American Writers Research Articles

Dialectics of Subaltern voices in Barbara Nimri Aziz’s Heir to a Silent Song

Heir to a Silent Song is a prose work by an American writer, anthropologist, critic and a vibrant researcher Barbara Nimri Aziz. Beside the delineation of her travel record and the rustic life of common people living in the eastern hills, the prose echoes the subaltern voices as a protest against evils and aberrations existing in the social system. As an epitome of the voices of the voiceless, it depicts the plight, the grievances and the pathos of basically two female rebels from the eastern hills of Nepal: Yogmaya and Durgadevi. Subaltern studies are the study of social protest, and the social exclusion and exploitation. Since subaltern refers to the group of oppressed, suppressed and marginalized people, Aziz ventures to portray them as the messiahs of subaltern people in her work. This paper strives to explore how Aziz delineates them as the representative figures of subaltern aesthetics. It attempts to answer the questions: “How do Yogmaya and Durga Devi represent subaltern voices? and what do they combat for? ”This research study conceptualizes the theoretical frameworks of subaltern theories to invigorate the study. Aziz presents how two women combat for female rights and justice for the poor and low class people in the contemporary society during Rana regime. The desperate struggle of two subaltern females against social evils like caste and gender discriminations, corruption, exploitation, fraudulent activities etc. is a striking thrust of the prose work.

Decolonized Trauma: Narrative, Memory and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. The present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Specifically, we draw upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The findings indicate the multiple ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans – that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze – as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The study also reveals that the leading female character, like the novelist Adichie, creates an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called ‘cross-cultural solidarity’ in reconstructing a new community.

Narrative Time in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: A Genettian Perspective

This article utilizes Gérard Genette’s (1972/1980) narrative discourse theory in order to explore the temporal narrative strategies deployed in The Hunger Games (2008), the first novel in the popular series by the American writer Suzanne Collins. Though Genette’s comprehensive theory includes such elements as time, mood, and voice, the main focus of the study will be narrative time, whose elements order, duration, and frequency and their subcategories are first defined and then applied to the analysis of this novel. Genette’s theory of narrative discourse has almost invariably been considered as a purely formal one, a highly systematic classification of terms designed to describe narrative structures, without focusing on the social and cultural factors. In contrast, the present analysis aims at exploring both the formal and the communicative components of Genette’s theory, with a view to bridging the gap between old classical and current postclassical narratology.

Female Gothic, Modernity and the Aesthetics of Change: Demythologising the South in Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty, an American fiction writer, brings forth women’s issues and promotes feminist ethics in her writings: novels and short stories. Her stories reveal her concern with the extended subordination of women under machismo in Southern America. More significantly, her work highlights the growth of women’s liberal thinking during the development of modernity in the southern parts of America. She looks at the change in time and thought under modernity to examine the local culture and literature with a critical eye on the strict gender order in the South. Her fiction explores varied forms of oppression in marriage, kinship, and community structure of the changing South through female Gothicism. In depicting her female characters as fleeing spatial confinement for freedom and self-transformation, Welty develops an aesthetic of mobility that threatens the mythologized constructions of Southern culture. This eventually leads to a reactionary modernism that calls for the redefinition of identity and culture in the history of Southern America. For centuries, the South has been considered the most segregated, white-centric patriarchal society due to its particular culture, geography and history. The change in thought and culture caused by modernity becomes a threat to the customary plantation business as well as to the conservative male hierarchical order as it engenders a revision of women’s identity. This study may help in further research on Gothic literary studies in combination with discourses on culture and women’s identity in literary works.Keywords: Female Gothic, mythologized culture, modernity, Southern America, women’s identity

Whiteness and the Affective Economy of Happy Antiracism inNative SonandMeridian

This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emotion alienates people of color. It argues that a cohort of twentieth-century African American writers critiqued this happy antiracism in their fiction, examining Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) as two representative examples. Both novels portray what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” specifically the unequal affective economy produced by antiracism’s circulation as a cultural object. Wright considers how antiracism occasions happiness in white subjects by bolstering their sense of their own virtue, and how this happiness alienates African Americans, for whom antiracism is embedded in the experience of ongoing racial violence. Writing in the heyday of second-wave feminism, Walker examines how, even as antiracism shores up happy feeling, it can also compromise the agency of white women, whose activism is mediated by the persistence of nineteenth-century ideals of sentimentalism and domesticity.

Writer Fighting against Discrimination and Eastern Reality

Discrimination against women and girls – including gender-based violence, harmful traditional practices – is the most common form of inequality. Giving preference, privileges to sons and underestimating girls, which is the main cause of the harmful practice of sex selection based on gender, is still a widespread practice in some countries. Against this background, the role and contribution of those politicians, writers and people interested in this issue, who, at the risk of their lives, fight to improve the situation, is invaluable. Among the people with their priceless input in promotion of the above mentioned issue, we would distinguish Jean Sasson, the modern American writ-er and researcher who considered the request of an Arab woman and turned her notes about real stories into an artistic reality. In the novel “The Princess’ Diaries,” the victim of discrimination asks for help, as there is no other way for her to change any-thing; however, she hopes the situation in her country will change for the benefit of women and as it is believed, fighting always makes sense. The objective of the given paper is to bring to light the form of expressing the protest against unfair reality by the victim herself. Moreover, we aim to draw a parallel between two women and the ways they communicate the harsh reality to the rest of the world.

CONFRONTATION AND MUTUAL REFLECTION OF TWO WORLDS IN “THE GRASS DANCER” BY SUSAN POWER

An important layer of this research is dedicated to critical studies, which are directed at the strategies of creating a peculiarly Indian literary theory and practice. We have a desire to separate the indigenous tradition from the broad American, in particular, Anglo-American and recognize Indian writing as a component of the multicultural paradigm. Currently, there is a noticeable confrontation between two camps of literary critics: one of them is oriented to European literary theories and believes that they should form the basis of literary interpretations of indigenous writers’ works; another wing is determined by the need to clarify the peculiarities of the literary paradigm of “Indian realism” in the context of a globalized society taking into account new literary models of the perception of ethnic minorities. The need to write the article is caused by the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the problem in Ukrainian literary studies and the growing objective interest in the works of Native American writers, in particular Susan Power. The article proposes a conceptual and methodological determination of the study of a literary text written in the style of Indian realism, which makes it possible to reveal the raised scientific problem at many levels. The article examines how the drama of loss, search and a new acquisition of national identity by the Sioux people was artistically and aesthetically reflected in the text of Susan Power`s novel “The Grass Dancer”. The presentation and consideration of the problem of national and cultural identity provides an opportunity to see the artistic diversity in the understanding of the personal destiny of a person and the people in general, literary ideas about the Sioux people beliefs peculiarities, their aesthetic component and place in the national cultural canon. The main thing is to avoid the trap of a politicized and ideologized theory of multiculturalism, in which modern critics increasingly see an opportunity to interpret the texts of indigenous writers, which is actually the ideology of colonial domination hidden behind political correctness. The main purpose of this article is to outline a coherent theoretical and empirical model of multi-level functioning of Dakota national identity concept in the novel “The Grass Dancer” by Susan Power. Also the aim is to substantiate the leading concept of Sioux national identity literary manifestations interpretation as a unique code, epistemological, socio-cultural and artistic-aesthetic factor that plays a significant role in the modern worldview formation process and myth-making of Dakota society representatives. The following article involves historical-cultural and structural approaches, which correspond to the purpose and tasks of the research; methods of cultural-semantic analysis and phenomenological methods were also used. The persistent deconstruction of the Eurocentric canon of world literature, not only at the level of academic discussions, but also in the system of university teaching of world literature, demands new texts such as “The Grass Dancer”. The reformatting of canons is, of course, a permanent process, but the globalization of the literary canon today acquires a qualitatively new scale and breadth proposed by Susan Power. Multiculturalism with its influence on cultural dynamics and the idea of national and cultural identity can’t be considered the driving cultural stimulus of changes in all its ambiguity. To an even greater extent, transculturalism, proposed by Power, aimed at defining common interests and common values across cultural and national borders for non-native readers. That is her main contribution to the construction of a more globalized literary canon. Susan Power as a Native American writer has repeatedly addressed the specified range of the Indigenous problems, which constantly tested the agreement prevalent in the nonnative science with the most urgent problems of Native literary studies.

Dear Scottie – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Letters to his Daughter

       Our article aims at a brief literary analysis of the letters written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the famous American writer to his only child, Scottie. Despite his short life (1896-1940), Fitzgerald left an indelible mark not only on English-language literature, but also on world literature. His novels and short stories have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. And the new screen adaptation of his masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" once again opened the door for the writer in the hearts of millions of modern youth. The writer's biography is no less impressive than the lives of his most reckless characters. Fitzgerald's life was full of adventures and extremes. He had periods of carefree life and days when he had to constantly ask his literary agent for an advance. Scottie, his only daughter, was the brightest point of his life, born to him by his wife, the beautiful and talented Zelda Sayre. Dozens of letters written to Scott reveal the truest and most intimate side of the writer - the father figure and that of the role of the father - for which he never betrayed.

Healing of Wounds, Return of the Soul -----A Study of the African Diaspora in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" from the Perspective of Postcolonial Theory

In the 1990s, there was a big explosion in diaspora literature, and black literature became more active in academia. Beloved, one of the historical trilogy of African American writer Tony Morrison. This paper will use the research methods of "text reading" and "thematic content analysis" to analyze and explain the diaspora of the novel " Beloved". Especially the shaping of characters in the novel and the exploration of African-American identity, in the pursuit of the origin of the lack of identity and the exploration of the return of identitythat is, the hybridization of identity. And from the post-colonial theory to be analyzed. It is not difficult for us to find that only by loving ourselves and actively integrating into the black community can we face the ghost of history, rediscover the meaning of history to reality, smash the unspeakable otherness attached to the past, and embark on the road of gaining the status of subjectivity.

A Son at the Front; American Writers and World War I

A Son at the Front; American Writers and World War I

The Carrier of Shame and Glory-An Interpretation of the Letter A in The Scarlet Letter from the Perspective of Symbolism

Hawthorne, an American romantic writer in the 19th century, has a talent for using symbolism as a literary expression. This kind of artistic feature can be specifically seen in his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. From the initial derogatory meaning of “adultery” and “awful” to the later “able” and “adorable”, the letter A in The Scarlet Letter has different meanings in various periods. This article starts with the letter A and provides a comprehensive and concise analysis of the use of symbolism, including the symbolic implications and the artistic effects produced by these symbolic means, aiming to help understand the ideological content of the work.

Anthropocene / Climate Fiction: A Study of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140

Global warming is one of the most concerning problems in today’s world, especially since the early decades of the 21st century. Several scientists, as well as writers, have attempted to illuminate the negative consequences of climate change in their work. In addition, climate fiction has emerged as an important type of science fiction to investigate and raise awareness about anthropogenic climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson, an American science fiction writer whose oeuvre includes climate fiction, has produced several works that focus on illuminating the catastrophic consequences of anthropogenic climate change. His 2017 novel New York 2140 is a case in point. This paper aims to elucidate the effects of climate change on human life. As an example of "Anthropocene" fiction, New York 2140 is also concerned with showing the intricate relation between capitalism, politics, and the environment. In addition, this paper intends to show how Robinson, in his novel, does not only focus on magnifying the negative consequences of global warming but also on how his utopian perspective is revealed by his depiction of how people adapt successfully to this catastrophe.
 
 Received: 1 December 2022 / Accepted: 12 April 2023 / Published: 5 May 2023

Protagonists’ Predicament in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

<em>Hills Like White Elephants</em> is one of the short stories written by American writer Ernest Hemingway, which is mainly about conversations between an American man and a girl who are arguing about whether she should receive an abortion procedure when waiting for an express train from Barcelona to Madrid. This paper aims to analyse the protagonists’ predicament through stylistics of fiction as a research perspective and comes to a conclusion that facing the disillusion of traditional values and the dysfunction of original morality under the attack of wars, the protagonists are the representatives of “the lost generation” who suffers the trauma and wanders around the world, only to find out there’s no corner for them to rest and elude away the loneliness.

EXPRESSION OF CRIMINAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE NOVELS OF F. M. DOSTOEVSKY "CRIME AND PUNISHMENT" AND J. STEINBECK "THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT"

Determine the influence of the image of Raskolnikov from the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment" to create the image of Ethan Hawley - the hero of the novel by the American writer J. Steinbeck "The Winter of Our Anxiety".

A Republic of the Imagination: In Conversation with Azar Nafisi

A Republic of the ImaginationIn Conversation with Azar Nafisi Daniel Simon (bio) and Azar Nafisi (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution PHOTO BY YOUSEF AL-ABDULLAH Fiction, storytelling, is the bearer, the carrier of empathy. Click for larger view View full resolution With her latest book of essays, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (2022), Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi offers a "resistance reading list" that the Washington Post hails as offering "a new canon for the tyrannies of the present and the dystopian possibilities of the future." Over Zoom, we discussed the power of storytelling embodied by Scheherazade and Alice in Wonderland; the intergenerational threads that connect readers; and the role of writers and readers in preserving memory and defending truth. [End Page 32] Daniel Simon: We're talking today about your newest book, Read Dangerously, which I really love—thank you so much for writing it. I think it's a perfect fit for the theme of our May issue, which is called "The Future of the Book." And it's an opportune moment to speak with you about your own passion for reading, writing, and books and how they've played such a large part in your life. In the epistolary genre consisting of letters to "Baba," your late father, you write beautifully in Read Dangerously about the intergenerational thread that connects teachers and readers, such as your parents, Nezhat and Ahmad, to your own children and now your grandchildren; Professor James Yoch here at the University of Oklahoma and your student Razieh in Tehran; even your own reading of writers from Plato to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood during the 1970s and then again more recently as you are composing these letters. If a student in Norman or Tehran were to ask you what it means to read dangerously in 2023, what would you tell them? Azar Nafisi: Well, this book is partly a response to the trend I had noticed, especially in the US, where we use books as comfort food. We read them not in order to be disturbed or find something new, but we read them in order for them to confirm what we already know, at times to confirm our prejudices: "Why don't they speak what I want them to?" So, there's no challenge—we're uncomfortable with challenge. We want to eliminate rather than create an exchange. And so, for me, reading dangerously means that we take that risk to read in order to be disturbed. As James Baldwin says, artists are here to disturb the peace. Writers are not here to warm the cockles of your heart. For me, the best example of a good reader or a reader who takes risks is Alice in Wonderland. Out of millions of little girls, there's this one little girl who is bored with the routine of her life, and she's after something different. What makes Alice so exceptional is the fact that she has what Nabokov calls the third eye of the imagination. She sees not just reality in terms of appearances, but she also sees beyond reality, the magic of reality. And she sees not only a white rabbit but a white rabbit who talks and wears a waistcoat and a watch. She runs after that white rabbit, not saying, like some of our readers, that this is not how rabbits act. She risks going into the world of the white rabbit. And when she jumps into that hole, she doesn't say, Am I going to survive this? What's going to happen to me next? And her reward, of course, is the world—everything, every creature in that world, has a sign of being in her real life, but she's now seeing them in a new light. Her vision of reality is changing as she goes from one person to another. The last thing that I want to say about Alice, which I think is really important, is that like all good stories, it challenges and questions, not just the world outside but the reader...

Dream Bridge: Selected Poems by Oleh Lysheha

Reviewed by: Dream Bridge: Selected Poems by Oleh Lysheha Ostap Kin OLEH LYSHEHA Dream Bridge: Selected Poems Trans. Virlana Tkacz & Wanda Phipps. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2022. 160 pages. IN NOVEMBER 2013 I met Oleh Lysheha for the first and last time. During that meeting, we chatted about the United States (where Lysheha spent a whole year on a Fulbright scholarship), the underground Lviv scene of the 1970s and '80s, the Ukrainian modernist poets of the early twentieth century, and American writers of the nineteenth century. At some point, Lysheha shared this legend (or myth) that captivates my attention still. In 1939, when the Soviets entered Lviv, they authorized the establishment of a union of writers so that Ukrainian- and Polishand Yiddish-language writers populating the city could coexist on some kind of official level. Thus, newspapers and journals were established, and the publishing industry also began to function in Lviv, printing all kinds of books. Legend has it that one day Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer from Drohobych, appeared in the office of Petro Kozlaniuk, a writer affiliated with the newly created union of writers. Schulz gave him a manuscript of a short story he allegedly wrote in Ukrainian. After spending some time on the work, Kozlaniuk's verdict was adverse: this story won't be published. A myth, a legend, an exaggeration, this lore of Schulz's unknown short story in Ukrainian is still captivating. (Upon reflection, this might have been a reworked story of Schulz trying to pitch his original Polish-language work to a newly established venue, interested in works embodying social realism as its true virtue.) Oleh Lyshesha, born in 1949, had succeeded, without carrying too much or giving it much of a try, in securing a special place in the literary canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ukrainian literature. In addition to being a genuine poet, he was also an outstanding prose writer and essayist, and hopefully, one day, his prose, too, will see the light of day in English translation. His poems are arresting; his technique is demanding, changeable, and progressing; his story as a writer is captivating; and his behavior is extravagant as befits a poet—all in all, features that a great poet might possess. Lysheha's formative and decisive years took place in the city of Lviv, once a multicultural and multilingual crossroads, and overlapped with the Soviet Union's stagnation period, with little perspective and a dull atmosphere of total hopelessness. But there was a cohort of people eager to form a clandestine circle that intellectually and culturally opposed the boredom of daily routine and led nonconformist lives. When Lysheha was a senior at a local university, studying the English language and literature, shortly before graduation he was expelled for participating in an unofficial literary journal, Skrynia (The Chest). Lysheha had to start a life from scratch. The fact of being expelled from the university closed the doors to any official establishments, which the poet didn't quite seek anyway. Nevertheless, that expulsion offered him priceless intellectual freedom to create and share the work he cultivated until the end of his life. For most of the Soviet era, his work was thoroughly appreciated, although clandestinely, by a highly appreciative and selective circle of readers and colleagues. It wasn't until before the collapse of the Soviet Union that his first collection, Zyma v Tysmenytsi (Winter in Tysmenytsia), came out when he was forty. It is represented in this collection by just a few poems, including the blockbuster poem "Song 212": "There are so many superstars, overgrown with weeds.. / Somewhere Tom Jones // Is still singing about that green-green grass.. // On such a night under the moon among the trees // cinnamon mushrooms // practice choreography." [End Page 74] The constellation of writers that formed Lysheha as an author and illuminated his path is quite unusual for a poet who lived in those geographical coordinates at that time. His poetry has something of a modernist feel, like that of Ezra Pound (whom he rendered into Ukrainian); then, on a different level, there is a mixed team of heavyweights from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Henry David Thoreau, Robert...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Daniel Simon BOOKS REMAIN one of the great achievements of the human experiment. Over the millennia, the seismic shifts that began with the rise of languages, consolidation of the alphabet, and Gutenberg's invention of the mechanical printing press in the fifteenth century made possible the codex form that endures amidst this latest seismic shift, the Digital Age. UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, with its focus on conserving the world's documentary heritage, wagers that our future—cultural or otherwise—is inextricably tied to our ability to remember the past through the stories that preserve it. The twentieth-century book arts master Harry Duncan stated it memorably: "I think the whole point of a book is the text—the verbal creation of the author. Type, like handwriting, is simply a system of visible signs that still speech into a special form which waits to be resurrected in the human voice—to be re-created, because no reader will hear a poem exactly the same as another reader or the same as the author wrote it. So it's an interesting business to retrieve what is there. It's the way literature conquers time" (Against the Grain, ed. Robert Dana, 1986). From a more radical perspective, the technology of books not only emblematizes print culture but perpetuates the agency of that culture in a posthumanist age. "Let's restore to publishing its true reputation," writes publisher Richard Nash, "not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up" (VQR, Spring 2013). As the sixteen writers gathered in this issue's "The Future of the Book" cover feature attest, books possess both a radical, "barbarous" agency and a conservatory, civilizing staying power (page 30). For Japanese poet Shizue Ogawa, who lost all her books and journals when her family's house burned down during her senior year in high school, we learn that her oldest surviving poem is preserved in a high school newspaper. From Azar Nafisi's belief in the power of books—via the imagination—to "address our humanity, against any kind of absolutism, including the absolutism of death"; to Gerald Vizenor's survey of Native American writers' books of "presence, resistance, survivance, and liberty"; to Serge Chamchinov's vision of "books in perpetual becoming" toward an unknown future, the ability of books to both document and conquer time as well as traverse real and imagined geographies remains a testament to their protean, babelian flourishing. And we've learned to be agnostic about the forms our books take. As the editors were preparing to send this issue to press, to be printed by an offset lithography process more than a century old, I came across an original copy of Clara Luper's Behold the Walls (1979), her firsthand account of leading the nonviolent Oklahoma City sit-in movement in 1958, which helped catalyze the civil rights movement in the United States. (Karlos Hill's interview with her daughter, Marilyn Luper Hildreth, appears on page 14.) The binding of the cheaply produced paperback was falling apart, but the power of Luper's testimony still leaps off the page. "Black and White together must prepare for America's third century," she writes in the epilogue, "knowing that the third century will be one of uncertainty, and the challenge of removing the 'Invisible Walls' will be our greatest task." Preserved in the pages of Behold the Walls, the prophecy of Clara Luper's witness remains as prescient today as it did in her lifetime, and in a new edition, forthcoming from the OU Press, that prophetic voice—and the culture of the book writ large—will resonate into the twenty-first century. [End Page 3] I would like to thank Alice-Catherine Carls for her guiding vision in conceptualizing and carrying out this issue's cover feature. As a longtime contributor to and editorial board member of WLT, she has not only enthusiastically supported our mission but helped us carry it out in...

Light-Years

Research Article| May 01 2023 Light-Years Grace Q. Song Grace Q. Song Grace Q. Song is a Chinese American writer residing in New York City. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in the Boiler, the Journal, the Offing, the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Potomac Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Previous works have been selected for inclusion in Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She is the winner of the 11th Annual Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest, selected by Vi Khi Nao, and she studies English at Columbia University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2023) 2023 (100): 48. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10320898 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Grace Q. Song; Light-Years. the minnesota review 1 May 2023; 2023 (100): 48. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-10320898 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2023 Grace Q. Song2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

『기록실로의 여행』에 나타난 공간의 확장과 축소의 상징성 연구

The aim of this paper is to examine the symbols of ‘Space’ in Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster, the representative American writer. It is likely that the hero in the novel, the old man called Mr. Blank is forced to be confined in a small room, a kind of ward or cell, in which he never recognizes the flow of time as well as the memory of his personal experiences. In addition, he is enforced to read a uncompleted report on a table about which he has never heard of, and to write the rest of the report. The report of which title is ‘Travels in the Scriptorium’ tells the history of Confederation, we are sure, a kind of alternative history about the beginning of American history invading the territory of native Americans, which makes not only the hero but also the readers confused. By way of this kind of description to show the history of American natives who had been driven to be deterritorized from their homeland, Auster is trying to provide the readers the alternative history in order for Americans to recognize the process of writing the history. I guess that in The Travels in the Sciriptorium, the author of the book shows we might be a Mr. Blank or a Graf forced to acknowledge the history of the US.

Grotesque Faces and Masks of Sherwood Anderson's Characters

The purpose of the presented publication is critical analysis, interpretation and connotative searches of the novels of a great American writer Sherwood Anderson. From this point of view, the work discusses Anderson's short, plotless novels and their composition. Writer's writing style, environment, criticism of the era, crisis of culture and art, philosophical and psychological topics are shown as well. The architectonics of Sh. Anderson's novels is solid, concise and capacious. They contain the most important fragments of human existence, sometimes the entire history. Sh. Anderson comprehends present time, difficult existential environment with all intensity. Anderson's protagonist characters compete with time, era, degraded system and authoritarian regime. They are characters out of the time stream. The writer's tragic faces and masks create the reality of the era. Capitalist values ​​and worldview destroy and enslave people with high ideal principles and values. Anderson's characters are victims of violence, harsh realities of capitalism, and pressures of society. They are most worried about the scarcity of human resources and the lack of humanity. A complete disaster of Anderson's characters is caused due to idleness and loneliness. The characters, who are broken from life, talk to us about the unbearable reality. All these are convulsions of an intolerant epoch. Discursive thinking, connotative searches, interpretation, meditations, multi-dimensionality of thought, critical analysis, judgment, confrontation, understanding of metaphors and symbols, methodological searches follow the presented texts.