8. The Importance of Being Kawabata

This is one of those rare essays, Dear M. Barthes, that will persuade you some minor critical category has been scandalously overlooked. I’m sure if you pay close attention, you will agree that it develops a valuable thesis about how stories inflect consciousness. You may even be surprised to see that concepts derived from particle physics like “inflect,” “valence,” and “oscillate” help us to recover a sense of human dignity. The overlooked critical category is that of the “narratee” and the ..

Alpine ethnobotany in Italy: traditional knowledge of gastronomic and medicinal plants among the Occitans of the upper Varaita valley, Piedmont

A gastronomic and medical ethnobotanical study was conducted among the Occitan communities living in Blins/Bellino and Chianale, in the upper Val Varaita, in the Piedmontese Alps, North-Western Italy, and the traditional uses of 88 botanical taxa were recorded. Comparisons with and analysis of other ethnobotanical studies previously carried out in other Piemontese and surrounding areas, show that approximately one fourth of the botanical taxa quoted in this survey are also known in other surrounding Occitan valleys. It is also evident that traditional knowledge in the Varaita valley has been heavily eroded. This study also examined the local legal framework for the gathering of botanical taxa, and the potential utilization of the most quoted medicinal and food wild herbs in the local market, and suggests that the continuing widespread local collection from the wild of the aerial parts of Alpine wormwood for preparing liqueurs (Artemisia genipi, A. glacialis, and A. umbelliformis) should be seriously reconsidered in terms of sustainability, given the limited availability of these species, even though their collection is culturally salient in the entire study area

A Companion to World Literature

Jiwei Xiao is a contributing author, To the Frontier of the Mind: Shen Congwen and World Literature, Volume 5a, Chapter 29. A Companion to World Literature is a far-reaching and sustained study of key authors, texts, and topics from around the world and throughout history. Six comprehensive volumes present essays from over 300 prominent international scholars focusing on many aspects of this vast and burgeoning field of literature, from its ancient origins to the most modern narratives. Almost by definition, the texts of world literature are unfamiliar; they stretch our hermeneutic circles, thrust us before unfamiliar genres, modes, forms, and themes. They require a greater degree of attention and focus, and in turn engage our imagination in new ways. This Companion explores texts within their particular cultural context, as well as their ability to speak to readers in other contexts, demonstrating the ways in which world literature can challenge parochial world views by identifying cultural commonalities. Each unique volume includes introductory chapters on a variety of theoretical viewpoints that inform the field, followed by essays considering the ways in which authors and their books contribute to and engage with the many visions and variations of world literature as a genre. Explores how texts, tropes, narratives, and genres reflect nations, languages, cultures, and periods Links world literary theory and texts in a clear, synoptic style Identifies how individual texts are influenced and affected by issues such as intertextuality, translation, and sociohistorical conditions Presents a variety of methodologies to demonstrate how modern scholars approach the study of world literature A significant addition to the field, A Companion to World Literature provides advanced students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in world literature and literary theory.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/modernlanguagesandliterature-books/1021/thumbnail.jp

Space and the colonial encounter in Lawrence Durrell, Out el-Kouloub and Naguib Mahfouz.

This study is an attempt to see how colonial and postcolonial discourses produce the social fabric of mid-twentieth-century Egypt. By examining city space in novels of the period this study aims to explore how colonial and postcolonial discourses articulate everyday practices. The theoretical thesis, derived from Henri Lefebvre's insights into the production of space, is that attention to everyday spaces can reveal obscured social relationships. In three chapters on three writers prominent in British colonial, Egyptian Francophone and Egyptian Arabic literary circles, I explore how space reveals the colonial-colonized encounter. Chapter One, "The Decay of Order: Late Colonial Space in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet" (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea, published 1957-60) argues that the narrative depends on colonial spaces constructed according to ordering representations and colonized spaces constructed according to the dynamic interplay of forces. Chapter Two, "The Harem and the Sea: Women's Space in Out el-Kouloub's Le Coffret hindou, Ramza and Hefnaoui le Magnifique," (texts published 1951-61) examines how Out el-Kouloub, an important but neglected member of Egypt's once-thriving Francophone community, constructs gendered spaces to articulate a sophisticated critique of both traditional and Western affective practices. Chapter Three, "Space and the Malaise of the City in Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, Cairo Trilogy and Miramar," argues that close attention to Mahfouz's spaces allows one to see the roles money, ideology, religion and custom play in producing Egyptian "urban malaise.". It emerges from the analysis that colonial and postcolonial literary spaces employ different ordering schemes which channel practice differently. The major argument of the study is, therefore, that the disjunction between different spaces leads to debacle as practices corresponding to one space unwittingly exceed the limits of another. The significance of this study, beyond proposing revisionary readings of Durrell and Out el-Kouloub and providing a new perspective on Mahfouzian "urban malaise," lies in the light it sheds on how literary spaces reveal the deployment of cultural codes. The potential for decentered space to reveal postcolonial relational discourses as opposed to reaffirming an imperious ordering of privileged subjectivity makes space an increasingly useful tool in cultural critique.Ph.D.Comparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104861/1/9610235.pdfDescription of 9610235.pdf : Restricted to UM users only