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'The Birthday Girl' is a story within a story. The narrator, whom we know nothing of except that she is having this conversation, tells us what the other woman tells her about her 20th birthday. Btw, the other woman is over 30, has two children - a boy and a girl, drives an Audi, is married to a CPA 3 years older than herself, they have an Irish settler, and she plays tennis with her girlfriends twice a week. She used to wait tables every Friday at one of the better-known Italian restaurants in the Roppongi district of Tokyo in her student days, which is where her story is set. O.W. (other woman) had to work on her birthday, Friday, November 17, because her waitress friend who offered to fill in for her became sick. O.W. didn't mind; work would take her mind off of what she had a sinking feeling was a break-up, with her boyfriend since high school. Her story is quite straightforward - she had to deliver dinner to the owner of the restaurant, because the manage, who did...

Diti Golder's post It was the aim of our syllabus committee to include marginalized voices, such as Linda Hogan's. She is not mainstream because (a) she is of Native American ethnicity and (b) her themes are somewhat metaphysical: life, death, rebirth, the circle of life, oneness with nature's people etc. This  essay  on the Native American perspective w.r.t. Linda Hogan is a lifesaver. Let us examine the many, many themes in this essay. Firstly, work:  -according to  Elana here , working shapes the way people live, from individuals to communities, to the globe. When I think about it, “work” means to me to exert physical or mental effort in order to do, make or accomplish something, or the function of completing a process or carrying out a task. -Hogan carries the words "Our work is our altar" throughout her life, the words having deeply resounded with her on account of just having been healed and nursed by the woman who uttered them.  -She s...

Textbook scribblings: self/other authority/powerlessness advanced/backward white/colored beauty/lack thereof (ugliness) science(scientific)/superstition(superstitious) civilized/barbaric Christian(religious)/pagan own systems of language/native systems of language An important and recurring binary of self vs other, where, as above, the former is privileged over the latter. If you recall from Marxism, ideology is a set of ideas and beliefs propagated by a certain section of society (the dominant one, that possesses authority). This is done through control over discourse. The point is, the colonizers and the colonized made sense of or learned to make sense of their "self", respectively, in relation to one another (as, say, superior/inferior). Basically the colonizers were creating an identity for the "other" and imposing it through control and authority. Notebook scribblings: Adopt phase: postcolonial writer who adopts the Western way of writing ...

Printable PDF Ch1.1   Ch1.2 Ch5 Ch8: Marxism Ch10: Postcolonial criticism Ch2: Structuralism Ch12: Narratology Ch12.ii: Aristotle vs Plato Ch3: Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction Ch6: Feminism Ch9: New historicism and cultural materialism Ch4: Postmodernism Ch13: Ecocriticism

Modernism was after WWI (1914-1918 and after). It was a series of cultural movements. There were systems in place that promised people that their needs would be fulfilled and that failed them. They were disillusioned, angry and anxious; and they expressed this through art, literature, architecture etc. This was the beginning of the avant-garde movement. Hemingway's zero endings Ezra Pound - "make it new" stream of consciousness impressionism self-reflexivity People began to question everything, including the existence of God. Modernists recognized that the old order had crumbled - they were happy that the old had given way to the new, but were deeply anxious about how to set up a new world order rejected certainty of Enlightenment Age thought (such as belief in experiments and rationality) - chaos and disorder was more real for them rejected the existence of an all-powerful creator saw traditional forms of art as outdated no fixed answer avant-garde:...

You no longer privilege only literary texts - you begin to recognize and appreciate other texts, such as annals, rituals, fashion etc, since they are also part of the era. There is no more foregrounding of certain texts over others, and there is equal importance given to co-texts. New Historicism opposes the exclusively text-based approach. There is no more isolation. Texts cannot exist in a vacuum. New Historicism borrows heavily from Marxism, as with the the proposition that every text is rooted in social relations, factoring power struggles, and material conditions of life. Stephen Greenblatt  started this; he first used the term. Here's some ppt points: parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts reaction to text-only approach which placed literature in a vacuum; it was a recovery of the referent textuality of history and historicity of texts: texts and co-texts old historicism saw history as objective, unchanging and which can be recovered easily new hist...

Notes and excerpts from Susan Gubar's introduction to 'Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century': (i) Feminist studies have multiplied into various forms of inquiry in which every category linked to gender has itself undergone critical redefinition. (The book was published in 2000.) Just as proponents of identity politics enlarged the meaning of the term "women" by combining such categories as race and sex with gender analysis, post-structuralist thinkers used gender analysis to display the instability of such categories as race and sex. (ii) That is, the terms race, sex, religion, and caste started out as fixed phrases w.r.t. gender, but considerations of gender quickly complicated their meanings. (iii) Gubar held the "passionate belief that the pedagogic function of feminist studies depends on abrogating scholarly ghettoization and that its future vitality hinges on our ability to bring gender into play with different sorts of difference...