The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens

YesThis article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life

Working, travelling, and identity: J.B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934)

The motivation for travel is central to its form and content. This article addresses an under-represented area of travel writing: the travel text that results from a journey undertaken for work purposes. By considering J. B. Priestley’s English Journey as a case-study, it argues that the text’s critical reception, at first disorientated and confused, and later dominated by historical and political readings, has resulted from Priestley’s emphasis on work rather than leisure. In his text Priestley explores the relationship of work and identity, and his own position as writer and traveller is central to this, symbolised in his preoccupation with the figure of the travelling salesman

Téa Obreht’s Transnational Disremembering within the Mythical Realism of The Tiger’s Wife

This paper discusses Téa Obreht's 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife within the context of transmigrations and post-national conceptions of both the real and mythical translocality. Through analysis of Obreht’s discourse of disremembering, which is in Aleksandar Hemon’s definition a recognition of one’s own experience under the new narrative, the paper will explore the transnational dimensions of the Slavic-American identity of The Tiger’s Wife. The aim of this paper is to focus on the new understanding of transnational relationality as well as on a reconception of reality that disremembers Obreht’s or, on a larger scale, human experience within the mythical realism of The Tiger’s Wife.Keywords: transnationalism, the Slavic-American identity, disremembering, Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife, mythical realismTo disremember, according to Aleksandar Hemon, a celebrated Bosnian-American writer with an immigrant experience, is to recognize one’s own experience under the new narrative. He points out that it especially refers to the “people who have come through a form of actual, physical slaughter, and to the extent the construction of narrative is memory, then the narrative, for them, has to involve a quantity of amnesia. More amnesia that is involved in most narrative” (Interview by Richard Wirick). Disremembering blends non-fiction and fiction, genocide documentation and utopian imagery, and implies an alternative interpretation of reality. Hemon’s 2008 novel The Lazarus Project is a transnational project of disremembering. In The Lazarus Project, Hemon intertwines a double narrative of the multilayered parallel universes of the past and the present by following the narrator Vladimir Brik, a post-war Bosnian who lives in the United States, as he questions his life. Brik traces the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who is a survivor of the Kishinev pogrom in what is now Moldova, and an alleged anarchist. At the same time, Brik questions both the inner and outer aspects of his reality. In the first-person narrative, he explains that he needs to re-imagine what he could not retrieve, and to see what he could not imagine. For this reason, he disremembers his own experience within the story of Lazarus that also implies resurrection and a new birth story. This paper will analyze Téa Obreht’s evocative 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife from the point of view of a Hemonesque narrative concept of disremembering and, within the discourse, an Obrehtesque interaction of myth and truth

Reading ‘Fundamental British Values’ Through Children’s Gothic: Imperialism, History, Pedagogy

This paper reads the U.K. Government’s “fundamental British values” project alongside two children’s Gothic novels, Coram Boy (2000) by Jamila Gavin and City of Ghosts (2009) by Bali Rai. In 2011 the U.K. Government outlined what it described as “fundamental British values” (FBV), making it a requirement for U.K. schools to promote these values. Many critics have shown that the root of FBV lies in Islamophobia and imperialist nostalgia and suggested that the promotion of “British” values in school will exclude minority groups already under siege from racist elements in contemporary Britain. Other critics argue that the promotion of FBV reduces opportunities to explore issues of belonging, belief, and nationhood in the classroom. This article argues that the Gothic fictions of Jamila Gavin and Bali Rai offer a space in which to critically examine British history (and so, its values) in a way that is acutely relevant to these education contexts. Coram Boy and City of Ghosts use the Gothic to interrogate aspects of British history elided by the FBV project. That is, they point to Britain’s imperial and colonial history and offer a rejoinder to the Government’s insistence that “British Values” equate to democracy, respect for the rule of law and mutual respect and tolerance of those from different faiths and religions. Furthermore, Gavin’s and Rai’s use of the Gothic creates a space in which the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in FBV can be explored. However, their “gothicized” histories of Britain do not render the idea of shared values invalid. The diversity and interconnectedness of the characters offer an alternative version of identity to the patronising and arrogant FBV project, which is aimed at promoting a national identity based on sameness and assimilation. Rai and Gavin look to Britain’s past through the lens of the Gothic not only to refute nationalism and racism, but also to offer a productive alternative that gestures towards a more cosmopolitan vision of identity

In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing

This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of `monstrosity' generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The author shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics

D. H. Lawrence as Noah: Redemptions of the Inhuman and «Non-Human»

Constatant que l’inhumain se situe au-delà d’une frontière qui n’est jamais complètement franchie dans l’œuvre de D. H. Lawrence, cet article aborde, par le biais de l’animalité et du totémisme, deux manifestations possibles du « non-humain » dans l’humain. Une étude plus poussée de The Rainbow (1915) et de Women in Love (1920), deux romans sous-tendus pas le motif de l’Arche de Noé, permet de déceler les modalités du passage d’une sphère à l’autre

The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932

This book examines the transformation of English literary criticism which underlies the study of English literature today, focusing on the social objectives of the pioneer critics and educationalists who established modern English studies. In particular, he discusses their view of literary culture as a civilizing influence capable of reconciling class conflict, and their concern for its preservation in the face of the new dangers of "mass society": advertising, pulp fiction, and cinema

Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins

Surveys a war-haunted, self-consciously disoriented but exceptionally vibrant decade of writing.The 1920s emerge in this study as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations.Spanning genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Chris Baldick's approachable study of the decade sets out a 'map' of the new post-Great-War literary landscape with its unique configuration of genres, settings and character-types. Successive chapters investigate the place of ideas (biological, Freudian, esoteric, and more) in literature; the uses of anachronism and the time-sense of the Twenties; re-shapings of war-memory and war myth into varieties of Twenties 'disillusionment'; and curious connections between crime-writing and comedy in the period. This account moves easily between experimental and mor

The concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms

Adaptált digitalizált tankönyv. Az ELTE Fogyatékosügyi Központja a fogyatékossággal élő hallgatók megsegítése céljából tankönyveket adaptál. A tananyag akadálymentes, adaptált változata az arra jogosult ( a fogyatékosügyi koordinátoroknál regisztrált) hallgatók számára érhető el