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"Working class Fiction."
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L'Assommoir
Regarded by critics as one of the highest pinnacles of achievement in Emile Zola's literary career,
eBook
Angel station
\"Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smâichov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese population. Topol's novel, in sparse yet poetic language--agilely brought into English by the author's longtime translator Alex Zucker--weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith.\"-- Provided by publisher
Book
Demographic Fever Dreams
In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under attack by secular men (in Turkey), or of Muslim Romeos luring Hindu women to convert (in India). In each of these cases, the story lodges in the body and takes on a life of its own, inspiring fear and devotion, and centering the need for a heroic rescue. Here, we argue for the need for feminist engagement with political narratives about population change and point to the important work that fantastical stories focused on demographically based fears have done for the recent rise of right-wing politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. We refer to these stories as demographic fever dreams to emphasize their simultaneous obsession with demography and detachment from demographic data. Our analysis shows that demographic fever dreams deploy gendered tropes to create a narrative of vulnerability for dominant groups in relation to a takeover by religious, racial, and sexual others. Attending to the discursive constitution of demographic fever dreams in media and by political leaders in each context, we examine how they effectively invoke populist fears and identify which bodies become threatening and which ones need protection. We show that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Donald Trump in the United States, and Narendra Modi in India have all deployed an imaginary of an authentic nation under threat—whether that is racialized as the white working class in the United States or given religious inflection as authentically Sunni in Turkey and authentically Hindu in India. This imaginary becomes a fetishized group under threat from all manner of others threatening demographic destruction. In each of these instances, we argue that figures with political power use a vivid and fantastic fiction to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality so as to consolidate political power or to dismiss and undermine class tensions and create fictitious communities of homogeneity. Thus, demographic fever dreams effectively produce a rationale for strongman masculinity and contribute to the retrenchment of nationalist values.
Journal Article
The jungle
Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant in search of a better life, faces instead an epic struggle for survival. His story of factory life in Chicago in the early twentieth century is a saga of barbarous working conditions, crushing poverty, crime, disease, and despair.
Book
The Impact of Interactive Shared Book Reading on Children's Language Skills: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Purpose: Research has indicated that interactive shared book reading can support a wide range of early language skills and that children who are read to regularly in the early years learn language faster, enter school with a larger vocabulary, and become more successful readers at school. Despite the large volume of research suggesting interactive shared reading is beneficial for language development, two fundamental issues remain outstanding: whether shared book reading interventions are equally effective (a) for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds and (b) for a range of language skills. Method: To address these issues, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of two 6-week interactive shared reading interventions on a range of language skills in children across the socioeconomic spectrum. One hundred and fifty children aged between 2;6 and 3;0 (years;months) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a pause reading, a dialogic reading, or an active shared reading control condition. Results: The findings indicated that the interventions were effective at changing caregiver reading behaviors. However, the interventions did not boost children's language skills over and above the effect of an active reading control condition. There were also no effects of socioeconomic status. Conclusion: This randomized controlled trial showed that caregivers from all socioeconomic backgrounds successfully adopted an interactive shared reading style. However, while the interventions were effective at increasing caregivers' use of interactive shared book reading behaviors, this did not have a significant impact on the children's language skills. The findings are discussed in terms of practical implications and future research.
Journal Article