Beyond the stereotypes: Mary Lavin's Irish women

This paper discusses Mary Lavin's place within the Irish literary tradition by means of an analysis of her representations of female characters. It argues, first, that Lavin's short stories depart from the short story tradition in general and the Irish short story tradition in particular by failing to subscribe to the cultivation of the romantic outsider and focusing instead on family relations and social responsibilities. Second, Mary Lavin's marginal position in a feminist or female literary tradition is explained through her unwillingness to portray women as victims and through the absence of a clear critique of patriarchy in her work. The paper then tries to characterise the relationship between individual and society in Lavin's short fiction in a more positive way, by focusing on the notions of individual fate and personal responsibility, which turn out to be crucial to Mary Lavin's philosophy. This philosophy is first discussed explicitly in a reading of the story ‘Happiness’ and ‘The Widow's Son’ and subsequently shown to lie behind the oppositions and dilemmas in several other stories. Finally, the article demonstrates how Lavin manages to realise her Nietzschean belief in an Amor Fati in some of her most positive female characters through a clever use of imagery and point of view, without thereby succumbing to sentimentality or cliché.     

Kamapim gutpela man: Papua New Guinean and Chinese refinery workers' changing understandings of becoming a good man

This article adds to research on emerging masculinities in the Pacific by analysing how Papua New Guinean and Chinese male employees' intercultural work experiences impact their perceptions of becoming a good man. The idea of a good man acts as a benchmark for assessing the adaptability of Papua New Guinean employees to new work environments and determining if Chinese colleagues are their desired partners. I illustrate this point by first considering ‘becoming’ as an alternate framework to the binary framework reflected in earlier research. I next describe how Papua New Guinean workers impress their Chinese supervisors through negotiations and concessions about industrial and subsistence farming time, as well as how working with Papua New Guinean workers alters Chinese employees' perceptions of work. Finally, I demonstrate how employment practices foster Papua New Guinean workers' evolving perspectives on becoming a gutpela man (‘good man’) and Chinese employees' evolving perspectives on becoming a good person, a vital route to becoming a chenggong man (‘successful man’). This article proposes characterizing emerging masculinities as hybrid identities that are context-dependent, interculturally exchanged and temporal by presenting two parties' new thoughts on becoming a good man. This article demonstrates modulatory power dynamics in the Chinese refinery based on a two-way narrative as opposed to portraying Chinese management as the dominating force.     

Domesticfication of urban space? Mothering and fathering while on family leave in the inner city of Helsinki

Cities have been described as masculine, but simultaneously emancipatory for women giving them the possibility to experiment with new identities. Women have gained access to the masculine sphere through working-life and financial independence. The new interest among families to live in inner cities has been interpreted as a way particularly for mothers to combine work with family life. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study, this paper investigates mothering and fathering practices on family leave in Helsinki, Finland. It explores how parenting is incorporated into the mothers’ and fathers’ urban self-identity, and argues that while parenting in the city traditional gender roles are blurred. The paper proposes the term domesticfication to describe how urban middle class mothering and fathering is being inscribed in Nordic contemporary urban space.     

The Feasibility of Teaching Scientific and Technical Russian without the Prerequisite of a General Russian Language Course

The plot of the short novel La mano en la trampa (Beatriz Guido, 1961) is about a young woman who becomes a heroine while trying to find out the truth about a family secret known as “El Opa.” Her work as a spy needs to be done in complete secrecy. Her family is behind her and she needs to escape from censorship. Her family story is similar to Argentina's context at that time when many people had to avoid the control and excessive power of Peron's government. Everything seems to be double in this novel: spaces, characters, life stories, ghosts, vampires, haunting and repressive atmospheres. All of these elements contribute to the gothic spirit in La mano en la trampa that I explore in this article.     

Emer Martin and multimodal family dysfunction: More Bread or I’ll Appear (1999)

Emer Martin’s More Bread or I’ll Appear (1999) revisits the discourse of the family in Ireland between the 1970s and the 1990s. This article contends that Martin intersects her work with family “issues” of the day so as to accommodate the representation of what can be termed as multimodal family dysfunction. She provides insights to the role of women, family and global female diaspora. This paper draws upon work by Diarmaid Ferriter, Alpha Connelly and the tenets of transnational feminism to account for the historical, ideological and sociocultural contexts of the time. For Martin, dysfunction is multimodal in the way in which the Irish family portrayed faces real “hidden issues” from different discourses. Her novel also focuses on the “wounds” that have been the effect of abuse, secrets, appearances, violence and lack of communication within the family. Another mode of Martin’s representation of dysfunction considers the transnational experiences of her female characters on the margins of an Ireland becoming global. Her novel invokes transnational perspectives so as to commit to dislodging nation-centric and family-centric visions of Ireland.     

‘Oh motherland I pledge to thee …’: a study into nationalism,gender and the representation of an imagined family within national anthems

In this paper, we argue that beyond understanding nations as imagined communities, the metaphor of an ‘imagined family’ or ‘filial community’ is a more useful concept towards understanding links between gender and nationhood as family relations in four ways: (1) providing a clear, hierarchical structure; (2) prescribing social roles and responsibilities; (3) being linked to positive affective connotations; and (4) reifying social phenomena as biologically determined. In order to empirically substantiate our claim, we will explore the prevalence and use of family metaphors in a key symbol of nationhood discourses. Through a qualitative analysis of national anthems as ‘mnemonics of national identity’, we demonstrate the widespread presence of family metaphors, discussing how they reproduce ideas of family and gender. Finally, we discuss how the ‘imagined family’ as present in anthems and other forms of national representation could inform future studies of nationalism and national politics.     

A Byzantine hagiographical parody: Life of Mary the Younger

Abstract

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life.     

挽王天培联不是刘莘园先生所作——读《辛亥革命老人刘莘园遗稿》发现的一个错误

2003年12月贵州人民出版社出版发行的《辛亥革命老人刘莘园遗稿》,其中《联语十则》之第八则有“功在定黔,罪在定黔,乱世为人真不易;朝言革命,暮言革命,先生结局竞如斯”这样一副挽联,根据有关文史资料所述,结合《遗稿》中的作者观点,以及联语中的错字来分析,可知该挽联并非刘莘园作品。     

Rites of passage: migrancy and liminality in Colum McCann's Songdogs and This Side of Brightness

This article deals with two novels by the Irish writer Colum McCann: Songdogs and This Side of Brightness. Reading the narratives of both texts through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, the essay reveals how McCann's characters undergo processes of liminal experience, which occasion structural changes in their familial relationships and in their individual identity. Turner's work primarily focused on the ritual behaviours of tribal groups and how liminality was used as a physical means toward spiritual ends; I diagnose similar dynamics in McCann's two literary fictions.     

RESTRUCTURING SOVIET AGRICULTURE: TOWARDS A SPATIAL DIMENSION

Recent Soviet reform legislation on agriculture (e.g., Land Law, Law on Property) is described and its implications for restructuring this troubled sector of the Soviet economy are surveyed. Collective, family, and individual contracting (and in some areas family farming on isolated farmsteads, or khutors) are altering the way collective and state farms are organized. Since provisions of the new legislation grant local soviets considerable authority in decisions on land tenure issues, the paper investigates how regional preferences and traditions in agriculture may reshape the rural landscape into one of greater diversity and increased spatial differentiation.     

‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness,Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these characters are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate. While the Victorian landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators at mid-century. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist responsibilities are fused with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory. In this article, I consider how landowners were written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with these expectations. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, which was covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way, as the novel serves as an important, but until now overlooked, reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of landowning masculinity in Castle Rackrent (1800). The Brontës repeatedly depict landowners retreating into the domestic sphere, which I argue forms an implicit narrative challenge to this figure’s social authority. This article opens up new ground for the examination of Victorian discourse on professionalization in relation to the Brontës’ works and a consideration of the ways in which this discourse was applied to landowners both in the periodical press and the Victorian novel.     

Representations of the Masculine in Tagame Gengoroh's Ero SM Manga

Tagame Gengoroh (1964–) is a Japanese manga writer who specialises in erotic gay male SM themed comics. Though prolific and having a substantial cult following in his native Japan, parts of the US and Europe, his work has not received the academic attention it deserves. This essay explores how Tagame constructs masculinity in three stories set in the context of wartime Japan. By drawing on several interdisciplinary areas to inform my reading of these narratives, I argue that, while on one level Tagame presents stories as graphic cartoon porn, on another level he weaves into the images and wording a much deeper sense of how homosociality can easily transform into homosexuality, despite his male characters being positioned as examples of hegemonic masculinity. The essay comments on how Tagame deterritorialises characters associated with wartime Japan such as the soldier, the POW and the kenpeitai by requiring them to engage in acts not typical of any definition of hegemonic masculinity, and then reterritorialises them into creating equally complex and horror-filled homosexual utopias.     

Becoming-minoritarian in Paco Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones

Abstract

Marginalization is at the core of Paco Bezerra’s work. The dramatic themes explored in his plays are varied, ranging from molestation, feminism, ecoterrorism, and immigration to bullying and many others. However, on another level throughout his oeuvre, there is always another element that stems from the marginalization aspect embedded in the dramatic conflict: a far more insidious and entrenched rotten core that affects everything and everyone on stage. While most of his characters are clearly beleaguered on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a combination of several biases that act unabashedly on the surface, there is also an unrelenting criticism toward a higher form of political oppression or authoritarianism that pervades each play. In this article, I examine Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones as enunciative acts of oppositional discursive strategy to show how the marginalization process, at the two levels sketched above, occurs. By analyzing the plays under Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minoritarian, minor literature and becoming-minoritarian, we can witness how marginalization functions to rupture the fragile order in Bezerra’s plays at both levels. Hereby we can see that the playwright has created works that belong to a minor language as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining the move from the particular issue at hand, the dramatic motor, to some larger unspecified phenomena, suggests a potentially troubling forecast for Spanish society.     

Sukli: uneven exchanges of care work of children left behind in Filipino transnational families

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complicated affective realities of children in the Philippines who engage in the labour of caring from the place of being ‘left behind’. I explore how children demonstrate care for their migrant mothers through various schooling tasks, undergirded by emotional dissonance, and often not through an idealized notion of love or tenderness. These acts demonstrate children allocate care work in transnational families in spite of complex emotional underpinnings I argue that the emotionality in those acts may be anger or frustration but children left behind are making sense of their labour through a culturally localized concept called sukli that connotes uneven exchange in care work to maintain the operations of a transnational family. The paper adds to our understanding of children’s affective experiences of migration within an Asian context.     

Francis Slade on Political Forms and Their Formation

The task of the article is to introduce the reader to one of the essential teachings of Francis Slade's understanding of political philosophy. After a brief presentation of why Slade examines political philosophy through the lens of form and what the principal political forms are, this article presents the form of premodern political philosophy by explicating what of its fundamental teachings modern political philosophy rejects and denies. The remainder of the work presents the modern form of the political by means of tracing the essential moments of the genesis of this form in Machiavelli's Prince and in Hobbes’ Leviathan. The argument focuses primarily on their revolutionary understanding of the human condition and its need to be transformed, or how man is no longer understood as a political animal and has necessarily become the subject of the state.     

As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book-based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.     

Mankind and its Histories: William Robertson,Georg Forster,and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate

The Scottish historian William Robertson's works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition […] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal “value” (Wert) of the various “races of mankind” (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ‘science of man’ in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forster's direct engagement with Robertson's work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man – built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertson's historiography was crucially indebted – is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ‘sciences of man’.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.