17,946 research outputs found

    The 'memoir problem', revisited.

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    The ‘memoir problem’ revisited “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir”. Neil Gunzlinger, book reviewer for the New York Times, griped in a review of yet another confessional memoir. It’s true; suddenly everyone is writing memoir, even people who only ever wrote fiction, rock music or poetry, or never wrote before. I even find myself writing memoir, but mining some of my own fictional writing for triggers and nudges, delving into old poems for clues and lines of inquiry. After all, the memory does not always linger on. Now, since revisiting this autobiographical writing as a resource for chapters of my Creative Nonfiction PhD thesis, a food memoir, in this paper I’ll discuss attempts made to fictionalise the ‘true’ events of the stories, and the uses made of them, to revitalise memoir. I also reflect on the work of controversial memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose six-volume work, ‘My struggle’, has offended members of his extended family, critics and purists, or simply bored many readers with the impossibly detailed accounts of his life, to ask again of memoir, “Should it be artful or truthful?

    Plotting Poetry 3. Conference report

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    Plotting Poetry 3. Conference repor

    Roots Reloaded. Culture, Identity and Social Development in the Digital Age

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    This edited volume is designed to explore different perspectives of culture, identity and social development using the impact of the digital age as a common thread, aiming at interdisciplinary audiences. Cases of communities and individuals using new technology as a tool to preserve and explore their cultural heritage alongside new media as a source for social orientation ranging from language acquisition to health-related issues will be covered. Therefore, aspects such as Art and Cultural Studies, Media and Communication, Behavioral Science, Psychology, Philosophy and innovative approaches used by creative individuals are included. From the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, to the Maoris of New Zealand, to the mystical teachings of Sufi brotherhoods, the significance of the oral and written traditions and their current relation to online activities shall be discussed in the opening article. The book continues with a closer look at obesity awareness support groups and their impact on social media, Facebook usage in language learning context, smartphone addiction and internet dependency, as well as online media reporting of controversial ethical issues. The Digital progress has already left its dominating mark as the world entered the 21st century. Without a doubt, as technology continues its ascent, society will be faced with new and altering values in an effort to catch-up with this extraordinary Digitization, adapt satisfactorily in order to utilize these strong developments in everyday life

    Book Reviews

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    Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture

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    Interest in the conjunctions of film and folklore is stronger and more diverse than ever. Documentaries on folk life and expression remain a vital genre, but scholars such as Sharon Sherman and Mikel Koven also are exploring how folklore elements appear in, and merge with, popular cinema. They look at how movies, a popular culture medium, can as well be both a medium and type of folklore, playing cultural roles and conveying meanings customarily found in other folkloric forms. They thus use the methodology of folklore studies to analyze films made for commercial distribution. The contributors to this book look at film and folklore convergences, showing how cinema conveys vernacular culture in traditional and popular venues. Folklore/Cinema will be of interest to scholars from many fields---folklore, film studies, popular culture, American studies, history, anthropology, and literature among them---and will help introduce students in various courses to intersections of film and culture.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1033/thumbnail.jp

    Book Reviews

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    Studying soap operas

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    This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries

    Digital Sound Studies

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    The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive

    The Queen of the Household: Mothers, Other Mothers, and Female Genealogy on the Plantation in Postslavery Women\u27s Fiction

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    In many ways, the plantation defined the U.S. South because it was the primary site of production, and therefore income, for prominent southerners. In addition to being a site of production, the plantation created a complex series of connected relationships that was imagined by the plantocracy to be a large family unit. It functioned according to a specific hierarchical model that was primarily based on a patriarchal understanding of genealogy. Yet Kate Chopin\u27s DĂ©sirĂ©e\u27s Baby and La Belle ZoraĂŻde, Pauline Hopkins\u27s Contending Forces, Zora Neale Hurston\u27s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julia Peterkin\u27s Scarlet Sister Mary, Eudora Welty\u27s Delta Wedding, and Katherine Anne Porter\u27s The Old Order are woman-centered; each text focuses on a mother-child relationship and privileges the voices of women over the voices of male characters. These texts focus on female genealogy rather than a traditional patriarchal understanding of genealogical history. Tracing female genealogy makes space to see alternate foci of power on the postslavery plantation and the ways women, particularly mothers, utilize this power. Looking at these texts through the lens of female genealogy illuminates moments when these authors explore the plantation\u27s insidious nature and resist its traditional power structure. Each story places emphasis on exploring individual identity through an understanding of one\u27s cultural and family history. This dissertation explores the ways black and white women, 1890–1950, express a shared identity. The six authors experience a shared historical memory; each author reflects on the impact the plantation has had on the characters in her stories, and each author presents a new image of the changing plantation south. The authors explore their characters\u27 anxieties about women\u27s roles and places in a patriarchal society, and they explore the ways women gain and exchange power, both overtly and covertly. They also examine the ways mothers and children both love each other and manipulate each other. They look at relationships between black and white women, and they examine the ways these women are family and the ways they are not. Finally, they examine the ways a shared violent history shapes relationships between women in the present

    Theorica et Practica: Historical Epistemology and the Re-Visioning of Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Medicine

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    Positivist medical historians, guided by the savoir of modern western biomedicine, have long depicted medieval medicine as an aberration along the continuum of scientific and medical progress. Historical epistemology, founded in the ideas of Cavailles, Foucault, Davidson, and Hacking, however, allows the historian to disrupt this false continuum and to unchain medieval medicine from modern medicine. Postmodernist approaches, such as those sourced in Lyotard, Barthes, and Derrida, allow the historian to further deconstruct medieval and modern medical discourse, revealing a multitude of narrative lenses spinning around biomedical and biocultural strands. In liberating these two medical systems and setting them within the distinct historical and epistemological contexts that both shaped and were shaped by them, the historian can revision the theories, practices, and culture of medieval medicine without having to anachronistically justify them according to modern medical discourse
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