Transnational Spaces Celebrating Fifty Years Of Literary And Cultural Intersections At Nemla

This volume celebrates fifty years of NeMLA’s important presence in the world of academia with a collection of essays that adopt a transnational critical lens. With the present selection, we intend to add our voices to the ongoing debate centered on the renegotiation of space, national, and cultural geographies; to foster both the re-thinking of language(s) and literature(s) not exclusively in English and the study of race, gender, sexuality, and class within and across national boundaries. Most pertinently for this collection, we hope to add meaningful material to produce new theoretical paradigms and to rethink the role and significance of the humanities in today’s world. In this light, 'Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary, Cultural, and Language Intersections at NeMLA' offers a contribution to the study of our present, transnational condition, from the point of view of an organization, the 'Northeast Modern Language Association', that since its inception in 1969, has sought to provide a space of encounter, debate, and open intellectual exchange for all its members as well as for the academe at large. The essays contained in this volume emphasize the interdependency and interrelations engendered by the globalized world in which we live, highlighting the possibility to create new knowledge and forms of understanding across the boundaries of nationhood and region. At the same time, they remind us that the present situation calls for a radical self-examination of a history of systemic racism which continues to produce episodes of police brutality, rationalizes cultural and economic exclusion, and normalizes the incarceration of African Americans and “illegal” immigrants, including children and minorities. In this light, with this volume, we hope to have provided inclusive, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan spaces of encounter, exchange, and interrogation.

This volume presents interpretive essays utilizing a variety of approaches to honor the 160th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s birth, celebrating the writer’s genius. This unique collection of scholarship explores a broad spectrum of subjects, including his travels, sexuality, children’s literature, jail writings, novel, poetry, individualism, masks, homosexuality, influence on others, and morality. It offers historical, biographical, psychological and sociological perspectives written by international experts and features a broad spectrum of subjects which will appeal to a range of scholars seeking original and alternative approaches to understanding Oscar Wilde, his aesthetics and his influence in a variety of genres in the twenty-first century. The multiplicity of interest in the writer expands across genres, disciplines, cultures and time. Quintessential Wilde examines his intellectual strength in “His Worldly Place,” analyzes his ingenious thoughts in “His Penetrating Philosophy,” and recounts his enduring place in “His Influential Aestheticism.”

Perhaps while reading Shakespeare you've asked yourself, What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince words and muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub? But if the Prince of Denmark had a Twitter account and an iPhone, he could tell his story in real time--and concisely! Hence the genius of Twitterature. Hatched in a dorm room at the brain trust that is the University of Chicago, Twitterature is a hilarious and irreverent re-imagining of the classics as a series of 140-character tweets from the protagonist. Providing a crash course in more than eighty of the world's best-known books, from Homer to Harry Potter, Virgil to Voltaire, Tolstoy to Twilight and Dante to The Da Vinci Code. It's the ultimate Cliffs Notes. Because as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore? Sample tweets: From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN??? From the Harry Potter series: Oh man big tournament at my school this year!! PSYCHED! I hope nobody dies this year, and every year as if by clockwork. From The Great Gatsby: Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast...IN THE POOL?

Authorship's Wake examines the aftermath of the 1960s critique of the author, epitomized by Roland Barthes's essay, “The Death of the Author.” This critique has given rise to a body of writing that confounds generic distinctions separating the literary and the theoretical. Its archive consists of texts by writers who either directly participated in this critique, as Barthes did, or whose intellectual formation took place in its immediate aftermath. These writers include some who are known primarily as theorists (Judith Butler), others known primarily as novelists (Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace), and yet others whose texts are difficult to categorize (the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner; the autotheory of Maggie Nelson). These writers share not only a central motivating question – how to move beyond the critique of the author-subject – but also a way of answering it: by writing texts that merge theoretical concerns with literary discourse. Authorship's Wake traces the responses their work offers in relation to four themes: communication, intention, agency, and labor.

Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.

Explores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.

In Reclaiming Difference, Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers--Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA)--showing how their writing has radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been configuring difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures, and by doing so they challenge the idea that racial and cultural identities function as stable points of reference in our unstable world. Focusing on the transformations that have taken place in postcolonial studies since the field began to focus on theory, Mardorossian highlights not only how these writers make use of the styles of creolization and hybridity that have dominated Caribbean and postcolonial studies in recent years but also how they distinguish themselves from the movement's leading figures by offering new articulations of the ties that link race and nation to gender and class. She illuminates how these writers extend the notion of hybridity away from racial and cultural differences in isolation from each other to a set of crisscrossing categories that challenge our simpler, normative figurations. For scholars in postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, literary feminist studies, and studies in comparative literature, Reclaiming Difference represents a new phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the field's terminology and assumptions.

Canadian literature, and specifically the teaching of Canadian literature, has emerged from a colonial duty to a nationalist enterprise and into the current territory of postcolonialism. From practical discussions related to specific texts, to more theoretical discussions about pedagogical practice regarding issues of nationalism and identity, Home-Work constitutes a major investigation and reassessment of the influence of postcolonial theory on Canadian literary pedagogy from some of the top scholars in the field.