True Nations and Half People: Rewriting Nationalism in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
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Postmodernism: the American T.V. Show, 'Family Guy, As a Politically Incorrect Document
Postmodernism: The American T.V. Show, 'Family Guy, As a Politically Incorrect Document Tyron Tyson Smith1; Ajit Duara2* 1Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, Maharashtra, India. 2*Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, Maharashtra, India. 2*[email protected] Abstract Postmodernism is a movement that grew out of modernism. Movements in art, literature, and cinema focused on a particular stance. The visual artists who created entertainment focused on expressing the creator herself/himself beginning from German expressionism to modernism, surrealism, cubism, etc. These art movements played an important part in what an artist (literature, art, and visual) portrayed to his or her audience. As perspectives played an important part, an understanding of what the artist needed to portray was critical. Modernism dealt with this portrayal, which came about due to the changes taking place in society. In terms of the industry, where the overall product dealt with features like individualism, experimentation and absurdity, modernism dealt with a need to overthrow past notions of what painting, literature, and the visual arts needed to be. "After World War II, the focus moved from Europe to the United States, and abstract expressionism (led by Jackson Pollock) continued the movement's momentum, followed by movements such as geometric abstractions, minimalism, process art, pop art, and pop music." Postmodernism helped do away with these shortcomings. An understanding of postmodernism is explored in this paper. The main point which sets it apart is concepts like pastiche, intersexuality, and spectacle. Concerning pop culture, an understanding of referencing is a constant trait used by postmodern art. -
Teaching the Voices of History Through Primary Sources and Historical Fiction: a Case Study of Teacher and Librarian Roles
Syracuse University SURFACE School of Information Studies - Dissertations School of Information Studies (iSchool) 2011 Teaching the Voices of History Through Primary Sources and Historical Fiction: A Case Study of Teacher and Librarian Roles Barbara K. Stripling Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/it_etd Recommended Citation Stripling, Barbara K., "Teaching the Voices of History Through Primary Sources and Historical Fiction: A Case Study of Teacher and Librarian Roles" (2011). School of Information Studies - Dissertations. 66. https://surface.syr.edu/it_etd/66 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Information Studies - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT The ability to analyze alternative points of view and to empathize (understand the beliefs, attitudes and actions of another from the other’s perspective rather than from one’s own) are essential building blocks for learning in the 21 st century. Empathy for the human participants of historical times has been deemed by a number of educators as important for the development of historical understanding. The classroom teacher and the school librarian both have a prominent stake in creating educational experiences that foster the development of perspective, empathy, and understanding. This case study was designed to investigate the idea -
Historical Document Analysis First Reading
HISTORICAL DOCUMENT ANALYSIS FIRST READING Look at the historical document: What date was the document written? ___________________________________ Who wrote the document? ____________________________________________ Who is the intended audience? ________________________________________ What is your initial response to this document? Annotate the historical document: . Underline words that you don’t recognize or cannot read. Using context clues, write-in replacement words for your underlined words. Circle phrases or sentences that are confusing. In the margin, write what you think the phrase or sentence means. Summarize the purpose and content of the historical document (What is the meaning?): SECOND READING How did the author organize his/her ideas? How did the structure help you understand the document? Is there a better way that his/her ideas could have been expressed (change in words, structure, etc.)? Cite two facts, opinions, and/or reasoned judgments used by the author of the historical document about the given topic: Facts: Opinions: Reasoned judgments: Based on the facts, opinions, and/or reasoned judgments, what is the author’s point of view about the topic? What sentence do you think is the most important in this historical document? Justify your answer with support from the document. THIRD READING Why is this document important in the United States’s history? How does this historical document connect to the topic/unit? Compare and contrast the treatment of this topic in this primary source with the information in your textbook/secondary -
Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern
ALASDAIR GRAY AND THE POSTMODERN Neil James Rhind PhD in English Literature The University Of Edinburgh 2008 2 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis has been composed by me; that it is entirely my own work, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified on the title page. Signed: Neil James Rhind 3 CONTENTS Title……………………………………….…………………………………………..1 Declaration……………………………….…………………………………………...2 Contents………………………………………………………………………………3 Abstract………………………………….………………………………..…………..4 Note on Abbreviations…………………………………………………………….….6 1. Alasdair Gray : Sick of Being A Postmodernist……………………………..…….7 2. The Generic Blending of Lanark and the Birth of Postmodern Glasgow…….…..60 3. RHETORIC RULES, OK? : 1982, Janine and selected shorter novels………….122 4. Reforming The Victorians: Poor Things and Postmodern History………………170 5. After Postmodernism? : A History Maker………………………………………….239 6. Conclusion: Reading Postmodernism in Gray…………………………………....303 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………………..320 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….324 4 ABSTRACT The prominence of the term ‘Postmodernism’ in critical responses to the work of Alasdair Gray has often appeared at odds with Gray’s own writing, both in his commitment to seemingly non-postmodernist concerns and his own repeatedly stated rejection of the label. In order to better understand Gray’s relationship to postmodernism, this thesis begins by outlining Gray’s reservations in this regard. Principally, this is taken as the result of his concerns -
Reciprocity in Experimental Writing, Hypertext Fiction, and Video Games
UNDERSTANDING INTERACTIVE FICTIONS AS A CONTINUUM: RECIPROCITY IN EXPERIMENTAL WRITING, HYPERTEXT FICTION, AND VIDEO GAMES. A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2015 ELIZABETH BURGESS SCHOOL OF ARTS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 2 LIST OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Materially Experimental Writing 30 1.1 Introduction.........................................................................................30 1.2 Context: metafiction, realism, telling the truth, and public opinion....36 1.3 Randomness, political implications, and potentiality..........................53 1.4 Instructions..........................................................................................69 1.41 Hopscotch...................................................................................69 1.42 The Unfortunates........................................................................83 1.43 Composition No. 1......................................................................87 1.5 Conclusion...........................................................................................94 Chapter Two: Hypertext Fiction 96 2.1 Introduction.........................................................................................96 2.2 Hypertexts: books that don’t end?......................................................102 2.3 Footnotes and telling the truth............................................................119 -
The Characters' Response to Social Structures in Alasdair Gray's Lanark
Compliance Versus Defiance: The Characters’ Response to Social Structures in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and 1982 Janine Markéta Gregorová Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic Abstract The article focuses on two novels by Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and 1982 Janine (1984), in particular on the ways in which the characters are influenced by externally imposed social structures and the attitudes they assume in dealing with them. The adverse workings of official institutions, such as education and employment facilities, are received with compliance on the part of the protagonist in 1982 Janine but meet with resistance from both of the two mirror protagonists in Lanark. In the context of the standing of Scotland within the United Kingdom, institutions represent the interests of the powerful English majority rather than the dependent Scottish minority, and therefore any act of rebellion against them is charged with a subversive potential. Besides the political implications, the article explores the social dimensions of the novels and illustrates by means of individual examples the means used by the powerful to exploit the powerless, as well as the strategies the latter employ to defend themselves. Keywords Alasdair Gray; Lanark; 1982 Janine; politics in literature; sexuality; twentieth-century Scottish literature When Alasdair Gray was asked by an interviewer whether the concern with monstrous institutions recurrent in his writing is a “kind of obstreperousness” springing from “a genetic perturbation” of the author, he replied: My approach to institutional dogma and criteria—let’s call it my approach to institutions—reflects their approach to me. Nations, cities, schools, marketing companies, hospitals, police forces have been made by people for the good of people. -
Text and Context: Another Look at Burmese Days
SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2005, ISSN 1479-8484 TEXT AND CONTEXT: ANOTHER LOOK AT BURMESE DAYS Stephen L. Keck National University of Singapore Students of colonial Burma inevitably turn to Burmese Days. The frequent pedagogical use of George Orwell’s (1903-1950) novel has meant that the text has become a part of the mythology of imperial experience not only for Burma, but for the British Empire as a whole.1 In fact, it is also possibly the most widely read book involving Southeast Asia. Burmese Days is often assigned to complement general service courses in world history, literature and political science. Since these classes aim to introduce students to liberal arts--less modestly referred to as `the humanities’-- they are basic staples of American university education. This means that thousands--if not tens of thousands--of students encounter the novel each year. In addition, Burmese Days is often assigned with texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Kipling’s Kim in higher level courses which focus upon European imperialism or the British Empire. The novel’s popularity, naturally, is not confined to the United States. While the number of British students who are forced to read Orwell cannot match the mass dragooning of freshmen and sophomores which takes place across the Atlantic, it is clear that in Britain Burmese Days remains as one of the essential novels of the 20th century. With respect to Southeast Asia, it is also clear that a healthy number of Singapore undergraduates have read the novel before they matriculate; some even manage to encounter it during the course of study at the National University of Singapore. -
Maquetacišn 1
Rio-H: the city history revealed through a web-based system José Ripper Kós PROURB – Post-Graduate Program of Urban Design - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Historians have relied mostly in descriptive narratives to convey the outcome of their research. This paper aims to overview the debate between historians who are narratives champions and those who support the analysis of historical structure, which evidences some shortages in both currents and the need for exploring new forms of historical representation. The historian Peter Burke, for example, defends a search for a third option based on contemporary literary experiments, which would synthesize both currents in a new narrative form. Although Burke does not mention electronic publications, this paper relates his hypotheses to those new forms of representation provided by computers. Digital tools have been increasingly used, in the last decades, for the study and representation of the city history. As the available instruments develop and the researchers become more familiar with them, their use turns out to be more effective and provides richer results. This paper aims to explore the use of information technology, particularly 3D models and databases, for the city history research. Rio-H is presented as a digital alternative for the representation of the city history. The tool developed as a prototype is grounded on 3D digital models representing the urban configuration of Rio de Janeiro in different periods of its evolution linked to a database of a great diversity of historical documents. Thus, the city history is accessed through 3D models’ images of the historical sites. -
Typography, Illustration and Narration in Three Novels by Alasdair Gray
Title Page. Typography, Illustration and Narration in Three Novels by Alasdair Gray: Lanark, 1982, Janine and Poor Things. Craig Linwood Bachelor of Arts (Honours) School of Humanities Arts, Education and Law Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2017 Abstract. The impetus of the thesis emerged through an academic interest in how experimental uses of typography and illustration functioned as a method of narration within literature. This was followed by investigations into the use of typography and illustration yielded that while there is a growing field of literary study examining non-linguistic elements within narratives, there are few studies into typography and illustration and how an author utilises and develops them as a method of narration. In light of this, this thesis examines attempts to expand upon the act of narration through the use of typography and illustration in both experimental and common forms. This is focused through Scottish artist Alasdair Gray and three of his novels: Lanark: A Life in Four Books, 1982, Janine and Poor Things. While Gray’s novels are contemporary his use of typography and illustration engages in wider print cultures that facilitated experiment into literature involving the manipulation of typography, illustration and the traditions of narrative. Experimentation in literature from 1650 to 1990, be it through illustration, typography or the composition of narrative, often emerged when printing practice and its product were no longer seen as efficient at communicating to modernising audiences. This act often coincided with larger changes within print cultures that affected laws, politics, the means of distribution, views of design i and methods of distribution. -
1 the New Scottish Renaissance? Scott Hames for Peter Boxall And
The New Scottish Renaissance? Scott Hames for Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7, British and Irish Fiction Since 1940 (Oxford University Press, 2016) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-history-of-the-novel-in- english-9780198749394?cc=gb&lang=en& In his judicious but untimely survey of the Scottish novel, Francis Russell Hart observed that ‘a distinctive feature of modern Scotland’s literary establishment has been its hostility to, or relative lack of interest in, the novel as a form’ (Hart 1978, p. vii). Poetry was the medium of the nationalist literary renaissance of the 1920s-30s, and its dominant figure, Hugh MacDiarmid, had ‘frankly and influentially expressed the view that the novel is an inferior kind of literary expression, that “prose” is “non- creative”’ (vii.). But from the revivalist perspective the real failing of modern fiction was not generative but recuperative. The territory of the novel was off-limits to cultural revival of MacDiarmid’s kind, being impervious to the willed recovery of latent nationality.1 ‘The trouble with nearly all modern Scottish literature’, he wrote in 1946, is that it deals with the past, with pre-Industrial-Revolution times or with rural areas where ‘the old ways’ to a large extent continue. But as soon as it tackles urban problems and the conditions and prospects of modern life it peters out. This is because we have no writer yet big enough to carry over the independent Scots literary tradition from the bucolic and non-industrialised milieu in which it flourished into the contemporary scene. -
Doktori Disszertáció
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar DOKTORI DISSZERTÁCIÓ Kirchknopf Andrea Recent (Re)workings of (Post-)Victorian Fiction (Posztviktoriánus regényátiratok) Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola A Doktori Iskola vezetıje: Dr. Kulcsár Szabó Ernı, egyetemi tanár Modern Angol és Amerikai Irodalom Program A Program vezetıje: Dr. Péter Ágnes, egyetemi tanár A bizottság tagjai és tudományos fokozatuk: Elnök: Dr. Péter Ágnes, CSc, habilitált doktor Külsı bíráló: Dr. Bényei Tamás, DSc, habilitált doktor Belsı bíráló: Dr. Takács Ferenc, PhD Tag: Dr. Rawlinson Zsuzsa, PhD Titkár: Dr. Farkas Ákos, PhD Póttag: Dr. Péteri Éva, PhD Póttag: Dr. Marinovich Sarolta, CSc Témavezetı: Dr. Friedrich Judit, CSc, tanszékvezetı egyetemi docens Budapest, 2011 Recent (Re)workings of (Post-)Victorian Fiction Contents & Explanations Introduction where readers learn what post-Victorian fiction is, why it is important and how it is approached in the following work. 1 Chapter 1. From Victorian to Post-Victorian : Definitions, Terminology, Context 10 1.1 The Meanings of Victorian 12 1.2 Appropriating Victorian : Terming Postmodern Rewrites 17 1.3 Contexts and Critical Discourses of Post-Victorian Fiction 27 The background to post-Victorian rewriting is established, settling basic questions like what to call this type of fiction and in which critical frameworks to discuss it. Chapter 2. Post-Victorian Fiction in its Social and Political Context 44 2.1 The Literary Scene: Authors, Readers, Criticism and the Market 45 2.2 Narratives of Identity in Post-Victorian Fiction 58 The history of post-Victorian fiction of the last thirty years is scrutinised by first exploring the contemporary literary landscape, then analysing novels within the framework of postcolonial and postimperial narratives. -
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Alasdair Gray - most prolic, multi- gifted and bibulous of writers Liiz Callder News - Books Thursday, 2nd January 2020 Liz Calder recalls the writer and artist, who has died at the age of 85 Sharp-eyed literary trainspotters may have noticed that Alasdair Gray had more than one UK publisher, and that despite his Scottish nationalism, two of them were London-based. For over a decade he offered some of his works to his first and primary publisher, Canongate, and others to Cape and later to Bloomsbury. It came about this way. In the early '80s I was editing books by the Scottish historian Angus Calder (no relation). He told me of his wildly gifted writer friend Alasdair Gray, whose beloved publisher, the tiny Scottish house of Canongate, founded in 1973 by Stephanie and Angus Wolfe-Murray, was strapped for cash and couldn't afford to offer Alasdair an advance for his next book. Canongate had heroically published his magnum opus, Lanark, in 1981, to universal acclaim, followed by Unlikely Stories, Mostly. Could we at Cape step in and publish his new novel, 1982, Janine? We could. It came out in 1984. In 1987, after I moved from Cape to join others in setting up Bloomsbury, Alasdair decided to share his books between Canongate and Bloomsbury. So it went for the next decade, during which we published Poor Things, Ten Tales, Tall and True, Old Men in Love and others. Alasdair was the most generous of souls as well as the most prolific, hardworking, loyal, multi-gifted and bibulous of writers.