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research by Hywel Dix

Centelhas de Transformações – Paulo Freire e Raymond Williams ed. Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Débora Mazza and Nima Spigolon. São José do Rio Preto, Editora HN, 2021

This chapter explores the place of race and religion in the work of Raymond Williams and Paulo Fr... more This chapter explores the place of race and religion in the work of Raymond Williams and Paulo Freire. Beginning with a discussion of William Empson’s Structure of Complex Words (1951), it argues that the work of Empson was a greater influence on Williams’s work than has previously been realised, especially in using social linguistics to analyse culture. However, there are also two key elements in Empson for which there are no equivalent in Williams: a Christian sensibility and a Eurocentric perspective which fails to incorporate racial diversity. Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977) are all rooted in the work of Empson but say virtually nothing about either religion or race and the jettisoning of these things has a series of very precise effects. Positively, it enables Williams to move away from the Eurocentric racial politics of Empson so that his work can be read as a corrective to his predecessor’s in this regard. On the other hand, the opportunity to identify forms of counter-hegemonic relationships that a sociology of religious organisations can provide is missed – and Williams interprets organisations of religion solely as organs of the dominant ideology. The problem with this assumption is that it fails to account for how the kinds of relationship that typify faith-based communities (of all kinds) are inflected by experiences of race and can provide instances of counter-hegemonic solidarity. This, the chapter argues, is why it is worth reading Williams alongside his exact contemporary Paulo Freire, because in Freire’s work a connection between a critical racial politics and an acknowledgement of the contribution certain religious communities can potentially make to that politics can be re-established.

Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists: Challenges, Practices and Complexities, ed. Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace. , 2020

The attached chart proposes a model for 6 varieties of career trajectory for authors' careers, ga... more The attached chart proposes a model for 6 varieties of career trajectory for authors' careers, gauging success (however reckoned) against time.

The chapter from which it is drawn argues that a particular challenge when thinking about contemporary writers is that their later works often suffer through critical comparison to earlier ones for which they are well known. Moreover, until recently the concept of a literary career had received inadequate critical attention. This chapter argues that our thinking about these issues has the potential to be enhanced by career construction theory (CCT). By applying CCT to a discussion of the late stage of contemporary authorial careers, it presents career construction as a new theory of authorship, and constructs a framework for considering what is specific to late-career works. The chapter then draws attention to forms of creative self-reflection that writers are able to engage in during the later stages of their careers, and finally assesses the extent to which such forms of reflection entail a merging of individual vision with wider social themes and collective aspirations.

Word & Text VII, 2017

This essay argues that, compared to other components of French critical theory (structuralism, po... more This essay argues that, compared to other components of French critical theory (structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism and intertextuality), autofiction has been less influential both in its 'home' country and in the English-speaking world. This relative neglect is ironic because, as the article shows, those different areas of theoretical inquiry each helped pave the way for the development of ideas about autofiction, but simultaneously eclipsed them so that for decades autofiction remained under-conceptualized and under-researched. Having identified and critiqued a number of reasons for this belatedness, the essay then identifies two recent contexts that are more auspicious for the evolution of theories of autofiction. Specifically, it argues that developments in the concept of participatory culture (including audience research) on the one hand and the proliferation of various forms of historical and/or cultural memorials, commemorative events and public anniversaries on the other both provide meaningful contexts in which theories of autofiction have recently started to reach their full potential.

University of Bucharest Review. 22 (1), 2020., 2020

This paper argues that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques a... more This paper argues that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques and methods by which postcolonial writers engage with the politics of memory in their depiction of a number of largely forgotten brutalities committed by the European imperial powers during the colonial era. More specifically, two of the elements of autofictional practice that have been of particular interest to postcolonial writers are its capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory on the one hand; while also radically destabilizing notions of absolute truth and authenticity on the other. Drawing on research into the relationship between writing and forms of public commemoration, the paper analyses Fred D'Aguiar's portrayal of the killing of African slaves thrown overboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 in Feeding the Ghosts (1997); Kamila Shamsie's depiction of the massacre of demonstrators protesting against colonial rule in India in Peshawar in 1930 in A God in Every Stone (2014); and Jackie Kay's homage to the sinking of the SS Mendi, a ship carrying southern African non-combatant personnel to assist in the British effort in World War One in "Lament for the Mendi Men" (2011). It will suggest that even though these texts are not strictly works of autofiction, the techniques afforded by that genre are useful to those writers seeking to draw attention towards a number of neglected historical events. Colonial massacres, enslavement of people and naval disasters during the imperial period have received far less historical or cultural memorialization than other more widely recognized historical events such as VE Day or the Somme. By establishing these events as being culturally and morally important to remember, the paper will argue, autofiction provides a number of tools for engaging with the politics of public memory and commemorative events in the present.

Margins, Vol. IV, 2014

This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a numb... more This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a number of arguments about Welsh culture, colonial history and postcolonial theory. It will argue that Sheers engages in the practice of 'writing back', a practice commonly associated with postcolonial literatures, but does something slightly different with it. His texts The Dust Diaries (2004), Resistance (2007), White Ravens (2009) and The Gospel of Us (2012) 'write back' not so much to the imperial powers, but to Wales's own distant literary traditions in order to rediscover and reaffirm them. That is, Sheers takes the paradigm of writing back from his reading of the anti-colonial literatures of the 1960s and 1970s and uses it in a different context. This reveals that the resources provided by the 'writing back' model of postcolonial writing have been fruitful to Sheers as a Welsh writer in the years since Wales received a degree of devolved political autonomy from the United Kingdom as a whole, which has also been a period in which Welsh culture more generally has been attempting to articulate its own voice.To make such a claim is not necessarily to suggest that Welsh Writing in English is a postcolonial literature in any reductive or simplistic sense; but to suggest that some of the practices normally associated with decolonising cultures have provided fertile ideas to Welsh writers as they attempt to express that voice.

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/cankujhss/issue/55223, 2020

Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, as of June 2020, presents its 14th ... more Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, as of June 2020, presents its 14th volume, and in this issue of the volume, we are giving place to possibly one of the first attempts to work on the topic of pandemic within a linguistic framework, “The British Press’ Coverage of Coronavirus Threat”. Pursuing a comparative linguistic analysis of headlines from serious and sensationalist journalism in the UK, the authors of the article show that “information is one of the most powerful tools, not only to just inform but also to alarm people and create panic”. Following the premise that information is a power to be channeled in the direction of benefit more than hindrance, we maintained our efforts in adhering to and reaching goals of academic discussion in these difficult times. As in our earlier issues, in this issue of the volume too, we continue to cover interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of different areas of the human sciences that fall within the scope of the Journal. Sharing and expanding the new perspectives in humanities and social sciences is of primary focus for the Journal, which aims to reach wider audience through its fully open-access policy.
We, as the editorial board, would like to wholeheartedly thank all the authors for their scholarly contributions and the team of referees for their reviews. We owe special thanks to Dr. Anna Maria Karczewska from University of Białystok, Poland for her tremendous work as the guest editor for this issue. We also like to thank the Board of Trustees and the Presidency of Çankaya University, and the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for their continuous support.
Mustafa Kırca mkirca@gmail.com
Editor-in-Chief
Çankaya University, Turkey
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/cankujhss/issue/55223

Anglistik, 2015

According to the biographical note printed inside the front cover of Imtiaz Dharker's fourth volu... more According to the biographical note printed inside the front cover of Imtiaz Dharker's fourth volume of poetry, Leaving Fingerprints (2009),
Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between Mumbai, London and Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary filmmaker and has published four collections with Bloodaxe in Britain. From the beginning, it appears that Dharker situates her work within a number of different poetic traditions. By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American. Moreover, in addition to situating herself within and between these myriad different national communities, Dharker's work draws also on the cultural resources available in other kinds of community. The community of feminism is one example of this. Communities of language and of religion, communities of writers and of readers, of work and friendship and family are all further examples. This paper will argue that the entanglement both with different national communities and other kinds of affiliations constitutes in Dharker's work a poetic self whose vision and perspective is transnational in scope. This in turn has the effect of promoting in her work a rethinking of traditional notions of nationhood (i.e. Britishness) and belonging in favour of elected transnational affinities. In other words, the nation is defined in her work by its complex relationship to other communities, as the fundamental condition of its existence.

Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018

Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences has reached its 12th volume this yea... more Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences has reached its 12th volume this year with the contributions of the colleagues who shared their valuable studies with us, the reviewers who devoted their valuable time and energy to evaluating and commenting on the papers, and the colleagues and friends at Çankaya University who put their efforts to realize this project. The issue covers a wide variety of interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of language and translation studies, linguistics, foreign language education, translator education, literary studies and translation, comparative literature, and theory and cultural studies that fall within the scope of the Journal. We, as the editorial board, would like to thank wholeheartedly all the authors for their scholarly contributions and the team of referees for their reviews. We owe special thanks to Dr Onorina Botezat for her tremendous work as the guest editor for this volume. We also like to thank the Presidency of Çankaya University and the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for their continuous support.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences is an open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal which publishes national and international works in humanities and social sciences. Sharing and expanding the new perspectives in humanities and social sciences is of primary focus for the Journal, which aims to reach wider audience through its fully open-access policy. We aim to facilitate a more expanded and participatory academic discussion on the theoretical and/or applied scholarly work and to inform scholars and public about recent developments in the fields that fall within the scope of the Journal.
We, as of December 2018, are proud to revive, after a few years of interruption, a journal that has years of publishing experience behind it.
Mustafa Kırca
Editor-in-Chief
Çankaya University, Turkey

Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections (eds. Onorina Botezat and Mustafa Kirca) Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019., 2019

This volume investigates identity discourses and self-constructions/de-constructions in various t... more This volume investigates identity discourses and self-constructions/de-constructions in various texts through imagological readings of films, narratives, and art works, examining different layers of cultural identities, on the one hand, and measuring the literary reception of ethnic identity constitution to reveal both the self and hetero images, on the other. The book features theoretical and analytical approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, and mainly focuses on the application of imagological perspectives in the fields of literature and translation, and specifically in literary works “carried over” from one culture to another. It will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literature, translation, cultural studies, and imagology, as well as for students studying in these fields.

Mustafa Kirca is Assistant Professor of English Literature in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Çankaya University, Turkey. His research focuses on postmodernist fiction, postcolonialism, parodic re-writing, and metafiction in the contemporary novel. He is the co-editor of Iris Murdoch and Her Work: Critical Essays (2010), B/Orders Unbound: Marginality, Ethnicity and Identity in Literatures (2017), Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives (2018).

Onorina Botezat is Director of the Center for Linguistic and Intercultural Research and Associate Professor at Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Romania. Her main fields of research are imagological and cultural studies and legal terminology. She is the author of Dictionary of Legal Terms, Romanian-English and English-Romanian (2011) and The Image of the Foreigner in the National Literature (2016), and editor of The Annals of “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University Linguistics, Literature and Methodology of Teaching.

Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives, 2018

The term ‘multiculturalism’ has been widely quoted to explain and study transnational networks an... more The term ‘multiculturalism’ has been widely quoted to explain and study transnational networks and cultural changes on a global scale. This book focuses on the application of multicultural theories and perspectives in the field of literature and particularly in contemporary narratives. Bringing together ten studies which blur the limits of conventional discourse, and employing an interdisciplinary approach to address research problems using methods and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, it features theoretical and analytical writings on multiculturalism and its traces in literatures that subvert the essentialist binary frameworks of ethnicity, race, nation and identity in a variety of texts. These include Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children and Shame, Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise, Lady Annie Brassey’s Sunshine and Storm in the East; or, Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople, and Sir Henry Blount’s A Voyage into the Levant. Approaching theoretical issues concerning multiculturalism from multiple perspectives and looking for its traces in different time periods and genres, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literature and cultural studies, as well as students studying in the same fields and the general reader.

Papers by Hywel Dix

Textes et contextes

This paper provides a comparative reading of two pairs of satirical novels – one pair from the en... more This paper provides a comparative reading of two pairs of satirical novels – one pair from the end of the nineteenth century, and one pair from the start of the twenty-first – in order to explore similarities, continuities and variations in satirical practice between the dawns of two new centuries.George Gissing‘s New Grub Street (1891) for example, is a novel about the writing of novels. It implicates its writer and readers in the process of creating satirical representations of a society from which they cannot distance themselves. Or, it is a novel involved in the using up of the very stock of cultural capital that it deploys. This contrasts with William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), where satire is employed as a connective device, projecting onto a desired future a fictional dissolution of social, political and economic hierarchies.The paper suggests that more recent novels by Sebastian Faulks and Amanda Craig use satire to create a sense of the world that is caught somewhat...

Routledge eBooks, Dec 13, 2022

Autofiction and Cultural Memory

Raymond Williams, Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain Keywords 5, Autumn 2007. To Ra... more Raymond Williams, Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain Keywords 5, Autumn 2007. To Raymond Williams, the nation-state was fundamentally an institution of cultural modernity and imperialism. In his major work, The Country and the City (1973), he attempted an examination of the connections that exist between the capitalist order and the nation state. Beginning with a look at the genre of country house writing, Williams was interested in how this writing both reflected the power of a late feudal aristocracy and actively contributed to augmenting its power. The idealisation of one particular class was accompanied by a mystification of national interest and national identity. Williams pursued this analysis across a long historical period, from early modernity into the twentieth century. He explored the structural congruence that existed between the process of nation building in Britain and empire building overseas. In the last instance, he extended the metaphor of the country house, suggesting that, throughout the period of imperialism, the Western world has become something like an enormous country estate. It draws resources and labour from its (third world) hinterland, while also blinding itself to the injustices and violence on which this process is founded. While writing The Country and the City, Williams was also at work on a detective novel, The Volunteers (1978). In what follows I shall offer a reading of The Volunteers, tied to a survey of The Country and the City.

Literary Criticism, Autofiction in English, Jun 4, 2018

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2022

Since the term autofiction was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s, a key scholarly debate ha... more Since the term autofiction was coined by Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s, a key scholarly debate has been whether autofiction is a genre in its own right, a subvariant of autobiography, or whether it is better approached along lines other than generic. Although researchers have approached this question in different ways, many agree that autofiction is a form of writing that responds to the specific cultural conditions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the relationship between celebrity and everyday life, a variety of scandals and controversies, and forms of public confession. Because writers of autofiction often frame their work either as a form of confessional writing or as writing produced in the aftermath of a traumatic experience, they have typically taken a serial approach to life writing. In some cases, this entails splitting aspects of their lives across separate published works, while others return several times to a single experience in various written text...

Centelhas de Transformações – Paulo Freire e Raymond Williams ed. Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Débora Mazza and Nima Spigolon. São José do Rio Preto, Editora HN, 2021

Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists: Challenges, Practices and Complexities, ed. Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace. , 2020

Word & Text VII, 2017

University of Bucharest Review. 22 (1), 2020., 2020

Margins, Vol. IV, 2014

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/cankujhss/issue/55223, 2020

Anglistik, 2015

Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018

Mapping Cultural Identities and Intersections (eds. Onorina Botezat and Mustafa Kirca) Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019., 2019

Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives, 2018

Textes et contextes

Routledge eBooks, Dec 13, 2022

Autofiction and Cultural Memory

Literary Criticism, Autofiction in English, Jun 4, 2018

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2022

American Literary History

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2022

Gerontology, 2014

Access to full text and tables of contents, including tentative ones for forthcoming issues: www.... more Access to full text and tables of contents, including tentative ones for forthcoming issues: www.karger.com/ger_issues

This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a numb... more This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a number of arguments about Welsh culture, colonial history and postcolonial theory. It will argue that Sheers engages in the practice of ‘writing back’, a practice commonly associated with postcolonial literatures, but does something slightly different with it. His texts The Dust Diaries (2004), Resistance (2007), White Ravens (2009) and The Gospel of Us (2012) ‘write back’ not so much to the imperial powers, but to Wales’s own distant literary traditions in order to rediscover and re-affirm them. That is, Sheers takes the paradigm of writing back from his reading of the anti-colonial literatures of the 1960s and 1970s and uses it in a different context. This reveals that the resources provided by the ‘writing back’ model of postcolonial writing have been fruitful to Sheers as a Welsh writer in the years since Wales received a degree of devolved political autonomy from the United Kingdom as a...

Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists, 2020

Textual Practice, 2015

This paper explores the extent to which Eastern Europe has been historically subject to a process... more This paper explores the extent to which Eastern Europe has been historically subject to a process of 'othering' in the western literary imagination; and how far the western practice of 'Balkanism' can be considered congruous with the wider practice of 'Orientalism' throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twentyfirst. Drawing on theoretical work by Vesna Goldsworthy and Mariia Todorova, it shows that both in fiction and literary scholarship western writers have been unable fully to conceptualise Eastern Europe, with the result that their fictional portrayals are evasive and indistinct and their literary analysis unable to define a clear object. Malcolm Bradbury's novel Rates of Exchange (1983), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) and Jim Crace's Six (20034) are explored alongside Edward Said's Beginnings and Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious to show that this under-conceptualisation has continued to dominate literary representations of Eastern Europe during the late-and post-Cold War periods, thereby subjecting Said and Jameson to a rigorous critique of their own methods with regards to the western practice of 'Balkanism' of which they are uncritical.

Http Revuesshs U Bourgogne Fr Textes Contextes, Dec 14, 2012

This paper provides a comparative reading of two pairs of satirical novels-one pair from the end ... more This paper provides a comparative reading of two pairs of satirical novels-one pair from the end of the nineteenth century, and one pair from the start of the twenty-first-in order to explore similarities, continuities and variations in satirical practice between the dawns of two new centuries. George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) for example, is a novel about the writing of novels. It implicates its writer and readers in the process of creating satirical representations of a society from which they cannot distance themselves. Or, it is a novel involved in the using up of the very stock of cultural capital that it deploys. This contrasts with William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), where satire is employed as a connective device, projecting onto a desired future a fictional dissolution of social, political and economic hierarchies.

Literature of an Independent England, 2013

University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2020

I argue that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques and methods... more I argue that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques and methods by which postcolonial writers engage with the politics of memory in their depiction of a number of largely forgotten brutalities committed by the European imperial powers during the colonial era. More specifically, two of the elements of autofictional practice that have been of particular interest to postcolonial writers are its capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory on the one hand; while also radically destabilizing notions of absolute truth and authenticity on the other. Drawing on research into the relationship between writing and forms of public commemoration, the article analyses Fred D'Aguiar's portrayal of the killing of African slaves thrown overboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 in Feeding the Ghosts (1997); Kamila Shamsie's depiction of the massacre of demonstrators protesting against colonial rule in India in Peshawar in 1930 in A God in Every Stone (2014); and Jackie Kay's homage to the sinking of the SS Mendi, a ship carrying southern African non-combatant personnel to assist in the British effort in World War One in "Lament for the Mendi Men" (2011). It will suggest that even though these texts are not strictly works of autofiction, the techniques afforded by that genre are useful to those writers seeking to draw attention towards a number of neglected historical events. Colonial massacres, enslavement of people and naval disasters during the imperial period have received far less historical or cultural memorialization than other more widely recognized historical events such as VE Day or the Somme. By establishing these events as being culturally and morally important to remember, the article will argue, autofiction provides a number of tools for engaging with the politics of public memory and commemorative events in the present.