Flowers For Algernon Research Articles

A Journey to Healing Pain: Trauma Writing of Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon, first published in 1959, is a novel written by the American writer Daniel Keyes. It tells the story of Charlie Gordon’s journey from having an intellectual disability to gaining extraordinary intelligence, as well as his regression when one experimental procedure starts to goes wrong. “Trauma” is a marked theme in the work, which plays a vital role in portraying characters and developing plots. In the light of trauma theory, this essay puts a focus on the relationship between trauma and the individual, and author of this paper argues that family and society are two major roots in imposing misery upon the protagonist. With the interference of technology, trauma is rediscovered and represented by his confusion, maladjustment, and rage. Ultimately, he treats it through finding himself, building connections with others, and doing contributions to the society. It is concluded that based on writing the trauma of the intelligently disabled, Keyes vividly communicates his concerns on then further revealing the theme of science and technology, goodness, and wisdom.

The Study of Language Resources Revealing Mental Disorders in a Literary Text

Different writers try to organize and refine the raw material of facts to empathize and clarify what is the most significant in life in diverse ways. Each writer’s style is unique. Nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. Just there are writers who worship figurative language; there are others who apart from figurative language use graphic devices for narratives and sending messages to readers. The way in which authors manipulate these means as well as how they apply them in the context evoke readers’ appropriate comprehension. As a result, readers draw inferences as they are expected to do. The present paper aims at clarifying what graphic means are applied while portraying Charlie in “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, a mentally disabled person and his hurt and sufferings. In the world of fiction authors often violate the accepted rules in order to achieve particular purposes. Being one of graphic means, punctuation is frequently ignored by the author in “Flowers for Algernon”. Therefore, the author creates the appropriate atmosphere. The other device that helps the author affect readers is graphic realization of mispronounced words, whose importance is also analyzed in the work. One more device analyzed and illustrated in the paper is a spelling mistake that is deliberately made by the author to achieve particular goals.Graphic means are considered visual effects that have a great influence on readers since authors want their readers to infer their main message. The way the author uses to portray a vivid image of a mentally disabled person is marked by the application of some graphic devices.

The Study of Postmodernism Tendency in Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon is a story about Charlie Gordon, a 32-year-old mentally challenged, who happens to have the opportunity to undergo a surgical procedure that will increase his mental capabilities. After the surgery, he has to face many great changes, like getting used to his high IQ. At the end of the story, the surgery reverses, and Charlie’s intelligence returns to its original level. Though it’s science fiction by Daniel Keyes, it has some postmodernism tendencies if judged from this perspective. To analyze the postmodernism tendencies in this book, the basic information of the book and postmodernism should be given. So, the first part introduces the summary of this book and its general information. Then lists some of the important features of postmodernism and postmodernism in literature, namely the loss of grand narrative, simulacrum, and language features. The next part acts on a detailed analysis based on the original text from the above-mentioned perspective. First, the disappearance of grand narratives, which in this book is the disbelieve in religion and science. The grand narrative in other words is mini-narratives, so this task then introduces three essential themes of this novel, that is the circle of life, the ethical problem of medical uses for intelligence surgery, and the psychoanalysis of the subconscious through dreams. All these aspects show diversity as a feature of postmodernism. Next, this task introduces the simulacrum in this novel, which is the distinction between authority and reality. Lastly, this task analyzes the language features of this novel.

Speech Portrait of a Mentally Unhealthy Character as a Translation Problem

The aim of this article is to describe the mechanism of determining the key parameters of the speech portrait of a mentally unhealthy character in a literary text in terms of achieving pragmatic adequacy in translation. The material used for analysis includes the novel ‘Flowers for Algernon’ by Daniel Keyes, the short story ‘Survivor Type’ by Stephen King, and the novel ‘American Psycho’ by Bret Easton Ellis. The authors utilize a proposed algorithm of pretranslation analysis as a tool. It has been established that specific linguistic markers are employed in creating the speech portrait in literary texts, observed through one or multiple parameters. These linguistic markers accurately characterize the existing facts of altered language consciousness in mental disorders. Components of the character’s speech portrait may include verbal aggression (obscene language), metaphors, specific sentence structures, verbalization of grandiosity, etc. The authors conclude that the proposed algorithm, with the application of psycholinguistics data, allows for tracing the peculiarities of selecting expressive means in the original text and identifying relevant markers of the speech portrait of a mentally unhealthy character for subsequent representation of these characteristics as functional dominants in translation. This will help avoid shifts in realizing the character’s image in translation.

STYLISTIC DEVICES IN REVEALING CHARACTERS’ EMOTIONS AND WAYS OF THEIR TRANSLATION

The present research focuses on the analysis of the most common stylistic devices that are used to depict characters’ emotions in two novels “Flowers for Algernon” (2006) and “The Minds of Billy Milligan” (1995) written by the American author Daniel Keyes. The patterns of translation of emotionally coloured extracts of the text where these stylistic devices have been used are analysed in this research. As stylistic devices are considered to be an integral part of the composition of works of fiction and they add emotional colouring and exert pragmatic influence on the readers, translators Viktor Shovkun and Olena Stusenko faced onerous work as their task was to find accurate equivalents and use translation transformations in order to avoid literal translation, achieve adequacy on all levels and preserve the stylistic colouring. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the translation should fully replace the original text and recipients should perceive the translated text as identical to the original even though stylistic devices and the emotional component of linguistic semantics are arduous to convey in translation. This research also concludes that translators most often resorted to lexical (concretization, generalization and modulation), lexico-grammatical (omission and addition) and grammatical (verbalization and nominalization) translation transformations to avoid literal translation. It has also been established and verified by a comparative method that more stylistic devices are used in the Ukrainian translation than in the original text. The most widely used stylistic devices are metaphors, epithets, comparisons and idioms. Key words: stylistic device, translation transformation, source text, target text, pragmatics, communicative intention, emotions.

INTENTIONAL LEXICAL DEVIATIONS IN FICTION AS A TRANSLATION PROBLEM (BASED ON “FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON” BY D. KEYES)

The article examines intentional lexical deviations in a literary text on the example of “Flowers for Algernon” by D. Keyes and its translation into Russian. Writing the text, the author can use such violations as an effective stylistic device to create a specific speech portrait of a character. Changes in the intellect and consciousness of the protagonist of the novel are revealed in the lexical level of the language: as intellectual development progresses, the flow of the character’s thoughts becomes logical, the vocabulary is enriched with new “complex” expressions, lexical errors disappear, and the character’s speech acquires expressiveness and artistic imagery. To translate texts containing intentional lexical deviations adequately, the translator should be creative and resourceful, which often requires the use of translation strategies and various kinds of transformations, such as generalization, omission and holistic transformation.

ПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКОЕ ЗНАНИЕ КАК КОДИРУЮЩИЙ ФАКТОР ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО ТЕКСТА

The article deals with such topical problem as the transfer of scientific knowledge to the aesthetic sphere. The novelty and relevance of the article is due to the fact that it contains a poetic analysis of the novel “Flowers for Algernon” by a modern American writer D. Keyes in the perspective of the cording factor as a principle for organizing an artistic text. The authors turn to the timely task of researching D. Keyes’s work with a view to the broader understanding some sing and semiosis problems of non-classical literary text. As a result of the meticulous analysis, the authors show a new poetic significance of the writer’s cognitive interpreting modern reality which became an essential element of organizing the text of the novel “Flowers for Algernon”. The principles of incorporating psychological knowledge into the construal of text meaning were determined. The accumulated evidence allow to justify the inclusion of the novel in the general art process of developing adequate poetic tools aimed at reflecting the changed ideas about the modern world.

Mental health and being smart in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was first published as a short story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959. After the story successfully elicited critical acclaim and brought literary awards to its author, Keyes expanded the story into a novel that was first published in 1966. Daniel Keyes recounts the saddening story of Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded thirty-two-year-old man, who is chosen by scientists for an experiment that would supposedly improve one’s mental capacity in a short time span. The experiment gradually proves to be successful as Charlie’s mental health improves. Yet, as Charlie turns unexpectedly very intelligent and cultured, reaching the ability to speak several languages including Latin, he finds out that the experiment he has been through brings a temporary state of mental well-being to the subject who would quickly return to one’s initial mental state. This purpose of paper is to discuss the concept of healing and well-being and question whether being well is an ideological or medical concept in terms of madness and civilization from the perspective of Foulcault who sees madness in a certain cultural space in society which the position and definition of “healthy” individuals depend on.

From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel, by Holly Blackford

Reviewed by: From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel by Holly Blackford Margaret R. Higonnet (bio) From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel, by Holly Blackford; pp. 296. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018, $50.00. Holly Blackford’s From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel grows out of the seed planted in her 2013 essay about “Child Study” as a legacy of Darwinian thought and the rise of child psychology. Charles Darwin, she argued, “drove forward the Child Study movement in the late Victorian period, framing questions about development in terms of evolution, adaptation to environment, and the relationship between atavistic instinct and human will” (“Raw Shok and Modern Method: Child Consciousness in Flowers for Algernon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38 [2003], 287). Blackford’s book sums up her thesis that Victorian child psychologists were “studying the ascent of man” in the aphorism that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (68). This phrase suggests that the individual child’s growing consciousness and mental control follow an arc drawn by Darwinians from so-called primitive peoples to a supposedly civilized modern race. Blackford traces a Victorian reconceptualization of the child as representation not of the future (the image projected in the age of revolution by many Romantic writers), but of the past. In an application of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, Victorians postulated that a child’s consciousness would develop from a so-called savage mentality, rooted in folklore and myth, to civilized adult self-control and a capacity for detached study. Darwin himself juxtaposed his study of evolution with an 1839 diary that he kept about his infant child and published in 1877; Hippolyte Taine likewise studied the language development of his daughter in order to access her actions by instinct or choice. The goal of the scientific community, Blackford argues, was to use the child to understand the adult, both by differentiating the two and by examining how reflective consciousness and creative imagination were integrated in child and adult. Blackford connects scholarship about the mental development of children to the dynamic of child consciousness depicted in novels that served as sources for thinkers from the fin-de-siècle to the mid-twentieth century. Her close readings, particularly of the first pages of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), sharpen our vision of the meandering path taken by Alice’s reflections: as she slips back and forth between two worlds, in her projective observation of her kitten, her imitation of others, and in her critique of adult authority as nonsense. The child’s playful imagination imitates the internal and external worlds at the same time as it reads them, while also recombining fragmentary observations. Blackford compares Alice to Henry James’s Maisie to consider James’s complex depictions of a child’s observation and performance as Maisie acquires a capacity to conceal herself. Although Blackford does not argue that these particular texts influenced scientific theories, she does draw a general causal connection. The key role of literature for the scientific community reflects the difficulty of gaining access to childhood mental processes by detached adult observation. Accordingly, in this book the broad panorama of theories about mental development by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists is animated by detailed analyses of selected literary passages that evoke a young character’s mental operations from perception to growing consciousness. The Victorian British authors examined are Carroll, James, Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890]), and J. M. Barrie (Peter [End Page 670] and Wendy [1911]), and they all offer openings onto themes of alienation and divided consciousness. Blackford’s title, From Alice to Algernon, she tells us, could be translated as “from Darwin to Freud,” continuing to thinkers such as Franz Boas, Jean Piaget, and B. F. Skinner, who grapple with cultural differences and social conditioning (2). In a rich web of references to different thinkers, Blackford underscores their interest in child study, but she does not apply her own analytic tools to close readings of their philosophic and scientific texts. Over...

Translation Shift and Spelling Error Analysis found in the Indonesian Translation of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Translation Shift and Spelling Error Analysis found in the Indonesian Translation of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Передача сильной позиции при переводе художественного произведения (на примере романа Д. Киза «Цветы для Элджернона»)

Передача сильной позиции при переводе художественного произведения (на примере романа Д. Киза «Цветы для Элджернона»)

In retrospect: Flowers for Algernon

Ananyo Bhattacharya looks back at a science-fiction touchstone on the ethics of experimental biology.

On being a discontinuous person: Ontological insecurity, the wounded storyteller and time in Daniel Keyes’s <i>Flowers for Algernon</i>

This article explores ontological security and insecurity in Daniel Keyes’s novel, Flowers for Algernon. It opens with a very brief overview of the 1960s counter-culture to contextualise not only Keyes’s novel but also Laing’s theories of ontological (in)security. After a discussion of Laing’s concept of ontological security and insecurity, the focus shifts to Arthur W. Frank’s notions of the wounded storyteller and how Charlie Gordon’s entry into the medical world constitutes a colonisation of the body that brings with it a deepening sense of ontological insecurity. In entering the world of medical research, Charlie becomes the wounded storyteller, offering a first-person account of his experiences during the experiment and its aftermath. As the initial success of the surgery deteriorates steadily into failure, with the protagonist’s intelligence returning steadily to its pre-operation level, the question of time and how he can make the best use of it to record the experiment becomes paramount. The final section of the article centres on the growing link between the surgery’s failure and how it increases the protagonist’s ontological insecurity. He uses the diminishing amount of time available to him in search of understanding the fuller implications of the experiment. Eventually, he reverts to his initial rudimentary ontological security when he finds himself with the same intellectual level, as prior to the experiment.

Reading in the ’60s

Reading in the ’60s Carole Maso (bio) Overnight to Many Distant Cities. It happened on a Saturday foray into the metropolis, where as a high school student I would hang out in that now irretrievably lost Greenwich Village, trying to imagine a life for myself. All I knew then was that I wanted to be free, and that I was not. I had gone into the Eighth Street Bookshop where I would mystically pick books from the shelves—opening to a random page in hopes of a revelation. That Saturday, opening a book, I was met by a kind of musical banter, a prose at once sweet and slightly dissonant. On another page I found a list, a joke, a column of numbers, Robert Kennedy, a flurry of ampersands…What was this? Did I gasp? I may have gasped. I looked at the title: Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). In an instant something dormant in me sprung awake. I had been ever so slowly being etherized (like a patient) on a steady dose of high school staples: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lord of the Flies (1954), Flowers for Algernon (1959), A Separate Peace (1959), well meaning perhaps I don’t know, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), made all the worse by the meanings and interpretations foisted on them. They were teachable I suppose and they were taught to death. How did any of us survive I wonder? But here in an afternoon all was changed. That day I bought all the Barthelme on the shelf. Was it not a carnival, the circus come to town, was it not a magic show? Not since Doctor Seuss, not since Through the Looking Glass (1871), not since the glittery darkness and thrills of the daydreaming years of my early childhood had I experienced anything like this. This was nothing like the narratives I’d ever seen, that’s for sure, and coming into school I read aloud to my English teacher from “The Balloon:” There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the “meaning” of the balloon; this subsided because we have learned not to insist on meanings and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena. As you can imagine this went over—well—like a lead balloon. Oh but how all Possibility seemed to open in an instant! There were breathtaking changes in register and tone—stories that freely ranged across a wide variety of fields—art and music and the life on the street. A story might use any means, well why not? Deliriously I entered into the dislocations, dissolutions, the fracture, enraptured. Also there was an incredible poignancy. A sadness I had held inside, a sadness we all held back then, as the nightly drone of names and numbers of the dead were read on the television. Vietnam. Somehow the war existed in those pages too. An overwhelmingly melancholy syntax. Something of the way the world worked in me seemed to find a shape on his page. How? Gone the unifying principles, the fixed meanings, the solid characters. Welcome doubt, welcome contingency. Knowledge, as I knew first hand from school was dubious, what could be known, unclear. The cohesive version of self we were asked to chart that year in English in the unending unit called Who Am I? I could toss that out now. I adored the hilarious metaphysics, the negative epistemology, none of these words did I use or know back then, but that is what I loved. The idea one could invent the world on the page out of this and that, and presumably invent oneself in the process. A [End Page 6] bricolage, I could be heard saying (I was in French III at the time). I was exhilarated. I felt improbably endless. Limitless. I was boundlessly joyful. I was alive. I knew nothing then about anything, but eventually, over time, one book has led to another. Barthelme pointed me to Borges, Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Kafka, Kleist, Flaubert, Beckett, Eliot, Sterne, Cervantes, Sei Shnagon, Madame Murasaki, the Surrealists, Ashbery. I found out about his pals: Coover and...

‘a grate contribyushun for sience’: Promise, threat, and the trauma of failure in Daniel Keyes’s <i>Flowers for Algernon</i>

Using aspects of Arthur Frank’s The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics as its basis, this article explores promise, threat and the trauma of failure in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and in so doing, offers two alternative metaphors for the curative journey. The first is the plateau or medical model which begins in health, declines into illness and subsequently seeks to restore health to the ill individual. The second, parabolic metaphor begins in illness, rises out of that state but, eventually, regresses into ill-health again. This metaphor is akin to the inverted U-curve. As the novel’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon is the first human to undergo experimental surgery to ameliorate his mental retardation by raising his intelligence to a level approximating normality at least. The experiment has been carried out successfully on laboratory mice, including one named Algernon. Charlie’s progress through the experiment and its consequences is charted through a series of progress reports he writes. The language of the reports themselves epitomises his progress whilst providing an account of what transpires in Algernon’s case. Promise, threat and the trauma of failure, characterised by the ascent, apogee and descent of the parabolic metaphor, provide a tripartite structure for the article.

Raw Shok and Modern Method: Child Consciousness in Flowers for Algernon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This essay situates child consciousness in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon in the legacy of child consciousness pioneered in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew . Not only do Christopher Boone and Charlie Gordon bear kinship with Huck and Maisie in replaying similar themes as they explore both protective freedoms and confining limits of the human mind, but they also exemplify how the method of the modern novel came to focus on child consciousness to mark environmental conditioning and broader social problems.

"You’re Not the Same Kind of Human Being": The Evolution of Pity to Horror in Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon

Key words: mental disability, Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, pity, narrative theoryOf American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.

Poprawne tłumaczenia z błędami. O tłumaczeniu błędów językowych użytych jako zabieg literacki

The paper presents the results of the analysis of some theoretical and practical issues related to errors in translations, especially those used as a literary device. The first part shows two classifications of errors in translations, by Hejwowski and Nord. The author of the paper adds another, more general classification, that focuses on the difference between the errors introduced in texts by the authors or translators intentionally or unintentionally. The second part presents 10 types of errors used by Daniel Keyes in his novel Flowers for Algernon . The story is written as a diary of a mentally retarded man who makes a lot of mistakes: spelling, punctuation, grammatical, lexical, syntactic and stylistic. The types and the frequency of errors in the original are compared to the types and the frequency of errors in the French and Polish translation. It shows that in different language systems the translators could not or decided not to copy the model of the hero’s faulty writing. Only one type of errors is impossible to introduce in the Polish version, i.e., the omission of the apostrophe. All the remaining errors are present in both versions but their frequency may be different. The French translation intensifies spelling mistakes, uses fewer lexical errors and its grammatical errors are due to the spelling of unpronounced flexions. The Polish text contains more lexical, grammatical, especially fexional, and syntactic errors. It also introduces one type of error, inexistent in the original, which is typical of the Polish language system, namely, the transcription of denasalisation and devoicing. The translators had to adapt the types of errors and their frequency to create a model of faulty writing that would be seen as natural by the French and Polish readers.

Literary works as case studies for teaching human experimentation ethics.

Case studies are widely used as a teaching strategy for a variety of topics in various disciplines. They are particularly valued as a teaching strategy in the teaching of ethics because they provide a context for understanding the complexities of situations involving ethical dilemmas. This article describes the successful use of two literary works as case studies in teaching master's students about the ethical issues in human experimentation. Pygmalion and Flowers for Algernon were selected to exemplify the ethical considerations important in the conduct of research with human subjects. Students found the assignment both personally and professionally stimulating and recommended continued use of the assignment in the course.

Of Mice and Men: An Interdisciplinary Unit

It was this thought coupled with the inquisitive nature of thirteen year olds which lead a team of teachers at the Beck Middle School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to discuss the possibilities of developing an interdisciplinary unit using Flowers for Algernon as one central core. After hours of brainstorming, arguing, writing, and rewriting, a pilot interdisciplinary unit evolved which we called Of Mice and Men, affec tionately known as The Mouse Unit. Below is a short description of this unit as it fits into the Beck program.