| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
- Fjellestad, Danuta, et al.
(author)
-
Discontents With/In Realism
- 2003
-
In: Realism and its discontents. - Karlsrkona : Blekinge Institute of Technology. - 9172959991 ; , s. 9-29
-
Book chapter (pop. science, debate, etc.)
|
|
| 3. |
- Holmgren Troy, Maria, 1962-, et al.
(author)
-
Making Home : Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels
- 2014. - 1
-
Book (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Making Home explores the figure of the orphan child in a broad selection of contemporary US novels by popular and critically acclaimed authors Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michal Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Toni Morrison. The orphan child is a continuous presence in US literature, not only in children’s books and nineteenth-century texts, but also in a variety of genres of contemporary fiction for adults. Making Home examines the meanings of this trope in the contexts of American literary history, social history and ideologies of family, race and nation. It argues that contemporary orphan characters function both as links to literary history and as figures around which authors can critique the limits of literary history, family identity and national belonging.
|
|
| 4. |
- Holmgren Troy, Maria, 1962-, et al.
(author)
-
Making Home : Orphanhood, kinship and cultural memory in contemporary American novels
- 2021. - 1st paperback
-
Book (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the times of perceived national crisis, concerns about American identity, family and literary history are articulated around this literary figure.The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison among others, and investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national and literary home.By analysing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.
|
|
| 5. |
- Kella, Elizabeth, 1958-
(author)
-
Affect and Nostalgia in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation
- 2015
-
In: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. - : De Gruyter. - 0081-6272 .- 2082-5102. ; 50:2-3, s. 7-20
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article examines the affective terrain of Poland, Canada, and the US in Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical account of her migration and exile in Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), the text that launched Hoffman’s reputation as a writer and intellectual. Hoffman’s Jewish family left Poland for Vancouver in 1959, when restrictions on emigration were lifted. Hoffman was 13 when she emigrated to Canada, where she lived until she went to college in the US and began her career. Lost in Translation represents her trajectory in terms of “Paradise,” “Exile,” and “The New World,” and the narrative explicitly thematizes nostalgia. While Hoffman’s nostalgia for post-war Poland has sometimes earned censure from critics who draw attention to Polish anti-Semitism and the failings of Communism, this article stresses how Hoffman’s nostalgia for her Polish childhood is saturated with self-consciousness and an awareness of the politics of remembering and forgetting. Thus, Hoffman’s work helps nuance the literary and critical discourse on nostalgia. Drawing on theories of nostalgia and affect developed by Svetlana Boym and Sara Ahmed, and on Adriana Margareta Dancus’s notion of “affective displacement,” this article examines Hoffman’s complex understanding of nostalgia. It argues that nostalgia in Lost in Translation is conceived as an emotion which offers the means to critique cultural practices and resist cultural assimilation. Moreover, the lyricism of Hoffman’s autobiography becomes a mode for performing the ambivalence of nostalgia and diasporic feeling.
|
|
| 6. |
- Kella, Elizabeth, 1958-
(author)
-
Affect and Nostalgia in Life-Writing of the Polish Diaspora
- 2015
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper examines the affective landscapes of Poland, Canada, and the US in Eva Hoffman’s autobiographical account of her immigrant/exilic life in Lost in Translation (1989). Hoffman’s reputation as a writer and intellectual was launched with this autobiography. Hoffman left Poland for Vancouver with her Jewish family in 1959, when she was 13, and lived there until college in the US, where she made her career. She lives today primarily in London. Hoffman’s autobiography is divided into three parts, dealing first with Poland, then Canada, then the US. Hoffman's text explicitly thematizes nostalgia. Hoffman affirms her nostalgia for her Polish childhood with a postmodern awareness. Though Lost in Translation has been celebrated for its self-reflexivity and its treatment of the links between language and subjectivity, some scholars have been highly critical of the “nostalgic” view of Poland. Hoffman's work is clearly invested in the dynamics and the affect of remembering and forgetting particular times and particular places. In this paper, I examine Hoffman's understandings of nostalgia, and of the affective landscapes with which she engages. Poland, Canada, and the US have powerful associations, but I focus on primarily on Poland and Canada, emphasizing the overlooked importance of Hoffman's Canadian years. I am particularly interested in exploring how affect—defined roughly as “something that moves, that triggers reactions, forces, or intensities . . ., simultaneously engaging the mind and body, reason and emotions” (Berberich, Campbell and Hudson 314), and including the affect of nostalgia—is represented and textually communicated with readers. Thus, I look at the effects of Hoffman’s privileging of lyricism as a mode and mood for life-writing.
|
|
| 7. |
- Kella, Elizabeth, 1958-
(author)
-
Countering Captivity in Popular Genres: The Only Good Indian and Older Than America.
- 2013
-
Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper examines the appropriation and redirection of the Gothic in two contemporary, Native-centered feature films that concern a history that can be said to haunt many Native North American communities today: the history of Indian boarding schools. Georgina Lightning’s Older than America (2008) and Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009) make use of Gothic conventions and the figures of the ghost and the vampire to visually relate the history and horrors of Indian boarding schools. Each of these Native-centered films displays a cinematic desire to decenter Eurocentric histories and to counter mainstream American genres with histories and forms of importance to Native North American peoples. Willmott’s film critiques mythologies of the West and frontier heroism, and Lightning’s attempts to sensitize non-Native viewers to contemporary Native North American concerns while also asserting visual sovereignty and affirming spiritual values.
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
- Kella, Elizabeth, 1958-
(author)
-
Discovering the Past? Memory, Postmemory, and Affect in Autobiographies by Emilia Degenius and Lisa Appignanesi
- 2016
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The concept of postmemory has been advanced to account for some of the ways that the strong cultural and individual memories of trauma survivors impact on members of the next generation: their children. According to Marianne Hirsch (1997, 2012), post-memory generations have a special tie to history, which they “remember” through emotional and imaginative investment in the memories of others, whose stories, photographs, and day-to-day actions impart a strong sense of the life-changing, often life-threatening, circumstances they have lived through.In this paper, I explore the relevance and possible limitations of the concept of postmemory for two auto/biographical works written by women of the Polish diaspora: Losing the Dead (2006) by Lisa Appignanesi and Åka Skridskor I Warszawa (Ice-skating in Warsaw) (2014) by Emilia Degenius. Born about 10 years apart (1946 and 1955), the two writers have some similarities, including Jewish backgrounds, parental and personal experiences of anti-Semitism, and emigration from post-war Poland with subsequent fraught relations to the Polish language. Appignanesi, writing in English, has become a cultural commentator and author with an interest in memory and psychoanalysis. Degenius immigrated alone to Sweden in 1972, where she joined her sister, and she has become a practicing psychoanalyst and author of two autobiographical works in Swedish.The narratives of these women writers of the Polish diaspora straddle genres of autobiography, biography, family history, fiction, and memoir. In each account, the relationship to parental figures is of central importance. They each have double narrative strands, one that reconstructs the childhood past through the excavation of memory, and one that figures the adult narrator’s attempts to understand the past through return journeys to Poland, documentation, and interaction. I examine the texts’ formal and thematic characteristics in relation to postmemory.
|
|
