#ma literary studies

[live-from-flaturn]

“I wanna be the guy who gets to unsheathe his sword at the end of every episode. You know, when the screen freezes dramatically.”

- my partner who has only vague, osmosis-based knowledge of Asian drama tropes

#bl tropes #asian drama tropes #television transitions are fascinating cross-culturally #like legit i could write papers about this #i won't cause i have no time #but i could and i kind of want to #fandom studies #literary analysis ma

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Mildred Harnack

Mildred “Mili” Harnack was a writer and academic from Wisconsin who moved to Berlin with her German husband in 1930. As Hitler rose to power, Mili created the largest resistance group in Nazi Germany and was targeted for execution by the Fuhrer himself.

Mili was born Mildred Fish in Milwaukee in 1902. Her father William was a teacher, and her mother Georgina was an activist for women’s suffrage. Mili had a natural facility with languages, and was fluent in German by the time she reached adulthood. Throughout her life, Mili loved German literature and culture. She attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she majored in English literature. Mili lived in a rooming house popular with writers, and worked as a film and drama critic for a local newspaper.

After receiving her BA, Mili went on to earn an MA in English in 1925. The next year she moved back to Milwaukee and worked as a lecturer at the Milwaukee State Normal School (now the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.) She met Arvid Harnack, a German economist and lawyer who was studying at the university on a Rockefeller fellowship. Arvid was from a prominent family of German intellectuals. After a whirlwind love affair, they were married in August 1926 at her brother’s farm. Arvid’s fellowship ended and he returned to Germany, followed by Mili the year later, after she completed a teaching session at Goucher College in Baltimore.

In Germany, Mili worked on her doctoral thesis and lectured at universities in German cities Jena and Giessen. The country was plunging deeper into political turmoil, and the Nazi party was rising to power amid the chaos. More than half of Mili’s students were outspoken Nazis. She moved to Berlin in 1930 to be with her husband, and began working as an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin. Mili lectured about her favorite English and American writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw. She was so popular with students that in just a year and a half, enrollment in the class tripled.

Mili connected with other American expatriates in Berlin and formed a literary salon where anti-Nazi academics and intellectuals could express themselves freely. By 1934, the Nazi secret police were everywhere and the salon was disbanded. Fellow ex-pat Martha Dodd, a close friend of Mili’s, later described her Berlin salon as “the last of the meager remnants of free thought.” Many of those who had participated in the salons continued to meet in the Harnacks’ living room but instead of discussing literature, they planned anti-Nazi political activism

Meanwhile, Mili achieved renown as a writer. She published essays in prominent German literary journals until the mid-30’s, when magazines started to print only “approved opinions” (in support of Hitler). She was able to continue working as a translator, and her German-language translation of Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published in 1936.

Mili returned to the U.S. on a book tour in 1937, and her old friends were shocked at the drastic change in her personality. Earlier she had been friendly and easy-going, but four years living under Nazi rule made Mili anxious, stiff and guarded. She’d had to wear a metaphorical mask to survive in the totalitarian German state, and couldn’t shed the mask even when she left Europe. Mili’s family urged her to stay in the U.S. but she was determined to return to her husband and her political activism group, now called “The Circle.”

Mili’s unassuming manner combined with an extremely sharp intellect enabled her to penetrate the highest circles of German politics and diplomacy. She used these connections to get exit and travel visas for Jewish friends and colleagues, among them prominent publisher Max Tau. Mili also surreptitiously gleaned information from highly placed contacts, which she transmitted to fellow members of the resistance.

Mildred was fired from her teaching job at the University of Berlin because of her political beliefs, and she began teaching at night school, where her students were mostly working class or unemployed. She recruited many of them to join The Circle. The group published anti-Nazi leaflets, written by Mildred, and secretly left stacks of them in public places throughout the city.

German intelligence called them “the Red Orchestra” and falsely smeared them as communists working for the Soviets. Undeterred, the group increased their activities and cooperated with other resistance units. Around this time Mili wrote, “I saw it clearly before my eyes. From then on our work not only implies the risk of losing our freedom, from now on death was a possibility.” Led by Mili, The Circle became the largest resistance group in Nazi Germany. They incited civil disobedience against the Nazi regime, documented Nazi atrocities, and transmitted military intelligence to the Allies.

In the summer of 1942, the Nazis intercepted radio transmissions that revealed the identity of prominent resistance fighters including the Harnacks. On September 7, Mili and Arvid were arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. Arvid was tried by the Reich Military Tribunal and sentenced to death on December 19. He was hanged three days later at Plotzensee Prison.

Mili languished in a squalid prison cell for months, where she was tortured and contracted tuberculosis. She went on trial and was sentenced to six years in prison. However, Hitler heard about the American woman who fought so effectively against his regime, and he ordered a new trial for Mili. The kangaroo court delivered a pre-determined death sentence, and at Hitler’s explicit request Mili was beheaded by guillotine on February 16, 1943. Her last words were, “And I have loved Germany so much!” After her execution, Mili’s body was given to an anatomy professor at Humboldt University to dissect for research. After he finished, he gave the rest of her remains to a friend of hers, who had Mili buried in Zehlendorf Cemetery in Berlin.

The only writing that survived from her time in prison were a few translated lines from Goethe: “In all the frequent troubles of our days/A God gave compensation – more his praise/In looking sky-and heavenward as duty/In sunshine and in virtue and in beauty.”

Mildred’s brave actions and tragic death have not been forgotten. In Berlin, a street and a school are named for her, and in her native Wisconsin schools observe Mildred Fish Harnack Day. The University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts an annual Mildred Fish-Harnack Human RIghts and Democracy Lecture, and a sculpture of Mili was unveiled in Madison in 2019.

For fighting Hitler at the cost of her own life, we honor Mildred Harnack as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Image: Gestapo mug shots of Mildred taken after her arrest in 1942.

#Thursday Hero 🎖️

[garadinervi]

«Poder» – A Journal of Feminist Literary Perspectives, Vol. III, No. 2: 'Audre Lorde: Poetry Is Not a Luxury', Hunter College Press, Spring 1989 [Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

Exhibition: "A Language to Hear Myself": Feminist Poets Speak, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA, February 29 – June 17, 2016

#graphic design #poetry #exhibition #magazine #cover #magazine cover #audre lorde #poder #hunter college press #schlesinger library #radcliffe institute #1980s #2010s

[qqueenofhades]

Wait hold up you know SIX LANGUAGES

Like I grew up bilingual (English in school and Spanish at home) and got through my two years of a foreign language in high school relearning (terrible) textbook Spanish, and I genuinely do not think my brain could hold another language in there if I tried and wouldn’t even know where to go about start to learn another one

But holy shit SIX langauges is so incredibly impressive and I dunno if you've talked about it before, but could you share a little more about how/why you have SO MANY?

Aha, thanks. I know that someone (recently?) asked me about this, but I can't be arsed to dig through my archives to find that answer, so the short version is:

I have studied French in some capacity for most of my life (it was the main foreign language in my house; my parents both speak it); this was enough to successfully bullshit a last-minute MA graduate proficiency exam while barely studying (seriously, don't do this) and then I did medieval French history for my PhD. This means I can read most things, including complicated academic texts (I will not understand a certain word here and there, but otherwise fine), and speak/understand enough to get around in France by myself.

My Spanish and Italian is somewhat ancillary to that. I studied Italian in high school and used to remember a lot more than I do now, enough to translate things, but (alas) I haven't practiced it in a while and lost most of it (but if I worked on it for a while, it would probably come back). I live in a fairly bilingual Spanish-English city and also briefly studied Spanish once upon a time, so there are daily opportunities to read and/or hear it. I would not say my current grasp of either one is particularly outstanding, but still generally enough to at least get the sense of things I read.

I am a medievalist, so I had to study Latin. It was kind of unavoidable. Not gonna lie, I Did Not Enjoy It, though if I had actually planned my career trajectory better, I should have taken it in undergrad. But I didn't, because why would you do that to yourself voluntarily? In any event, I can read charters and documents and primary source texts in Latin, although slowly and with a lot of swearing and recourse to William Whitaker's Words. I certainly can't read literary or elaborate poems or whatever, but for what I do, it's fine.

I taught myself how to read Cyrillic and started studying Russian during the first lockdown in 2020. I can understand some basic phrases and a few grammatical conventions, read text, understand the alphabet, and a few other things, though it is (as noted) very beginner-level. I would like to brush up on it, but that is among the many, MANY things I do not have actual time and/or brainpower for.

#anonymous #ask

[salvadorbonaparte]

Re-Introduction Post

Hello everyone, so much has changed in my life that I think it's time to re-introduce myself

Name: Mack

Age: 24

Pronouns: They/He (English), Sie/Er/Hen (German)

Academic Background: BA in English Language and Linguistics and Hispanic Studies, MA (nearly finished) in Translation Studies, PhD (prospective) in German/Translation Studies

Academic Interests: Sociolinguistics, Morphology, Audiovisual Translation, Minority Languages, Literary and Poetry Translation, Censorship in Translation, Accessibility, Subtitling and Dubbing, Science Communication

Other Interests: Language Learning, Horror, Creative Writing, Films and TV, Cultures, History, Art

What to expect on this blog in the future: Posts on language learning, linguistics and translation studies. Postgraduate tips and insights into my own journey towards a PhD. Further updates of my MEGA folder of language, linguistics, translation, history, literature and culture resources (check my pinned post!) I've also been considering making some YouTube videos! It sometimes takes me a while to answer but I also love receiving questions on any of my academic Interests (or personal interests, seriously, just talk to me, I don't bite). Chaotic Academia.

This blog isn't for you if you: don't support academic piracy, don't support other's journeys including the right to drop out of a course at any stage or never attend university at all, make fun of people's accents or language level or accessibility needs, are elitist when it comes to academic access for working class, queer, disabled people and ethnic minorities, the typical fuck off if you're transphobic, racist, ableist, antisemitic etc etc etc (I don't believe in DNIs but like why would you want to interact with my blog if you're any of the above, just fuck off)

#Langblr #Studyblr #Lingblr #Gradblr #phdblr

[mariacallous]

If you were asked to guess which prestigious film-making duo had spent their career scratching around desperately for cash, trying to wriggle out of paying their cast and crew, ping-ponging between lovers, and having such blood-curdling bust-ups that their neighbours called the police, it might be some time before “Merchant Ivory” sprang to mind. But a new warts-and-all documentary about the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the US director James Ivory makes it clear that the simmering passions in their films, such as the EM Forster trilogy of A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End, were nothing compared to the scalding, volatile ones behind the camera.

From their initial meeting in New York in 1961 to Merchant’s death during surgery in 2005, the pair were as inseparable as their brand name, with its absence of any hyphen or ampersand, might suggest. Their output was always more eclectic than they got credit for. They began with a clutch of insightful Indian-set dramas including Shakespeare-Wallah, their 1965 study of a troupe of travelling actors, featuring a young, pixieish Felicity Kendal. From there, they moved on to Savages, a satire on civilisation and primitivism, and The Wild Party, a skewering of 1920s Hollywood excess that pipped Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to the post by nearly half a century.

It was in the 1980s and early 1990s, though, that Merchant Ivory became box-office titans, cornering the market in plush dramas about repressed Brits in period dress. Those literary adaptations launched the careers of Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Julian Sands, and helped make stars of Emma Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis. Most were scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who had been with them, on and off, since their 1963 debut The Householder; she even lived in the same apartment building in midtown New York. Many were scored by Richard Robbins, who was romantically involved with Merchant while also holding a candle for Bonham Carter. These films restored the costume drama to the position it had occupied during David Lean’s heyday. The roaring trade in Jane Austen adaptations might never have happened without them. You could even blame Merchant Ivory for Bridgerton.

Though the pictures were uniformly pretty, making them was often ugly. Money was always scarce. Asked where he would find the cash for the next movie, Merchant replied: “Wherever it is now.” After Jenny Beavan and John Bright won an Academy Award for the costumes in A Room With a View, he said:“I got you your Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?” As Ivory was painstakingly composing each shot, Merchant’s familiar, booming battle cry would ring out: “Shoot, Jim, shoot!”

Heat and Dust, starring Julie Christie, was especially fraught. Only 30 or 40% of the budget was in place by the time the cameras started rolling in India in 1982; Merchant would rise at dawn to steal the telegrams from the actors’ hotels so they didn’t know their agents were urging them to down tools. Interviewees in the documentary concede that the producer was a “conman” with a “bazaar mentality”. But he was also an incorrigible charmer who dispensed flattery by the bucketload, threw lavish picnics, and wangled entrées to magnificent temples and palaces. “You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill him,” says one friend, the journalist Anna Kythreotis. “But you couldn’t not love him.”

Stephen Soucy, who directed the documentary, doesn’t soft-pedal how wretched those sets could be. “Every film was a struggle,” he tells me. “People were not having a good time. Thompson had a huge fight with Ismail on Howards End because she’d been working for 13 days in a row, and he tried to cancel her weekend off. Gwyneth Paltrow hated every minute of making Jefferson in Paris. Hated it! Laura Linney was miserable on The City of Your Final Destination because the whole thing was a shitshow. But you watch the films and you see no sense of that.”

Soucy’s movie features archive TV clips of the duo bickering even in the midst of promoting a film. “Oh, they were authentic all right,” he says. “They clashed a lot.”The authenticity extended to their sexuality. The subject was not discussed publicly until after Ivory won an Oscar for writing Call Me By Your Name: “You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay, with a deeply conservative Muslim family,” Ivory told me in 2018. But the pair were open to those who knew them. “I never had a sense of guilt,” Ivory says, pointing out that the crew on The Householder referred to him and Merchant as “Jack and Jill”.

Soucy had already begun filming his documentary when Ivory published a frank, fragmentary memoir, Solid Ivory, which dwells in phallocentric detail on his lovers before and during his relationship with Merchant, including the novelist Bruce Chatwin. It was that book which emboldened Soucy to ask questions on screen – including about “the crazy, complicated triangle of Jim, Ismail and Dick [Robbins]” – that he might not otherwise have broached.

The documentary is most valuable, though, in making a case for Ivory as an underrated advocate for gay representation. The Remains of the Day, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel about a repressed butler, may be the duo’s masterpiece, but it was their gay love story Maurice that was their riskiest undertaking. Set in the early 20th century, its release in 1987 could scarcely have been timelier: it was the height of the Aids crisis, and only a few months before the Conservative government’s homophobic Section 28 became law.

“Ismail wasn’t as driven as Jim to make Maurice,” explains Soucy. “And Ruth was too busy to write it. But Jim’s dogged determination won the day. They’d had this global blockbuster with A Room With a View, and he knew it could be now or never. People would pull aside Paul Bradley, the associate producer, and say: ‘Why are they doing Maurice when they could be making anything?’ I give Jim so much credit for having the vision and tenacity to make sure the film got made.”

Merchant Ivory don’t usually figure in surveys of queer cinema, though they are part of its ecosystem, and not only because of Maurice. Ron Peck, who made the gay classic Nighthawks, was a crew member on The Bostonians. Andrew Haigh, director of All of Us Strangers, landed his first industry job as a poorly paid assistant in Merchant’s Soho office in the late 1990s; in Haigh’s 2011 breakthrough film Weekend, one character admits to freeze-framing the naked swimming scene in A Room With a View to enjoy “Rupert Graves’s juddering cock”. Merchant even offered a role in Savages to Holly Woodlawn, the transgender star of Andy Warhol’s Trash, only for her to decline because the fee was so low.

The position of Merchant Ivory at the pinnacle of British cinema couldn’t last for ever. Following the success of The Remains of the Day, which was nominated for eight Oscars, the brand faltered and fizzled. Their films had already been dismissed by the director Alan Parker as representing “the Laura Ashley school” of cinema. Gary Sinyor spoofed their oeuvre in the splendid pastiche Stiff Upper Lips (originally titled Period!), while Eric Idle was plotting his own send-up called The Remains of the Piano. The culture had moved on.

There was still an appetite for upper-middle-class British repression, but only if it was funny: Richard Curtis drew on some of Merchant Ivory’s repertory company of actors (Grant, Thompson, Simon Callow) for a run of hits beginning with Four Weddings and a Funeral, which took the poshos out of period dress and plonked them into romcoms.

The team itself was splintering. Merchant had begun directing his own projects. When he and Ivory did collaborate, the results were often unwieldy, lacking the stabilising literary foundation of their best work. “Films like Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso didn’t come from these character-driven novels like Forster, James or Ishiguro,” notes Soucy. “Jefferson and Picasso were not figures that audiences warmed to.” Four years after Merchant’s death, Ivory’s solo project The City of Your Final Destination became mired in lawsuits, including one from Anthony Hopkins for unpaid earnings.

Soucy’s film, though, is a reminder of their glory days. It may also stoke interest in the movies among young queer audiences whose only connection to Ivory, now 95, is through Call Me By Your Name. “People walk up to Jim in the street to shake his hand and thank him for Maurice,” says Soucy. “But I also wanted to include the more dysfunctional side of how they were made. Hopefully it will be inspiring to young film-makers to see that great work can come out of chaos.”

[aerithisms]

If you feel like it, I’d love to hear about your dissertation on Studio Ghibli. I’m so curious how you approached it. What did you focus on? Was there a lot of academic writing to situate your work or were you pretty much on your own?

sure, thank you so much for asking! this got a bit long so putting it under a read more

my degree was in english literature but the course had a strong film element, so i was looking at it from a literary/film studies perspective. the topic was on the way miyazaki's oeuvre rejects gender essentialist associations between gender and the "nature/culture dualism", i.e. the perceived dichotomy between the natural and human worlds. i arrived at that topic because a lot of the existing scholarship on miyazaki's work looks at it through a feminist lens or an environmentalist lens, and i wanted to try to combine the two. i focused on nausicaä of the valley of the wind and princess mononoke because they're big lynchpins of his filmography and they're very similar - mononoke is arguably a retread of the same narrative and thematic building blocks as nausicaä with miyazaki having 14 added years of experience.

to address the topic i ended up looking into ecofeminist theory and literary criticism as the theoretical background and reading a lot of donna haraway, who's a hugely influential figure in the scholarship on cultural dualisms (and whose work is also notoriously difficult to parse lmao). i also looked a bit at what had been written on women in anime and manga, which involved some reading about shoujo, and generally looked into the english language scholarship on anime. i also wanted to learn more about miyazaki as a person and a filmmaker and my main references for that were the documentary 10 years with hayao miyazaki and the books starting point and turning point, which compile interviews he's given and things he's written about his own work from 1979 to 2008.

with regards to scholarship on miyazaki's work, i was limited to english language scholarship as i can't read japanese. there is certainly some english scholarship on him - he's by far the most written about japanese anime director in english scholarship - but there's not nearly as much as you might expect for such an accomplished and influential filmmaker, especially when you start narrowing it down to the scholarship on individual films. i'd say this is due to a historical lack of respect for anime in general from academics (even my supervisor was quite skeptical of it throughout the project lol). a lot of my most important references were quite recently published - the book princess mononoke: understanding studio ghibli's monster princess is the first collection of essays on princess mononoke to be published in english and it only came out in 2018 (i did the dissertation in 2021). a really prominent figure in my bibliography was susan napier, who was one of the first western scholars to give anime a legitimate place at the table back in the late 90s, and who published miyazakiworld: a life in art in 2018, which i think is a really accessible academic perspective on his work. (she also did this ted talk about being looked down upon for taking anime seriously which is an interesting watch if you have 15 minutes)

a lot of the journal articles i referenced can be found on this site, which is compiled by someone who's not a film or literary scholar but is just a genuine enthusiast for anime and manga studies (they also have a degree in library and information science - my current area of study! - so no wonder the site is well organised and well researched lol). their bibliography for articles about miyazaki's work can be found here - obvs you'd need institutional access to read most of that and i can't guarantee this list is exhaustive especially since it's been 3 years since i was researching this but i think it gives a good idea of how much is out there. again it's far from nothing but it's also not a huge amount, which to be honest i think made my project a lot easier and more manageable than a dissertation on someone who's received a lot of scholarly attention would've been. i could get a really good grasp of the entire scholarly field, which would've been impossible if i'd been writing on, say, jane austen.

it was a really fun topic to write about for my dissertation! i bought copies of the books i've linked because i loved the research process so much (another book i bought and recommend is the anime art of hayao miyazaki, which focuses on the more technical aspects of his filmmaking). i do think i was limited by my inability to read japanese and i'd love to find out what's going on in the japanese scholarship but i'm still pretty happy with what i was able to do. again thanks for asking about it and giving me an excuse to talk about it lol

#blahs #answers #ghibli

[pencil-urchin]

Doodle of my Mirialan OC, Iria. She's a scholar--Peofessor of Cultural Anthropology/Archaeology, with a minor in Art History: all centered on what she calls "The Culture of Warfare" and how it defines and shapes those cultures which engage in war.

She also put herself through school as an exotic dancer in a not-very-nice place, like you do.

(Hold on because I'm about to word vomit)

***

She has a list of other skills and knowledges, but I don't want anyone crying "Mary Sue!" so a quick note:

All but a handful of her knowledge and abilities are skills I currently have or had at one point, and I promise I am not anyone's idea of a "Mary Sue."

These skills and achievements include:

-Multiple Advanced Degrees (I have an Associate's, a Bachelor's, and 3 Master's degrees)

-Art (I am a professional artist, and although I have a long way to go and a lot of room to improve, I have worked hard to get where I am, and obtained both an MA in Visual Development and an MFA in Concept Art in the process)

-Martial Arts (I stopped one test shy of a black belt when I was 17 because I started college)

-Fencing (I started fencing when I was 21, which is how I met my husband; we were both competitive until and somewhat during grad school, but now we mostly just coach)

-Music (clarinet and vocal primarily, then violin and piano for a short time)

-Writing (creative and academic, my second degree was in Literary Studies)

-Multilingual (I have studied Spanish, French, Latin, and Russian)

-Organization schemes/data analysis and curation (my first Masters was in Library Science, and I was a librarian for over ten years)

-Handling of rare/historic artifacts (I studied special collections, collection management, and rare books in my MLS)

-Cooking (my husband and I love cooking together)

-Fashion (as part of my MLS I worked in a designer and historic fashion archive)

-Metalwork (I have taken metalsmithing classes, worked as a jeweler's apprentice, and even got to try blacksmithing once upon a time)

-First Aid (through my first two years of grad school I was Healthcare Provider certified to offer assistance with CPR, use of a defibrillator, assisting with someone choking, etc)

-Emergency Response (for a while in my late teens, I participated in a program meant to prepare young adults for Firefighter I training, which included a rigorous exercise routine, specialized training in the use of emergency equipment, and learning the most basic foundations of Fire Science)

-Acting (listen I don't think I'm good, but I was in Improv as a kid, love to RP at the game table , and was even a mime once)

-Field Ecology (loved this class, caught so many snakes, frogs, turtles, and lizards: I do not do spiders or insects, and therefore neither do my characters)

Skills I ABSOLUTELY do not have that my OC has:

-social grace (I'm an awkward weirdo)

-physical grace (despite all I have done, I am so clumsy)

-beauty (I am a swamp witch without the swamp)

-confidence (see above)

-dancing (I did dance and drill team when I was in junior high, did swing choir in high school, did the "shimmy" belly dance workout, and took a pole-dance workout class once which was an absolute blast, but JFC I am NOT a dancer, I promise)

***

I'm sure there's more, but you get the idea. A multifaceted character with a collection of experiences that seem disparate isn't different from what we are IRL when we break ourselves down into a list like this. In addition to all the positives, I'm also old (35), neurodivergent and mentally-Ill.

So yeah, not a "Mary Sue."

#art #digitalart #artist #concept artist #digital painting #original character #original art #oc #mirialan #star wars #multifaceted #not a mary sue #art by a woman

[lboogie1906]

Dr. Kofi Awoonor (born George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams; March 13, 1935 – September 21, 2013) was a Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams and was published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. He taught African literature at the University of Ghana. He was among those who were killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi.

He was born in Wheta, Ghana. He was the eldest of 10 children in the family. He was educated at Achimota School and graduated from the University of Ghana. He wrote his first poetry book, Rediscovery. His early works were inspired by the singing and verse of his native Ewe people and he published translations of the work of three Ewe dirge singers. He managed the Ghana Film Corporation and helped to found the Ghana Playhouse. He was an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and an associate editor of Transition Magazine.

He studied literature at University College London (MA) and while in England wrote several radio plays for the BBC, and began using the name, Kofi Awoonor.

He spent the early 1970s in the US, studying and teaching at Stony Brook University where he obtained his Ph.D. He wrote This Earth, My Brother, and Night of My Blood.

He returned to Ghana in 1975 as head of the English department at the University of Cape Coast. Within months he was arrested for helping a soldier accused of trying to overthrow the military government and was imprisoned without trial; he was released when his sentence was remitted in October 1976. The House by the Sea is about his time in jail. He became politically active. He continued to write mostly non-fiction.

He was Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil, before serving as his country’s ambassador to Cuba. He was Ghana’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where he headed the committee against apartheid. He was a former Chairman of the Council of State, the main advisory body to the president of Ghana. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[strawberry-library]

weekly studyblr

2.25-3.2

total books read (2024): 6

gone girl: 3%

academic progress

romantic literature: read Jane Barber’s account of the 1798 rebellion, read Dinah Goff’s account of the 1798 rebellion, study for midterm, take midterm

french II: finish assigned homework, get back grade for exam 1 (91%)

literary criticism: read selected pages of Proust’s Finding Time Again, prepare study sheets

women writers: study for midterm, take midterm

calculus: finish assigned homework

completed goals

complete my BA/MA writing sample (12/12)

submit my BA/MA program application

attend job interview (got the job!!!)

#dear diary #studyblr #english major #academia #light academia #pink academia #calculus #french #book: gone girl #gyllian flynn #spring #winter #gone girl

[anghraine]

I wonder if you can guide me on whether I should pursue Linguistics or Literature for my MA since you already are working on your PhD in Literary Studies? It's my dream to major in Literary Criticism and I believe I can always get another MA in Linguistics, but for now I don't want to waste my time and power on something that might not be so useful in the future. How has your experience been with Literary Studies? Would you advice a fellow academic to pursue it?

Hmm, I would always suggest getting advice from an actual advisor or committee chair if you have one. However, here is what advice I can give, with the caveat that I am a random stranger on the Internet who doesn't know you.

First: broadly speaking, if you're really sure about what your ultimate goal is, you're probably best served by doing the things directly related to that goal if it doesn't make much of a difference to you otherwise. I suspect that an MA in English literature will do more to help you get into a PhD program in English literature than a degree in linguistics.

That said, the fields are related enough that if there would be no difference with regard to GPA, what recommendations you can get, and (most importantly) your writing sample, it may not matter that much in the long run, unless you envision your PhD literary work as particularly involved in linguistics (sometimes this is the case).

But the work you do in an MA in literature is probably going to be more geared towards preparing you for further work in literature than one in linguistics. If one subject is generally easier for you to get high grades in or if you tend to have better relationships with instructors in one of the fields, that may be the best for PhD acceptance purposes.

Another concern that people sometimes don't want to talk about, or alternately are very annoying about: the current state of the job market in literary studies is dire in a lot of places (certainly in the USA, where I live). It was bad before COVID and is worse now. Exactly how dire the situation is depends on your specialization, but it's pretty bad all around.

I honestly don't know what the job market for linguists looks like, especially since there are a lot of different professions within the field (a high school friend of mine with a linguistics degree ended up in speech pathology and says it's much easier to find work in that field). I did use linguistics for technical writing credit, but that was years ago and I just don't know what opportunities look like now, pragmatically speaking. Possibly the outlook is better than in literary studies, and if so, a graduate linguistics degree might be more helpful if you don't get into a literature PhD program or do get the degree but don't get hired in academia afterwards.

OTOH, there are a lot of things you can do with an MA or PhD in English outside of academia (and those things are usually more profitable because of the defunding of the arts etc etc). Some jobs simply want the degree and don't care much what it's in, for instance.

Some do care, but are actually looking for people with English degrees. A friend of mine once got a very good job in Seattle because he had an English degree in addition to his computer science degree and they wanted someone with that kind of background to work on an online dictionary.

A friend from my grad school cohort used his literature MA to get a job in technical writing, so there's that. A graduate degree in English can help if you want to go into editing or publishing (maybe even law), though there are major issues in publishing as well. If you're interested in creative writing as well as literature, getting into a terminal creative writing degree program such as an MFA or PhD is sometimes helped by having a related MA already.

As for my experience in getting a PhD in literature, it has been very mixed. Sometimes it's fantastic, because you're in an environment that can be very intellectually nourishing, for lack of a better phrase. How actually supportive it is varies a lot (I have been lucky in that respect, but I know people whose programs had a lot of ambitious, cutthroat people and for whom it was miserable). It can be very nice and very helpful to be around people who care about the same general thing as you and who appreciate its value even if it's not their specific area of study. It's super cool to have full on tenured professors be like "oh, that's a bit outside my area, but it's an interesting question and Elizabeth would probably know more" or just straight-up have me take over teaching a class while they dealt with a crisis outside the classroom.

People outside academia (and some parts of fandom) have tended to find me deeply boring, and because I'm autistic, it's always a struggle not to just go on flat monologues about my fixations. I constantly had to remind myself that nobody around me was actually interested or wanted to hear about this kind of thing. But during both my MA and PhD, it was just different. Since all my local friends were in the program, I didn't have to worry nearly as much that people wouldn't know what I was talking about or would find it intrinsically dull, and we'd just sit around a table chattering about this stuff.

That said, this being a constant, inescapable aspect of your life with a lot of pressure and obligations and expectations and so forth—and just the sheer amount of reading you have to do—can start to suck the joy out of it, and this can be a major problem if it's one of your major sources of joy in the first place. I mean, there isn't much reason to do it if it isn't. But I have hardly read any fiction outside of my academic interests for years because the idea of reading any more just feels exhausting.

I don't read fanfic at this point, not because I think there is any intrinsic qualitative distinction between original and fanfic, but because my mind is so wrung out that I usually don't read stories of any kind unless it's part of research. Some of my friends who got degrees in literature experienced the same thing and gradually found joy in literature again once they were free of grad school bullshit, so this isn't a permanent rupture necessarily, just something to consider.

Then there's teaching, too, and the messy composition-literature dynamic, and frankly, as a whole, it's been really bad for my mental health, especially my mood swings. But a lot of that has to do with the culture around grad school and academia in general, not literature specifically (I think it would be worse if it were any other field, actually, except maybe creative writing). So it's worth bearing that possibility in mind, but not a certainty, either.

I know this is a lot! Basically, it depends on a whole ton of factors, and I can't give you an exact answer. But these are the kinds of things I would consider.

#anon replies #respuestas #ivory tower blogging #rare breed of attack unicorn #long post

[aureliusantoninusmarcus]

Naalala ko nagsulat ako ng essay (literary studies) patungkol sa konseptong ng real-and-ideal world, as a final requirement of this specific course.

nakakatuwa lang kasi napapatunayan, sa pamamagitan ng dialectic ni hegel, yung ugnayan ng ideal and real world sa novel ni cervantes na don quixote, at novel ni flaubert na madame bovary.

yung parang mas pipiliin ng mga karakter mabuhay sa kanilang ideal world para alamin at unawain ang sarili nila kahit it strays away from the sacredness of life. Pipiliin nila ang kanilamg "I moment" to venture out the strangeness of the world kahit they are forced to compliment it with the real world.

I don't think it's an escape, kung bakit namumuhay si Don Quixote at Madame Bovary sa ideal world nila, but rather it's an act of transcendental homelessness, sabi nga ni lucaks ito yung kung saan they feel home outside their sacred real home.

but my grade here was so mababa kasi wrote this in a rush. lol 2-day writing lang huhu

[abrazilianreader]

Hi everyone!

My name is Michelle and I live in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I’m a 28-year-old ESL teacher whose main hobbies are reading and language learning. I just started my two-week long winter break and I plan to use the free time to focus on my hobbies. With that in mind, I figured joining the studyblr community would help me hold myself accountable, so here am I.

I have a MA in Literary Studies and reading is a big part of my life. I mostly only read literary fiction but I also like exploring genre literature every now and then. I’m trying (and failing) to read a novel a week this year. I’m a few novels behind and my main goal for the next couple of weeks is to catch up.

Although I’ve been able to make time for reading, I haven’t been able to study languages consistently. Besides Portuguese, my native language, I can speak English and Spanish fluently and I’m learning Japanese. I’m planning to sit the Cambridge C2 Proficiency exam and the JLPT N4 in December, so I need to study. For the next couple of weeks, I plan to establish a study routine that will get me motivated and that I can keep up with once winter break is over.

In summary, my winter break plans are: to catch up on my reading and to create a study routine and stick to it.

Come along on the journey!

(These are some photos I took over the past few months. I love taking pictures. I hope I can share more soon!)

#langblr #booklr #language #literature #studyblr #intro post

[salvadorbonaparte]

Hey! I recently found your blog and was wondering if you have any knowledge about the translation career? I'm in my third year of an English literature bachelor and am strongly considering becoming a translator or doing something with (literary) translation because I really love languages! Do you have any knowledge or tips about the field of work? If not, that's fine! I figured I'd ask just in case <3

Hey! Thank you for reaching out :)

I just finished the taught portion of my MA in Translation Studies and I'm preparing for my PhD so I'm not technically a professional translator yet (I'm not being paid lol).

If you love translation and can imagine yourself translating as your day job I really recommend looking into a translation master's or diploma (depending on where you are). Some countries don't really have any regulations and just let anyone become a translator but I'm very critical of that. If you're in Europe or consider studying there, consider a European Master's in Translation.

When it comes to literary translation it's really difficult to get into but it isn't impossible. I met a literary translator recently actually. There's the Emerging Translators Network and specialised degrees. I'd still recommend to look into other fields to have a backup plan (examples include video game localisation, commercial translation, medical translation, legal translation, translation technology, terminology management, project management, audio description, subtitling, surtitling, dubbing).

Some more general advice:

Learn about translation technologies. Seriously. There's a lot of fear mongering about AI but to paraphrase a translator I talked to recently: computers won't take your job but someone who can use a computer better than you might.

Be aware of the ethics of translation. I'm not only talking about the texts your translating but the way you interact with the industry. Capitalism is... Bad and if you're beginner with little experience and no degree companies might try to hire you just so they can pay you less. At the same time, professional translators won't be able to get jobs and have to lower their rates to compete. That's one of the reasons we've been pushing for better associations and why I often try to convince people to get professional training before becoming a translator.

If you want to get some ethical practice to build up your portfolio consider volunteering to subtitle/translate TED talks or join Translators Without Borders. You can also translate fan works and things like that.

If you want to get some taster sessions in what a degree in translation would look like, I have a lot of resources on translation studies in a folder in my pinned post. There is a lot of information on basic theory, strategies, technologies, audio-visual translation (which is my speciality).

If you have more questions feel free to ask them :)

#Asks #Translation Studies

[splendidemendax]

so as of today, my ma has officially been conferred upon me. i decided to celebrate by writing nearly 6k (more) words abt the text i studied for my thesis: ovid's heroides.

the heroides are poems pretending to be letters that are also kinda epic monologues, dramatic monologues, legal complaints, and suicide notes. they're ovid putting on female personae to test the boundaries of genre, morality, and legality* and making augustus look bad while he does it.

the themes i'm looking at this time around are gender, love, and morality. the passages are heroides 2 (phyllis to demophoon), 12 (medea to jason), and 14 (hypermnestra to lyncaeus). there's also a fun little intro to the theory of diegetic/narrative levels, a concept which i used in my thesis but also find really useful for fandom, explained with doyle's sherlock holmes stories as an example.

*why yes my life was forever changed by some article somewhere referring to the collection as "literary drag." i think the author was trying to be insulting but that's actually the coolest possible way to describe them.

(previous chapters: homer’s iliad | aeschylus’ agamemnon | vergil’s aeneid | cicero’s against catiline | seneca's apocolocyntosis)

#i really really like this collection. i like it so much. you should read it. #classical lit for fandom purposes #classics #latin #mea res

[geraldbelena]

Remarkable Writers In Different Periods

Japanese Period

1. Julian Cruz Balmaceda

Julián Cruz Balmaceda, sometimes written Balmaseda, was a Filipino poet, essayist, playwright, novelist, journalist, and linguist who lived from January 28, 1885, to September 18, 1947. He produced a number of works in Spanish, English, and Filipino.

reference:

2. Jose Ma. Hernandez

Both a writer and a teacher, Jose Maria Hernandez. In America, he pursued acting and writing studies. His most well-known piece is the three-act historical drama Panday Pira.

the other plays Jose Ma wrote. Night Wind, Sunrise in the Farm, The Empty House, Prelude to Dapitan, and White Sunday are some of the plays by Hernandez that are based on the Bible.

The play White Sunday took home the literary Palanca Memorial Award.

reference: https://tl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Maria_Hernandez

Philippine Literature Period

1. Jose Carcia Villa

Jose Garca Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter who lived from August 5, 1908, to February 7, 1997. He was given the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973[2][3] and the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken[4]. He is credited with introducing the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in poetry writing as well as the extensive use of punctuation, particularly commas, which earned him the moniker "Comma Poet"[5]. He wrote under the pen name Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion") Another poet, E, also looked into these creatures. Villa is honored in the poem "Doveglion, Adventures in Value" by E. Cummings.[3]

reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Garc%C3%ADa_Villa

2. Rodolfo Dato

Bicolano poet and educator Rodolfo Guevarra Dato. He produced tunes with an English sound. He became the dean of the University of Nueva Caceres and is Luis Dato's elder brother. He also published essays on Bikolnon culture. He compiled and edited Filipino Poetry, one of the most well-known anthologies of English poets, in 1924.

reference: https://bcl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Dato

The New Society

1. Anciento Silvestre

Despite not having received any formal training in writing, he was still able to produce beautiful poems, short stories, novels, and essays that contributed to the literature of the Philippines.

Eight categories in which his poems are categorized are found in the Nature collection: Free, Moving, Image of Life, Pulse of Love, Strong of Faith, Sign of Hope, Open to the Path of Greatness, and Blood in the Light of Sun.

Aniceto F. Silvestre won four First Prizes for his poetry before the war, a Third Prize for his work while under the Commonwealth government, a First Prize in the tenth year of the Republic of the Philippines, and a First Prize at the 1969 Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.

reference: https://tl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniceto_Silvestre

2. Pelagio Cruz

The first Chief-of-Staff from the Philippine Air Force to serve in the Armed Forces of the Philippines was Pelagio A. Cruz (June 16, 1912 – October 21, 1986).

reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagio_Cruz

The Period of Third Republic Philippines Literature (1965-1972)

1. N.V.M. Gonzalez

Gonzalez was a novelist and short story writer who is considered one of the pioneers of modern Philippine literature. His works often dealt with rural life and the struggles of the working class, and he was known for his vivid descriptions and lyrical prose. Gonzalez's contribution to Philippine literature was in his portrayal of the everyday lives of ordinary Filipinos, and his use of vernacular language and local settings in his writing.

reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._V._M._Gonzalez

2. F. Sionil Jose

Jose was a novelist and journalist who is known for his epic historical novels that explore Philippine society and politics. His works often deal with issues of poverty, social injustice, and corruption, and he is considered one of the most important writers in Philippine literature. Jose's contribution to Philippine literature was in his critical examination of Philippine society and his efforts to expose the corruption and injustices that plague it.

reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Sionil_Jos%C3%A9

Photo Credits:

1st Img:

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-transsion&sxsrf=APwXEdeh3fEJ-aNLwLWVyG2H1Gu4KjrUOQ:1683042906425&q=julian+cruz+balmaceda&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV09C0_9b-AhVDEnAKHWLvAV8Q0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=360&bih=728&dpr=3#imgrc=rp-VeXX39fK64M&lnspr=W251bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGxd

2nd Img:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F2%2F2d%2FJose_Maria_Hernandez_%2528cropped%2529.png&tbnid=lm88ETGpDRKXxM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcommons.wikimedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFile%3AJose_Maria_Hernandez_(cropped).png&docid=m2shDy1ECOyezM&w=266&h=401&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim

3rd Img:

https://www.google.com/search?q=jose+garcia+villa&oq=&aqs=chrome.4.69i58j69i176j69i64j35i39i362i523l3j46i39i362i523l3j35i39i362i523l4j46i39i362i523l2.-1j0j4&client=ms-android-transsion&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=CGPmkqI7nsXTDM&lnspr=W251bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGxd

4th Img:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fluisgdato.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F05%2Frodolfo-guevara-dato-3.jpg&tbnid=6co6Mp93mhvXlM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fluisgdato.com%2Frodolfo-dato-biography%2F&docid=BZolhF-r1zKphM&w=925&h=1325&hl=en-US&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim

5th Img:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-xckfea8CKj4%2FVrCzk2-6H1I%2FAAAAAAAAALM%2FQzTFcn_ejt8%2Fs1600%2Fjcdejesus1.jpg&tbnid=S42XqT0Xi85r_M&vet=1&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbsit1a-pilipinas-sining-panitikan.blogspot.com%2Fp%2Fblog-page.html&docid=MGnu2VpXdvHzFM&w=297&h=446&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim

6th Img:

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-transsion&hl=en&sxsrf=APwXEdceZGInGd3oc8u6oiLdBIktPtTZGw:1683044736143&q=pelagio+sulit+cruz&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7642dhtf-AhVRx2EKHcgcB6AQ0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=360&bih=728&dpr=3#imgrc=rjS6raSke0zKcM&lnspr=W251bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGwsbnVsbCxudWxsLG51bGxd

7th Img:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.colostate.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F56%2F2017%2F10%2FNVM-Gonzales.jpg&tbnid=mgz3WQDMC0ln0M&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.colostate.edu%2Fnews%2Ffilipino-american-history-month-n-v-m-gonzalez%2F&docid=UDb9tMnz-nafBM&w=315&h=442&hl=en-US&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim

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