Novels Research Articles

THE CRISIS OF SOCIABILITY AND LAUGHTER IN THOMAS MANN'S DER ZAUBERBERG

ABSTRACTThe article explores the significance of laughter in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. While laughter is a prominent feature in the novel, it has not received sufficient critical consideration either in Mann scholarship or, more generally, in studies of modernism. Through close examination of selected episodes of laughter, this study establishes the importance of laughter in the novel, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis examines the extent to which the representation of laughter in the novel conforms to or deviates from recent characterisations of laughter in modernist texts. While certain interpretations of modernist laughter as disruptive and/or pathological can be applied to this text, this is not entirely true of its use in Der Zauberberg. Rather, the significance of laughter shifts constantly throughout the novel, culminating in a crisis of laughter that is part of a larger crisis of sociability and ‘Bildung’. The novel suggests that laughter formerly played a critical role in fostering communication, sociability, self‐awareness, and civility. In contrast, the crisis of laughter towards the end of the novel invites reflection on the loss of these social and humane functions. The crisis of laughter in Der Zauberberg, I argue, is of particular relevance to the interpretation of laughter in other modernist novels which engage in critical dialogue with the ‘Bildungsroman’ tradition.

The Political Unconscious in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam: The Post-Cold War Paradigm Shift and Morality in the Era of the Late Capitalist Market

Amsterdam opens a new phase in Ian McEwan’s writing career both for its differences from his earlier novels and short stories and for its Booker Prize success. Although the novel’s early critics designate the novel as a lightweight diversion from McEwan’s more serious subject matter, he earnestly dismisses these views and argues that while Amsterdam indeed differs from his novels written up to that point, this does not minimise the novel’s significance. This article takes up McEwan’s side in this debate in that Amsterdam is indeed a significant novel which reflects and reproduces perfectly well a post-Cold War paradigm shift in the world from a bipolar to a unipolar socio-political global order with which the previous power positions are forced, in the 1990s, to transform. McEwan’s novel reflects this socio-political transformation, and it symbolically addresses the crises of power, authority, and direction by way of creating a tension, in its narrative, between moral obligation and self-interest, where moral duty aligns with left-wing politics and self-interest with right-wing politics. This article further argues that the novel does not only reflect and reproduce that historical-political context but also, when it is interpreted using Fredric Jameson’s interpretative model for exploring texts’ political unconscious, serves as a symbolic resolution of its given historical-political moment.

On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist

Abstract This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. Working across four central cases (Samuel Richardson’s “man of feeling” Sir Charles Grandison, Charlotte Smith’s self-effacing protagonist Lionel Desmond, Walter Scott’s “mediocre heroes,” and Jane Austen’s “creepmouse” heroine Fanny Price), the essay describes witness-protagonists as characters with an uncertain relation to the novel as a whole. Straddling the functions of narrator and character, witness and agent, they pose at once a formal problem (of where to place the character in relation to the story) and a political one (of who can participate in the life of the collective) that had particular salience in the era of emergent mass politics.

Vocation, Hypocrisy and Secularization: Iris Murdoch and the Clergy of the Church of England

This article examines the treatment of Anglican clergy in the novels of Iris Murdoch, setting this discussion in the context of Murdoch's own engagement with Christianity: one of sympathy without assent, yet with detailed knowledge of the secularizing theologies of the period. Clerical interventions in pastoral situations, politely tolerated in the earlier novels, are openly and robustly rejected in the later books. That pastoral care is, for Murdoch, vitiated by a desire for control, against which Murdoch set her ideal of self-emptying attention. Murdoch also dramatizes the loss of faith which forced, on some of the clergy, an inconsistency between outward speech and inner conviction. For some, the apparent hypocrisy is resolved by suicide or exile; for others, their vocation must continue as a witness to something absolute, even if they themselves can longer articulate its nature with any conviction. The Church remains necessary even if God himself is not.

“Damn the Empire!”: Imperial Excess, National Nostalgia, and Metaphysical Modernism in the Poetics of Parade’s End

Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford’s Sylvia Tietjens, for example, proclaims that “You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for”. And in the very same year, Virginia Woolf’s shell-shocked Septimus Smith “went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare…” I argue that Ford’s understanding of the causality of war involves a strange combination of these two explanations in Parade’s End’s triangulation of seventeenth-century English literary tradition along with sexual and imperial conquest. While countless modernist novels exhibit a sensibility to the power of early modern poetry amidst battle, Parade’s End displays a particularly emphatic and extended focus on the relationship between poetic tradition and war. Soldiers of various ranks “talk…in intimate undertones about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form”, host timed sonnet competitions in the trenches, recurringly quote the seduction poetry of Marvell, and fantasize about George Herbert’s lifespan being “the only satisfactory age in England…yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, to-morrow?”. To answer this question, my own transtemporal study will use early modern scholarship to investigate seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry’s dual power to inspire and potentially obviate war. Much has been written on this tetralogy’s anti-linear plot but less on the broader temporality of its politico-literary vision. I contend that the metaphysical allusions of this text help Ford to show us the complexities of nationalism in the imperial conquest and imperial damnation that (early) modern aesthetics can catalyse.

Multifractal analysis of Chinese literary and web novels

Multifractal analysis of literary works, utilizing measures such as sentence length and word length as time series, have revealed the prevalence of multifractal structures within these works. After constructing a corpus of 712 Chinese novels, we performed multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) and multifractal detrending moving average analysis (MF-DMA) on them. Both method revealed that non-monotonic generalized Hurst exponential curves and distorted spectral functions appeared in about half of the web novels, but were rarely found in literary novels. By conducting a meticulous examination of sentence length sequences and adjustment of the time series range covered by the computation, it becomes apparent that this irregular Hurst exponent curve stems from the uneven distribution of long sentences within the work. This uneven distribution mirrors the instability present in the author’s creative style, which is intimately linked to the characteristics of the publishing mechanisms for web novels.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE MYTHICAL PATTERNS IN ULYSSES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ARCHETYPE THEORY

As one of the important creative themes of modern literature, mythology is constantly reiterated in the writings of modern writers. Through retelling, we can travel through the time tunnel and feel the poetic wisdom of our ancestors. The inherent characteristic of myth is symbolism, and at the same time, it has strong metaphor and inclusiveness, which has opened up an almost infinite space of meaning for modern writers. Mythology provides rich prototype resources for the plot structure framework of narrative works, and expresses the writer's unique creative perspective and aesthetic awareness. James Joyce was an outstanding modern novelist in the West in the 20th century, and he created unique mythological novels. Ulysses adopts the mythological prototype structure and uses the theme of the ancient hero Odysseus returning home, echoing the deep meaning of modern people's search for a spiritual home. This paper uses the theory of myth-prototype criticism and combines the theory of collective unconsciousness to explore the creation mode of Ulysses from the perspective of mythic archetype criticism, to explain how ancient myths and modern writers have a spiritual fit, and to further feel the uniqueness of Joyce's novels. Some artistic charm and the practical significance brought by Ulysses. Our era needs the spirit of exploration and courage left over from the early days of human society, and the connotation of archetypal criticism has positive ideological value to this day.

Spiritual Rebirth in Three 19th-Century European Classics Compared to Transpersonal Experiences in Zeno’s Conscience: A Psychosynthetic Analysis of Zeno’s Conscience

In the first article of the two interconnected articles, titled "Out-of-time experiences in four iconic 20th-century European modernist novels including Zeno's Conscience" (Tóth-Izsó, 2023b) the examination of Kairos experiences transpired through the lens of a psychosynthetic framework. In this second article the most important transpersonal experiences of the characters of Brothers Karamazov, Les Miserables, and A Christmas Carol are briefly presented and interpreted from a psychosynthetic view, by using appropriate quotes. The spiritual experiences presented in this paper clearly show religious aspects and thus can be interpreted as mystical experiences that constitute a broad category of the more inclusive transpersonal experiences. These two share similar characteristics to a certain extent, but also differ in many aspects as we will see in the comparison presented. In the Conclusion, transpersonal experiences of Zeno—identified in the first article— are compared with similar experiences of the characters of the three selected classics. This comparison revealed, that while in the case of Zeno —the only sporadic—transpersonal events were hidden deeply in the text and had no lasting effect on the life of Zeno, in the cases of the three analysed classics these events were markedly conspicuous and had radical life-changing effects on the concerned characters' life.

企劃論文] 영창서관 도서목록 수록 현대소설의 양상

This article explored the publishing trend of the Yeongchang Bookstore based on the New Book List in 1930s. Among them, the purpose was to examine the characteristic aspects of works classified as ‘literary novels’. The New Book List can be seen as a selection of bestsellers or steady sellers who gained popularity among novels published by the Yeongchang Bookstore. The Yeongchang Bookstore is a publisher closely related to sixpence novels. The reason why actual works have not been confirmed among the publications of the Yeongchang Bookstore is related to the background of many unknown publications. In addition, various issues related to the publishing environment, such as authors, copyrights, and censorship, affected the spread and distribution of sixpence popular novels. It is also necessary to consider the relevance of the literary situation of the time, when the artistic identity of the sixpence popular novel was relatively not recognized. And the problem of confusion in the notation of author names is also revealed. This can be said to be a problem caused by the coexistence of modernity and premodernity in the creation and distribution process of sixpence popular novels. The copyright reached them, but the subject of protection was not the actual author. Most of the damage caused by copyright issues was concentrated on sixpence popular novels.

Komodifikasi Novel pada Platform Sastra Siber: Studi Pragmatisme Penulis Novel di Aplikasi Fizzo

This research aims to explain and analyze the commodification of novels on the Fizzo cyber literary platform, understand the role of pragmatism in the commodification process, and provide insight into the impact of commodification on cyber literary novels. Novels have become commodities through commodification on the Fizzo cyber-literary platform. Cyberliterary platforms offer economic benefits to novel writers. Novel writers who do not have good marketing skills think pragmatically about publishing novels on cyber-literary platforms. Therefore, it is necessary to research pragmatism in the commodification of novels on the Sibe Fizzo literary platform. The formulation of this research problem is: how are novels commodified on the Fizzo cyber literary platform? How does the author's pragmatism play a role in the commodification of the novel on cyber-literary platforms? This research uses a qualitative descriptive design with observations and interviews as the main data. The data were analyzed using hermeneutic analysis. The results of this research show that commodification on the Fizzo cyber literary platform includes offering economic benefits, characteristics of popular literary novels, genre division, and intensive promotion on the internet. Novel writers on the Fizzo cyber literary platform are oriented towards readers' tastes. This can be seen from the characteristics of novels, which have simple plots, tend to be clichés, use controversial issues, have regular publication schedules, and use language trends. This situation has implications for the quality of novels on cyber-literary platforms that are uncontrolled and subordinate to the market. However, the openness of interaction between readers and writers is a discourse that continues to develop, which is the basis for the creative process of novel writers to innovate on the Fizzo cyber literary platform.

On the Verge between Retranslation and Revision: Revisiting Translations of Modernist Novels in Türkiye

This research aims to elucidate the underlying forces that propelled the first translators to reprocess their texts within the framework of modernist literature, and to reveal the nature of these reprocessed texts as retranslations or revisions. The corpus of this study is composed of modernist novels To The Lighthouse (1927), Lolita (1955), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Nightwood (1936). The first translators of these novels into Turkish felt the need to reprocess texts over long periods. The second versions could be classified as retranslations according to the characteristics outlined by the retranslation hypothesis. However, considering the limitations of this hypothesis, particularly regarding retranslations from the 2000s onward, it seems insufficient to explain current dynamics. To establish a clear differentiation between revision and retranslation, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of the first and subsequent versions. Based on the analysis, it has been determined that there are limited but significant changes in the revised texts. While the number of alterations may not reach statistical significance to label them as "retranslations", they can be categorized as "revisions." It has been concluded that the triggering factors behind the revisions are related to the changing sociocultural factors, patronage and the habitus of the translators.

Literary Novels as Teaching Material: Business Owners’ Traits in ‘Merantau Ke Deli’

Literary Novels as Teaching Material: Business Owners’ Traits in ‘Merantau Ke Deli’

Out-of-time Experiences in Four Iconic Twentieth Century European Modernist Novels Including Zeno's Conscience: A Psychosynthetic Analysis

On the centenary of the release of Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience in 1923, it is opportune to explore the renowned psychoanalytical novel from a fresh perspective—one that not only refrains from contradicting the traditional interpretation but also enhances and complements it. The psychosynthetic approach that I intend to employ in analyzing the transpersonal experiences depicted in "Zeno's Conscience" will demonstrate its efficacy as a valuable tool for attaining a more profound comprehension of the protagonist's—potentially reflecting Svevo's—complex personality. As Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, articulates, it delves into the concept of multiple minds. In this first article of the two, transpersonal experiences of Zeno are identified, followed by descripting similar experiences in three iconic 20th-century European modernist novels, Ulysses, Time Regained and The Man Without Qualities, by using appropriate quotes. The common main feature of these four novels is the steadily flowing time, the natural medium of the "horizontal" processes of personal psychosynthesis (Chronos). My focus here is, however, on the detectable – although rather sporadic – "vertical" episodes of transpersonal psychosynthesis, which are, in a sense, "out of time" (Kairos). Moreover, Zeno's transpersonal experiences are compared with that of the characters’ of the selected three iconic modernist novels.

Conrad, Lawrence, and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre

Abstract This article considers Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love as modernist reworkings of the industrial novels of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's Hard Times. Conrad and Lawrence, the article argues, rework the industrial-novel genre as a way to figure a crisis of British culture—and of the novel as a form. In the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern Western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life, the synoptic historical narratives of Nostromo and Women in Love describe the transformation of the earlier promise of development into an apocalyptic present, and, in turn, the dissolution of the progressive assurance of the realist novel. While the nineteenth-century novels plead for reform and paternalistic care to moderate but protect the free market and liberalism, Nostromo and Women in Love narrate precisely the historical fulfillment of this wish—but, then, in turn, also narrate the end of that reformist logic and the triumph of a fully globalized and “perfected” capitalism, which they characterize as worse than the free-market capitalism that the earlier novels both criticize and celebrate. Drawing on Marxist-feminist theories of “social reproduction,” the article describes especially how the modernist novels imagine the family as a machine for maintaining and servicing capitalist production: the regeneration of the family—a trope so important to the resolution of plot in the realist novel—is now a sign of decay instead of resilience.

A study of the relationship between the prosperity of literary novels and the prevalence of the imperial examination system in the Ming Dynasty based on the LDA model

Abstract In this paper, we first determine the coupled linkage analysis model of the Ming dynasty imperial examination system and novel literary prosperity, extract the links between potential themes from a large-scale corpus, and mine the probability distribution of lexical items. Then the method of calculating the similarity of thematic coupling is investigated, using the co-occurrence information of lexical items to calculate the association weights, inline, outline and coupling relationships among lexical items, semantic information and relevance of lexical items. Then the historical evolution of the imperial examination system and its position in history are explored. Finally, based on the model mining algorithm, the relationship between the imperial examination system and the prosperity of literary novels is analyzed in terms of the drawbacks of the imperial examination system in the Ming Dynasty, the impact of the imperial examination on the richness of novels and the number of novels. Regarding the influence of novel richness, the criticism of the imperial examination system reached 44% in the early Ming Dynasty, 52% in the middle, and 60% in the late Ming Dynasty. Novels on themes such as magic, immortality, and the grotesque reached 50% in the early Ming Dynasty, 55% in the middle, and 59% in the late. In terms of the number of literary novels, the number of novels written during the Jianwen period was 504, and the number of novels written by those who failed the imperial examinations was 322, with a large number of literati who failed the imperial examinations devoting themselves to literary creation. The system of taking scholars from the eight examinations in the Ming Dynasty promoted the prosperity of literary novel creation.

Transnationalism and the Literary Reception of Australian Women Writers’ Fiction in the US, 2010–2020: Three Case Studies

ABSTRACT The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads.

Narrative of Deficit and Authentic Portrayals of Mental Illness and Cultural Sensitivities in Young Adult Literature

This article sheds light on the narrative of deficit that often surrounds characters who have mental illness in young adult literary novels (YAL) and critiques the manner in which that narrative perpetuates the stigma of mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder. We focus on two 21st century young adult novels whose characters are accurately depicted as having mental illness and whose authors authentically share the characters’ successes and struggles as well as the impact of their mental illness symptoms on family, friends, and neighbors. Our aim is to analyze and critique these novels to inform researchers and authors of YAL about the danger of romanticizing stigma surrounding mental illness, which, through the descriptions of characters’ behaviors and language used by the authors (whether intentional or not), can perpetuate the narrative of deficit that is associated with characters with mental illness.

KAJIAN EMOSIONALISME DAN EGOISME TOKOH DALAM NOVEL PULANG PERGI KARYA TERE LIYE

The problem of this study is the emotionality and selfishness of the characters in the novel of Tere Liye Pulang. The purpose of this study is to describe the study of emotionality and egoism in literary novels. The method used in this study is a descriptive method. The data source for this study is the novel Pulang Go by Tere Liye published by Sabak Grip Nusantara Jakarta in January 2021. The data collection technique of this study is the documentary technique. The data analysis technique for this study is the content analysis technique. The results of the research and discussion of the novel Tere Liye Pulang Go show the results of the emotional analysis, which includes the emotions of sadness, anger, fear and happiness of the characters Bujang, Salonga, Krestniy Otets, Maria, Natascha and Thomas. And the results of the analysis of egoism include 4 things, namely how a person perceives himself as himself, how a person thinks about himself, how a person evaluates himself, how a person tries to improve himself in various ways.
 
 Keywords: Emotionalism Studies, Selfishness, Novel

TURNING ART INTO VISION: PROSE, POETRY, PAINTING INTERFACE OF LANDSCAPE ARTISTS, AND IMPRESSIONISTS

The paper discusses the interface of literature and painting through the prism of a 19th century art movement, better known as Impressionism. A movement in painting and literature, Impressionism stylistically made way for the beholder, listener, or reader to participate in recreating the experience of the artist. Its “new” method was to suggest the “impression” or effect on the artist rather than to make precise and explicit the objective characteristics of things and events. Emerging in France in the latter half of the 19th century with painters like Monet, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Cezanne, this art movement seems to have had a major impact on the world literary and cultural scene, facilitating and manifesting a symbiosis between sister arts, that is, painting and literature. To trace the gradual advent of Impressionism, the paper recounts the journey of English romantic landscape painters like Turner and Constable as we eventually reach the French Impressionists while concomitantly discussing how literary Impressionists, particularly modern novelists, deploy the stream-of-consciousness technique, and poets, often seen as “Symbolists” and “Imagists,” have contributed to the evolution of modernist literature and sensibilities.

A Transitivity Analysis of Prefaces Written for Modernist Novel (Re)Translations: Understanding Paratexts as a Tool of Recontextualization

This study focuses on paratexts as recontextualization tools, specifically prefaces written for (re)translations, and problematizes Turkish (re)translations of modernist novels written in English, which, for reasons of morality, encountered legal difficulties, and were stigmatized, banned, or confiscated in the source culture. Recontextualization resonates with (re)producing ideologies, exposing various agents' deliberate power positions in determining discourse structures within the more general framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Against this backdrop, this study, which is part of a larger project, has a twofold purpose: a) to evaluate 15 prefaces extracted from (re)translations of 10 modernist novels as a tool for recontextualization; and b) to investigate the preface discourse regarding the transfer of modernist novels into the target culture through the lens of transitivity analysis, based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model. SFL proposes that the main system by which experiential meaning is associated with process choices within the framework of ideational meta-function is transitivity; transitivity analysis is therefore applied to the prefaces to unveil the relationships established between the processes and the actors. The analysis of findings revealed that recontextualization was functionalized to create an explicit, rather than an implicit discourse structure through the intensive use of material processes. It concludes that prefaces written to (re)translations in Turkish context, as liminal devices between the fictitious and real worlds, are clearly instrumentalized to position the key players in the adaptation, promotion, and representation of these books within their new cultural context, and thus, were designed to influence the discourse surrounding the transfer of modernist novels into the target culture.