English and American Contemporary Literature

Among the papers left in the house in San Francisco that William Saroyan (1908-1981) built for his mother and sister after his first successes on Broadway in 1939-1940 was a totally unknown first novel, written in 1929 upon return from his first great travel experience, a failed pilgrimage to New York City.  He arrived in Manhattan by bus from San Francisco on his twentieth birthday, 31 August 1928, determined to make a breakthrough as a young writer.  He titled the work Follow and until its discover less than a decade ago, it was assumed he had not ventured into writing novels until after his early success in the short story (ten collected volume from 1934 to 1941) and the theater, starting in 1938.  The work dates five years before his story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” which launched his literary career with great fanfare and became the title of his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and other Stories (1934).  Follow, a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his first attempt to break away from home, was serialize in the Fresno Bee in 2008 during the centenary of his birth.  It was then recommended to the Press at California State University, Fresno, by Dickran Kouymjian, who divided the manuscript into two parts and wrote a long Introduction-Foreward contextualizing the work within Saroyan’s very prolific writing career.  William B. Secrest, Jr. edited the final volume and added to it five unpublished early stories from the dark New York experience he found in Saroyan’s archives at Stanford University.  Included in this excerpt from the book are its covers, the title pages, and the detailed Foreward.

Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), a fitting final part of the novelist's recent trilogy comprising American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), dramatizes powerfully the interplay of secrecy and self-transformation that determines human identity. Identity in its varied performative guises had always been a central problematic in Roth's fiction. For a novelist whose works register forcefully the solidity and specificity of the identifiable material world, a characteristic Roth shares with most nineteenth-century realist writers, the de-constructive turn of the narrative in this novel, which calls into question the es-sentialist notions of self, class, and racial identity, inaugurates a radical shift in direction. This decentering principle, not a wholly unfamiliar strategy in Roth's works, is notably at work in his earlier novels such as The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Counterlife (1986), Deception (1990), and Operation Shylock (1993). Telling a poignant tale of men and women driven by despair and angst in contemporary multicultural America, The Human Stain focuses on the constitution of identity and difference by negotiating the definition of self and the distortions it is subject to in the perception of the other. 2 Interestingly, the Rothian narrator's self-appointed role in reclaiming the complex identities of his protagonists by ascribing motives to their actions seems hardly objective because ultimately the images he carves of them are constructs of his own imagination. This constructedness of identity in Roth's fiction, if a typical postmodern discursive practice, not only disengages from the genre's characteristic reveling in dissipation and disputation of the self, but contrary to all expectations invests the self with the open-ended-ness of reinvention. The Human Stain effectively explores the transgressively audacious quest for freedom of its central characters that is shot through with the comedy of self-inventions and misreadings. If Roth's notion of identity is both fluid and protean, then the reader's conjecture of the novel as dissipating in a plethora of signifiers is paradoxically belied. On the contrary, provisional understandings of human action and character

Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Harris-Birtill provides a critical introduction to David Mitchell’s complete works, before discussing her experiences as organiser of the international David Mitchell Conference 2017, held at the University of St Andrews on 3rd June 2017, and its relationship to the special edition. Highlighting the dominance of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas in both Mitchell’s UK book sales and across current literary criticism to date, Harris-Birtill introduces the articles in the special edition, summarising the contributions of each essay. Drawing on the conference discussion, and the decision to include the author in the event, Harris-Birtill argues for the importance of openly discussing the scholarly issues and rewards of working with living authors in the field of contemporary literature.

Education is a sign and gift of the development and progress of human civilization. It simply functions to transmit a nation's historical, cultural as well as moral values (Sattar, 1982:12). It is also viewed as a subsystem of the total systems of the society that influences or is influenced by various social institutions, and ideologies like religion, family, state, politics, community, or social stratification (Buch,1974:92).However, thousands-years old human civilization has developed a universal definition or concept of education. Consequently, whenever any fallacy or phony practice is noticed in the case of education, it fairly becomes vivid to every conscious and educated man of every society. They can distinguish what is education and what is not. Here is a matter of deep concern regarding education in modern time that the absence or lack of emphasis on various fundamentals or basic aspects of education in modern curriculum. Studies and evaluation of syllabuses of different higher educational institutions, particularly of Bangladesh show that there is little or zero emphasis on the moral values of education in the programs of graduation and post graduation specifically. Curriculum designers seem to be too much technical or mechanical in their approach of designing curriculum. This tendency of over emphasis on technical or so called job oriented education misguides them to avoid covering the fundamentals or basic concepts of education while designing the syllabus. As a result, a kind of educational anarchy is going on in the realm of modern education. Learners are going far from attaining the essential purposes of education. They little think and care about what the goals and functions of education and an educated citizen are. They fail to fulfill what society expects from educated society. The society is thus also deprived from their expectation of benefit education and services of educated class. The current study is an effort to focus on what the actual concepts of education are and what is going on in modern practices of education in Bangladesh. Finally, it tries to find some solutions to bring the educational practices back to its origin or track to achieve the purposes of education.

The central idea upon which plays of Micheal Frayn are established is that a text or event is reborn and reconstructed every time it is recited or recalled. He sublimated history, physics, and various dramatic techniques into splendid drama to reflect upon the dilemmas thrown to the human in today's world of indeterminacy. It will be explored how Frayn has plied 'uncertainty principle' to drama with a distance from Becket and Brecht by analyzing three plays. Furthermore, his expressed perspective on the Brechtian notion of the 'alienation effect' is discussed. The plays chosen for this article areNoises Off (1982), Audience (1991), and Copenhagen (1998).

The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry-the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women's poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided.

Five:2:One Magazine (September 2016) http://five2onemagazine.com/3995-2micropoetry-by-m-a-istvan-jr-thesideshow/ M. A. ISTVAN JR., PhD steals whatever he can from supermarkets and more and more of his daily calories are coming from sugar packets and those mini jelly trays.

Semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research and Beckett’s theatre is one which engages a large spectrum of subjects and concerns that touch upon multiple aspects of human experience. The Beckettian dramatic text, as shall be demonstrated in this book, is a fertile ground for a semiotic investigation that is orchestrated by the profound insights of C. S. Peirce. As it applies semiotics to Beckett’s theatre, this book seeks to preserve, communicate and throw into relief those ‘universal values’ in the playwright’s works which remain unchallenged despite every change and every revolution in human societies.
What this book will hopefully contribute to the general canon of theatrical studies is its study of the Beckettian dramatic text not as a model of the ‘absurd’ tradition, but rather as a cultural product whose writer's thinking can scarcely be dissociated from the cultural environment within which it took shape, and whose deciphering requires the use of cultural codes and sub-codes which will undergo detailed examination in the course of analysis, a study that we may so generically call a cultural semiotic study of Beckett.

Pier Vittorio Tondelli, one of the most significant writers of the European Eighties, was arguably the first interpreter within the Italian literary milieu of Morrissey’s lyrics and imaginary. The artist from Manchester – first with his band, The Smiths, and then as a solo artist – established himself as the most “literary” songwriter in contemporary English culture, becoming a cult author thanks to works which span from the records Meat Is Murder (1985), The Queen Is Dead (1986) and Viva Hate (1988) to the book consecration of his Autobiography (2013), published in the Penguin Classics collection. Tondelli deeply engaged with the melancholy poetics that characterized Morrissey’s lyrics (spleen, Wildean decadentism, a desperate sentimentalism and a distinctive sexual ambiguity), going as far as to insert precise mentions and references from Morrissey’s works in his most famous novels. From Rimini (1985) to the spiritual testament Camere separate (1989), along with the miscellaneous nonfiction anthology Un weekend postmoderno (1990), Tondelli never ceased to dialogue with the British singer as a poetic coeval soulmate within an aesthetic paradigm of both the “artist as a young man” and the homosexual as a “forbidden hero”. Due to his early death, Tondelli never had a chance to meet Morrissey personally and Morrissey probably never read Tondelli’s works. This article seeks to investigate in detail the almost unexplored relationship between two crucial authors of the European Eighties, whose apparently separate rooms become connecting through literature, the search for a homeland, lost and found time.

de genere. Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
No 6 (2020)

"Kids Don’t Just Wanna Have Fun. Material Girls, Wild Boys, and the Melancholic Eighties"
Editors for this issue: Maria Giovanna Fusco (University of L’Aquila) and Fiorenzo Iuliano (University of Cagliari

A farewell letter published in the American daily newspaper of Paris, the International Herald Tribune, to Pulitzer Prize winning American author William Saroyan (1908-1981) after his death by a friend in Paris. It focuses on his life in the City of Lights and the apartment he lived in on rue Taitbout in the 9th arrondisement for the last twenty years of his life, moving back and forth from Paris to Fresno.

The aim of this article is to read Tracy Chevalier‟s novel Falling Angels (2001) in the light of the following concepts: Mikhail M. Bakhtin‟s dialogism and Carnival and Julia Kristeva‟s Semiotic and abjection. This article is divided into four parts: The first part points out important characteristics and implications of Bakhtin‟s concept of dialogism and seeks to demonstrate that Falling Angels can be considered as a dialogic novel. The second part explores Bakhtin‟s notion of Carnival and tries to show that Carnival is a central theme in Chevalier‟s novel. The third part discusses Kristeva‟s concept of the Semiotic and seeks to demonstrate its significance for the portrayal of the novel‟s main character, Kitty Coleman. The fourth part explores Kristeva‟s concept of abjection and tries to show its impact on several female characters in the novel. By reading Falling Angels through the lens of the Bakhtinian and Kristevan concepts of dialogism, Carnival, the Semiotic and abjection, t...

L'apertura all'Europa e al mondo occidentale, soprattutto alla cultura pop inglese e americana, avviata lentamente in Irlanda a partire dalla seconda metà degli anni Cinquanta, ha avuto un forte impatto sulla popolazione dell'isola. Fino ad allora, infatti, l'Irlanda e gli irlandesi erano rimasti confinati in una visione mitica dell'isola, alimentata soprattutto dalle parole dell'allora presidente Eamon de Valera. De Valera, che aveva sognato un'Irlanda puritana, cattolica, dedita all'agricoltura e di lingua gaelica, aveva invece favorito la nascita di una società forzatamente repressa, bigotta e costretta in larga parte all'indigenza. Una società simile, costretta tra Stato e Chiesa, risultò inevitabilmente attratti dalle immagini di benessere di città come Londra e Parigi che iniziavano ad arrivare attraverso la televisione. I vincoli imposti da de Valera, primo tra tutti la censura letteraria e cinematografica, ma anche il divieto di uso di sistemi contraccettivi, stavano già venendo meno a metà degli anni Cinquanta. Il contatto con le realtà esterne non fece altro che accelerare il naturale processo di emancipazione e la richiesta, da parte di una larga fetta della popolazione, di migliori condizioni di vita, soprattutto nelle zone rurali e di confine. Non tutta la popolazione irlandese era però pronta a sopportare lo shock culturale che colpì l'isola in quegli anni.

This paper is an analysis of a poem by Felicia Hemans, a 19th century Romantic woman writer. Focusing on “The Bride of the Greek isle”, the study argues that Hemans death poems explore death as a means of freedom from the patriarchal society. It is not as some critics said that Hemans had morbid passion with death, or that her domesticity in her poems is unbearable. The paper, therefore, explores the journey of the bride, in the poem, as a journey towards freedom not death, using Freud’s psychoanalytical division of human’s mind into Id, Ego and Superego. Meanwhile, the study analyzes the images that Hemans used, and their significance to the study of women’s freedom through death. This paper shows that the three divisions of the narrative poem parallel in the structure the division of Freud’s human mind into Id, Ego, and Superego.

Through an analysis of David Peace’s noir-fiction novel «Nineteen Seventy Four» (1999), I intend to explore how the author addresses a complex notion of the boundaries between empathy and rejection in relation to violence. Taking as a starting point Judith Butler’s idea of the body as a site where vulnerability and identity converge, I would like to approach how Peace uses the generic conventions of crime fiction to present a more ambiguous and uncomfortable idea of sympathy, for even the protagonist—the young crime correspondent of the Yorkshire Post in the year 1974—goes through different stages in terms of his likeability and vulnerability: while at first he hopes missing ten-year-old Clare Kempley be found dead so that he can cover a good story, he experiences a shocking change when confronted with the gruesome details and images of the torture and painful end that the little girl had to endure; furthermore, when he decides to try and, ironically, uncover the truth for the sake of justice, his own body becomes a tool to exert violence on others, at the same time that it makes him the object of torture and abuse. In this sense, by paying attention to how the novel revolves around the motif of the limits between “justified” and “unjust” violence, “crimes” and “pranks,” I will also aim at exploring how Peace takes advantage of a very political and graphic genre to venture wider thematic reaches that go beyond the microcosms of 1974 Leeds.

The aim of this article is to read Tracy Chevalier"s novel Falling Angels (2001) in the light of the following concepts: Mikhail M. Bakhtin"s dialogism and Carnival and Julia Kristeva"s Semiotic and abjection. This article is divided into four parts: The first part points out important characteristics and implications of Bakhtin"s concept of dialogism and seeks to demonstrate that Falling Angels can be considered as a dialogic novel. The second part explores Bakhtin"s notion of Carnival and tries to show that Carnival is a central theme in Chevalier"s novel. The third part discusses Kristeva"s concept of the Semiotic and seeks to demonstrate its significance for the portrayal of the novel"s main character, Kitty Coleman. The fourth part explores Kristeva"s concept of abjection and tries to show its impact on several female characters in the novel. By reading Falling Angels through the lens of the Bakhtinian and Kristevan concepts of dialogism, Carnival, the Semiotic and abjection, this article aims to elucidate the interrelationship between language, history, society, culture, the

The poem "Leaving the Tate", by Fleur Adcock, results from a commission by Tate Gallery (currently, Tate Britain) to the author. As she didn’t comply totally with the rules of the request, Adcock made it possible to elaborate a poem that does not limit itself to the (re) reading of one or more of the works of art showed in the museum. My essay argues that the poem presents a set of assertions not only about painting, but also about pictorial arts in general, which can be read as an art theory. / "Leaving the Tate", de Fleur Adcock, resulta de um pedido feito pelos responsáveis da Tate Gallery (actualmente, Tate Britain) à autora, ainda que a mesma explique que não cumpriu à regra o que lhe foi solicitado. Assim, permite-se fazer um poema que não se limita a ser uma (re)leitura de uma ou mais das obras de arte presentes no museu. A minha análise e reflexão irão no sentido de demonstrar que este poema apresenta um conjunto de asserções não só sobre a pintura mas também sobre as artes pictóricas em geral, transformando-se, desta forma, numa teoria de arte.

Produced on the fringes of philosophy and literary criticism, this book is a pioneering study which aims to explicitly address and thematize what may be called a “critical philosophy in the condition of modernism”. Its most important and original contribution to both disciplines is a self-conscious reflection on possible modes of writing philosophy today, and a systematic comparison with what happened in literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The volume is divided into six sections, where internationally renowned scholars discuss such pressing topics as the role of an unreliable narrator in a major philosophical treatise, the different mediums of art-production and how these impact on our perception of the Work itself, the role of narrative in animal ethics and the filmic adaption of a Modernist classic.

In order to understand A.S. Byatt’s short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” from her collection Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), it is necessary to understand the principle of dynamic tension that she employs in her work. As such, the initial part of this paper examines how Byatt engages in a constant process of critical examination using examples that prove pertinent to the story, such as her critique of D.H. Lawrence’s cosmological dichotomies of sun (masculine) and moon (feminine), her playful subversion of gender and sexuality in Possession, the deconstruction of postmodern theory in The Biographer’s Tale, and her fascination with retelling and subverting the myth of Melusine. The second part of the paper analyzes how these dynamic tensions manifest themselves in the story in question, from Byatt’s critique of Keats’s romanticism, to her subversion of the line between myth and reality, her examination of artistic realism and abstraction through the story's references to David Hockney, and her reframing of all these questions in terms of problematic cultural
assumptions about gender and sexuality. Altogether, these examples demonstrate the critical mindset at work in Byatt’s fiction, which never flinches from confronting the complexities that necessarily co-exist in life and art.

A. S. Byatt’s story “Racine and the Tablecloth” (1987) has received little critical attention, even though it appears at a pivotal moment in her career. Nonetheless, Byatt herself highlighted its importance when she published “Arachne” (2000), a reflection on Ovid that further articulates the inspirations and themes of the earlier story. Considering these two texts as companion pieces, this article sets out to unravel Byatt’s metaphor of the text as a fabric woven together from heterogeneous threads, first by setting this concept in the context of Roland Barthes’s theories about textuality, then by tracing how “Racine and the Tablecloth” is itself spun from a multiplicity of sources and ideas that exist in dynamic tension: Byatt’s own experiences, Euripides, Ovid, and of course, Racine.

This sold-out one-day conference on the works of British author David Mitchell was held at the University of St Andrews School of English on Saturday 3rd June 2017. The conference brought together twenty speakers from ten countries to discuss the works of British author David Mitchell, with a reading by the author and a visit to see his rare works held in the university’s Special Collections.

This academic conference on David Mitchell's works sought to broaden the understanding of this author's fictional world through critical discussion of these literary works and their wider cultural impact. It aimed to stimulate new and unexplored critical perspectives, bringing together those researching, teaching and studying this author's work.

The present article provides new insights into Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) and Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), by applying two Marxist notions, namely class struggle and subsequent alienation. It argues the Marxist orientation of such texts against prevalent postcolonial parameters. In Heart of Darkness, the Company arguably represents the bourgeoisie, while workers like Kurtz represent the proletariat. Kurtz exerts himself in order to procure ivory so that the Company makes profit. Thus, Kurtz is alienated from the product of his labor. As a result, he alienates himself from Africans as well as Europeans. In “The Man Who Would Be King,” the imperialist Europeans in India represent the capitalists, while Dravot and Carnehan represent the proletariat because they cannot benefit from the resources of India. Consequently, Dravot and Carnehan alienate themselves from Europeans and go to Kafiristan, where they establish themselves as...

The girl is walking with her father, her hand in his. Rain picking up, the man quickens a bit. Unsure how to adjust, the girl tries steps short and fast. But these have her surpass him, his arm stretched ahead. What she does, then, is break her rhythm, almost stop, at his full stretch of arm so that she may start again that way, short and fast, after lagging behind.