CRITICAL QUARTERLY最新文献_第7页

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-04-24 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12779

Julia Dallaway

{"title":"The Art of Precarity","authors":"Julia Dallaway","doi":"10.1111/criq.12779","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12779","url":null,"abstract":"The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin by Nonia Williams (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)Interspersed between the chapters of literary criticism in Nonia Williams’s monograph The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin (2023) are brief ‘biographical vignettes’ that centre on distinct components of the life of British experimental writer Ann Quin (1936–1973).1 One of these vignettes, entitled ‘A bedsit room of her own’, details Quin’s meagre education, poorly paid secretarial jobs and confined living spaces. Expanding on the Virginia Woolf reference in its title, 'A bedsit room of her own' contrasts Woolf’s 1920s feminist hope with Quin’s 1960s reality:This passage invites us to reflect on the relationship between material precarity and literary creativity. Williams acknowledges Woolf’s belief that the two are inversely related—in other words, that material deprivation precludes creativity—while hinting that, in Quin’s case, the situation might be more complex.In its Introduction, Williams’s monograph testifies to how Quin’s experimental novels resist the realist mode deemed acceptable for working-class writers in her time (p. 7). Williams quotes the novelist Claire-Louise Bennett’s intriguing claim that ‘growing up in a working-class environment may well engender an aesthetic sensibility that quite naturally produces work that is idiosyncratic, polyvocal, and apparently experimental’.2 By claiming that Quin’s ‘living conditions […] were profoundly and inextricably bound up with and in the specific experimental forms of [her] writing’ (pp. 7–8), Williams likewise entertains the possibility that it was precisely Quin’s impoverished conditions that stimulated her literary experimentalism. This connection offers a compelling premise for Williams’s study of Quin.The monograph's emphasis on the adjective ‘precarious’, which features in its title, further ties together a material experience and a literary aesthetic. Williams states that this key word ‘intentionally refers to […] both Quin’s lived experience—such as her volatile material conditions, sexual and emotional life, mental states and more—and the experimentalism of the writing’ (p. 6). In her focus on the concept of precarity, Williams is tapping into a salient cultural issue. In 2012, Noam Chomsky referred to the rise of the ‘precariat’: a new social demographic, composed of ‘people who live a precarious existence’, which he saw as ‘becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere’.3 The Guardian similarly reported, in 2019, that ‘a new “precariat” is forming across Europe: millions of people who have jobs but still can’t quite make ends meet’.4 By centring her analysis on the term ‘precarious’, Williams reminds us that Quin—a writer who spent most of her literary career living from one pay cheque to the next, with occasional financial relief in the form of gr","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 2","pages":"126-132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12779","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140663727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Notes on contributors 关于撰稿人的说明

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-04-02 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12777

引用次数: 0

White 白色

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-03-12 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12775

Seth Mehl

{"title":"White","authors":"Seth Mehl","doi":"10.1111/criq.12775","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12775","url":null,"abstract":"It is the ongoing malleability of white in reference to a category of human beings – and its propensity to be shiftingly employed for inclusion or exclusion, with deadly results – that renders it a keyword. White as a category of human beings has, over the centuries, been defined in practice in multiple, ever-changing ways, including a wide range of physical attributes well beyond (skin) colour; geography; (mythical or biological) lineage; simple habit or custom; or genetics. Often, these definitions have been at odds with each other.White has cognates across Indo-European languages, referring to light colour or brightness. White in this sense could be used absolutely – referring strictly to the colour of snow, for example – and as an absolute term did not have synonyms in OE.From OE, white could describe light-coloured skin as a mark of illness or cowardice, alternating with wan, blake, pale, dead, and bloodless from ME (with no synonyms in OE). White alternated with fair from OE to indicate light-coloured skin as a mark of femininity and beauty; white could, in this sense, signify an unfavourable femininity in men. To describe a typical, healthy skin colour, white was uncommon: instead, red and bright were common from OE; ruddy from C13. Crucially, red in OE subsumed what we might now call purple, pink, red, orange, and brown.When precisely white comes to be used as a category of human being – rather than as a relative descriptor – is contentious. The process certainly begins in EModE, and it is firmly in place by LModE in the pseudo-science of race. Today, the entrenchment of this meaning is reflected in corpus data insofar as descriptions of population demographics – by category – produce some of the most common collocations with white: predominately white, overwhelmingly white, mostly white, disproportionately white. In this sense, white no longer refers exclusively – or indeed, sometimes, at all – to colour. Blumenbach's 1795 dissertation, foundational to racial pseudo-science, introduces Caucasian – now a common synonym for white – but Blumenbach seemed less preoccupied with skin colour than with facial structure, geography, lineage, and ranked degrees of beauty. In C19 and C20 American writing, facial structure, hair texture, and lineage are commonly referenced as definitive characteristics of a category of white people – by that point, white has moved well beyond relative lightness of skin.This element of the semantic development of white parallels – in reverse – that of black. Black's negative senses and uses in OE were expanded and intensified in the early modern era, alongside Atlantic slavery. Similarly, white's positive senses and uses seem to multiply and intensify from the ","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"106-111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12775","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140117556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Editorial: Distant Voices/Still Lives 遥远的声音/静止的生命

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-03-07 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12776

Colin MacCabe

引用次数: 0

The Challenge of Ambivalence: Hitchens on Orwell 矛盾的挑战希钦斯论奥威尔

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12773

Roseanna Webster

引用次数: 0

On the ‘Hitchslap’ 关于 "希奇巴掌

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-25 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12769

Yohann Koshy

引用次数: 0

The Real Age of Newspapers: Hitch, the Vanity Fair Years 报纸的真实时代希奇，《名利场》年代

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-25 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12774

Stephen Smith

引用次数: 0

Inclusive 包容性

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-22 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12772

Kathryn Allan

{"title":"Inclusive","authors":"Kathryn Allan","doi":"10.1111/criq.12772","DOIUrl":"10.1111/criq.12772","url":null,"abstract":"Inclusive is an important term in modern times, central in governmental and institutional discourse on a range of issues, in educational settings, and in discussions about language policy. In its earlier meanings, some of which continue in use, inclusive marks the boundaries of what is and is not in a set, but it has also become a keyword in relation to social equality agendas, indicating a removal of real and perceived boundaries. Being inclusive in the latter sense can have specific entailments and require an individual or group to address the physical obstacles that might prevent particular groups of people from participating in particular activities; in other contexts, though, inclusive is much vaguer, a generally positive description that aligns the speaker with a set of values that are not always clearly defined.Inclusive is borrowed into English from Latin and is attested in writing from the early fifteenth century (OED1); the related verb include has a dual etymology from French and Latin and is borrowed around the same time, and the antonym exclusive is first attested slightly later. inclusive appears to be used first as an adverb which postmodifies phrases referring to periods of time or to locations, for example, in expressions like ‘January to June inclusive’; this kind of use is still common, although less likely to refer to anything other than time. From the mid-sixteenth century it is also used as an adjective, both in the general meaning ‘that is included’, which is relatively short-lived, but more often in the sense ‘that includes’, which survives into the present day. The related noun inclusion is attested from around the same time as the adverb; both inclusiveness and inclusivity are derived from inclusive within English, in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries respectively.Changes in the meanings of inclusive over its history relate to what it can modify, that is, what can be described as inclusive, and its object, that is, what can be included. Some senses involve concrete objects, for example, the obsolete OED sense 3 ‘That encloses or surrounds something’, which applies specifically to entities such as walls and fires which can create a physical boundary. Shakespeare's Richard III plays with this sense in referring to a crown as ‘The inclusiue verge, Of golden mettall that must round my browe’ (1597 W. Shakespeare Richard III iv. i. 58, quoted in OED). Less restricted are uses which refer to a range of concrete and (more often) abstract entities: Arnold Bennett's 1909 book. Literary taste: how to form it uses inclusive of a particular type of collection, meaning ‘including all of many elements of something’, in his statement that ‘Every Englishman..ought to own a comprehensive and inclusive library of English literature’ (1909 A. Bennett Li","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 3","pages":"95-100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.12772","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139951178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

‘Too Straight’ for Fiction: Christopher Hitchens and No One Left to Lie To 太直 "的小说：克里斯托弗-希钦斯与无人可欺

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-22 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12770

Ash Caton

引用次数: 0

Living in a World of Pain 生活在痛苦的世界里

IF 0.2 4区文学

CRITICAL QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-21 DOI: 10.1111/criq.12771

Jake Williams

引用次数: 0