Language Of Fiction Research Articles

Renu's Regionalism: Language and Form

The modern Hindi writer Phanishwarnath Renu developed a distinctive “regional” style in his fiction, which Hindi critics have defined in terms of his focus on the way of life of a particular area, the Purnea region of northeastern Bihar. However, Renu's regionalism cannot be separated from his innovations in the language and form of fiction. He employed a variety of dialects and deviated from conventional spelling and grammar, to draw the reader into the rural universe of sound. He included indigenous genres, such as the folk song, folktale, and rural drama, within the frame of the modern novel, thereby creating a new structure for the regional novel.

Reflective and Non-Reflective Consciousness in the Language of Fiction

Reflective and Non-Reflective Consciousness in the Language of Fiction

Luandino Vieira's Short Fiction: Decolonization in the Third Register

The central theme of Luandino Vieira's short fiction is the «anthropological» daily existence in the musseques, slums, which surround the city of Luanda. The socio-political question of the epoch—the liberations movements and the repression by the colonial rulers—do not escape the author's view. Prior to the publication of Luandino's works, the language of Angolan fiction was indistinguishable from that of standard Portuguese fiction. The relationship of Quimbundo, the Bantu dialect of Luanda, and Portuguese is the key to the originality of Luandino's works. This becomes quite evident in the collections Velhas estorias and No amigamente na vida. Language register is Luandino's prime consideration. The «establishment» figures of the stories speak in Portuguese, while the people of the musseques function in Quimbundo. When the two social groups come into contact so do their languages. The result is a third register of speech, one which reflects the PortugueseQuimbundo heritage and results in a new literary language. The basic contribution of Quimbundo is within the lexico-semantic area. In addition to a large number of Bantu words, new shades of meaning are given to common Portuguese terms through innovations in their traditional meaning and usage, as well as through their recreation along African language principles. Portuguese contributes its wealth of morphemes—principally suffixes—which enhance the Quimbundo vocabulary. Syntax is similarly recreated. Although Luandino's short fiction has been called hermetic, it does present an epoch of Angolan society. Its existence is an affirmation of national independence. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol4/iss2/10 LUANDINO VIEIRA'S SHORT FICTION: DECOLONIZATION IN THE THIRD REGISTER* IRWIN STERN Columbia University Contemporary linguistic theory views language as a human artifact, that is, an utensil of man's existence which can be shaped according to his changing conditions and needs.' The languages-incontact phenomenon readily attests to this attitude. We can speak of the influence of ancient Greek on Latin, of Arabic on Spanish, or of French on old English with the resultant linguistic modification or enrichment of Latin, Spanish, and English as some outstanding examples of this phenomenon at work. It has been only within the last quarter century that any serious critical consideration and attention has been given to the literary product of modern examples of languages-in-contact, or to what has been called «bilingual literature.» 2 African literatures in the twentieth century offer an ample area for the study of the literary aspect of the languages-in-contact phenomenon. Indeed, some investigation has been carried out into the significance of this literature in Africa.' Such has not been the case for Angolan literature. Because of the 1974 Portuguese revolution, Angolan independence, and the publication of the works of a major contemporary Angolan writer, such an evaluation can now be effected. That writer is Jose Luandino Vieira, pseudonym of Jose Vieira Mateus da Graca.

"The Nine of Hearts": Fragment of A Psycho-Reading of La Nausee

have selected for our attention a rather insignificant detail in a rather famous scene: the scene at the cafe, the Rendez-vous des Cheminots, where Roquentin finally experiences with a capital N: are bad! Things are very bad: have it, the filth, the Nausea (p. 18).1 Along with the print, here assumes capital importance: it attains a status which is clinical, as the symptom of a malady, ontological, as the revelation, through this malady, of the subject's mode of being-in-the-world, and esthetic, as the call to salvation through art, which is offered here by the rag-time with a vocal refrain and which will be taken up again by the book, the novel planned by Roquentin in the conclusion. Sartre produces a discourse which totalizes, or rather, which progresses by a process of totalization until the moment when Roquentin can say: I understood that had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life (p. 129). Fictional language is equipped, is coupled with a metalanguage which is imperious, even imperialistic, and which seems, from the beginning, to exclude commentary, or, what amounts to the same thing, to include it.

The Word as Object: The Rabelaisian Novel

If we examine George Steiner's argument that scientific revolution of mid-seventeenth century marked beginning of a retreat from word, a decline of humanistic confidence in ability of verbal language to apprehend totality of reality and experience, we discover an interesting paradox.' For within a hundred years wordiest of all artistic forms, novel, is a thriving enterprise. It is also true that by eighteenth century a novelist like Sterne was questioning efficacy of fictional language in ways that will continue to be common to novelists of our own day. But such questioning had already begun in sixteenth century with Rabelais. So to understand better this ongoing problem of novelist's confrontation with his medium, we must go back to historical moment at which novel as we know it had its inception-the birth of age of printing. The Gutenberg revolution transformed primarily oral art of literature into a primarily visual one, replacing spoken word with printed Literature thus became largely a mode of silence, to be read to oneself rather than spoken or heard aloud. At same time language became objectified, reified, mass-produced as part of a concrete and portable object, book. For Marshall McLuhan significance of Rabelais lies in his early awareness of the that issues from mere additive association of homogeneous parts, that is, from the uniformity and repeatability of printed word. He is primarily referring to homogenizing and democratizing effects of print on reading public of Rabelais' day; but there is also gigantism of Rabelais' prose style-particularly evident in his catalogues-which was influenced by new typographical effects available to him. McLuhan goes on to say that Rabelais is a transitional figure, since earthy tactility of his work was a throwback to old audile-tactile manuscript culture at same time as his visual verbosity

Presupposing, Existence, and the Language of Fiction

Presupposing, Existence, and the Language of Fiction

The Language of Fiction: Word-Clusters in Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

The Language of Fiction: Word-Clusters in Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

The Stranger's Secrets

To do justice to Camus requires an indifference to literary fashions in the light of which Camus is likely to appear quaintly archaic, as well as to the appeal of a life and a work pervaded by an apparently unassailable integrity. Tough-mindedness would seem to demand that we ignore those claims to sympathy which made Camus something of a moral hero to many of his readers: the struggle against poverty and illness, Camus' tortured conscience, his suspicion of political theories and positions which might promote or justify human suffering, the simplicity and intensity of his attachment to life, and the accident which brutally vindicated his impressive and useless protest against the unacceptable fact of death. Camus' work has profited from the quietly glamorous nobility of his life. More than that: his urgently sincere tone has obscured the presence in his work of some of the habits of thought and of feeling against which he argued most eloquently. He is a comparatively uninteresting writer, and the quality of his achievement is, for me, all the more vitiated by an indulgence in abstraction, a secretly prideful reticence of feeling, and an easy cynicism, all of which he constantly, and rightly, attacked for their dehumanizing effects on life. I find the moraliste of Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L'Homme revolte a dull and vague thinker; as a playwright, Camus strikes me not only as less inventive or radical than Beckett, Arrabal, and even Ionesco, but also, within the conventions of a more traditional theater of linguistic and psychological coherence, less successful than the Sartre of Huis clos and Les Sequestres d'Altona. Camus' fiction-especially L'Etranger and a couple of stories in L'Exil et le royaume-is another matter, however, and L'Etranger deserves to be discussed as an impressive if flawed exercise in a kind of writing promoted by the New Novelists of the 1950s to the dignity, and occasionally narrow rigor, of doctrine. The doctrine is not Camus', but the refreshed novelistic techniques we find in L'Etranger could nonetheless be thought of as an example and an inspiration for what has now become an excessively theoretical determination to re-structure the relation between language and psychology in fiction.

The Storyteller and the Problem of Language in Samuel Beckett's Fiction

The Storyteller and the Problem of Language in Samuel Beckett's Fiction

Review: Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, by David Lodge and The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, by Frank Kermode

Review: <i>Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel</i>, by David Lodge and <i>The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction</i>, by Frank Kermode

: Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel . David Lodge. ; The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction . Frank Kermode.

: Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel . David Lodge. ; The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction . Frank Kermode.

"Language of Fiction": A Reply

"Language of Fiction": A Reply

Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel

Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel

Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel by David Lodge

Book Review| April 01 1967 Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel by David Lodge Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. By Lodge, David. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Pp. xii, 283. $7.50. E. M. Jennings E. M. Jennings Duke University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1967) 66 (2): 271–272. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-66-2-271 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation E. M. Jennings; Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel by David Lodge. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 1967; 66 (2): 271–272. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-66-2-271 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 JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1967 by Duke University Press1967 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Language of Fiction

Language of Fiction