Reading,tourism, and geography consumption in literary places

Literature and geography are closely related in the worlds of consumption and mobility, and literature is often used as a resource for the tourism industry. The reading and consumption of literature, therefore, are related to visitation of a real place, and the roles of readers and tourists merge. The case of one literary tourism site, the San Mao Teahouse in the ancient town of Zhouzhuang in China, is selected to explain the complexity of reading and geography consumption in literary tourism. Observations and in-depth interviews were used to collect the data, and then the thematic analysis method was used. The study finds that tourists can also actively participate in the construction of literary places at destinations where relevant texts do not exist. In this kind of literary place, consumption occurs in multiple spaces as a result of tourists’ reading combined with geographical consumption. This study proposes a conceptual framework to analyze the geography consumption of literature in tourist destinations. The results show that the main geography consumption is reflected in three aspects, namely text, reality, and imagination. Based on their previous reading experiences, readers explore both the literary text and the reality. In this process, their imaginations always have an effect. Two distinguishing features have been found: first, through actively reading and decoding literary geography, the readers recreate a new fictionalized reality based on their imaginations. Second, the readers pursue the imaginative process from the real Zhouzhuang back to an imagined place that San Mao wrote about. The study contributes to the current literary geography research field, especially from the perspective of consumption. The study also provides a new perspective on literature in the modern world and practical implications for the design of literary tourist products and literary heritage conservation.     

A Feminist Literary Cartography of the Canadian North: Women,writing and place in Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

This article examines the idea of North in Aritha van Herk's (1990) Places Far From Ellesmere, a feminist rereading of Anna Karenin that is also an exploration of place—Ellesmere Island—and of gender, identity and belonging. I situate my reading of Ellesmere firstly within feminist literary theory, focusing on the concept of intertextuality and on the implications of the concept, from the perspective of feminist theorists, for the acts of writing and reading. I further contextualise van Herk's work by outlining the growing sensitivity to the complexities of writing Canadian space in Canadian literary criticism. The focus then shifts to Ellesmere, beginning with an investigation of van Herk's representational practices and philosophies, which are organised around a critique of the relationship between writing, gender and power. I argue that van Herk's insistence upon the power of feminist textual rereadings, an insistence that results from her aversion to authority, critically shapes her geographical imaginary, and her understanding of North. By extending the text and thereby the practice of reading to geography, van Herk makes possible a feminist representation or rereading of the North that simultaneously contests the conventions of literature, of place and of gender. Ultimately, I argue that it is van Herk's commitment to investigate the processes of representation in which she is engaged that makes her representation of the North such a valuable text for feminist and literary geographers.     

‘Come Buy,Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London

Placing Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ (1862) within the rich context of children's London guidebooks establishes a literary tradition in which readers are counseled to be wise urban consumers. During this period of rapid industrialization, exotic foods appeared on English tables amid public fears about food adulteration. Rossetti's poem and contemporary guidebooks transmit the anxiety surrounding food selection and consumption. From Aunt Busy-Bee's New London Cries (1852) to Aunt Louisa's London Alphabet (1872), London is depicted as an urban sounding board for commercial opportunities and moral choices. Removed from agrarian sites of production, urban readers are urged to select food according to the moral character of the vendor. In Rossetti's famous poem, Lizzie's and Laura's choices are immediately relevant to readers who hearkened to similar cries shouted daily in their neighborhoods. Rossetti herself would have heard them growing up in London, and these traditional cries bear semantic and metaphoric similarities to the goblins' cries. Apart from serving as inspirations for Rossetti's work, guides to the cries are also important documents in their own right, part of the corpus of near-forgotten work penned for children to amuse them in their idle hours as well as to instruct them in proper practices of commercial enterprise and moral consumption. The child reader is invited to know London and to absorb lessons by piecing together the letters and sounds of the metropolis.     

The First Circle and the Last Man: Solzhenitsyn's Political Science

The author examines David Hume's History of England to elucidate his thoughts on the subject of education. He argues that education's ability to improve moral judgments drives Hume's interest. With this in mind, the idiosyncratic review of English literature scattered throughout Hume's History can be seen in its proper light. Finally, the author suggests History represents Hume's best effort to develop a literary style capable of improving morals.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.     

Demetrios Capetanakis: a Greek poet (coming out) in England

Abstract

The homosexual undertones of Demetrios Capetanakis's English writings become evident when the work is seen in the context of the British literary circle that was instrumental in its publication. However, reading Capetanakis's poems as a 'coming out' narrative leads us to assess the mismatching interpretations of gender and sexuality in Greece and the West and the larger complications of identity and identifications. It is suggested that, in Capetanakis's work written in English, what seems at first a liberating expression of the 'true self' through writing can instead be viewed as positing the problem of the idea of a stable, unified and solid identity.     

WHAT IS HISTORY? WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Ivan Jablonka seeks something other than a mere combination of history, social science, and literature. He would like history, itself understood as a social science, to be a literature of the real world. He is also interested in literature informed not only by the results but, more important, by the forms of reasoning and inquiry of history and related social sciences (notably anthropology and sociology). Jablonka's own positioning within the Annales seems obvious, notably in his stress on cognition, problem‐oriented research, and the status of history as a social science. But the attention and research devoted in the work of scholars in and around the Annales to the relations among history, literature, and fiction have not been pronounced, and in this context Jablonka inflects the understanding of history in relatively underdeveloped directions. Despite possible disagreements one may have over specific issues, Jablonka's thought‐provoking book raises very important questions, opens many significant avenues of inquiry, and seeks a desirable interaction between historical and literary approaches.     

Beyond the One-World Frame of Fiction: The Breakdown of Reality in Hushang Golshiri's Stories

The debate over political commitment in Iran was never limited to adjudicating content: it was frequently a debate over form as well. In the realm of fiction, this debate fixated on realism, the nature of mimesis, and the autonomy of art and the literary text. Within a few short years after forming the iconoclastic journal Jong-e Esfahan in 1965 with a group of likeminded colleagues, the writer Hushang Golshiri had become the preeminent modernist fiction writer in Iran. His critical essays represented a passionate defense of aesthetic autonomy at a time when realism and, particularly, socialist and “engaged” literature were powerful shibboleths in the Tehran literary scene. This paper begins with a look at Golshiri's critical interventions in this debate and then moves on to show how the short stories he produced in the Jong era were an even more integral part of his response to the mimesis question. By reading his stories with a methodology drawn from “possible worlds” theories of narratology, Todorov's fantastic, and Golshiri's own theories, we see how these works break down the “one-world” frame of reality that realism takes for granted, and require the reader to grapple with multiple, often contradictory, possible realities in its stead.     

Freedom Isn't Free: Free Will in La vida es sueño Revisited

This article analyzes the structural composition of the chicana/o novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra, by Tomás Rivera, a book that has become a collective point of reference for chicana/o culture and community. Its structure will be explained, including the importance of personal and collective memory as elements that evolve every chapter as a fragmentary part of a whole. The classical concept of "art of memory" joined to the rhetoric of discourse opens a new perspective to analyze this fragmentation and helps the reader to understand the connection of its elements. Finally, the idea of "theater of memory" may be applied to the novel's chicana/o universe as a dramatic device for structuring the narrator's personal memories, achieving a final literary composition similar to a memorable, collective altarpiece full of impressive images from this community's daily struggle in the 1960s.     

Notes on Contributors

The author contends that Leonardo Sciascia's L’affaire Moro is not a work of non-fiction, as Sciascia proposed, but of historical fiction, and that Sciascia's Moro is a literary character, more a spokesperson for Sciascia's political views than a reflection of the historical figure. Sciascia's Moro embodies the same qualities as many of Sciascia's other protagonists, such as a radical individualism and willingness to sacrifice all in order to protect their dignity and liberty. What emanates from the text is a ‘postmodern’ blend that interprets and imposes a narrative hierarchy on events, and conveys a mental reality that need not necessarily coincide with what can be proven with evidence. In fact, Sciascia combines factual information and his own ‘conjectural knowledge’ to convince his reader of the ‘moral truth’ of his argument. Sciascia's is indeed a strong narrative in that it succeeded in shaping how the Italian public views to this day a critical juncture in its recent history.     

Today's State of Exception: Abu-Jamal,Agamben, JanMofiamed,and the Democratic State of Emergency

Abstract

This essay engages the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and the literary criticism of Abdul R. JanMohammed in critically exploring the contours of the present arrangement of democratic politics in the United States. Giorgio Agamben's exception theory of sovereignty and bare life are deployed in order to grasp the political meaning of surprisingly unprecedented and exceptional recent court rulings in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982. Abu-Jamal's experience of exceptional rulings also requires a critical elaboration of the racialized nature of American democracy. Thus, Agamben's theory finds a critical complement with the work of literary theorist Abdul R. JanMohammed, particularly JanMohammed's formulations of "social death" and the "dialectics of death" for "death-bound-subjects." The theories of Agamben and JanMohammed make clear the nature of Abu-Jamal's political struggle and the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed. The significance of Abu-Jamal's case thus becomes one of understanding the production and reproduction of the state of exception and the (im)possibilities of political transformation and liberation from the arrested state of democracy in the modern world.     

Thomas Arnold,Christian Manliness and the Problem of Boyhood

Thomas Arnold is a well-known character in Victorian Studies. His life and work are usually discussed in relation to his role as Headmaster of Rugby School and the development of the English public school system. His importance in the history of Victorian manliness has, by contrast, been somewhat obscured. When scholars do comment on his highly influential idea of Christian manliness, they tend to assume it was an overtly gendered ideal, opposed to a well-developed notion of effeminacy. A closer study of Arnold's thought and writings, as well as the reflections of his contemporaries and pupils, reveals rather that his understanding of manliness was structured primarily around an opposition between moral maturity on the one hand and immoral boyishness on the other. As this article argues, one of Arnold's chief concerns at Rugby was to ‘anticipate’ or ‘hasten’ the onset of moral manhood in his pupils. Moreover, his discussion of manliness in his role as Headmaster was closely connected to his work as a historian – another neglected aspect of Arnold's career. Inspired, above all, by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico, Arnold's historical writing is punctuated by the Vichian concept that nations, like individuals, pass through distinct stages of maturity, from infancy, through childhood, manhood, age and decrepitude. A close reading of Arnold's school sermons and other works on the peculiar dangers of boyhood suggests clearly that his historical writing inspired the notions of moral manliness and vicious boyhood that underpinned much of his educational thought.     

Scolding aesthetics in biblical literature

Abstract

The leading purpose of this study is to critically introduce a textual layer in the Bible which is both ideologically intriguing and aestethically appealing. The textual, Biblical layer in focus may be entitled “Scolding Aesthetics”, Accordingly, the Biblical narrator dexterously utilizes an intricate literary mechanism while harnessing it to a morel rebuke which he aims at a certain Biblical character (usually of high fame and reputation). Hence, scolding aesthetics may also be considered an intersection where Biblical literary artistry and moral values cross, interact and mutually produce a complex textual system.

The current study demonstrate the practice of that Biblical‐literary‐moral strategy through a close reading of three Biblical texts: Genesis, 12 (Abraham descends to Egypt) 2 Samuel, 11 (King David who does not participate in the war against the Ammonites) and Genesis, 3 (Eve's Fall). All three illustrations effectively surrender and display the aesthetic‐moral mechanism under consideration while plausibly proving as well how the “epidemic” textual layer of the Bible may deliberately lead astray. Accordingly, under the seemingly simple and “innocent” narrative one may excavate underlying currents of remarkably aesthetic intricacy which operates impressively as rhetorical tool of moral lesson.     

The Realization of Harmony in a Broken World: Reconsidering the Role of Ethics in Milbank's Ontology of Peace

Milbank's Christian ontology of peace indicates a way out of the contemporary crisis of Western democracies. Milbank argues that politics should have a positive and communitarian goal, and that contemporary liberalism fails insofar as it is preoccupied with the limitation of evil, and insofar as it presupposes a fundamentally egoistic anthropology. Milbank's alternative harmonizing vision of reality and humankind has been criticized for preempting all too quickly a harmony which has not yet been realized, and for thereby undermining the crucial role of reactive ethical laws and human work for the realization of true harmony in a world marred by a tragic dimension. Contrary to this criticism, this article advances the claim that Milbank pays too little attention to the ways in which real harmony is already being realized in the world, which is why he presents his ontology as an ideal toward which an entire society should work, under the guidance of ethical laws. A reading of Schillebeeckx's more positive reception of liberalism will serve to illustrate the political consequences of a position that focuses more on the already realized harmony in this world than on an ideal harmony.     

“Boundless Compassion”: The Contemporary Relevance of Schopenhauer's Ethics

Schopenhauer had important things to say about ethics in both normative and meta-ethical senses, but his impact on the evolution of moral theory has been minimized by the unfortunate neglect of his philosophy in general. A contemporary assessment of his ethical views reveals that they are both imaginative and interesting, not least because they challenge assumptions held by more canonical figures in the history of philosophy, both before and after his time. Since the roots of ethics are currently being vigorously re-examined, it is regrettable that Schopenhauer's ideas have been omitted from mainstream discussion in the field. I attempt to remedy this lack by investigating how his ethics of compassion contributes to the following areas: reconciling ethics with strict determinism; naturalizing ethics; developing the philosophy of education; seeking inner peace and world peace; re-visioning our relationship with non-human animals and the environment. As this list indicates, Schopenhauer's moral theory has relevance for a much wider audience, beyond the limited sphere of professional philosophy. And because the world is in dire need of moral rejuvenation, any inspiration provided by a major thinker such as Schopenhauer should be heartily welcomed. While certain internal problems are posed by his metaphysical and epistemological doctrines, we can see past these in order to appropriate the living insights still to be found in Schopenhauer's ethical thought.     

Antimodernist Antecedents in Early Canadian Modernism: Archibald MacMechan’s “A Ballade of Canadian Literature” and F.R. Scott’s “the Canadian Authors Meet”

ABSTRACT

Archibald MacMechan’s regular column in the Montreal Standard entitled “The Dean’s Window” (1906–1933) is an important index to educated antimodernist literary values. MacMechan brought his reading of world literature into his appraisals of the Canadian scene, through his groundbreaking work, Headwaters of Canadian Literature(1924). In a 1912 “Dean’s Window” column, MacMechan, a published poet, opened with a poem of his own, “The Ballade of Canadian Literature,” which anticipated F.R. Scott’s “The Canadian Authors Meet”—itself a seminal work of early Canadian modernism. By no means binaries, the degree to which modernism and antimodernism could resemble each other is manifest in MacMechan’s and Scott’s poems, even though Scott’s poem eviscerates the Canadian Authors Association, an organization of which MacMechan was a founding member.     

Spinoza's counter-aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.     

The voice of the dead king Chindasuinth: poetry,politics, and the discourse of penance in Visigothic Spain

Around ad 653, Eugenius II, bishop of Toledo, composed a first‐person poetic epitaph for the deceased Visigothic king Chindasuinth (r. 642–53) in which the monarch is made to speak with self‐deprecating candour. This paper offers a reassessment of the poem's language and rhetorical strategy by situating it within contemporary discourses surrounding royal admonition and penance. Rather than interpreting Eugenius's composition as an act of defamation, as the majority of critics have done, it reads the poem as a dignifying literary expression of atonement. This reading corresponds with other specimens of Eugenius's poetry and evidence from a developing literary culture at Chindasuinth's court.