Childrens Literature最新文献

{"title":"Nonhuman Subject and the Spatiotemporal Reimagination of the Borderlands in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange","authors":"Hee Park","doi":"10.3390/literature2040023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040023","url":null,"abstract":"In Tropic of Orange (1997), Karen Tei Yamashita uses literary imagination to challenge the settler-colonial discourse on space and time in the Americas. The influence of Latin American magical realism on Yamashita is most pronounced in the orange, a nonhuman object imbued with human agency. The orange magically initiates cross-border movements of people that disrupt the binaries of local/global, East/West, and North/South, challenging the unequal distribution of freedom of movement across the globe. In this paper, I engage with Wai-Chee Dimock’s concept of “deep time” to discuss the temporality of such border crossings. I propose that the cyclicality symbolized by the orange provides an alternative to linear settler-colonial management of spacetime.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91113578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: Finding Human Agency in a Commodified Techno-Culture","authors":"Ahmad A. Ghashmari","doi":"10.3390/literature2040022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040022","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses the commodification of the human experience in late capitalism as depicted in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and the potential of technology in helping the human subject in evading commodification. The novel shows how the virtual world and the physical world can become mutually supportive in allowing the characters to search for meaning, pattern and wholeness by using technology as an empowering force for the human subject while managing to avoid being consumed by a powerful capitalist market. The novel’s protagonist’s success in using technology as a humanizing force proves that humans can thrive within its sphere without necessarily being absorbed or overwhelmed by it.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84046367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Magic Realist Unconscious: Twain, Yamashita and Jackson","authors":"T. Tatsumi","doi":"10.3390/literature2040021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040021","url":null,"abstract":"The literary topic of Siamese twins is not unfamiliar. American literary history tells us of the genealogy from Mark Twain’s pseudo-antebellum story The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), Karen Tei Yamashita’s postmodern metafiction “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation and the Deconstruction of Stereotype via the Absurdity of Metaphor” (1999), down to Shelley Jackson’s James Tiptree, Jr. award winner Half-Life (2006). Rereading these works, we are easily invited to notice the political unconscious hidden deep within each plot: Twain’s selection of the Italian Siamese twins based upon Chang and Eng Bunker, antebellum stars of the Barnum Museum, cannot help but recall the ideal of the post-Civil War world uniting the North and the South; Yamashita’s figure of the conjoined twins Heco and Okada derives from Hikozo Hamada, an antebellum Japanese who made every effort to empower the bond between Japan and the United States, and John Okada, the Japanese American writer well known for his masterpiece No No Boy (1957); and Jackson’s characterization of the female conjoined twins Nora and Blanche Olney represents a new civil rights movement in the post-Cold War age in the near future, establishing a close friendship between the humans and the post-humans. This literary and cultural context should convince us that Yamashita’s short story “Siamese Twins and Mongoloids” serves as a kind of singularity point between realist twins and magic realist twins. Influenced by Twain’s twins, Yamashita paves the way for the re-figuration of the conjoined twins not only as tragi-comical freaks in the Gilded Age but also as representative men of magic realist America in our Multiculturalist Age. A Close reading of this metafiction composed in a way reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Bruce Sterling will enable us to rediscover not only the role conjoined twins played in cultural history, but also the reason why Yamashita had to feature them once again in her novel I Hotel (2010) whose plot centers around the Asian American civil rights movement between the 1960s and the 1970s. Accordingly, an Asian American magic realist perspective will clarify the way Yamashita positioned the figure of Siamese Twins as representing legal and political double standards, and the way the catachresis of Siamese Twins came to be naturalized, questioned and dismissed in American literary history from the 19th century through the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77102669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare’s Ambivalence: Epistemological Hesitation about the Origin of Evil","authors":"Tee Montague","doi":"10.3390/literature2040020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040020","url":null,"abstract":"Recent studies of the conceptualization of the Devil in the early modern period have pointed to the shifting theological and philosophical coordinates, which made possible a diverse spectrum of representation of diabolical evil—from Francis Bacon’s naturalistic scepticism to King James’s supernatural demonology. Shakespeare has always been central to this discussion but has not yet been placed in a contextual frame that incorporates the rise of scholarly interest in the diabolical. This article interprets Shakespeare’s representation of diabolical evil in Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), Measure for Measure (1604) and Macbeth (1606) as constituted by a complex tension between natural and supernatural ideas about the origin of evil. Drawing on a raft of recent scholarship on representations of witchcraft and devils in the period, I show that diabolical figures in the universe of Shakespeare during the period of great tragedies between 1601 to 1606 exist in two modes of representation: as a persistent magical ambience and as a localized agent. Ambivalence is expressed in the hesitation between these opposing theological modes and is evident in the way that the Devil’s material agency is obscured and left unresolved. Viewing this through the lens of the fantastic as an ontological uncertainty that results in epistemological hesitation helps us to frame Shakespeare’s ambivalence, which at least in part originates in the ambivalent theology of Calvin. The analysis thereby positions hesitation and diabolic temptation in line with Calvin’s theology and shows how Calvin’s framework of secular evil presents an intellectual context through which Shakespeare’s ambiguity can be understood in theological terms.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74018356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mao Dun’s “Spring Silkworms”: Living Like Worms","authors":"Todd Foley","doi":"10.3390/literature2040019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040019","url":null,"abstract":"Mao Dun’s (茅盾) 1932 short story “Spring Silkworms” (春蚕), the first of a three-part series known as the Village Trilogy, is widely regarded as one of the author’s most representative works. Given Mao Dun’s leftist politics and commitment to critical realism, the story has generated debate over its depiction of the Chinese peasantry and the extent to which it condemns tradition in support of revolutionary progress. This article contends that the key to the ambiguity of the peasants’ depiction lies in the fundamental questioning of what is human, which underlies the story’s overall ideological framework. Through a close examination of the story and its 1933 film adaptation, the article aims to show how the silkworms act as a metaphor for the villagers themselves, who are dehumanized through their helplessness and alienated labor. By reading the human villagers as metaphorical worms, the article demonstrates how they are both exposed as a kind of valueless “bare life” and situated in a narrative pause in historical materialist time, which indicates a space for the potential fundamental reconceptualization of the human, Ultimately, the article hopes to push beyond didactic readings of the story’s politics to reveal an ontological anxiety at its core.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79968439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Michel Serres’s “Dream of Another Epistemology”: Provoking Somatic Encounters with the Universe","authors":"Keith Moser","doi":"10.3390/literature2040018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040018","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores Michel Serres’s “poetic dream of another epistemology” connected to an anti-Cartesian, sensorial view of knowledge. The philosopher alludes to empirical studies from the field of cognitive neuroscience, which have demonstrated that the mind and body are interwoven as part of one integrated entity, in order to propose an alternative epistemological framework for (re-) envisioning the nature of knowledge. The philosopher’s rehabilitation of our senses illustrates that our body is replete with overlapping epistemological channels that bifurcate in all directions. Serres explains how somatic encounters with the universe enable us to constitute a stable sense of self in relation to the larger world. However, he recognizes that there are a plethora of obstacles standing in the way of allowing his epistemological dream to come to fruition. In what he refers to as the Exo-Darwinian, hominescent era, the (post-) modern, urbanized lifestyle affords very little contact with the remainder of the planet. Moreover, Serres laments how climate change has already forever eradicated spaces of meaning that are indispensable as part of an epistemological quest of knowing what and who we are as planetary beings.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76174934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Narrative Bodies of James Baldwin: A Discussion of Literary and Sartorial Style","authors":"S. Covington","doi":"10.3390/literature2040017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040017","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by Terry Newman’s literary and sartorial analysis of writers in her book Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, I analyze James Baldwin’s literary and sartorial style using excerpts from his works and archival photography. I also add a signifier/signified analysis using social semiotic theory. According to De Saussure, there are two main parts to any sign, the signifier, which connotes any material thing, and the signified, which is the meaning that is made of that thing by the receiver. Social semiotics changes the focus from the sign to the way people use semiotic resources to produce communicative artifacts, collectively. In the semiotic tradition, I extend the literary text (Go Tell it on the Mountain, Another Country, and Just Above My Head) to a larger reading of the culture in which it was created and to the more universal structures that are inherent within it. Clothing is also considered a critical semiotic resource because it is viewed as a sign that signifies a particular meaning. In my analysis, I illuminate how Baldwin’s sartorial style is a mirror (signifier) to reflect his literary style and reflects the creative and spiritual (signified) essence of his work, connected to and with collective Black narratives of style.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81740279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Staging St George after the Reformation","authors":"L. Hopkins","doi":"10.3390/literature2030016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2030016","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the agricultural calendar, his strong association with fireworks, his popular designation as a specifically English saint, and some of the customs traditionally observed on his feast day of 23 April. It then moves on to consider some of the plays in which he is mentioned or alluded to, including works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, as well as a romance by Richard Johnson that was later dramatized, and culminates with references in three plays produced by members of the Cavendish family of Bolsover and Welbeck. It argues that referring to St George offered a way of talking about Englishness even when (perhaps especially when) that concept was contested, and also suggests that the legendary folk hero Guy of Warwick, presented in some texts as the son of St George, could sometimes act as a dramatic proxy for the saint.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89258071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women and Nature: An Ecofeminist Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus","authors":"Nigus Michael Gebreyohannes, Abiye Daniel David","doi":"10.3390/literature2030015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2030015","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this research is to explore ecofeminist issues in Chimamanda Nagozi Adichie’s novel Purple Hibiscus. It examines the connections between women and nature as well as how unjustified patriarchal domination and Christianity impact these groups as well as indigenous people. A close reading of the novel was conducted in order to select extracts that demonstrate ecofeminist issues. Then, textual analysis was adopted to analyze the selected extracts. Thus, based on the analysis made, the novel shows strong interaction between women and the natural environment. The main character, Kambili, perceives nature as a symbol of hope, freedom, and impressiveness. In contrast, she represents nature as a foreshadowing of chaos and loss of life. The other issue stated in the novel is the women’s skill in nurturing plants and flowers. The novel claims that Aunty Ifeoma is knowledgeable and skillful when it comes to gardening. Additionally, Kambili’s mother is characterized as an excellent gardener who enjoys caring for the plants and flowers in her garden. Moreover, women are portrayed in the novel as the ones who harvest and produce agricultural goods. Finally, Purple Hibiscus illustrates how the patriarchal system and Christianity have led to an unjustified domination of nature and humans based on gender, religion, class, and tradition.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85350530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marginalization of Sundarbans’ Marichjhapi: Ecocriticism Approaches in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder’s Blood Island","authors":"C. Biswas, S. Channarayapatna","doi":"10.3390/literature2030014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2030014","url":null,"abstract":"The article identifies the Sundarbans landscape as a ‘marginal scape’ in the context of the Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979. It applies the conservationist vs. environmental (in)justice approach of ecocriticism to Amitava Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder’s Blood Island: An Oral History of Marichjhapi Massacre. It relates the idea of environmental discrimination and injustice based on caste to the misallocation of the ‘Commons’. For the Marichjhapi Dalit Refugees, the Sundarbans landscape and its ecological attributes become an essential medium in reconstructing their layered identity after migrating from Bangladesh to Sundarbans, which becomes marginalized. The paper argues that the management of environmental resources/landscapes has always been in the hands of the rich, entwined with Brahminical hegemony, who try to impose political geography over ecological systems to suppress the dispossessed. It concludes by comprehending that any justice-based approach (here, social and environmental) still favours non-human beings and ends up causing a multi-layered crisis for marginalized human populations.","PeriodicalId":40504,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73760420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}