American Writers Research Articles

Лингвоконцепт PRIVACY в эссе Дж. Франзена «Имперская спальня» (1998)

The aim of the research is to propose an interpretation of the linguoconcept PRIVACY through the prism of the works by the American writer J. Franzen, in development of previously expressed interpretations. J. Franzen’s essay “The Imperial Bedroom” (1998) was chosen as the research material. The paper analyzes the changes in the life of the American society against the backdrop of the increasing role of state and corporate technological control in different spheres of an individual’s life; it identifies the link between the thematic originality of J. Franzen’s essay collection “How to Be Alone” and social processes in the USA at the end of the last century; and reveals the originality of the linguoconcept PRIVACY in J. Franzen’s system of values based on the material of the essay “The Imperial Bedroom”. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the presentation of the linguoconcept PRIVACY as interpreted by J. Franzen through the opposition of the states of public space – visibility / PRIVACY – invisibility. As a result, the paper shows that the linguoconcept PRIVACY, previously associated with the state of invisibility, in J. Franzen’s interpretation has incorporated the public space, depriving the individual of the opportunity to be visible in the public space and exposing his vulnerability in private life. The results obtained are extremely important for modern American studies as they open up opportunities for further research on the linguoconcept PRIVACY taking into account current socio-political issues.

Identity Politics as Lingua Franca?

Abstract Although identity politics dates back to the 1960 s, it has acquired a new urgency since the ascendance of Black Lives Matter in the late 2010 s. And while identity politics, as a critical framework, was developed in the United States, its rhetoric has since been taken up in much of the rest of the world. This article argues that the terminology of US-style identity politics is especially ill-suited to Germany, a country in which race does not exist as a legal category, and discrimination and inequality do not revolve around a Black/white axis. It points out, moreover, that the German appropriation of certain words and concepts – such as diversity, political correctness, cancel culture, woke, intersectionality, and others – clashes both with their usage and meaning in the US and with the demographic changes that have transformed post-Second World War German culture. In order to illustrate this clash, this article compares Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical A Strange Loop (2019) with Yael Ronen’s Slippery Slope (2021), a critically acclaimed musical performed in English at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. It critiques Slippery Slope’s appropriation of the buzzwords of identity politics and notes with regret that German theatres are ill-equipped to perform the plays of the most important playwrights working in the US today, a new generation of African American writers, including Jackson, whose work is steeped in the performance traditions of Black American cultures.

Madness and Resistance under the Flashback and Juxtaposition—Spatial Narration in The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar, the only novel by American poet and writer Sylvia Plath, vividly portrays the marginalized experience of American women in the mid-20th century and depicts the struggles of female intellectuals in constructing their own identities.This paper, by using the concepts of flashback and juxtaposition in spatial narration theory, explores three key aspects: the physical spatial changes in the whole story, the interplay between psychological and physical spaces under flashbacks and juxtaposition, and the protagonist Esther’s resistance against the male-dominated society and her awakening of female consciousness in the bell jar. It analyzes how Esther’s psychological space evolves within the ever-shifting physical spaces, leading to her feelings of helplessness, despair, and madness. Furthermore, it examines how through her rebellious madness, Esther achieves her awakening of female consciousness, constructs her own identity as a female intellectual, and raises her voice in a male-dominated society oppressive at the time.

Narrative Matters: Ursula Le Guin's writings and adolescence.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was an influential American writer who was a leading literary figure of the 20th century. She is known for her contributions to the science fiction and fantasy genres. She wrote numerous novels, short stories, poems, and essays throughout her career, exploring various themes and pushing the boundaries of speculative fiction. In this article, I discuss Le Guin's writings on the developmental tasks of adolescence. In Le Guin's fiction, she examines how different social and cultural contexts determine patterns of maturation and the acquisition of the roles and responsibilities of adulthood. This article focuses on two novels, A Wizard of Earthsea from the Books of Earthsea (Le Guin, 2018), and Coming of Age in Karhide (Le Guin, 2017).

The influence of the Past and the Present in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

The most American writers who tackle the theme of past and present in their works are Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. This paper attempts to analyze the theme of past and present in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and Williams' A streetcar Named Desire. They have presented their tragic theory of the relationship between the characters' tragic downfall and the power of the unconscious self or their psychological mental fate. They have used memory as a recurrent motif in their major plays. The aim of this paper is to analyze memory that symbolizes the past and its impact on the present in the two selected plays. The major characters are shown through memory as they feel haunted with the restraints of past, which casts shadow on their present condition. As the human archetypes live under unfavorable conditions whether they are political, social, or economic, they cover their harsh realities with memory of the beautiful past.

Solitude and Exile in Roberto Bolaño

Profoundly original and deliberately shocking, innovative and puzzling at the same time, Roberto Bolaño (1953 – 2003) is now considered one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. Born in Chile, he grew up in Mexico and then traveled across the South American continent, finally settling in Europe, in his steady attempt to establish his reputation of a poet and a novelist. His entire work represents a constant challenge to the literary critics, given the fact that he distinctively addressed some important universal issues (like human loneliness or the impossibility to establish an authentic connection and dialogue in the midst of an alienated society); but he is also famous for his particular way of meditating upon the often hidden meanings of exile in the contemporary world. His characters travel around the world as well as within themselves, in order to find their identity and to assert the truth of their own existence at the same time. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

A Study of the Master-Slave Dialectic Relationship of the "Other" in "The Ballad of the Sad Café"

"The Ballad of the Sad Café" is one of the representative works of American writer Carson McCullers, which deeply explores the master-slave dialectic relationship of the "Other" under existentialism by depicting the complex relationships among three protagonists in a southern town. In the novel, the protagonists show both a longing for and a resistance to the "Other." Marvin Macy's obsession with Amelia and his manipulation of Cousin Lymon, as well as Amelia's dependence on Cousin Lymon and her disgust towards Marvin, reflect the complex and distorted relationship between them. This relationship is not only a master-slave relationship in emotions but also a dialectical process of self-awareness and other-awareness under existentialism. The novel reveals the eternal master-slave relationship between people by showing the power struggles and psychological changes between love and being loved, control and being controlled. In this relationship, the "Other" is both the object of love and control, while the protagonists constantly seek self-identity and freedom in their relationship with the "Other." Through an in-depth study of the master-slave dialectic relationship of the "Other" in "The Ballad of the Sad Café," we can better understand the complexity of interpersonal relationships under existentialism and the eternal exploration of self and the "Other" in the depths of the human heart.

The usage of instrumental syntaxames with the prepositions

The analysis of the examples collected from the literary works of English and American writers testifies that the instrumental syntax is expressed explicitly using the models with+S, by+S, through+S, in+S, on+S, for+S. Among these models, the most productive in expressing instrumental syntax is with+S. In the sentences the combination with+S can appear in different syntactic positions

Native americans in the stories of Sherman Alexie

In the XX century of American Literature the themes, new characters, new directions and genres could be observed in the novels, stories and poems. In their scholarly articles literary critics analyzed the multicultural dimension in the literature of this period as the country had raised a new generation of immigrants, who were writing about their national identities in American society. Thus XX century American literature could be considered as multicultural literature that depicted the life of new generation of people who belong to various cultures but who grew up and were educated in modern American society. In its turn this multiculturalism caused the development of different nations studies that examined this aspect of literature. Examples are Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Mexican literary studies. Similarly, there is also Native American literature that studies creative works written by a new generation of Native American Indians. Representatives of Native American Literature raised several issues that young generation of native Americans are facing in American society. This paper deals with the stories of the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, whose works depict life, interests and problems of modern native Americans.

The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”

Abstract This paper sets out to examine how the first-person plural narration form is used in diasporic Chinese American writer Yiyun Li’s short story “Immortality” to represent the collective loss of subjectivity – namely how she represents the consequences of that loss from a psychological perspective as part of her experiment in artistic innovation. It explores Li’s characterization – especially her realistic depiction of the collective narrators’ psychology under totalitarianism and how she allows their psychology to affect the form of her representation. I argue that although through the ventriloquy in English, Li has given the “we”-narrators a discursive voice to articulate their hidden thoughts and feelings – something not possible in their mother tongue, the “we”-narrators are unable to exceed their existential limitations to speak a purely personal language immune from official appropriation. Li’s story also underlines the extreme form as well as the emotional consequences of that collective loss of subjectivity, namely the “we”-community’s avoidance of mass melancholia in reaction to the tragic end of their compatriot victim of the dictatorship in order to preserve their prevailing collective ego-ideal.1

The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain by Brian K. Goodman (review)

The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain by Brian K. Goodman (review)

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

‘I’m not a fighter. I’m a lay down and die-er’: An interview with Diane Cook

A conversation between acclaimed American short story writer and novelist Diane Cook and writer A. J. Ashworth, focusing in particular on the ecological elements in Cook’s writing in her debut collection Man V. Nature. Cook also discusses the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic in her fiction, writing about aftermaths, her own experiences with nature and the environment, as well as some of her influences.

The archetypal versatility of the image of Becky Hildebrandt in the J. Franzen's novel "Crossroads"

The object of the study is the novel "Crossroads" by American writer Jonathan Franzen, which became widely known outside the United States and was translated into Russian in 2022. The object of the study is one of the female images of this novel - the image of Becky Hildebrandt, which combines a number of archetypal functions: a daughter in relation to parents Marion and Russ, a sister for brothers Clem and Perry, a bride for the young musician Tanner Evans. In the last chapters of the novel, Becky becomes a mother, thus passing through all the female family archetypal roles. Franzen's creative method, which tends to psychological realism, is focused on the specifics of the inner world of the characters, and it can be argued that the deep psychologism of his works is based on a consistent and systematic understanding of archetypal roles. The study of the heroine's image is carried out from the standpoint of an archetypal approach dating back to the works of C.G. Jung. The archetypal approach opens up to the researcher the opportunity to penetrate deeper into the psychological essence of a literary text. Female images, viewed from the point of view of reflecting archetypal features in them, appear in connection with other characters, and the gender-role specificity of their functioning becomes more visible. In the modern world, where the crisis of traditional values is clearly felt, a better understanding of the importance and complementarity of gender roles makes it possible to form moral supports leading both man and society in the direction of mental well-being. Archetypal analysis reveals one of the basic attitudes of the writer: a modern woman is forced to play several roles at once; the mixing of these roles, their instability inevitably lead to problematic situations in the life of not only the woman herself, but also her entire family.

The Image of Mother in the fantasy novel "A Game of Thrones" by G. Martin.

The image of the mother is a constant of the world culture, and therefore it can be found in almost any national literature. The research material of this study is the work of the American fantasy writer George Martin. The object of the study is the image of the mother in the novel “A Game of Thrones” from the cycle “A Song of Ice and Fire”. This series of novels has been positively reviewed by critics and warmly received by readers. In this study, the author refers to the image of the mother and conducts a practical analysis of the female characters represented in the novel. Three protagonists representing the above mentioned image of mother were analyzed. The novelist aims to create diverse characters who possess unique personalities. At the same time, each specific protagonist has ambivalence and duality. The primary method of research is a comparative analysis of the heroines selected by the author in order to identify the fundamental characteristics of the image of the mother in the work of George Martin. The principal conclusions of the study are: the presence of a specific writer’s approach to the process of a mother image creation in a fantasy narrative, explained by his desire to create multifaceted characters with unique personalities, as well as the ambivalence and duality of one image in each particular protagonist. These conclusions make it possible to further conduct a more extensive study in order to investigate into other literary images presented in the works of the American writer, since fantasy, as a literary phenomenon, is experiencing increasing scientific interest. The scientific novelty is explained by a sufficient lack of conducted scientific research on the image of the mother in fantasy works, in particular, in the works of George Martin.

W.E.B. Du Bois' Autobiographical Legacy: Impact on African American Literature and Civil Rights

This research paper explores the autobiographical legacy of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, commonly known as W.E.B. Du Bois, and its profound influence on African American literature and the Civil Rights Movement. Du Bois, a prominent African American scholar, writer, and civil rights activist, penned a series of autobiographical works that not only documented his own life experiences but also played a pivotal role in shaping the narrative of the African American struggle for civil rights and equality. This paper examines Du Bois' autobiographical writings, including "The Souls of Black Folk," "Dusk of Dawn," and "The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois," and their impact on the broader African American literary tradition and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. By analyzing Du Bois' life and his written accounts, this paper illustrates how his autobiographical legacy contributed to the intellectual and social fabric of African American history.

The theme of maturation in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Nelle Harper Lee

The article is devoted to the study of narrative and genre features of the famous work of Nelle Harper Lee ‟To Kill a Mockingbird”. It considers such categories of poetics as composition, chronotope and a system of characters. The study analyses the theme of maturation and the traits of ‟southern noir”, traditional and innovative characteristics of the initiation novel. Due to these peculiarities the American writer is not only able to focus on the inner life of the main heroine, but also to present the historical and cultural background of the narrative, as well as to create expressive psychological portraits of the characters. The conclusion is made about the transfer of ideas from human personality formation and maturation to the ethno-racial context, the formation of a specific model of initiation in the American literature. The process of migration of adult literature in children’s literature is noted both at the level of individual storylines and entire narratives. The novel by Harper Lee contains the traits of the initiation novel, as the main semantic dominant theme is maturation through overcoming challenges (social injustice, cruelty, ambivalence of the categories of good and evil). The concept of becoming a person in the work of the writer refers to the origins of the national consciousness: the interaction of nature and civilization, natural and artificial, as well as aesthetic categories of fiction and reality.

Stylistic peculiarities of Edgar Poe’s and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s gothic novellas

The article deals with the comparative analysis of stylistic features of selected short stories (novellas) by the American writers Edgar Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Using a set of methods (theoretical analysis, holistic text analysis, stylistic analysis), relying on the creative manifestos of the two authors, as well as on the results of stylistic analysis of the corpus of short stories, the authors of the article trace the continuity and distinctive features in the work of the two writers. The obtained results allow to state the presence of similar features in the short stories of Edgar Poe and Howard Lovecraft, such as gothic chronotope, mystical and fantastic elements, common type of narrator, characterised by a borderline state, and deliberate fear-mongering. At the same time, however, the texts of both authors demonstrate specific features. Poe’s Gothic novellas are characterised by increased psychologism, which manifests itself in the prevalence of such stylistic devices as repetition, gradation, aposiopeisis, rhetorical question and exclamation, which eloquently testify to the “inner horrorˮ of the characters. The high allusiveness of Poe’s short stories testifies to the close connection of the described events with reality. The prevailing stylistic devices of Lovecraft’s novellas (epithets, personifications) testify to the author’s attempt to breathe life into inanimate objects, to extract them from non-existence, and to make the reader experience a “cosmicˮ horror of the unknown and external. The author’s complicated syntax combined with irrational enumerative rows suggests that Lovecraft’s work might be influenced by modernist aesthetics.

Novel “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers in Context of a New Cultural Paradigm

The article explores the leading metamodernist features evident in the autobiographical novel ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ (2001) by a contemporary American writer Dave Eggers. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristic features of metamodernism in contemporary works on the basis of an interpretive analysis of D. Eggers’ autobiographical novel “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, to determine ways of their original implementation in this novel. The review of theoretical sources confirms the significance of Eggers’ works in the development of key trends in the new cultural paradigm of post-postmodernism. The author can be attributed to a galaxy of American writers who fully embody the tenets of metamodernism. A practical analysis of the selected novel for study allows for the assertion that the main characteristics of metamodernism in the examined novel can be identified as the following elements: a revival of the author’s role, post-irony, new sincerity, and neo-realism. To embody these artistic elements, the author employs various literary techniques such as the contamination of artistic and documentary elements, meta-narration and meta-meta-narration, and the fusion of realistic and romantic perceptions of reality. Eggers explores traditional themes of family values, friendship, responsibility, and finding one's place in life through a new metamodern lens.

The Shaping of the Other and the Speech of the Self—Interpretation of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan from a Imagological Perspective

Chinese American writer Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan focuses on the Yao minority in China, bringing the ancient and mysterious culture of nu shu to the world. This paper will combine the relevant theories of comparative literary imagological studies to explore Lisa See’s portrayal of the complex image of “China” as the “Other” in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and the reasons for its creation. And then to unearth the image of “Self” reflected through the image of the “Other”, that is, Lisa See’s concern for feminism and her identification with her own identity as a Chinese American, and to further understand the relationship between the “Other” and the “Self”.