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The aim of the article is to present the image of male protagonists in the literature written by some of so-called “young writers” of the 80s and 90s in Italy. These authors deprive the male figure of his traditional attributes of authority and power. They achieve this aim by realizing textual strategies such as a metaphorical attempt on the patriarch or an attack on other’s male authority, by a visualization of the masculinity as uncompleted or prosthetic, and by a victimization of the male protagonist.
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Jaime Bayly is one of the most controversial Hispanic-American writers of recent times. Both his provocative media image and his writings — which supposedly reffer to his personal experience — focus on gay themes. The aim of the present article is to show, by way of the work of literary scholars who engage in queer theory and sociologists who examine questions of sexuality, how certain changes in the sexual dimension of human life typical of societies of so-called high modernity (although with marked influences from Latin American culture), are reflected in the Peruvian’s writings. Situating Bayly’s novels in a broader literary and social context, the article attempts to shed light on the cultural construction of gender and sexuality.
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This paper intends to trace, in Ancient Greek philosophy and oral literature (particularly in Hesiod, Homer and Aristotle), possible roots of the image of women transmitted through Spanish proverbs. In this paper, proverbs are conceived as cultural products which reflect the worldview of the community that once coined them and, at the same time, they are understood as a power tool which guides the interpretation of reality and influences human behavior. The article states that the image of femininity was built from the masculine perspective, which defined it through a process of estrangement emerged from considering women as “the other” and from projecting on that image men’s point of view on how women are and how they should be.
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The objective of the present work is to study the constructions of sexual identities that are found in "The Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Manuel Puig. In order to clarify this concept, it is important to contextualize the book in its period, its area of political conflicts that were present in Argentina in the 70s, as well as in the significantly phallic-centered society. Subsequently, through the use of dichotomies, the text will analyze the problem of the rigidity of the binary logic and, at the same time, will present new forms of gender-sexual constructions. Finally, this article will investigate the notion of homosexuality as a transgressive practice that questions the hegemonic discourse of heterosexuality seen and understood as the only legitimate orientation.
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This text, which contains some remarkable references to literature, appears to treat only of homosexuality, gay identity, and its history. In fact, however, an attempt was made to redefine the extensively discussed issue as to go even further and relate it to the roots of humanity: the relationship between sexuality, desire, and identity.
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The novel "Tutto su mia nonna" by Silvia Ballestra is the excellent example of language, writing and sensibility straightforwardly feminine. The main characters of the narration that is the three generations of woman, become the vivid and active subjects of the narration, who form the reality, non only filtering the world which is being narrated in their personal emotional way, but also structuring their world in relationship to the social existence as though their activity does not refer only to their private and personal zone. The definition of femininity passes through the language as it is not only the way to comunicate but it assumes three different manners: conative, magical and sensual. The sensual and tangible aspect values, by the use of marchigiano dialect, the material, concrete meaning that refers to the body and its physical expression. The magical and commemorative function is proper of the everyday language and it pushes the main character, the narrator to immerge in the recollections of the past that is rituals and old habits of the family. The most important function though is the conative one, which focuses on the interpersonal contact assuming the real communicative function that brings the family together.In this way the language becomes a treasure, a connection and a relationship. As for the formal level of writing, the interlocutory discourse is maintained by the use of the pronoun tu that refers to the reader who participates in the narration that touches more subjects in the narrative passages and in those of the philosophical and the metanovelistic kind as well.
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Gabriele, the main character of the novel by Nicola Lecca, discovers within himself a homosexual inclination which doesn’t conform to a traditional masculinity. Thus, it causes identity crisis. The protagonist carries out an obsessive auto analysis. He tries to represent self-discipline. This should lead him to regain confidence and social assimilation. The Article shows three stages, which Gabriele goes through: the ideal type of masculinity, the protest period and the discovery of his real identity. All three describe a subordination, an attempt to get the autonomy back and the awareness of freedom. This process was analysed in a range of few components: the main character’s space, his social relations, his homosexual experience, judging his own body, the emotional conflict between trying to be perfect, low self-esteem and the act of writing. Nicola Lecca’s text may be read as a voice in discussion about stereotypical masculine pattern which in this case is questioned.
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Guatemala, a country with a long patriarchal history, has always been a place of marginalization for its women. Nowadays, the works of the female writers are still being underestimated and rarely appear next to their male colleagues in the national anthologies. There are two principal aims of the present work. The first one is to analyse the poems of the two most prominent female representatives of the Guatemalan feminist poetry: Ana María Rodas and Luz Méndez de la Vega, in order to reclaim their legitimate place in the canon of the Guatemalan literature. The second one it to expose a difficult situation of the contemporary Guatemalan women, and their literary struggle for the right to have their own voice, to reexpress themselves and to break with the traditional roles imposed by the patriarchal society.
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Alda Merini’s early vocation to poetry produced a twofold clash with society: as a woman and as a poet. Madness was for her both a choice of otherness (as the choice of living homeless) and diagnosis: a sentence by society to her disadvantage. Through and notwithstanding the experience of mental illness, of imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital, and of the consequent stigma, Alda Merini was able to build up her identity. Against the power mechanisms of psychiatry and against social exclusion, she grabbed the sword of writing. Thanks to writing (which is therapy and singing) Alda Merini did not let the hell experience of the psychiatric hospital and the stigma of illness overcome her. She was able, in this way, to realize her vocation as woman and poet.
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The fantastic discourse has not been explored thoroughly in the Bosnian- Herzegovinian literary studies, and this is the reason why it is an attractive field of scholarly analysis. This text is an attempt to open the door into the heterogeneous world of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian fantastic, from the national tradition till postmodern narratives. I used, among other works, the material from the Nenad Radanović’s Anthology of the fantastic narrative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I also consulted works about fiction of diverse literary theoreticians, starting with “the father of modern theory about fantastic” Tzvetan Todorov, to end with the modern theoretician of fantastic lieterature Renate Lachmann. The conclusions of this paper confirmed the initial thesis that the fantastic discourse and the fantastic aestethics exist like a particular canon in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature, but also the fear that the fantastic literature resists systematization, qualification, monosemy, the enclosure into theoretical frame. Luckily, it also resists “the temporality as a supreme form of nothingness” (Branimir Donat), so we have ahead of us temptations and challenge of the future studying of this subject.
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The anglicisms neologisms are a typical example of the conflict between two principles which try to be satisfied in the norm of standard language: the principle of stability and the principle of evolutioness. The standard language norm finds neologisms difficult to accept as equal units of the lexical system of a language, but there are reasons for their existance. Namely, these lexical items fulfill an expressive, stylistic and pragmatic function which the already existing lexemes cannot fulfill. Since neologisms enrich a language, the attitude towards anglicisms neologisms should be according to the facts: they should not be avoided, but neither unconditionally accepted, instead, the context and the functionality of every new lexeme that appears in the system of the already existing lexemes in the Bosnian language should be analysed.
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