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Recent criticism has increasingly asserted the centrality of gothic in the Canadian canon, and explicitly gothic conceptions of the forested and frozen North inform several of Margaret Atwood‘s novels, poems, essays and short stories. Her haunted wilderness settings are sites for the negotiation of identity and power relationships. This essay focuses on her 1970 poem sequence The Journals of Susanna Moodie and her short story `Death by Landscape (from her 1991 Wilderness Tips collection), considering them in relation to critical models of postcolonial gothic.
James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is a book-length study of his groundbreaking novels, analysing and contextualising each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. Historicised through diverse contexts such as Scottish socialism, public transport, emigration, ‘Booker Prize’ culture and Glasgow's controversial ‘City of Culture’ status in 1990, the book offers readings of Kelman's style, characterisation and linguistic innovations. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist, and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicised literary tradition which transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. Kelman is cautious about the power relationship between the working-class worlds he represents in his fiction, and the latent preconceptions embedded in the language of academic and critical commentary. In response, the study is self-critical, questioning the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert and politically necessary.
‘reflexivity’: being ‘more open to the need for an awareness of those many “others” whose ways of thinking are so different from ours’ ( Hall, 2017 : 254). For aid workers, it should lead to a greater questioning of the contexts in which the humanitarian sector operates, at headquarters and in the field, as well as the processes that have helped to shaped them and the deep-rooted power relationships that underpin them. We can also read these debates as part of a longer-term trend
their history or their demands, or to explain the power relationships between the different groups and the logic behind the violence they were engaged in. Two of the most common ‘hooks’ I found were the rapes they were suspected of committing and the child soldiers they were reported to have among their ranks. Twenty-eight per cent (16/58) of the pieces by special correspondents to eastern DRC that I examined for my thesis on the Mai-Mai mentioned rape. The issues of
. The humanitarian ideal was therefore ‘inaccessible to savage tribes that … follow their brute instincts without a second thought, while civilized nations … seek to humanize it’ ( Moynier, 1888 ). This goes to show that humanitarian principles, far from being a timeless good, are not immune to prevailing stereotypes or political power relationships. As a treaty aimed at an emblematic nineteenth-century battle was being signed, the conflicts and massacres of civil wars and
and others, and whether wearable technology can promote human autonomy when it is locked into commercial and power relationships in which the users’ best interests are not paramount ( Wissinger, 2017 ). These questions are also highly pertinent in the humanitarian, where the risks are greater and the power of users (as consumers and citizens) much less. It has been noted that the literature on datafied self-care focuses overwhelmingly on wealthy, educated
2 Agency and structure: interpreting power relationships Agents or structures? There are many different accounts of the nature of social or political power in society.1 One of the deepest divides between those accounts is whether ‘power’ is predicated on agents or on structures. Within each segment of the divide reside other divisions, notably over what constitutes an agent and what is the nature of the structure of society. These divisions are deeply implicated within the broader divide I have identified. Some accounts of agents are themselves deeply structural
relationships between characters in Frankenstein encourage a simultaneous sexually ‘tense’ knowledge/power relationship between the reader and the text. Much of the queer Gothic reading pleasure lies in experiencing the play of recognition, knowledge and ignorance in these narratives and in being put in the alarming, but also thrilling, position of the other ‘one’ in the text who might recognise the meaning
awareness and performance of social class, stepping beyond its boundaries was fraught with difficulty, as was failing to perform manliness at all. More complex were men who chose to perform eccentric masculinities that rejected the norms of their class or society more broadly, and not only achieved manliness but shaped broader social power relationships. Such performances were viewed as successful because they were coherent, suggestive of a truthful rendering of character, and because they were assertive claims to identity. Not all such performances were happily received
different social groups interacted in courtrooms; to highlight how they created, understood and used different resources for manliness in this process; and to think about the implications of their interactions for power relationships across class, ethnicity and in the context of • 1 • BARCLAY PRINT.indd 1 11/10/2018 10:05 MEN ON TRIAL political rights. This is a history of the important role that gender played in the production of social, legal and political power within courtrooms. Ultimately, it seeks to ascertain how men’s performances of masculinity impacted on