Since the 2016 election, there has been much soul searching in certain progressive circles about the role that identity should play in liberal politics in the United States and beyond. Authors as diverse as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, and David Wootton have recently urged us to consider the possibility of constructing a form of liberalism in which identity does not necessarily play a central role. In the writings of at least some of these authors, we may discern a desire to recover the heritage of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on abstract individualism and the importance of so-called “negative” freedoms, such as freedom of speech.

In recent years Jesmyn Ward’s workhas received significant critical attention for its stark depiction of race, class, and gender dynamics through Bois Sauvage, microcosm of a rural South typically marginalized in the US imaginary. However, her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, while still deeply invested in a specific, southern time and place, engages with peripheries in which these categories are constructed. Where does life intersect with death, sickness clash with health, or freedom meet incarceration?

Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature

According to Walter Benjamin, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”; we are losing “the ability to share experiences.” Without storytelling, which was once “a capability that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions,” we are fragmented into a piece of “information” and isolate ourselves in what is believed to be subjectivity (“The Storyteller”). And yet, in exceptional situations, storytelling appears still possible. For example, when the northeast Japan was struck by the earthquake and tsunami disaster, after initial muteness and banal narrativization by the major media (which was indeed a disaster for storytelling), there emerged stories among the survivors.

Translation Reviewis a peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing the best new scholarship on all aspects of literary translation studies. Each issue highlights a translator in an interview and features articles and essays on the history, practice, and theory of translation, as well as translations of contemporary international writers into English. 

Please see instructions for authors available at the link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=utrv20&page=instructions

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulp paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold at a price the working classes could afford, though they were popular with all classes, including president Woodrow Wilson. The earlier magazines, such as All-Story, were general fiction magazines, though later they diversified and helped solidify many of the genres we are familiar with today, including western, detective, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance and sports fiction.

A decade ago, Dipesh Chakrabarty declared in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” that understanding climate change required a transformation in our concept of history. This seminar poses history as a limit-problem for contemporary literary and critical responses to climate change. How do existing responses, in light of their various theoretical provenances, contend with a phenomenon whose nature is diachronically outside an anthropocentric critical framework and irreducible to the terms and temporalities of human history, economics, and social structuration?  Under the heading “speculative ecology,” our panel aims to bring together literary, theoretical, and historical responses to the ecological crisis of our time.