Women,writing and politics in Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell and Notes from Prison

In That Smell and Notes from Prison, Sonallah Ibrahim engages literary and feminist discourses in his political narrative against the Nasserist regime and the culture of commitment (iltizam) of the 1960s. Ibrahim's antihero is a newly released writer who is faced with the challenges of overcoming his failure to connect with women and society, and find a motivation to write. He realizes that most readers, writers and critics are not in favour of his literature of exposé, which refuses to depict or treat the ugly reality as a beautiful one. In foreshadowing the 1967 defeat and the impotence of Arabs, That Smell and Notes from Prison warns of a prolonged cultural and literary decay should political corruption override basic human and women's rights in the Arab world.     

Family Historiography in The White Earth

In recent years, family history research has become a popular activity for many Australians. This imperative to connect with our ancestors extends into the field of literary production. In this essay, we examine one prominent novel that reflects this movement, Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004). Looking through a lens of family history and historiography, the novel asks questions about postcolonial belonging, inheritance, and the violent foundations of the nation. McGahan’s young protagonist, William, stands to inherit a vast but crumbling property on the Darling Downs in Queensland. As William discovers more about the land, he comes into contact with both his own white pastoralist ancestors, and the powerful Indigenous spirits who inhabit secret and sacred spaces in the landscape. We argue that William’s encounter with secret family histories produces the hysteria at the climax of the novel, when the repressed violence of the past returns to haunt the present. Confronted with hidden knowledge, William—and, by proxy, the reader—is called to reconsider inherited histories in light of contemporary historiographies. The move towards knowledge of the family’s origins is a realisation of the complexity of the white Australian relationship to the land and its first inhabitants.     

逆反与复归自然的“拱形结构”：“世纪末”文学思想探析

“世纪末”主要由两种审美风格构成,一种是以“逆反自然”为价值取向的颓废主义,它崇尚人工美而贬低自然美,表现萎缩的生命力和矫揉造作的人性;另一种是以“复归自然”为价值取向的原始主义,它崇尚自然美而贬低人工,表现蓬勃的生命强力和未经修饰的原始意识和内心情绪。两种审美风格看似完全对立,实则共同扮演现代文明批判者的角色。逆反自然和复归自然构成了“世纪末”文学的内在矛盾,这个矛盾统一于“意志”,围绕“意志”形成“世纪末”思想的拱形结构,发散出20世纪现代派文学的诸多元素。     

论中国文学传播的三种历史形态

中国文学在历史上的几次重大转型,都是伴随着语言及传播工具的革新而向前发展的。“言文疏离”代表着中国古代文学传播形态或者说是中国古代文学的形态样式;现代以来,白话文的文学范式体现了具有“言文合一”特征的现代精英文学传播形态;大众媒体出现之后,有了电影文学、电视文学、广播文学、报刊文学,而网络媒体的出现,有效地催生出以电子传媒为载体、具有“精英”与“草根”相融合特征的文学传播形态。     

唐初五十年类书与诗对文学的影响

唐初五十年类书的编纂和诗的创作,对唐初文学被学术同化具有深刻影响。首先,唐初类书不过是词藻堆砌,将词藻当做学术进行研究,其直接的影响是造成文学在研究领域被学术同化。其次,唐初的诗是＂类书式＂的诗,从而造成了文学在创作领域被学术同化的现象。     

Generational discourse in urban youth images

The history of generations is often researched in the light of ego-documents, including diaries or letters. These sources of communication between young and old require methods of literary criticism, as this article suggests in exemplary cases. Popular (and in some cases popular forms of learned) literature show how stereotypes dominated letters between Nuremberg fathers and sons fom the 16th century. Reading these letters as witnesses of direct emotional expression, as has been done so far, would be problematic on a theoretical level of the concept of autobiography (according the Ricoeur ‘an other’ of the self), but also an empirical level. Letters were cultural artefacts that were considered well-formed only when they met the standards set by the urban youth image. This included a conglomerate of religious discourses, psychological assumption about the nature of emotions, the urban system of values and honour relating to merchant education more specifically. In letters of this intergenerational context, even information could be put into the context of a situational self-representation of the person writing. Writing a letter as an apprentice or a student was not at all confined to convey factual information. Rather than that, writing letters meant to participate in the generation of norms and to act on a meta-level of communication, as well. Negative images of youth were rhetorically implemented in letters to maintain and reaffirm the hierarchy within the family. Letter exchanges secured economic stability of family firms and the subsequent social rise.     

Open Government: Origin,Development, and Conceptual Perspectives

The term “open government” is frequently used in practice and science. Since President Obama’s Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies in March 2009, open government has attracted an enormous amount of public attention. It is applied by authors from diverse areas, leading to a very heterogeneous comprehension of the concept. Against this background, this article screens the current open government literature to deduce an integrative definition of open government. Furthermore, this article analyzes the empirical and conceptual literature of open government to deduce an open government framework. In general, this article provides a clear understanding of the open government concept.     

Predictive Policing: Review of Benefits and Drawbacks

This literature review illuminates the conceptualization of predictive policing, and also its potential and realized benefits and drawbacks. The review shows a discrepancy between the considerable attention for potential benefits and drawbacks of predictive policing in the literature, and the empirical evidence that is available. The empirical evidence provides little support for the claimed benefits of predictive policing. Whereas some empirical studies conclude that predictive policing strategies lead to a decrease in crime, others find no effect. At the same time, there is no empirical evidence at all for the claimed drawbacks. We conclude that the current thrust of predictive policing initiatives is based on convincing arguments and anecdotal evidence rather than on systematic empirical research. We urge the research community to do independent tests of both positive and negative expectations to generate an evidence base for predictive policing.     

Amor Matris 1: Language and Loss in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron

This article examines the South African novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin’s writings on economics. Though Millin has most commonly been treated as a theorist of race and miscegenation, her novels and nonfiction writings demonstrate an equally strong interest in how global economic institutions affect South African life. Eatough proposes that Millin’s fascination with such diverse economic practices as currency speculation, actuarial accounting, and stock broking stems from the way in which these practices dramatize a seemingly insuperable tension between Anglo professionalism and South African nationalism. As the article shows, Millin’s efforts to overcome Anglo-Afrikaner rivalry and fashion a unified white nationalism entailed a radical rethinking of what global professional networks were in their innermost essence. Central to this nationalist project, Eatough argues, was Millin’s tendency to regard such networks less as rooted national institutions than as distant speculative devices capable of inflating the value of South African nationality. Over the course of the article, Eatough investigates how Millin uses this definition to finesse complaints by (primarily Afrikaner) nationalists against British control of the professions by suggesting that such articulations of envy drive speculative enterprise—and, thus, provide a means for transforming national abjection into national value.     

Going beyond data collection in ethnography: Options for bridging the gap between researchers and archivists

Abstract

This article investigates options for bridging the missing link between ethnographic field research and archiving. It interrogates the place of archiving in the entire fieldwork process and the roles played by researchers and archivists in promoting access. While a number of reasons explain the gap between research and archiving, the article identifies lack of collaboration as the main challenge. Borrowing from the postmodernist theoretical framework, the article argues that archivists cannot detach themselves from data collection, because the decisions they make are not objective but personal and subjective. The conclusion and main message are that digital technology, in spite of its many advantages, may not deliver all that it promises to data collection and archiving. There is a need to complement digital technology data collection and archiving with traditional archiving methods because of the latter's reliability and cost effectiveness.