The World Literature in the Period of Cultural Diversity

- The literature of the world is evidently diversed and universal.

- Certain literature coming from the different parts of the globe display the lives of their
people.

- Major journalistic sources, twitter, blogs and online forums created.

- More traditional forms of literature have been less successful in conforming to new
technology.

- "Electronic literature" have grown yet exist within a small niche.

- Pari passu - a Latin phrase meaning "equal footing" that describes situations where two
or more assets, securities, creditors, or obligations are equally managed without
preference

- Science fiction has been rising.

- Jack Kerouac - an American writer best known for the novel On the Road, which
became an American classic, pioneering the Beat Generation in the 1950s.

- Adrienne Rich - one of America's foremost public intellectuals. Her earliest work,
including "A Change of World (1951), which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets
Award, while her work of the late 1960's and 70's became increasingly radical in both its
free-verse form and feminist and political content.

- Linh Dinh - the author of two collections of stories, "Fake House (Seven Stories Press
2000)" and "Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004)."

- Mishima Yukio - pseudonym of Hiraoka Kimitake, is a prolific writer who is regarded by

many critics as the most important Japanese novelist. He worked in a Tokyo factory and
after the war studied law at the University of Tokyo. His other works are Ai no kawaki
(1950; Thirst for Love), Kinjiki (1954; Forbidden Colours), and Shiosai (1954; The Sound of
Waves).

"Power" by Adrienne Rich

- The poem is an ode to the bravery and strong heart of Marie Curie whose great efforts
in the field of radioactive research has changed our lives today. Adrienne Rich as a
radical feminist wished to devote this poem to Marie Curie for her undying efforts in
creating a better life for the generations ahead of her. Marie Curie suffered to a great
extent from the exposure to chemicals that we expelled in her experiments, but never
was it an obstacle between her work and her passion. Her love for her work and the
extent of her devotion to it, which was in fact the power to her existence is what
Adrienne talks about in this poem. (Summary from Website Contributors)

"Eating Fried Chicken" by Linh Dinh

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times

When I’m eating fried chicken
When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,
When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,
The various blood debts you owe me,
My past humiliations and my future crimes—
Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.
But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times
When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything
That’s not generally available to mankind.
(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)
And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots,
And meat brings humiliation,
And each gasp of air
Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

"Swaddling Clothes" by Yukio Mishima, translated by Ivan Morris

- After a shocking incident in their home two days earlier, Toshiko and her actor
husband meet friends in a Tokyo nightclub. The young wife and mother is
dumbfounded to hear her husband recounting the incident—which has disturbed her
greatly—as merely an amusing story for their companions’ entertainment. Troubled and
vulnerable, Toshiko feels acutely aware of her husband’s insensitivity, neglect, and lack
of consideration for her. Her mind swells with loneliness and her fears of the future
provoked by her horror at the scene she has so recently encountered in her son’s
nursery. The story that so horrifies Toshiko began with the arrival of a new nurse, a
woman with an oddly distended stomach and a prodigious appetite. Not long after she
arrived, loud moans came from the nursery. Toshiko and her husband rushed in to
discover the nurse giving birth on the floor. Toshiko’s husband rescued the family’s good
rug and placed a blanket under the nurse to prevent damage to the parquet floor.
Although two days have passed, Toshiko, in contrast to her husband, is still preoccupied
by this experience. In particular, she obsesses about one scene that she alone
witnessed. The doctor who finally arrived to attend the nurse derided her and her
bastard child so strongly that he had his attendant wrap the newborn boy in
newspaper. Appalled by the doctor’s cruelty, Toshiko rewrapped the child in new
flannel. The image of the innocent child in his soiled paper wrappings, however,
remains. As Toshiko’s husband sets out from the nightclub for other engagements, she
goes home alone in a taxi. Riding through the darkened streets of Tokyo, she reflects on
the nurse’s child and the secret shame of his birth. What if this boy, twenty years hence,
should meet her own son? The one, reared in solid comfort, might be savagely
attacked by

the other who will have been turned into a brute by a life of deprivation and disgrace.
The bloody newspapers in which that newborn was briefly wrapped would mark him for
life; they would be a blight on his being, the secret emblem of his entire existence, his
inescapable doom. She imagines one day going to the boy to tell him of her secret
knowledge of his first moments of life. On impulse, Toshiko leaves her taxi and walks
beneath the cherry blossoms in the dark deserted park near the Imperial Palace. She
wanders until she encounters the form of a man, asleep on a bench, wrapped in
newspapers. Standing beside the dirty anonymous figure, she imagines this young man
as the future manifestation of the baby recently born in her house. With a rustle of
newspaper, a powerful hand seizes her wrist. Instantly, Toshiko realizes that both her
foreboding and her powerful sense of connection to the baby in newspaper swaddling
have been realized. (Summary from eNotes)