions for the future embedded within contemporary culture.

The contribution that scholarly organizations make to the study of languages and literatures is a service to the value of systematically learning and using meaning—understanding that meaning operates in systems. Constructively speaking, these organizations support the teaching and research of our world’s experts in grammar, genre, medium, production, reception, exchange, critique, appreciation, and so on. More defensively, they are bulwarks against systems of misinformation, against the empowerment of misrepresentation and distrust between people.
The chapters in this volume range from the Old Testament to Facebook and from East Asia to West Africa via Australia, the Americas, and Europe. The scholarly strength forged across that range speaks to similar strengths that so many scholarly organizations devoted to studies in languages and literatures have cultivated and maintained—often in the face of government indifference or hostility towards the Humanities. Beyond Babel makes a powerful case for their potential.

The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.

The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography, the culture of the book, and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors, and, more recently, on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain, Protestant bastions in continental Europe, and America. Between the covers of Words, Books, Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon, Milton, Defoe, Dryden, Pope, Richardson, Swift, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street, the biographer John Aubrey, the lexicographer and biographer Johnson, the bibliophile Hollis, and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially, they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse, poach, snip, and savour a book’s every word and image.

How did Nordic culture become associated with the fuzzy brand “cool”, as by default? In Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History twenty-one scholars in collaboration question the seemingly natural fit between “Nordic” and “Cool” by investigating its variegated trajectories through literary history, from medieval legends to digital poetry. At the same time, the elasticity and polysemy of the word “cool” become a means to explore Nordic literary history afresh. It opens up a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches within a regional framework and reveals hitherto unseen links between familiar and less familiar tracks and sites. Following diverse paths of “Nordic cool” in respect to – among other things – nature, survival, love, whiteness, style, economics, heroism and colonialism, this book challenges all-too-recognisable narratives, and underlines the sheer knowledge potential of literary historical research.

As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences.
These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.
Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.

Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity, and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so, he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel, tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States, England, France, and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature, through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations, Cruz shows how, in Puig’s hands, the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts, films, discourses, and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.

The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

Here friends of Anthony W. Johnson honour him as a re-embodiment of the polymathic artist-scholar figure once observable in Ben Jonson, on whom he has done some of his most distinctive work. Part I of the book reflects his strong grounding in English literature and culture of the seventeenth century, with essays, not only on Ben Jonson, but also on university drama, on grammar school drama, and on humanist literary taste. Part II responds to his pioneering flights of culture-imagological time-travel to other periods, with essays on riddles through the ages, on Matthew Arnold’s doubts about Homeric pictorialism, and on anciently comic elements in George Gissing’s urban fiction. Part III celebrates his importance, both as scholar and artist, for the present day, with essays extending imagological analysis to the singer Nick Drake, to the avant-garde Danish poet Morten Søkilde, and to Sean S. Baker’s film Tangerine, plus a climactic celebration of Johnson’s own performances on solo violin and guitar as augmented by self-recording.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies, historical perspectives, and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.
Literary writers, through their handling of deixis, evaluative and modal expressions, tellability, politeness norms, and genre expectations, activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users, and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account, human beings are profoundly influenced by society, but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people, literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals”, who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.
As well as explaining these theoretical positions, the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers, including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

Where is Adaptation? Mapping cultures, texts, and contexts explores the vast terrain of contemporary adaptation studies and offers a wide variety of answers to the title question in 24 chapters by 29 international practitioners and scholars of adaptation, both eminent and emerging. From insightful self-analyses by practitioners (a novelist, a film director, a comics artist) to analyses of adaptations of place, culture, and identity, the authors brought together in this collection represent a broad cross-section of current work in adaptation studies. From the development of technologies impacting film festivals, to the symbiotic potential of interweaving disability and adaptation studies, censorship, exploring the “glocal,” and an examination of the Association for Adaptation Studies at its 10th anniversary, the original contributions in this volume aim to trace the leading edges of this evolving field.

Raul P. Lejano offers a boldly original synthesis of narratology, psychology, and human geography. This helps him articulate his two main insights: that our identity as individuals, though not completely determined by sociocultural factors, nevertheless profoundly reflects our embeddedness in particular places; and that the way we think of, or would like to think of, our own identity is most readily captured in the stories we tell about ourselves. Most revealing of all, he suggests, are our stories about coming to grips with an entire city, especially when our experience of it is actually one of dislocation or relocation – when we in some sense or other “lose” a city to which we have hitherto belonged, or when we “find” a new one. By way of illustration the book includes four specially commissioned autobiographical stories by writers of Filipino origin, which Lejano’s analytical chapters compare and contrast with each other within his interdisciplinary frame of reference. At once learnedly sophisticated and readably empathetic, his commentaries are underpinned by a basically phenomenological orientation, which leads him to view human individuals as essentially relational beings, naturally inclined to enter into dialogue with both their fellow-creatures and the larger environment.

In his account of text and textual meaning, Pettersson demonstrates that a text as commonly conceived is not only a verbal structure but also a physical entity, two kinds of phenomena which do not in fact add up to a unitary object. He describes this current notion of text as convenient enough for many practical purposes, but inadequate in discussions of a theoretically more demanding nature. Having clearly demonstrated its intellectual drawbacks, he develops an alternative, boldly revisionary way of thinking about text and textual meaning. His careful argument is in challenging dialogue with assumptions about language-in-use to be found in a wide range of present-day literary theory, linguistics, philosophical aesthetics, and philosophy of language.

David Lucking sees Shakespeare’s plays as negotiating tensions between a number of alternative, and sometimes mutually antagonistic perspectives. Some of these perspectives are associated with particular languages, cultures and texts, while others involve philosophical issues such as the nature of personal ontology and distinctions between reality and dream, being and nothingness. In elaborating his insights Lucking draws extensive comparisons with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and between Sophocles’ Theban plays and King Lear, and he also pays close attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. Re-assessing a wide range of earlier commentary, his nine essays confirm the lasting value of apposite contextualization in tandem with detailed close reading.

In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, formulating the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions, views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words, music, dancing, visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then, creative works have played a crucial role in realigning, reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends.
The volume is divided into three sections, each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds, and why does this matter?

The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.

A lively series of spatial turns in literary studies since the 1990s give rise to this engaged and practical book, devoted to the question of how to teach and study the relationship between all sorts of literature and all sorts of location. Among the many concrete examples explored are texts created between the early seventeenth and the early twenty-first centuries, in genres ranging from stage drama and lyric poetry to television, by way of several studies of fiction definable in a broad way as realist. Writers and thinkers discussed include Michel de Certeau, Edward Casey, Gwendolyn Brooks, Christina Rossetti, Dickens, J. Hillis Miller, Lynne Reid Banks, Heidegger, Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Stephen C. Levinson, Bernard Malamud, E.M. Forster, Thomas Burke and Samuel Beckett. The book is underpinned by the philosophical topology of Jeff Malpas, who insists that human life is necessarily and primarily located. It is aimed at students and teachers of literary place at all university levels.

How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over the last decade has charted the impact of new technologies on human conduct. It explores how changes in literary production, distribution, and consumption can be correlated to changes in social practices more generally. And it examines how (and if) contemporary media culture affects our understanding of literary aesthetics.
Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.

Do the notions of “World Lingua Franca” and “World Literature” now need to be firmly relegated to an imperialist-cum-colonialist past? Or can they be rehabilitated in a practical and equitable way that fully endorses a politics of recognition? For scholars in the field of languages and literatures, this is the central dilemma to be faced in a world that is increasingly globalized. In this book, the possible banes and benefits of globalization are illuminated from many different viewpoints by scholars based in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. Among their more particular topics of discussion are: language spread, language hegemony, and language conservation; literary canons, literature and identity, and literary anthologies; and the bearing of the new communication technologies on languages and literatures alike. Throughout the book, however, the most frequently explored opposition is between languages or literatures perceived as “major” and others perceived as “minor”, two terms which are sometimes qualitative in connotation, sometimes quantitative, and sometimes both at once, depending on who is using them and with reference to what.