Scholarly Publications - English Language and Literature

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/115651

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Open Access
The African novel of ideas: philosophy and individualism in the age of global writing
(Duke University Press, 2023-03-01) Wright, Timothy
Open Access
Free will
(Cambridge University Press, 2023-09-18) Selleri, Andrea
Open Access
Stages of loss: The English comedians and their reception
(Cambridge University Press, 2022) Kurtuluş, Gül
Open Access
Melancholy's ends: Thomson's reveries
(Wayne State University Press, 2022-12-01) Williams, Jonathan C.
Open Access
Remains of the social: Desiring the post-apartheid
(University of Minnesota Press, 2022) Wright, Timothy
Open Access
Swinburne’s boyishness
(Oxford University Press, 2022-02-12) Selleri, Andrea
This article reconsiders the early critical reception of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1866 collection Poems and Ballads with a view to articulating the extent to which the critical hostility that famously greeted the book upon publication was mediated by the category of ‘boyishness’. I show that the complaint that the 29-year-old Swinburne wrote, and by implication thought and felt, too much like a boy and not enough like an adult man lay at the core of the critical onslaught and contributed to underpin critics’ various complaints of obscenity, blasphemy, bad taste and so on. After considering the nature of the connection between the boyish quality often associated with Swinburne as a person throughout his life and the poetical ‘boyishness’ critics perceived in his work, I propose a taxonomy of three main meanings of boyishness that emerge from the early critics’ attacks: boyishness as lack of virility, boyishness as lack of self-restraint, and boyishness as lack of intellectual maturity. By analysing these critical readings in the context of various medical, pedagogical and more broadly cultural discourses of the time, I make the case that Swinburne found himself cast as someone who presented precisely the characteristics of boyhood of which a functioning adult man was supposed to rid himself. The broader argument is that by giving close attention to age-based slurs, we can gain a more fine-grained account of mid-Victorian attitudes to childhood and maturity, and society’s self-image more generally.
Open Access
Eastern exoticism: Thackeray as tourist and anti-tourist
(Istanbul Universitesi, Edebiyat Fakultesi - University of Istanbul, Faculty of Letters, 2021) Kennedy, Valerie
William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1846 Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo exemplifies the complexity of nineteenth-century travel-writing where exploration exists alongside tourism (and anti-tourism). In key Ottoman locations like Smyrna, Constantinople, and Cairo, the narrator’s desire for Oriental exoticism is sometimes realised but often disappointed as the East becomes increasingly modernised and Westernised. These conflicting perspectives are expressed through allusions, East-West comparisons, and irony and satire in a self-conscious and unstable narrative. William Makepeace Thackeray’in 1846 tarihli Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo keşfin turizmle (ve turizm karşıtlığıyla) birlikte yer aldığı on dokuzuncu yüzyıl seyahat yazılarının karmaşıklığına örnek teşkil eder. İzmir, İstanbul, Kahire gibi Osmanlı şehirlerinde yazarın Doğu egzotizmi hevesi, Doğu’nun giderek modernleşmesi ve Batılılaşmasıyla ancak bazen gerçekleşmekte, fakat çoğu zaman hayal kırıklığıyla sonuçlanmaktadır. Bu çelişkili bakış açıları imalarla, Doğu-Batı karşılaştırmalarıyla, mahcup ve güvenilmez bir anlatı dâhilinde ironi ve taşlamayla aktarılır.
Open Access
Secularity and the limits of reason in Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man”
(Cambridge University Press, 2021-06-11) Çelikkol, Ayşe
As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.
Open Access
Capitalism in the pastoral mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-01-05) Çelikkol, Ayşe
Open Access
Poverty, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and J. R. McCulloch
(Selçuk Üniversitesi, 2021-06-07) Çelikkol, Ayşe
As the precursor to the science of economics, political economy concerned some topics that also preoccupied novelists, such as poverty and wealth. Literary criticism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been charting the ways in which the discourses of literature and political economy intersect, despite the Romantic disavowal of their commonalities. Aiming to contribute to this ongoing scholarly effort, this essay pinpoints an unexpected affinity between Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a novel which addresses the plight of the poor under the New Poor Law of 1834, and the political economist J. R. McCulloch’s writing on that piece of legislation. Both mistrust theoretical knowledge and privilege the particular as the basis on which one must make decisions. This affinity is unexpected because Oliver Twist repudiates political economy. Recognizing McCulloch’s and Dickens’s common epistemology alerts us to the ways in which the preference for the particular over the systemic shapes Oliver Twist. The common ground between Oliver Twist and McCulloch’s writing on the New Poor Law attests to the interconnectedness of literature and political economy.
Open Access
The Cambridge handbook of literary authorship
(Oxford University Press, 2021-05) Selleri, Andrea
Open Access
Oscar Wilde and the Freedom of the Will
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021-03-09) Selleri, Andrea
Open Access
Thomas Gray's elegy and the politics of memorialization
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) Williams, Jonathan C.
In this article, I argue that Thomas Gray's use of the elegy form in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) reveals poetry's struggle to know or comprehend the historical present. Not knowing how to memorialize the poor who have been presumably lost to history, Gray's elegist imagines alternate lives for the dead, thus recasting fictional imagination as historical remembrance and illustrating a divide between literary thought and historical reality. The Elegy thus bears witness to a form of poetic power that relies on obscuring rather than illuminating modernity and its mechanisms.
Open Access
Updating Shakespeare: reflections on the possibilities of reading and teaching Shakespeare today
(Truman State University Press, 2019) Kurtuluş, Gül
The author discusses the interpretation of William Shakespeare's plays in contemporary society. Topics include the availability of online resources to be an active reader of Shakespeare's plays, the adaptations of the plays to reflect contemporary society, and the variety of readings that were not possible in Shakespeare's time.
Open Access
The planetary in William Morris's late romances
(William Morris Society, 2018) Çelikkol, Ayşe
The metaphor of the wet highway, which Morris had rehearsed in the Water of the Wondrous Isles prior to its appearance in The Sundering Flood, ascribes to the flood the qualities associated with an artifice. The flood functions more effectively than its human-made counterpart, the road. In this description, connection to distant lands appears as natural as the rivers, seas and oceans themselves – it does not have to be mediated by technological developments that are shaped by the capitalist mode of production. Morris’s approach here resonates with today’s discourse on planetarity, which focuses on ecological networks that rival capitalist globalisation. As Amy Elias and Christian Morale write, the planetary indicates ‘a historically unprecedented web of relations among peoples, cultures, locales’ that have an ecological basis.2 This essay argues that William Morris’s late prose romances construe the planetary, and that, for Morris, such webs have a primeval character rather than constituting a recent development.
Open Access
Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aesthetics
(Indiana University Press, 2019) Wright, Timothy
Matthew Omelsky has recently coined the term “African Anthropocene” to describe how the intertwined crises wrought by global capitalism and man-made ecological disaster have disproportionately affected the African continent. This paper discusses a short story collection by the Ugandan writer Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun (2014), as one instance of an African aesthetics that uniquely registers and responds to this dual crisis. I focus in particular on the “vampire story” that opens this collection, arguing that Dila not only reinvents, but, in critical ways, “mutates” the canonical Euro-American vampire figure. In reimagining the aristocratic European vampire as a mutant, genetically modified swarm of mosquitos, Dila’s story suggests new, environmental forms of the monstrous emerging at the confluence of ecological catastrophe and corporate neocolonialism. At the same time, I show how Dila’s fiction draws on the history of colonialism in Africa in imagining modes of survival within this vampiric ecology. In order to unpack the political implications of what I call Dila’s “mutational aesthetics,” I trace Dila’s attempts to imagine forms of human-nonhuman entanglement that delink from a Western episteme and its ideological carapace of “the human,” providing instead post-humanist visions of survival and refuge.
Open Access
Linguistic silence and the alienation of female characters in Ulysses and the Blind Owl
(Slovene Comparative Literature Association, 2020) Najafibabanazar, Maryam
This article intends to demonstrate how female characters in Ulysses and The Blind Owl are deprived of full means of communication and expression. The connection with the concern with alienation in these two novels is that it is in the representation of female language that they show how characters—female characters and by extension women in general—are alienated from and marginalized by the masculine voices of the novels’ narrators and focalizers. It is noticeable that the narrative style of Ulysses and The Blind Owl, although very innovative and experimental, still allocates almost no space to female voices and language, with the major exception of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. With the benefit of more recent perspectives, Molly’s narrative can be read as deriving in some ways (the lack of punctuation being one major indication) from the semiotic and subverting the established discipline of language use (the symbolic), thus, as an example of écriture féminine.
Open Access
Bracket and voice: Drummond of Hawthornden’s lunular poetics
(Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2020) Hart, Patrick
Taking the proliferation of brackets in his Petrarchan verse as its starting point, this essay argues for a reevaluation of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s poetic voice. While even his admirers have tended to characterise his sonnets as operating at a single high rhetorical pitch, Drummond’s deployment of lunulae and crotchets serves to complicate the voice that emerges both from individual poems and from the collection as a whole, establishing a ‘lunar’ counterpart to the sequence’s Apollonian magniloquence, a sottovoce that functions as a distinctive correlative of the Petrarchan locus amoenus. Moreover, in setting ear against eye and text against tongue, Drummond’s brackets also pose difficult questions regarding what it might mean to talk of the text’s ‘voice’ at all. Attending to how Drummond’s punctuation establishes a radical incommensurability of melic and opsic, while setting the readings that emerge within the context of recent scholarship on the role of the voice in early modern reading practices, also means reframing Drummond’s relationship to the Baroque. Rather than focusing on the extremes to which he takes the Petrarchan conceit, we start to see Drummond as belonging to the early seventeenth-century transnational Baroque associated by historians such as Peter Burke with a crisis of representation. This recontextualisation might ultimately point (this essay concludes) towards Petrarch’s own proto-Baroque tendencies.
Open Access
World ecology in Martineau’s And Gaskell’s colonial pastorals
(Oxford University Press, 2020) Çelikkol, Ayşe
The pastoral tends to offer a retreat from modern life, but Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell reverse this pattern. They both turn to the colonies to reconcile the pastoral mode with capitalism, and, in their pastoral depictions of colonial life, we witness that mode’s peculiar capacity to narrate what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls ‘the capitalist world ecology’ – the globally systemic way of putting nature to work in the service of capitalism. Set in natural environments marked by human influence, the pastoral is a mode that can register economic relations with their ecological dimensions. In Martineau’s Homes Abroad and Cinnamon and Pearls – tales in Illustrations of Political Economy – and Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the pastoral aestheticizes the role that natural environments play in the development of capitalism. Homes Abroad presents peaceful agrarian life in Van Diemen’s Land as a lucrative enterprise in accord with modernization. Turning to Ceylon, Cinnamon and Pearls imagines an organic capitalism in which the celebration of plant life goes hand in hand with emergent property borders. In Mary Barton, the final pastoral setting in Canada is home to peace and progress. The felled trees in that setting signal the appropriation of nature for profit in the timber trade. These works of fiction capture the accumulation of capital in rural and suburban areas, which was historically key to the emergence of capitalism. The pastoral’s ability to depict the capitalist world ecology reflects a preoccupation with historical forces that is already present in the mode’s roots in antiquity.
Open Access
Three theses on the pedagogical relevance of second language acquisition research
(TÖMER, 2005) Eckerth, Johannes
The paper investigates the relevance of second language acquisition research inside language teaching. As a point of departure, three theses are proposed, each of which suggests a relevance criterion regarding second language acquisition research. These three theses are then exemplified by reference to three empirical studies in classroom-based L2 research. In conclusion, it is suggested that the field of task-based research is one in which L2 teaching andL2 research can benefit from each other. It is further proposed how this might be done, such that a cooperative and constructive dialogue between teachers and researchers develops.