Thomas Mann in Standard English Anthologies

The Slovak National Archives in Bratislava contain a large manuscript catalogue of an extensive book collection formerly located in one of the numerous residences of the branched aristocratic family Ziči, namely in Voderady near Trnava. The manuscript catalogue, entitled Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecae Vedrodiensis 1894 [A Catalogue of the Books of the Voderady Library 1894], presents a library which, according to information from the 19th century, contained about 12,000 volumes. In the catalogue, the books are divided into 19 thematic groups: theological works and prayer books, linguistic publications, dictionaries and manuals, periodicals, works on arts and crafts, Hungarian novels and short stories, German and Italian novels and short stories, French novels and short stories, English novels and short stories, the works of literature of other European and domestic provenance as well as ancient classics in various editions, memoirs, historical works, geographical literature and travelogues, natural-science publications, works on sports, specialised works on horse breeding, works on economy, legal and political works, and prints referred to as special works. This paper focuses on the thirteenth thematic group of the Voderady library, namely geographical literature and travelogues (Földrajz, Útleírás). This has been motivated by the fact that members of the Ziči family, the owners of the Voderady residence Jozef Ziči (1841–1924) and his brother Augustín (1852–1925), enjoyed not only travelling around Europe but also exploring distant exotic lands. Consequently, this group contains 717 registered titles, forming the largest group of the Voderady library. The presented literature in Hungarian, French, English and German comprises a wide range of works including travelogues, atlases and maps, tourist guides, manuals and professional geographical publications of both domestic and foreign provenance.

Any account of the postcolonial short story in Singapore needs to begin with a certain amount of necessary groundwork. Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multilingual literary culture calls into question the idea of a single cultural tradition for which reference to ‘the short story’ in the singular might suggest. And while Singapore as a nation-state did emerge from a history of colonization, its future is not necessarily conditioned by that past. An economically developed city-state strategically located between two rising global powers, India and China, Singapore is in many ways hypermodern, having already long encountered many of the contradictions regarding social inequality, multiculturalism and state surveillance that now trouble the postcolonial cities of former colonial powers. If short stories in Singapore defamiliarize readers from the social space of the city-state they also, perhaps more significantly, suggest the need to interrogate the notion of the postcolonial itself, and in particular the implicit privileging of the West in the context of global history. Singapore has literatures in each of its four official languages, but it may be that English-language writing occupies a particularly important nexus within the literary field that we often designate as postcolonial (see below). With this goal in mind, this chapter will explore the short stories of three contemporary Singapore writers — Suchen Lim, Alfian Sa’at and Wena Poon — and the manner in which each writer responds critically to elements of a contemporary Singaporean social space: such examination, however, needs to be prefaced by a brief account of the place of the English-language short story in Singapore.

German, and entitled Der Scharfschiitze. This collection, an example of literary presentation of civil war, the dreaded of all social calamities,2 revolves around the hostilities started in Lebanon two decades ago. Naoum, born in El Mina, Tripoli, in 1941, came to Germany at age twentythree. He devoted himself to writing in 1983, after working as waiter and, later on, as masseur number of years. He first published poems and short stories in anthologies designed foreign authors' literary output; then, he published several books, three of which deal with Lebanese issues: Der rote Hahn (1974), Der Scharfschiitze (1988), and Kaktusfeigen (1989). A volume of poetry entitled Sand, Steine und Blumen was published in 1991. His Karakus und andere orientalische Mdrchen (1986) and Die Kaffeehausgeschichten des Abu al Abed (1987), both written in the style of the oriental storyteller, attempt to revive the oriental oral tradition in Germany. With his books, radio broadcasts,3 audio cassettes and many public readings, Naoum, recipient of the Kulturpreis des Rheingau-Taunus-Kreises in 1992,4 has successfully established readership in Germany and made significant contribution to the relatively new literary trend of literature has emerged in Germany and has drawn attention particularly in the past two decades. Contrary to Leslie Adelson, I do not have reservations regarding the term migrants' literature' in Germany.5 This term (or German literature) is, in my opinion, the most neutral current expression to refer to-not demarcate-the literary output by non-Germans who publish in German. Naoum wrote Der Scharfschatze in 1979, four years after the outbreak of the war in Lebanon. When the collection was published ten years later, the author stated in his preface the dramatic events of the first two years of the war (1975-76), which he depicted in his accounts, had lost nothing of their sad actuality.6 By 1988, chaos still prevailed in Lebanon, a country, according to Edward Said, that began its public self-destruction in April 1975 (xiv). Like his compatriot Elias Khoury in his novelLittle Mountain, which covers the same period of Lebanon's war, Naoum confronts his readers with what Said defines in his foreword to Khoury's novel as urgently political themes and radically existential concerns. This is, according to Said, typical of writing in societies such as the Lebanese and the Palestinian, for whom their national identity is threatened with extinction... or with daily dissolution (xiv). Naoum's collection deals with the Lebanese experience as special case. Its focal point is the human suffering and the responses of individuals to an acute crisis. Civilians, not soldiers, are the principal

Meticulously edited and contextualized, Dean s edition of Woolson s complete letters opens the door to an extraordinarily gifted writer s world. It offers depth to Woolson studies, but it also connects Woolson to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace in new and fascinating ways. We see Woolson the tough but astute literary critic, the precise businesswoman, and the keen cultural critic of the North, the South, and Europe. Perhaps most importantly, Woolson s letters counter many false impressions of an isolated woman. This was a lifelived. Sharon M. Harris, University of Connecticut Uncovers the complex, witty, cosmopolitan, imaginative Woolson, who appears more obliquely in her prose and poetry. Peopled by the famous, the infamous, and the unknown, the letters sparkle with intelligence and energy, providing insight into contemporary attitudes that Woolson sometimes shared, sometimes satirized, and sometimes defied, while they reveal an ample sensibility that anticipates today s concerns for the environment, regional and national identity, and global citizenship. Karen L. Kilcup, author ofRobert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition The Complete Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolsonvibrate with the intelligence and sensitivity of an immensely private woman who reached out through her correspondence in search of like-minded souls. She found comrades among some of the most accomplished writers of her era as well as among men of science. Ultimately, these letters reveal the broad scope of a well-traveled life and the depth of an intensely observant artist. Every reader interested in the lives of nineteenth-century authors or women should savor every one of this extraordinary writer s letters. Anne Boyd Rioux, president, Constance Fenimore Woolson SocietyConstance Fenimore Woolson (1840 1894) led a colorful life, travelling throughout the U.S. and Europe, becoming a literary star, whose work was published in the premier magazines of her day. She wrote critically acclaimed novels, short stories, and poetry before her mysterious and untimely death in Venice at age fifty-three. Sharon Dean has recompiled, dated, and, in many cases, physically reassembled Woolson s extant correspondence from nearly forty sources. A trenchant critic of the customs and mores of her age, Woolson, in her letters, offers rich personal detail alongside nuanced ruminations on contemporary political and social conditions.Sharon L. Dean is professor emerita of English at Rivier College in New Hampshire. One of the foremost experts on Constance Fenimore Woolson, her most recent publication isConstance Fenimore Woolson: Selected Stories and Travel Narratives.

Between 1910 and 1934 W. E. B. Du Bois was editor of the NAACP's official magazine, the Crisis. This chapter examines the artwork, poetry, short stories, and plays he published and the ways he encouraged and celebrated African Americans’ artistic achievements. Du Bois used the arts to help forge a collective black identity and to inspire racial pride. He also challenged racial prejudice by offering alternative images—both visual and in writing—to racial stereotypes. This raises interesting questions about the nature of those images: How did expectations of gender, color, and class play out on the page? This chapter finds that black identity in the magazine was built around a predominantly but (interestingly) not exclusively middle-class idea of African American life, its model of black respectability often female.

‘Wilde did not converse - he told tales.’ Oscar Wilde was already famous as a brilliant wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. They have never lacked readers and admirers, George Orwell and W. B. Yeats among them. The stories give free rein to Wilde's originality, literary skill, and sophistication. They include poignant fairy-tales such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’, and the extravagant comedy and social observation of ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’. They also encompass the daring narrative experiments of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde's fictional investigation into the identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets, and the ‘Poems in Prose’, based on the Gospel stories. This edition demonstrates the centrality of Wilde's shorter fiction in his literary career, and his continuing development and experimentation with the short story format. Combining myth, romance, and irony, Wilde's stories enthral and challenge the reader. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

An increasingly complex environmental problem requires a creative education approach from an early age to foster positive environmental awareness and behaviour. Ecological education with a short story in English offers an interesting way to teach students about the importance of preserving the environment in primary schools. However, there are some problems with using this method. These include teachers who are incompetent in applying ecocriticism, no relevant learning materials, and students who are not actively engaged in environmental activities. Combining a number of major activities involving students directly is a solution to this problem. First, read and analyze short stories that relate to the environment. It helps them improve their ability to think critically and gain an in-depth understanding of environmental issues. Secondly, students are empowered to write short stories about environmental problems. This activity not only improves their writing skills, but also helps them understand the importance of keeping an environment. Third, implement real environmental projects, such as recycling events and planting trees in schools. Although there were some challenges to implement it, ecocritism through short stories in English managed to raise elementary school students' awareness and behaviour about the environment. Reading, writing, and real environment projects are practical activities that successfully enhance student environment-friendly understanding and behaviour.

118Reviews McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works ofRobert Coover, Donald Barthelme and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 300 pp. Cloth: $22.95. LeClair, Tom and Larry McCaffery. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983.305 pp. Cloth: $15.95. "The contemporary writer—the writer who is acutely in touch with the life ofwhich he is part—is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot." With his aggressiveskepticism aboutfiction's traditional goals, playful vitality, and insistenceon the medium as part of the message, the author-narrator of Ronald Sukenick's short story "The Death of the Novel" reflects a new fictional impulse emerging out of the sixties. Surely the novel was not dead or dying, only the kind of fiction that disguised thefacts oí its fictionality and the fictionality of those systems—time, space, personality, language—we impose on the flux, contradictions, and discontinuities ofwhatever is "out there." To be in touch is no longer just a matter of sensitivity and consciousness; it is also to be aware of the limits of our senses and consciousness, especially as they are conditioned by language. For language is not only part ofthe life we experience, it may be all we can know. In The Metafictional Muse, Larry McCaffery explores the philosophic, aesthetic, and ethical implications ofpostmodern American fiction by focusing on Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. In most postmodern fiction—including that of Heller, Vonnegut , Barth, Nabokov, and Pynchon—we find a characteristic pattern. An alienated character feels victimized by a cold, repressive, social order. He therefore creates a system that supplies order, value, and meaning to his life (it would be interesting to compare the typical male to the rare female protagonist, Oedipa Maas in particular). When a character fails to realize that his system is a fiction, he becomes its victim and is controlled by his creation—though "any system of order, whether derived from aesthetic principles, paranoia, madness, or superstition, is preferable to a life ofemptiness and chaos." In contrast to the character, the reader never loses sight ofthe fiction, the character's or the author's, since the author either intrudes his presence upon us, brings the act of his writing into the action of his story, or makes the reality of his medium a part ofthe reality it seems to reflect. McCaffery uses the term "metafiction" to identify two related forms: the first examines its own constructions as it develops, as well as the forms and language of previous fictions; the second asks how all fictional systems operate. McCaffery is thoroughly immersed in the postmodern scene, though not infected by its jargon. He has assimilated the philosophical and linguistic background, knows the pop culture that has changed our sensibilities, and can explicate Coover, Barthelme, and Gass in ways that lucidly illuminate his thesis. Indeed, one of the values of his book is its usefulness to the student or teacher working with this material for the first time. This very strength, however, leads to two shortcomings. First, the clarity is achieved at the expense of reductionism and oversimplification. He must summarize even though he warns us that summary is impossible. He often makes the writers seem didactic, losing sightofthe playfulness he intellectually recognizes . Nor does he spend sufficient time working out his allusions (a grammatical error on p. 50, which should have been caught by the editor, illuminates a hasty connection between the interference of a quantum physicist's observations and Henry Waugh's interventions into the Universal Baseball Association's "original system of order"). This first shortcoming may be due to McCaffery's attachment to his thesis, and it is ironic that his thesis illuminates the dangerofrelyingon systems. Perhaps he should have begun with a point he makes at the end of his "personal conclusion," that his study should be viewed not as a polemic but "as a tentative beginning to the investigation of an enormously rich period in American literature." Studies in American Fiction119 To capture the sense of...

The title of Gloria Fisk's monograph is somewhat deceptive. Seemingly a throwback to a fast-disappearing species of literary criticism—the single-author study—the book is not that at all. Taking Orhan Pamuk as an exemplary case study, Fisk brilliantly leapfrogs from there to raise broader questions on how the field of world literature is constituted in Euro-American academies and institutions; on what underpins our assumptions when reading literary works from different regions, especially those from the global South; and on the chasm between local and global forms of reception while reading international authors. Her monograph can be situated in a two decades-long conversation regarding the field and compass of world literature that has been shaped by a series of key texts, among them, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (originally published in French in 1999 and translated into English in 2005); David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2004); Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2005); Eric Hayot's On Literary Worlds (2012); Emily Apter's Against World Literature (2013); the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015); and Aamir Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). Populated by heavyweight critics, the field has generated a daunting debate that has grown alongside a flourishing mini-industry—at least relative to the rest of the squeezed humanities—that caters to the pedagogy of world literature in undergraduate and graduate curricula, tenure-track hires, research institutes, textbook anthologies, and academic monographs.It is undoubtedly reductive, though nonetheless accurate, to suggest that this debate has largely been divided into the polar camps of the proponents and opponents of world literature. Its proponents see world literature expanding the narrow confines of the Western canon, thereby breaking down disciplinary linguistic and national-literary boundaries, and also generating knowledge about other cultures to foster a cosmopolitan diversity. But its detractors invariably read world literature as the literary handmaiden to a neoliberal ethos that superficially celebrates diversity while reinforcing both the global forces of capitalism and the hegemony of the Anglophone, since these authors and their works are mainly propped up by multinational publishing industries, Western-based literary prizes (e.g. the Booker and the Nobel), and Anglo-American academic institutions. The divide between the enthusiasts and the skeptics of world literature was conveniently on display at a 2011 conversation at the American Comparative Literature Association between Damrosch and Spivak. The former suggested that we “have much to celebrate here” (456), thanks to a global expansion of the literature canon that might lead to “a more genuine understanding of the world” (463), whereas the latter maintained that “to say that [world literature] is the message of capitalist globalization is not to be tendentious” (467).Fisk comes neither to praise nor to bury world literature but instead to intervene elegantly and incisively in this impasse. As she writes, “I am reading the debate for and against world literature with less interest in taking sides than in taking the polarity apart” (166). The two ostensibly opposed camps have more in common than it may seem, she argues, in that both are structurally generated out of the same institutional framework. Operating in a domestic context in which a rhetoric of crisis pervades the humanities, in which the literary sphere of letters is marginalized in the broader public sphere, in which tenure-track positions and undergraduate enrollments in literature departments have dropped precipitously, critics are quick to instrumentalize literature to make more ambitious claims for its political utility. The supporters of world literature insist on “the good world literature can do” because of “the view it gives its readers on [foreign] worlds they would find hard to see without a local and literary guide” and because of “the kinds and degrees of solidarity [it] creates among strangers” (3–4). The importance of the humanities becomes legible insofar as world literature provides an aesthetic incubator for ethical principles that help readers navigate an increasingly plural and globalized world and that can thus counter the homogenizing processes of capital. Detractors, by contrast, see world literature as a product of neoliberal capitalist systems and seek to unmask its underlying complicity with “the cultural logic of the multinational corporation and the neoliberal university” (184). Fisk sees this anti–world literature position making similarly “grandiose claims” for the political radicalism and ethical good of literary studies. She notes the material irony of this critique in view of both the structural marginality of the humanities and the fact that mounting them helps us to “amass the cultural capital we need to get and keep a tenure track job” (184–85) in the neoliberal university in which we all work. Burdened by the assumptions we bring to world literature, we approach global novelists like Pamuk with the expectation that they, too, must function as a political agent of the liberal values of Western academies—to wit, as a defender of free speech, a cross-cultural bridge, a voice for the marginalized, and a critic of capitalism—without any regard for the position these authors occupy in their national spaces. This leads to the promotion of some global authors at the expense of others who do not meet these standards of liberal goodness, and forces novelists writing for a global readership into an uneasy role, caught between their domestic constraints and the international literary norms imposed on them.Fisk unfolds this argument over the course of her monograph with a dazzling demonstration of methodological scope and variety that reveals an expert grasp of different ways of reading. This scope is revealed in the tripartite structure and expanding foci of the book. The first two chapters examine the good attributed to the global novel in the kinds of cultural work it is expected to perform; the next two consider the good values the novelist is expected to champion qua world author; and the final two chapters interrogate the literary institutions (the Nobel Prize and the U.S. academy) that make claims for the good of world literature. Fisk's scale of interpretation thus widens from section to section, with the first hewing toward the more traditional approaches of close reading. She slyly titles her first two chapters “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People” and “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People's History”—common assumptions about the cultural work expected of world literature—but goes on to argue that a novel fails to reliably do such things. Focusing primarily on Pamuk's Snow, she shows how Pamuk toggles between realist conventions and metafictional postmodernism to cannily satisfy and subvert the reader's expectations by creating both proximity and distance between Western readers and his foreign characters. Furthermore, by altering the representation of historical events in Turkey in ways that elude most non-Turkish readers, Pamuk “thematize[s] the limits of the mimetic representation in world literature” (84) and reveals how realism is always culturally specific rather than a transparent lens into a different world.Turning in the next section from a hermeneutic focus on the text to the broader methods of cultural analysis, Fisk explains how the figure of the global author is constructed in the world republic of letters. Chapter 3 examines the controversy stemming from Pamuk's acknowledgment of the mass murder of Armenians—though he does not use the word genocide, as Fisk points out—under the Ottoman Empire to the fury of nationalist Turks, on one hand, and the admiration of his Western readers, on the other. Tracing the reasons for these opposed responses in his local and global readerships, Fisk criticizes how we box a novelist like Pamuk into being an advocate of human rights, even as we fail to attend to the local histories—nationalism, class, colonialism—that shape the Turkish public sphere and make it dangerous for Pamuk to occupy such a position. By doing so, we inadvertently “reinforce the global unevenness we critique” (112). Chapter 4 expands on this paradox by juxtaposing Pamuk with the father of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach, showing how the disciplinary fetishization of authorial exile forces world writers to sacrifice their relationship to their national publics to become celebrated international figures. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6, Fisk draws on the methods of the sociology of literature to clarify the way our definitions of world literature are inseparable from the norms with which our institutions of literary prizes and universities operate. The Nobel Prize honors foreign authors “for behaving like good citizens of participatory democracies” (164), a political standard rarely applied to Western authors, while U.S. academics make claims about world literature to “advance institutional interests” (171) that have little to do with Pamuk himself or his work. Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still.The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. She reminds us of the political limits of criticism; of the meaningful difference between aesthetics and politics in their effects on the world; of our privileged status as tenured or tenure-track faculty trafficking in world literature; and of our complicit if agonized relationship with the structures of literary and academic capitalism. In this respect, her monograph is an accomplished example of what Jeffrey Williams has described as a “new modesty in literary criticism.” He traces the fullest articulation of this trend to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” which recognizes that, despite the long and robust tradition of criticism conducted in the name of “political activism”—particularly under the aegis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and symptomatic reading—such claims overlook the fact that the “disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change” (2). Fisk echoes their call for a new “political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics” (Best and Marcus 15) when she insists that critical discourses which make grandiose pronouncements about world literature—whether about its ethical good or its complicity with capital—obscure the material conditions allowing those pronouncements to be made in the first place. These arguments rely solely on a form of “magical thinking,” Fisk complains, a phrase she repeatedly uses to describe these critical modes, and “we should not confuse talk of revolution for revolution” (Fisk 170). Williams rightly suggests that this trend toward critical modesty emerges in the wake of the waning power and status of the humanities and literary studies. Rather than being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—the Shelleyesque aims of the Nobel Prize formulated by Alfred Nobel (Fisk 137)—we are closer today to Auden's modest rebuttal that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But if critical modesty aspires to “less hubris” in its claims, it also loses something by virtue of its pragmatism—“the utopian impulse of criticism,” according to Williams, what Fisk would call “magical thinking” perhaps. This loss has led to the accusation that these varieties of surface reading ultimately succumb to a certain “political quietism” (Best and Marcus 16), an acceptance of the status quo of the diminished standing of humanistic study in the world.Given that the coda to her monograph is titled “Now, What?,” Fisk is clearly not proposing the quiet acceptance of the world as it is. If the assumptions we make about the good of world literature make us rather bad readers, we could do better, she argues, by developing reading methods that acknowledge our complicity with the neoliberal university instead of polemics that assume our autonomy from it. This might return us to the solutions of a modest criticism: more accurate descriptions of our state of affairs and self-reflexivity about how we are conditioned by them. Fisk's persuasive sociological analysis, however, also points us in a different direction, suggesting that the answer lies not in the intellectual realm of improved reading methodologies but in the material realm of institutional change. If we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Pamuk's local constraints—“give literary establishments . . . a vocabulary through which to see the complexity of [his] relation to the nationalist discourse” (194)—instead of expecting him to function as a neutral conduit across cultures, we can do so only if we continue to have access to scholarship from historians knowledgeable about Turkey, critics fluent with Turkish literary traditions, or institutional ties that link U.S.-based scholars with scholars elsewhere, all of which Fisk's brilliant monograph is indebted to. Put differently, we read world literature best when we retain access to the very methodologies that the present formation of “world literature” has institutionally supplanted to some extent: “area studies, for example, critical race studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and translation theory” (166), housed in the shrinking departments of comparative literature and foreign languages. Fisk acknowledges that there are better and worse polemics against world literature, but in choosing to focus on the “least convincing arguments that scholarly critics make” against it (168), her argument does not give sufficient attention to critiques that are less about establishing one's political purity or academic credentials by inveighing against neoliberalism, and more about confronting the institutional losses and deaths of disciplines that make us collectively worse readers. We need not return to a fetishization of reading world literature in the original language—for Fisk, Apter's Against World Literature is an exemplary instance of this—to argue that there is a profound intellectual loss when that language and literature ceases to be taught if it is replaced by the proliferation of world literature courses in translation. In such a scenario, we eventually lose the opportunity to learn from scholarship by those fluent in different languages, even if we ourselves are not. Thus, although Fisk argues that the debate for and against world literature is one waged in the hermetic walls of the Anglo-American academy that imposes a set of constraints on world authors, it is frequently also the case that this debate is fundamentally about how to read authors like Pamuk well—or, at least, better—insofar as the material distribution of resources across disciplines and departments shapes these readerly practices. Fisk's monograph is invaluable for highlighting how these practices are imbricated in the institutions we inhabit. If we take the logic of her argument seriously, how to become a good reader of world literature may have less to do with improving the critical methodologies of world literature, and more to do with fighting to ensure that the methodologies of adjacent disciplinary formations can continue to flourish in our institutions of learning, rather than be slowly eclipsed by the allure of the global.

Before we can ask whether there are too many lawyers we must answer several preliminary questions: whom do we consider lawyers, and what does and should influence their number? The term ‘lawyer’, w...

The demonolexis in Yu. Andrukhovych’s long short story “Recreatsii” (“Recreations”) has been analyzed in the article. In the course of the research there have been outlined the following lexical-semantic groups of demonomens: toponymic and onomastic names, modified lexemes, names of the rituals, genuine Ukrainian demonomens, obscene words and expressions, demonomens of Biblical origin, names from the world mythology and general demonolexis. The special lexical-semantic group has been formed by non personificated demonomens, which serve to convey the peculiarities of the contemporary Ukrainian writers’ mentality, their habits through speech. Such nomens help to reveal the protagonist’s soul, show the positive and negative sides of his personal ego, demonstrate the duality of the human perception of the world, indicate the causes of phobias, emotions, sensations. Key words: demonolexis, demonomen, lexical-semantic group, non personificated demonomen.

Lula Carson Smith McCullers (b. 1917–d. 1967), known most commonly as Carson McCullers, was an American novelist, writer of short stories, essayist, playwright, poet, and children’s author, born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, who spent most of her adult life outside the South, primarily in New York City. McCullers left her native region permanently with the publication of her first novel in 1940, when she was only twenty-three years old. Heralded as a wunderkind following the success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she went on to write four more novels, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), and Clock Without Hands (1961). McCullers also found success on the stage with the award-winning production of her first play, The Member of the Wedding (1950), a stage adaptation of her novel, that ran for 501 performances on Broadway. A second play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), was not well received by critics and closed after only forty-five performances. McCullers’s work has proven popular for adaptation. With the exception of Clock Without Hands, all her novels have been adapted for the screen and some of her short stories, including “A Domestic Dilemma,” “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud,” and “The Sojourner,” have been adapted as short films or for television. Due to a misdiagnosed and improperly treated case of childhood rheumatic disease, McCullers was plagued with ill health for most of her life. She had a series of increasingly debilitating strokes beginning in her early twenties that continued and ultimately led to her death on 29 September 1967 at age fifty. McCullers’s legacy seems secure, due in large part to the continued critical and popular interest in her work, especially The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, selected in a 1998 list by the Modern Library as the seventeenth of the one hundred most important 20th-century novels, and by Time magazine as one of the top one hundred novels published between 1923 and 2005. McCullers, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952, was a part of a group of writers from the American South seen as the literary representatives of the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Critical response to McCullers’s work is characterized by attention to her consideration of adolescence; disability; loneliness and the search for belonging, love, and understanding; gender and sexual identity; racial discrimination and racism; empathy; the outsider; freaks and freakishness; and what many mislabel as the Southern gothic or grotesque aspects of her work.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a key text in African American literature. Its author Zora Neale Hurston has become an iconic figure for her literary works and for her invaluable contribution to documenting elements of black folk culture in the rural south and in the Caribbean. This introductory book designed for students explores Hurston's artistic achievements and her unique character: her staunch individualism, her penchant for drama, her sometimes controversial politics, her philosophical influences and her views on gender relations. Lovalerie King explores Hurston's life and analyses her major works and short stories. Historical, social, political, and cultural contexts for Hurston's life and work, including her key role in the development of the Harlem Renaissance, are set out. The book concludes with an overview of the reception of Hurston's work, both in her lifetime and up to the present, as well as suggestions for further reading.

This article analyzes three short stories of refugee expulsion, immigrant displacement, and exilic return by contemporary writer Trần Vũ. Beyond the binary of nostalgia and assimilation, Vietnamese diasporic identity emerges in these narratives as the tenuous subject of physical and psychic trauma. Informed by postcolonial theories of diasporic identity, Asian American scholarship on racial abjection, and psychoanalytic and feminist analyses of trauma and sexual deviance, I argue that the characters in these stories either succumb to or subvert the unwitting repetition of trauma in their attempts to challenge, if only precariously, patterns of domination through sadomasochism and counternationalist historiography.

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.