American Literature

Negli anni sessanta, quando è uscito, I mimi era il libro che nessuno avrebbe voluto leggere. L'allora giovane Naipaul si era già fatto conoscere per Il massaggio mistico e Una casa per Mr. Biswas, due romanzi alla Narayan, leggeri, quasi comici, in cui i protagonisti sono caraibici di origine indiana che, all'indomani dell'indipendenza, cercano più o meno goffamente una nuova identità caraibica. Con I Mimi, Naipaul smette la maschera comica e indossa quella tragica per raccontare la storia di due naufragi: quello politico dell'isola fittizia di Isabella (in cui rivediamo Trinidad o Guyana), e quello personale di Ralph Singh, anche lui indiano caraibico sorpreso e rassegnato per l'inadeguatezza sua e della sua nazione di fronte all'indipendenza politica.

ANNÉE 2016-2017 «Giovita Scalvini, homme de lettres et patriote du Risorgimento italien : notes d'amour, réflexions morales et civiles» «Giovita Scalvini, letterato e patriota del Risorgimento italiano: note d'amore, riflessioni morali e civili» Thèse de Doctorat en Co-tutelle de: MARINA CANDIANI Directrice: Ch.ma Prof.ssa ELSA CHAARANI, UNIVERSITÉ DE LORRAINE-NANCY (FRANCIA) CO-Directeur: Ch.mo Prof. FABIO DANELON, UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI VERONA (ITALIA) INDICE Introduzione: 1. Ragioni di una ricerca p. 2. Oggetto della ricerca 3. Metodologia 4. Scopo della ricerca

* This idea, incidentally, is born out in the findings of quantum physics, which imply (in the understanding of Werner Heisenberg) that reality occurs only when an event registers in the mind of an observer. Stevens was at least generally aware of such metaphysically disturbing implications of modern physics.

x, 208 p.In this dissertation "literariness" is defined not merely as a quality of form by which texts are evaluated as literary, but as an immanent and critical sensibility by which reading, writing, speaking, learning, and teaching subjects within the literary humanities engage language in its immediate aesthetic (and thus also historical and ethical) aspect. This reorientation seeks to address the literary academy's overwhelming archival focus, which risks eliding literary endeavor as an embodied undertaking that inevitably reflects the historical contingency of its enactment. Literary endeavor in higher education is thus understood as a performance by which subjects enact not only the effect of literary texts upon themselves but also the contingencies of their socio-economic, national, cultural, and personal contexts. Subjects' responses to literature are seen as implicit identity claims that, inevitably constituted of biases, can be evaluated through the lens ...

English language teachers often find themselves in a setting much like a football match where the ultimate aim is to score a GOAL: helping students learn English. To achieve this, EFL teachers draw on a wide range of practices and personal values. This study set out to explore what these teachers consider most essential in their work by tapping into their lived experiences and professional beliefs. Using the metaphor of the “Starting Eleven of a TEAM”, participants were asked to name the eleven most important elements they believe are necessary for effective language teaching. Adopting a mixed method sequential exploratory design, the research began with a qualitative phase involving 53 teachers, who shared their individual 'line-ups'—the qualities or strategies they rely on most. Through careful content analysis, 55 recurring themes were identified, which then formed the basis of a structured questionnaire. In the second phase, this questionnaire was distributed to 750 EFL teachers via online survey. Their responses not only validated the earlier themes but also allowed us to see which qualities stood out across a much larger sample. According to the findings, the “best players” in EFL teachers’ Starting Elevens included: loving the profession, caring for students, having strong knowledge of English, being open to innovation, showing friendliness, nurturing a love for English, creating a positive classroom environment, being reliable, respecting students’ voices, showing patience, and understanding learners’ needs. Together, these qualities paint a compelling picture of what today’s EFL teachers believe matters most in the classroom.
Keywords: EFL, ELT, fundamentals, teachers’ perspectives

El ensayo El retorno literario de las voces antiguas en América es un breve compendio que enlista a escritores, obras, estilos y contextos, que da cuenta de la producción literaria en lenguas y culturas indígenas en el continente americano. Además, el texto representa -aunque apuradamente-una mirada actual en materia literaria, traspuesta de las lenguas indígenas a la lengua española, por parte de poetas, de narradores, de ensayistas y de dramaturgos, hablantes en lenguas vernáculas de nuestra América.

The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual path, and places his interest in Asian religions within larger cultural agendas and life choices. While identifying as a Jew, Ginsberg wished to transcend beyond his parents’ orbit and actively sought to create an inclusive, tolerant, and permissive society where persons such as himself could live and create at ease. He chose elements from the Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, weaving them together into an ever-growing cultural and spiritual quilt. The poet never underwent a conversion experience or restricted his choices and freedoms. In Ginsberg’s understanding, Buddhism was a universal, non-theistic religion that meshed well with an individualist outlook, and worked toward personal solace and mindfulness. He and other Jews saw no contradiction between enchantment with Buddhism and their Jewish identity.

The Grapes of Wrath stands not merely as a masterpiece of American literature but as a profound novel of protest, capturing the brutal realities of the Great Depression. Yet, its power extends beyond historical documentation; it functions as a grim prophecy. The novel meticulously charts a trajectory familiar to students of political theory: the Marxist cycle of class struggle leading to collective awareness and culminating in potential revolt. This framework provides a critical lens through which to view the novel's narrative of the Joad family's dispossession and awakening. Steinbeck's depiction of oppressed laborers and the calculated indifference of the elite finds a startling resonance in contemporary America. A landscape marked by profound wealth disparity, policy decisions that exacerbate class divisions, and the unexpected political ascent of socialist figures suggests that the "grapes of wrath"-Steinbeck's metaphor for the simmering fury of the exploited-are once again ripening in the heart of capitalist America.

There were many scandalous texts in the twentieth century, but a disproportionate number of them were biofictions. Why is this the case? By looking closely at five biographical novels from the twentieth century, and I conclude that the scandal of biofiction is that it can and does reveal what we are at our deepest and most base level of being, thereby debunking the comforting myths that humans have of themselves.

В статье исследуется влияние религиозного мыслителя и поэта XVII в. Томаса Траэрна на философию Герберта Рида. В центре внимания находится сочинение Траэрна «Сотницы медитаций» (1674 г., опубликовано в 1908 г.), поскольку именно оно оказало наибольшее воздействие на Рида. Автор статьи обозначает два главных вектора влияния: чувство славы, ставшее для Рида интеллектуальным и нравственным ориентиром, и детский опыт, отсылающий к подлинной реальности. Две важнейшие интуиции Траэрнамладенческая невинность, наделенная особым знанием-зрением (воплощенная в образе «Младенческого Ока»), и чувство славы как основной принцип его рационального мистицизма-становятся связующей нитью между творчеством Траэрна и философией Рида. Уже в первой автобиографии Рида 1933 г. появляется одно из его центральных понятий-«невинный взор»,-которое сопоставимо с понятием «Младенческое Око». Опыт детских лет Рид называет единственным реальным опытом, а всю последующую, взрослую жизнь-отголоском той жизни с невинной чувствительностью. Это созвучно мысли Траэрна о том, что именно младенческое состояние соотносится с трансцендентным и универсальным. Важно отметить, что Траэрн акцентирует не только невинность и чистоту, свойственные маленькому ребенку, но и особое знание, которое открыто ему. Такое понимание характерно и для Рида. Наряду с понятием «невинного взора» концепция чувства славы (это чувство Рид трактует как восторг причастности красоте и тайнам мироздания) становится основополагающей в философии Герберта Рида.

The objectives of this study are as follows: (1) to analyze the novel in term of its structural elements, and (2) to analyze the novel based on sociological perspective especially the worldview of Henry James about the confused of the American people about their social identity as reflected in his novel by compared his novel with the social condition of his society in America in the late of nineteenth century. In this research, the writer uses qualitative data, the data are taken from two main sources, there are primary data sources that refers to Henry James novel, “The Ambassadors”, and the secondary data source are several references and criticism and studies on Henry James novel, “The Ambassadors”. The writer also employs descriptive in analyzing the data that is to make an interpretation of the text and content analysis using deductive and inductive methods. The results of this study are (1) in Genetic structuralism perspective, a literary creation is a meaningful response of t...

Prologue: The Paradox of Change "The only thing that remains unchanged in the Universe is change." This truth-recognized from Heraclitus to quantum physics-illuminates the tragedy of our time: the incapacity to dwell dialectically within this perpetual flow. Contemporary Manichaeism is the symptom of a culture that, when faced with the anxiety provoked by change, responds not with the wisdom of becoming, but with the deadly rigidity of schism.

Organization theory is, like any other scientific program, also a form of literary project. Being able to express new ideas, images, or beliefs with the help of a concept, metaphor, or model is an accomplishment in its own right. Céline, the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, was one of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century. Céline was part of a long-standing literary tradition that made the hyperbole a central literary technique, combining sophisticated French prose with a spoken form of language, the language of rage and mockery. Céline's famous 'three points of suspension' enabled him to present the social world as unfolding on a single plane wherein different events are connected horizontally rather than vertically. For organization theorists, the literary style of Céline is appealing because it denies any innate values and qualities but rather seeks to report what is being observed without explaining it. Appropriating some of his literary techniques and devices may thus help to free organization theory from representational epistemologies, making organization theory writing a more 'passionate' (i.e. an intense and expressive) pursuit. abstract ephemera 11(3): 258-270 Céline and the aesthetics of hyperbole article Alexander Styhre ephemera 11(3): 258-270 Céline and the aesthetics of hyperbole article Alexander Styhre ephemera 11(3): 258-270 Céline and the aesthetics of hyperbole article Alexander Styhre ephemera 11(3): 258-270 Céline and the aesthetics of hyperbole article Alexander Styhre ephemera 11(3): 258-270 Céline and the aesthetics of hyperbole article Alexander Styhre

It's been ten years since my conversation with author Benjamin Alire Sáenz was first published in the inaugural issue of Study & Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature. When I began my project to conduct conversations with authors who write for young people in 2013, I wondered what form the exchanges would take to become publishable. The editors of Study & Scrutiny believed in in what I was doing and offered a home for the conversation with Sáenz and a few more over the years. Frankly, I was confident enough about conducting the conversations with young people's literature authors that the dialogues later became part of my full-length book Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations.

In the 1840s, Charleston, South Carolina became the unlikely birthplace of American Reform Judaism. When Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim rebuilt its synagogue after a fire, the congregation voted — by the razor-thin margin of 46 to 40 — to install a pipe organ. To many, the organ brought dignity and modern beauty to Jewish worship. To others, it was an outrage: the sound of the Christian church invading the synagogue. The dispute split Charleston’s Jewish community, led to the creation of a rival Orthodox congregation, and eventually landed in court.
The 1844–45 trial ended with a precedent-setting ruling: “the law knows no heresy.” From that point on, synagogue practice in America would be determined by majority vote, not rabbinic authority. What began as a quarrel over music reshaped Jewish life in America, giving birth to denominationalism — Reform, Orthodox, and later Conservative Judaism.

The politics of narrative visibility remain central to how disability and neurodivergence are represented, mediated, and made legible across literary and graphic forms. unSEEN/unHEARD: Disability and Neurodivergence, a comics anthology (2025), engages these issues through a sustained commitment to collaborative storytelling, formal experimentation, and editorial reflexivity. This interview with the anthology's editors-Anas Abdulhak, Aubrey Lyn Jeppson, and C.K. Carpenter-reflects on the curatorial principles, narrative strategies, and publication conditions that structured the project. Part A, titled 'Perspective, Process, and Publishing', voiced primarily by Carpenter in a collective editorial register, outlines the alignment of disability and neurodivergence within a shared curatorial frame, the criteria guiding selection and genre, and the use of crowdfunding as both infrastructure and distribution. Part B, titled 'Affordances, Affect, and Audience', turns to individual practices; while Abdulhak discusses visual identity and poetic form, Jeppson reflects on lettering and visual rhythm, and Carpenter addresses the rendering of pain and sensory intensity, alongside strategies for public engagement. Across both sections, the interview considers how comics create narrative and formal space for embodied difference. Particularly, it contributes to scholarship on graphic narrative, disability, and neurodivergence by foregrounding editorial methods as a mode of narrative composition and collaborative representation.

Contemporary Deaf literature and film of the science fiction (SF) genre such as Ted Evans’s The End and Donna Williams’s “When the Dead are Cured” imagine worlds where Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) are threatened with eradication. Employing schema criticism, the article shows how these social SF stories have the potential to transform harmful cognitive schemas that perpetuate eugenic drives, explaining how certain cognitive schemas uphold beliefs inherent to the ideology of ability (Bracher 2013; Siebers 2008). These SF texts question the ethics of genetic engineering and the desire to “cure” deafness; the intersection of disability and SF results in a subgenre of protest literature. Each protest story depicts eugenic ideologies that instantiate real-world SLPs’ activist claims to human and group rights. Further, these depictions of eugenic drives enable the activation of cognitive schemas that work against social injustices. SF as a mode of thought thus supports real-life protest ag...

Organized by period, each chapter grounds its analysis in one or two key works (novels, poems, or plays), offering readers both a historical framework and close readings of major texts. The Plant Turn argues that attending to plants in literature is not a novelty but part of a long cultural history now made urgent by the Anthropocene. By tracing the shifting symbolic, material, and ecological roles of plants across Victorian, Modernist, Postwar, and Contemporary writing, the volume shows how vegetal life has persistently shaped literary imagination, even when overlooked in critical discourse. At the same time, it underscores the necessity of revisiting these works today, when environmental crisis demands renewed attention to the interdependence of human and plant life. While this proposal outlines a selection of representative texts, we remain open to alternative works and suggestions, ensuring flexibility and inclusivity in shaping the final contents of the volume. The edited volume will be published under a prestigious academic press, ensuring both the scholarly rigor and the wide visibility it deserves.

This essay introduces Turkish-American author Erje Ayden and his work. Both have thus far been neglected in the twenty-first century scholarship, although Ayden had been a veritable legend in Greenwich Village during his lifetime. Most of his self-published novels are being currently reissued by various publishers. This essay discusses the unique amalgam of fact and fiction they contain, focusing on The Crazy Green of Second Avenue and The Legend of Erje Ayden. It argues that his novels are ensconced within a tradition of the twentieth-century American novel, and that some reveal pioneering work in the non-fiction novel genre. Ayden is moreover able to articulate the predicament of the Turkish-American who finds him/herself situated in two different social and cultural milieus.

Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts...a thousand special causes...have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects.-Alexis De Tocqueville More than any other people on Earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free.-John F. Kennedy When a nation's ways please the Lord, that nation is blessed with supernatural help.-Jerry Falwell All modern people have internalized and taken for granted the 5,000-year-old heritage of patri-archy, as well as the 3,000-year-old literalized thinking of the Judeo-Christian tradition. We live in what Joseph Campbell called a "de-mythologized world." It is not that we no longer have myths, but that we are unaware of them, they no longer serve us, and our ignorance of them makes us dangerous.

The Hellenism of Robert Kennedy
The paper is a kind of extensive commentary on RFK’ remarks on Aeschylus made in his famous Statement on Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This commentary includes RFK’ intellectual and cultural interests, his idealism, his perception of JFK’ assassination, his public speeches and his Thirteen Days. The role of Edith Hamilton and Gilbert Murray in shaping RFK’ approach to Greek legacy is also considered.

In this paper, the author interrogates the troubling effects of immigration on Diaz’s model of machismo and how both men and women react as victims. Hyper-masculine histories infiltrate everyday life for Latino people in Diaz’s work, and by exploring these interrelated short stories that illustrate the toxic effects of traditional macho identity, the author offers a critique to the macho script that complicates the process of immigration for Latinos in a social and familial platform.

First and foremost, I acknowledge my sincere gratitude to Almighty Allah, for giving me the patience to do the research. I can only hope that my dissertation will live up to the expectations of my supervisor, family, and friends. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my awesome supervisor Anika Saba who helped me throughout this journey with utmost patience. She always showed interest in my work and encouraged me, and it is her motivation that helped me to put together my thoughts into action. It would have been very complicated for me to work on this thesis paper if she would not have been there for me whenever I needed. Thank you for always believing in me. You are an amazing teacher and without you this paper would not have been possible.

First and foremost, I acknowledge my sincere gratitude to Almighty Allah, for giving me the patience to do the research. I can only hope that my dissertation will live up to the expectations of my supervisor, family, and friends. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my awesome supervisor Anika Saba who helped me throughout this journey with utmost patience. She always showed interest in my work and encouraged me, and it is her motivation that helped me to put together my thoughts into action. It would have been very complicated for me to work on this thesis paper if she would not have been there for me whenever I needed. Thank you for always believing in me. You are an amazing teacher and without you this paper would not have been possible.

The legend of the Golem is "one of the most enduring and imaginative tales in modern Jewish folklore and…perhaps the most famous of all modern Jewish literary fantasies" (Dekel and Gurley 241-42). The second most popular Jewish fantasy creature, the dybbuk, is a possessing ghost. By contrast, most golems lack this complex personality and knowledge of the past. They are new, limited constructs: either a blank slate like Frankenstein's monster or a programmed tool like the brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. However, in the recent Jewish fantasy boom, some authors are getting more creative and inventing golems inhabited by wise spirits. These new golems reckon with the near-annihilation of the past even as they battle the rising threat of the present. Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros (2023) explores the darker side of the golem legend. In Lithuania 1943, Ezra builds a golem to commemorate his daughter Chaya and avenge her death. As Vera teams up with the partisans, she explores her life as a golem, experiencing Chaya's memories but also questioning her own role in the world. Thane Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham (2003) tells another Holocaust ghost story-with the second and third generations haunted. Here, the possession brings forward a unique healing by allowing the ghosts voices.

A partir de contributions du philosophe russe M.M. Bakhtine sur le sujet du dialogue, ce papier donne a voir un eclairage nouveau que des recherches inscrites dans la philosophie des processus permettent d'apporter a la question de l'emergence d'idees innovantes. Les travaux de cet auteur permettent de developper une comprehension des microprocessus par lesquels des idees innovantes emergent au cours d'interactions langagieres lors de moments particuliers appeles des “moments saisissants”. L'etude empirique d'une succession de “moments saisissants” survenus au cours de dialogues tenus a differents moments de temps entre les deux memes personnes offre une comprehension de la maniere dont l'exploration de ces idees lors de dialogues successifs peut faciliter la mise en pratique d'idees innovantes.

Border Matters aims to challenge the tendency in American cultural studies to focus mainly on Anglo-American culture and to reproduce its foundational narrative of Anglo-American cultural exceptionalism. Seeing itself as an intervention against the latent imperialism and racism of a cultural studies that would separate Anglo culture from the cultural practices of African-Americans and Chicanos, Border Matters strives to theorize and instantiate a cultural studies which includes the residents, experiences, cultures, historical genealogies and political issues produced by the U.S.-Mexican border. Situating itself historically in the political context of an increasingly militarized hostility toward immigrants and migrants from the South, Saldívar's study nevertheless priveleges spatial and trans-historical readings, analyses, and juxtapositions. Similarly, while priveleging the subjective and lived experiences of border subjects as producers and products of culture, Saldívar nevertheless scrupulously reads them back against the economic, political, and historical contexts that determine their lives. Above all, Border Matters aims to decenter the North American focus of cultural studies, especially its exclusionary tendency to ignore the cultural heterogeneity of the Southern and Western regions, and openly vindicates a radicalized understanding of cultural practices, which recognizes culture as a social force, recognizes Chicano/a subjects as agents of culture, and which ultimately translates into a radicalized multiculturalist pedagogy. Border Matters is an ambitious book, seeking, as indicated by its subtitle, to "remap" American cultural studies by opening its southern border. Saldívar's project involves both a recuperation of an overlooked cultural history and border "theories" in the works of intellectuals like Renato Rosaldo, Vicki Ruiz, George J. Sanchez, and Nestor García Canclini, as well as in authors like Américo Paredes, José Montoya, Bernice Zamora, Alberto Rios, Arturo Islas, and Carmen Lomas Garza. The second half of the book focuses on Californian (both Baja and Alta), Tijuanan, and other border writers from the 19th century to the present, with a sustained focus on the politics of regional space and liminal culture. In as far as Saldívar's purpose is to demonstrate the rich cultural material available to cultural studies in the texts of the southern borderland, both as a conceptual and a geo-political space, he succeeds with pinache. His informed and nimble discussions of authors like John Rechy and the 19th century Baja California romancer María Amparo Ruiz de Barton, of popular genres like the corrida and the ballad, of different forms like painting, video, performance art, and poetry testify to the potential diversity and wealth of the comparative transnational cultural studies Saldívar advocates. On the other hand, whether out of a deliberate aversion to theoretical metanarratives, or simply a failure to weave together the various theoretical threads Saldívar invokes, the theoretical aspect of the book is by far its greatest weakness. Although Saldívar announces his intention to bring Chicano and border studies into dialogue with European (especially the British Birmingham School and older Frankfurt School) cultural studies, an excercise potentially very valuable, he does not succeed in doing so. Apart from

In "The Doctor", this is how the narrator defines the society of Montreal: "…. most other people simply floated in mossy little ponds labelled "French and Catholic" or "English and Protestant", never wondering what it might be like to step ashore; or wondering, perhaps, but weighing up the danger. To be out of a pond is to be in unmapped territory". (494). of the past which resists memory and narrative appropriation. In this way, and as the critic Karen E. Smythe aptly points out, high demands are made on the reader who becomes a necessary presence in the evaluation of the story: "Gallant's narrator and character elegists… most often use memory to escape from the past rather than to understand it… Thus a judgement of character and of self is implicitly demanded of the reader of Gallant's work". (1992:11).

El presente ensayo pretende dilucidar la relación que existe entre
el abordaje que J. D. Salinger hace del suicidio en su relato “Un
día perfecto para el pez banana” (1948) y la propuesta de dos de
los narradores peruanos más célebres de la generación de la
década de 1980: Guillermo Niño de Guzmán, en su historia
“Caballos de medianoche” (1984), y Pilar Dughi, en “Apúrense
por favor” (1996). Para ello, se propone una lectura intertextual
de los relatos mencionados, enfocada en las representaciones de
género atravesadas por dinámicas de violencia intrafamiliar y en
las nociones teóricas que ilustran al suicidio como un
signo/consecuencia de un ineludible malestar social.
Palabras clave: J. D. Salinger, Pilar Dughi, Guillermo Niño de
Guzmán, cuento peruano del siglo XX, suicidio.

Cita (APA 7ma. Ed.):
Palacios, T. (2025). El influjo salingeriano en Guillermo Niño de Guzmán y Pilar Dughi: Suicidio, Género y Violencia. En M. Mascarell García, M. Arriaga Flórez y F. Denegri (Eds.), Textos olvidados. Archivos periféricos y archivos inusuales (pp. 391-396). Dykinson. https://www.dykinson.com/libros/textos-olvidados-archivos-perifericos-y-archivos-inusuales/9791370064792/

In this chapter, I draw upon data I have collected as a scholar of asexuality as well as reflections on my personal experiences studying this community. My outsider status as an allosexual (i.e., non-asexual) scholar has given me a personal window into the paradigm-shifting power of centering asexual perspectives. I have seen how bringing asexuality from the margins to the center presents important insights for everyone, asexual or not. Hopefully, many readers will share this experience. The bulk of this chapter draws upon interviews with 77 individuals under the asexuality umbrella, which were conducted between 2020 and 2021, as well as a corresponding (and ongoing) digital ethnography of the asexual community. Some of my analysis also stems from my community-engaged work with asexual communities. Based on this work, I discuss both how asexuality contributes to long-standing debates about the relationships between gender, sexuality, and activism as well as how asexuality points toward entirely new lines of inquiry.

En rigor, una película es un trenzado. Un trenzado es una sabiduría del enredo. Y un análisis es otro trenzado. Pero, como tal, se vuelve otro enredo, a pesar suyo. Es este el modo en que abordaremos D'ailleurs, Derrida (1999) de Safaa Fathy. Para la analítica cinematográfica no puede existir ningún vínculo a ninguna realidad en la imagen para, precisamente, ser analizable y perteneciente a la ley fílmica. La condición de pertenencia fílmica para la analítica cinematográfica es: todo es película. Derrida, de hecho, pensará que no todo es película, esa es su posición dentro del filme de Safaa Fathy. No porque haya una realidad, sino porque siempre la ficción se encontrará excedida por algo otro, lo que nos lleva a decir, a la inversa, que entonces no todo es texto. El sonido de Medio Oriente, esas cuerdas de oud que resuenan en el filme, es una decisión fundamental: el ailleurs, hoy, es Medio Oriente, es suelo árabe. Y cuando decidimos ese suelo, no indicamos simplemente una alternativa de la historia: cuando decidimos ese suelo, abrimos una posibilidad impensada por esa misma historia.

Indigenous myths, legends and fairy tales-the dreams of a culture-grow out of the infinite depths of the past; no one "creates" them. Myths speak of origins, of the divine figures that were present at the beginning. They describe dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred into the World. By contrast, mythic literature is created by specific individuals with themes gathered from the culture's oral traditions. In a sense, our story-the myth of American innocence-isn't "real" myth, although we populate it with substitutes for the ancestral figures like Columbus (until recently), the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers. Some use the term "civic religion" to describe the beliefs about ourselves that we commonly call "Americanism." Historian Richard Slotkin writes that our experiences lead to stories and metaphors that, amplified in literature, assumed mythic proportions. Art and myth exert reciprocal pressure on each other, shaping a people's sense of reality. Thus, "a national mythology may come to exercise the same unconscious appeal as the archetypal myths of which they are the variants." Myths are ambiguous, like dreams vaguely remembered. So, it is appropriate that the most common descriptive phrase (not coined until the 1930's) for our own story is the "American Dream." Joseph Campbell taught that myths refer past themselves to mysterious and ineffable principles. Myth may serve four functions. The first is the mystical function: opening the mind to that which underlies all forms. The cosmological function explains how the universe works and connects the transcendent to the world of ordinary experience. The pedagogical function teaches the moral life and defines responsibility in terms of the particular culture.