Literary Criticism

Excerpt: Chapter 1. 

The Vegan Studies Project
Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror
Laura Wright
Foreword by Carol J. Adams

The foundational text for the nascent field of vegan studies

Reviews

“Combining personal narratives and gender studies with ecofeminism and pop culture, The Vegan Studies Project offers a brilliant analysis of the impact of vegans and veganism on America’s cultural landscape. Laura Wright’s argument for a new field of vegan studies rings true, and this book will be the foundational text.”
—Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals
“Studies like Wright’s—more than anything else—show how the vegan and vegetarian label and identity are a millstone and a barrier that hinders wider society’s willingness to engage seriously with the rights and wrongs of producing, killing, and eating so many animals. If our strategy is to lessen the harm wreaked on the animals with which humans share this planet, perhaps the strongest lesson we can draw from this work is to step aside from the vegan and vegetarian identity.”
—Tristram Stuart, author of The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times


Description

This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.

Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).

The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.

У раду је предочен приказ студија које се налазе у оквиру књиге Песници и поклоници Тање Поповић. Кроз есеје груписане у три тематске целине, аутор разматра питања традиције и њеног преобликовања, жанровских преступања и одступања, поштовања почетног узора и креирања новог обрасца. У средишту пажње су и стихотворни језик, песничке слике, односи књижевног центра и маргине, као и духовно сродство песника из различитих периода. Испитују се путеви којима књижевне мисли премрежују пространства, повезујући се и остварујући континуитет.

In his article "Agency, Desire, and Power in Schnitzler's Dream Novel and Kubrick's  Adaptation Eyes Wide Shut" Ari Ofengenden explores Arthur Schnitzler's novella and Stanley Kubrick's adaptation to offer insights into the ways in which desire disrupts and clashes with social structures
(i.e., family, relationships, and society in general). Ofengenden shows how the dynamic in which disruptive desire is ideologically narrativized back into acquiescence with the status quo. Ofengenden interprets the narrative of the film as unique intuitions into action and agency where sources of agency are opaque to the subject and arise by an impenetrable combination of desire and power.

Chapter IV (66)

Livy Pushes the Argument Further (66)

An Example of How Livy’s Military Accounts Can Prove Unreliable (68)

Livy the Historian (69)

The Impact of Alexander on Livy’s History Outside of the Digression (72)

The Failure of an Alexander in Italy (73)

The Association of Papirius Cursor with Alexander the Great (77)

The Piety of Alexander, the Piety of Scipio (78)

Alexander Compared to Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and Scipio (81)

Parallels between the Roman Victory at Magnesia and Alexander’s Victory at Gaugamela (87)

The Lingering Reputation of Alexander (91)

Livy’s Claim of Roman Superiority through the Domination of the World once Ruled by Alexander (93)

Alexander Marches Through the Streets of Rome as a Captive (97)

'Just as a baker bakes because he is a baker, and a farmer farms because he is a farmer, a thief steals because he is a thief, a writer writes because he is a writer.’  – Author Meja Mwangi

‘I am not gifted in business and cannot make it in farming. My life is in writing.’ - John Kiriamiti, author of My Life in Crime

A research paper entitled 'Changing Kenya's Literary Landscape, Part 2: Past, Present & Future'. It was authored by Kenyan writer Alexander Nderitu ('Kiss, Commander, Promise'), and is available at www.AlexanderNderitu.com/papers. The topics addressed in this document include:

- WRITERS IN POLITICS: A sampling of the world's greatest political books, with special focus on Africa

- SWAHILI LITERATURE and the case for KISWAHILI AS AFRICA'S LINGUA FRANCA

- FOUND IN TRANSLATION: How translation is opening doors to other markets

- KENYA vs UGANDA: Who has better writers?

- NOOKS, VOOKS & E-BOOKS: What the e-book revolution is all about

- JEREMIAH'S WATERS: The relationship between Scribes and Alcohol (in 'staggering' detail)

- CRAZY LIKE A FOX: A hilarious analysis of Humorists, plus tips on how to write Jokes, Satires and Comedies

- HIGHER LEARNING: Do Universities Kill by Degrees?

- Literary movements: PEN International, StoryMoja, Kwani?

- Scribbling Rivalry: Writing Families

- ON WRITING: How some the world's most fabled writers wrote, and what we can learn from them

This book explores literary fascination. Why do some texts capture us more than others; how do concepts of fascination evolve; what part does literature play in this; and how can literary fascination be pinpointed and conceptualised? Offering detailed case studies that include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan, this study investigates various mechanisms of fascination across different verbal media of attraction. It illuminates the ways in which these texts are designed, presented, and received and develops fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction that provides insight into our understanding of how perception functions with regard to literature and how it has evolved. Synthesizing these analyses, the book argues that narratives of fascination essentially work with medusamorphosis, a concept that takes its cue from the Gorgon Medusa and aids the analysis of key mechanisms used to elicit fascination.

Este trabajo propone otra lectura del cuento “La gallina degollada” de Horacio Quiroga a través de la cual pueden plantearse los límites del naturalismo en el relato. Se parte de la lectura tradicional para advertir el ingreso de elementos vinculados con el abandono, el melodrama y el exceso. De este modo, la nota monocorde que aporta el naturalismo en el relato no alcanza a justificar la dimensión de lo narrado, no alcanza solo con pensar en el objetivo de toda ficción naturalista: demostrar el funcionamiento de las patologías sociales. El relato actualiza el horror aprehendido de Edgar A. Poe y de Guy de Maupassant (extremado al máximo), se vuelve más real y en su cruce con las páginas de crímenes y rarezas de la prensa de la época, el infanticidio que también puede leerse como una forma de abandono, se articula con una intuición retórica: el melodrama y el sensacionalismo típico de muchas de las ficciones del escritor.

When I first read Beyond Elsewhere (Plus loin qu’ailleurs, Éditions du Cygne), by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, I simply fell in love in a way that hadn’t happened since I first read Henry James. It compelled me to translate the book and present a translation panel at this week’s 2015 AWP conference in Minneapolis titled “Translation as a Love Affair: International Perspectives on Creative Process.” Did you ever fall in love with a book? So much that you felt the need to translate it?
Working with Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Martha Collins, Willis Barnstone, and Donald Revell, we’ll discuss our roles as intermediaries, technicians, magicians, and alchemists working between languages to create inspired texts spanning cultural differences, geographic distances, and time.

I delight in synchronicities. It was uncanny that, right after discovering Plus loin qu’ailleurs, I was invited to the Puterbaugh Festival of International Literature & Culture at the University of Oklahoma to participate in the roundtable discussion “Reading Andrés Neuman,” one of the most innovative and exquisite writers today, whose novel Traveler of the Century—an attempt at a postmodern reading of a classical novel which can also be described as the “total novel,” all-encompassing, poetic, embracing numerous literary traditions, and examining history, politics, feminism, love, dreams, literature and the fantastic—is centered on two translators in love with language.
Read more: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/translation-love-affair-beyond-elsewhere-gabriel-arnou-laujeac#.VSQcpVy4l0u

The gulf between the humanities and the sciences, named "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow in his now-famous lecture and essay of the same name, grows increasingly wide, even as trends in the digital humanities claim to offer hope. A complete diagnosis of the problem may be found in a reading of a work of science produced by an acclaimed practitioner of literature: Goethe, in his book, The Metamorphoses of Plants. Via a reading of this work, the divide between the humanities and the sciences is traced back to a more fundamental divide which is essentially bio-philosophical in nature: the divide between the epistemological phenomena of idealism and materialism, which arise in human cognition via the dysfunctions of embodiment, an account which follows the the transcendental materialist ontology laid out by Adrian Johnston in his work on Slavoj Žižek. Armed with this ontology, recent movements within the humanities, notably the evolutionary and cognitive literary theory called for by Jonathan Gottschall and others, can help us begin to approach the perspectives of the sciences while they will perhaps, in good faith, meet us halfway.

Chapter III (55)

How Roman Arms Came to Conquer the Successors of Alexander (55)

How Much More Successful Was the Roman Legion than the Macedonian Phalanx? (57)

The Best Soldiers versus the Best Formation (59)

Why the Greeks Were Shocked after Rome’s Domination of Macedon (60)

Final Thoughts on the Impact of Alexander on Polybius’ Work (63)

A short blog-post looking at the ways in which Patrick Cattrysse in DESCRIPTIVE ADAPTATION STUDIES assumes a position of critical authority analogous to that of F. R. Leavis.  Adaptation Studies is good at deconstructing such positions, in its pursuit of critical dialogue between representatives of different disciplines.

Narratives create illusions of inevitability,
Mirage of human perfect ability,
Fables of  man’s grandeur and infallibility,
We are all intoxicated by our amazing history,
In love with fate, our destiny,
We have orgasms on history, it’s our aphrodisiac beauty,