Late Novels Research Articles

Гипермодерн “инженера” Гарина и преодоление постмодернизма Владимиром Сорокиным

SUMMARY: The article discusses the two latest novels by the modern Russian classic writer Vladimir Sorokin: Legacy (2023) and especially Doctor Garin (2021). Based on his interpretation of Sorokin’s aesthetical and philosophical program developed elsewhere, Ilya Gerasimov reads Doctor Garin as a literary work that did not go as planned. Dismayed by the unexpected result, Sorokin wrote Legacy as a follow-up meant to explicate Doctor Garin ’s message and explain it to himself and his readers. Therefore, Legacy develops to the extreme only one aspect of the 2021 novel. According to Gerasimov, Doctor Garin was planned as a postmodernist satire on the Russian intelligentsia, modernist literature, and the very society of modernity that produced them. Doctor Garin and his miraculous method of hypermodernism is an obvious reference to Aleksey Tolstoy’s The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1926–1927) about an impostor and adventurist seeking world domination. Sorokin mocks the modernist belief in “certain schemes to improve the human condition” (to quote this belief’s famous academic critic, James C. Scott) and Russian modernist literature, from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Vasily Aksenov, as well as modern governments’ failed political leadership. For over half of the book, Sorokin sustains his original rational design, channeling all his trademark spontaneous prose into “subtexts” – more or less extensive citations of imagined books or diaries introduced in the main text every 20–30 pages of the book. However, at some point, these subtexts disappear, and the protagonist fully immerses himself in Sorokin’s irrational narrative driven by the logic of language rather than ideological considerations. This change of narrative mode transforms everything – from the protagonist’s personality to the novel’s central message. Gerasimov argues that Sorokin chose time as a central argument of his antimodernist criticism, vindicating postmodernism as a condition of multiple isolated chronotopes, with each subculture or identity group living in a unique temporality of its own – contrary to modernism’s belief in progress and the normative universality of time. However, the spontaneous narrative of the novel’s second half produces a different effect. It models social reality as multidimensional and yet fundamentally interconnected. In any of the very distinctive chronotopes, social reality acquires its stable characteristics only situationally in the eyes of an active subject rather than by some preset, anonymous and objective factors, such as temporality or identity. This message is communicated by the narrative independently of its author, who attempted to produce a different conclusion in the follow-up novel Legacy . Inadvertently, instead of affirming a postmodernist worldview – relativist but static – and mocking the old modernism and some hypothetical “metamodernism” anticipated since the late 2010s, Sorokin outlined a program for a truly new, “post-postmodernist” modernism. It combines postmodernism’s multifaceted, multidimensional view of reality with modernism’s ability to produce a coherent narrative anchored in an unequivocal moral position. It embraces multiple temporalities, but also the idea of the future as a condition radically different from the past and present. Gerasimov uses the difference in conceptualizing temporality as the main criterion differentiating the modernist and postmodernist epistemes, in any of their aesthetic versions, as well as the hypothetical new modernism as spontaneously outlined in Sorokin’s Doctor Garin .

Le cri de la bête et la chute du géant : sons et mise à mort de l’adversaire dans l’aventure merveilleuse arthurienne

Cet article étudie la présence et le traitement du son dans la mise à mort de l’adversaire dans le roman arthurien. L’autrice établit tout d’abord une définition du topos, appuyée sur un large relevé d’occurrences, qui la conduit à voir dans la sonorisation de la mort de l’ennemi une variation d’un motif plus large et plus répandu. Elle étudie ensuite l’évolution de ce topos depuis les textes épiques jusqu’aux derniers romans. Elle remarque enfin la prégnance de ces sons dans une famille de récits dont les auteurs semblent chercher à perpétuer les premières formes du récit arthurien.

Personal non-property rights: genesis of legal regulation in Ukraine

Personal non-property rights are important components of everyone's rights capacity. The well-being of each of us essentially depends on the scope of personal non-property rights, how they will be established in law, because personal non-property rights are the basis of any person's life, they are the rights that a person acquires from birth and remains them till one’s death.
 The issue of personal non-property rights settlement occupies one of the central places in civil law science. Real provision of human rights is considered as a sign of a developed constitutional state, the result of building the democratic relations.
 Legislative consolidation of general provisions on personal non-property rights in Chapter 20 of the Civil Code of Ukraine was once perceived as a new stage in ensuring the comprehensive development of the individual, protection of his life, freedom, honor, dignity, security and inviolability. We fully share the views of authors and believe that the adoption of the Civil Code marked the beginning of a new era in the regulation of personal non-property relations and ensuring the rights of individuals in Ukraine.
 In our opinion, for a fuller understanding of these rights it is necessary to study the development of personal non-property rights in Ukraine: from the first scientific studies on a given topic to the latest novels - analysis of the Concept of updating the Civil Code of Ukraine, presented by members of the working group. Interesting and noteworthy are the proposals of the authors of the Concept on the consolidation and specification of personal non-property rights, expanding the rights on the security of individuals, strengthening the right to privacy, protection of personal data and many others.
 The conducted analysis shows the foresight of the domestic legislator, his broad view of the challenges and forehanded and adequate response to them. Indeed, we can not ignore the rapid development of science and technology, the emergence of new relationships that require detailed legal regulation.

Доктор Дорн против писателя Мопассана (об интертекстуальном подтексте чеховской «Чайки»)

Researchers hesitate in the interpretation of the hero of Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr. Dorn, seeing in him either a spokesman for the author’s position, or a “hidden trickster”. Meanwhile, if we say that Dorn embodies in the play the author’s critical attitude towards all its heroes, then both of these positions can be combined into one. The fact that Chekhov “objectified in faces” some of Maupassant’s judgments was justly noted. In fact, almost all the heroes embody certain ideas about a person, embodied in Maupassant’s travel “diary” Sur l’eau and in his latest novels. It is indeed no coincidence that Chekhov was called the “Russian Maupassant”. In The Seagull the Russian writer, on the one hand, openly admitted for the first time that in his works there really is not so little of Maupassant, and on the other hand, he subtly showed that he is “not Maupassant” — “he is different”. And what exactly is this “other”. Chekhov expresses this mainly through the image of Dorn. However, it becomes clear to the reader only if the peculiar intertextual subtext of this Chekhov play is read. The significant intertextual connections between The Seagull and Maupassant’s prose demonstrated in the article make it possible to reveal the presence of special “meanings of intertextuality” in the play. The significant intertextual connections between The Seagull and Maupassant’s prose demonstrated in the article make it possible to reveal the presence of special “meanings of intertextuality” in the play.

CREATING AS DECEPTION: THE CONCEPT OF ‘CULTURE OF ERASUREʼ IN MURIEL SPARKʼS NOVEL THE FINISHING SCHOOL

This paper will deal with the peculiar, Scottish view of the position of creative imagination in literature. A specific cultural background for this view will be presented, together with the reading of one of the latest novels by Muriel Spark, The Finishing School (2004). Concepts such as ‘culture of erasure,’ ‘Calvinism’ and its cultural heritage in the modern Scotland, as well as the role ‘imagination’ plays in the national spirit against the specific Scottish historical background will be investigated into. The focus of the paper will be less on Muriel Spark as an individual author, rather, the point of the paper will be how to contextualise some themes within Spark’s novel within the specificity of a national culture and history.

Onomastic Code in the Works of Dina Rubina “Napoleon Convoy” and “The White Dove of Cordoba”

The semantic and plot-generating functions of the onomastic paradigm in the works of Dina Rubina “Napoleon wagon train” and “The White Dove of Cordoba” is examined in the article. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the trilogy “Napoleon’s Wagon Train” has not previously been subjected to scientific analysis, nor has the artistic techniques of this trilogy been compared with those of other works by Dina Rubina. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that, based on the material of the latest novels by Rubina, repeated motives of the reification and humanization of a name, giving it the status of an independent being, a character equal to the bearers of this name, are revealed. Attention is paid to the tendencies in the use of the onomastic code and its gravitation towards a certain type of characters, the life story of which is considered by the author in comparison with the characters who lose, hide and deliberately deform their names in an extensive chronotope, covering the period from the era of antiquity, the Renaissance and the Napoleonic wars to the present day. It is proved that the onomastic code, manifested in novels included in different trilogies, appears as a structural component cementing all the later novelistic works of Dina Rubina as the author’s supertext, arranged according to uniform semantic laws. The proper name in Rubina’s works is a meta-symbol, a sign of personality identification in its uniqueness and in the history of the clan and family.

The Social Importance of How Bodies Inhabit Spaces with Others: A Queer Reading of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2003)—is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009), and culminating in The Paying Guests (2014), this phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion.

The <i>Acts of John</i>, the <i>Acts of Andrew</i> and the Greek Novel

Since the 1930s, it has been observed that the Greek novel and the Christian Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (AAA) display a series of similarities. This is not surprising, as the earlier AAA all belong to about the same period of time as the latest novels, except for Heliodorus, and derive from Asia Minor, the same area in which most of the surviving novels seem to have originated. Consequently, some of the similarities may well have been determined by the fact that the authors of the novel and the AAA lived in the same world. Yet there are clearly also scenes and motifs, which the AAA derived from the novel. In this contribution, I note the impact of the novel on the Acts of John and the Acts of Andrew and identify an influence from Chariton, Xenophon’s Ephesiaca and Achilles Tatius despite the fact that the novel ends in the reunion of the couple, who will enter now a happily married life with plenty of sex, whereas the couples in the AAA ideally end up in a chaste Platonic relationship. The surprising influence of the novel on the AAA may well be explained from a similar intended readership, that is, well educated higher-class women.

Drifting and Deterritorialization in Dionne Brand’s Love Enough

Dionne Brand provides the reader with vivid representations of the dilemmas and agonies from which people excluded in the history of belonging have been suffering. One of her latest novels Love Enough (2014) deals with the protagonists’ unceasing trial and error in the process of surviving in Toronto. In this paper, I analyze how Da’uud, Bedri, and Ghost’s process of drifting in Toronto causes a rupture with the monolithic sense of belonging in order to argue that they succeed in developing their own sense of belonging and connection and then reach in-between space, based on a link between Brand’s ideation of drifting and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conceptualization of deterritorialization. It would be meaningful to elucidate how Da’uud, Bedri, and Ghost’s everyday lives develop the possibility of loving themselves and each other enough, ultimately shedding light on the very beginning of the rupture with the history of belonging.

Mourning and Melancholy in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life and The Only Story

The loss of the beloved, the fear or experience of it, either because of death or other reasons has been a repeatedly occurring theme in the work of Julian Barnes. In Before She Met Me, the fear of loss forms the subconscious of a humorous and meticulous examination of obsessive jealousy, in Talking It Over and Love etc., it is analysed through deception, revenge and resentment. Even behind the apparent postmodernist strategies and playful tone of Flaubert’s Parrot, there resides the story of a retired, bereaving narrator who is trying to overcome the recent death of his once infidel wife. Irony and humour have always been the main traits of Barnes, no matter how serious the issues he represented. However, since the publication of The Sense of an Ending in 2011, Barnes’s novels have grown to be more melancholic and lyrical in tone and less humorous and playful in style. Barnes’s latest novels – The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life (2013), The Noise of Time (2016) and The Only Story (2018) – all develop around an aged protagonist or narrator whose story unfolds in an ironically self-aware lyrical tone, which detaches Barnes from postmodernism. The writing style of Julian Barnes, as a mature novelist, gets plainer as his mood becomes more sentimental and melancholic. This paper examines Barnes’s representation of mourning and melancholy in Levels of Life where he dedicates the last section to his bereavement process after the loss of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, and The Only Story where he offers the piercing and grim love story of Susan (48) and Paul (19). The concepts of mourning and melancholy will be analysed by reference to Freud’s and Derrida’s views to illustrate how Barnes subtly probes them in the two novels as an artist.

La educación escolar y los educadores profesionales como problema en Charles Dickens

En este artículo se estudia la evolución de la concepción dickensiana de la educación escolar y del maestro a través de la producción literaria del afamado autor inglés. Para ello se recurre a la conexión de tres elementos básicos: las experiencias escolares biográficas; las escuelas y educadores descritos en sus quince grandes novelas y las referencias al mundo escolar en cartas, discursos y publicaciones menores. El resultado del estudio es que la confianza inicial de Dickens en la capacidad educativa y reformadora de las escuelas y los maestros profesionales fue decayendo a lo largo del tiempo hasta llegar en sus últimas novelas a convertir al maestro profesional en villano.

«Digo carne»: La repolitización del cuerpo femenino en la narrativa de Marta Sanz

With the start of the new century, and especially during the last decade, many writers are starting to putt he focus on the body and its various problems derived from the current socioeconomic system. One of them is Marta Sanz, for whom, in her own words, writing consists of “naming the body” and, thanks to that, “conquering the territory”. His discourse is frontally opposed to the discourse of postmodernity and to the models of advanced capitalism, above all and more consciously in his latest novels. What this article aims to show is how and in what way the body and its repolitization constitute one of the central axes of this author’s writing.

No translator is an island: the changing dynamics of Murakami Haruki translations around the world

Tim Parks has included Haruki Murakami among the group of authors writing ‘dull global novels’, a perception that is in part the result of an exclusive focus on English-language translations of Murakami. By turning attention to translations in other languages, this essay reveals a more nuanced and complex picture, showing that depending on where and by whom he is translated, Murakami in fact emerges differently than in English, and arguing that his writing is perhaps not so ‘dull’, after all. After briefly describing the history of Murakami translations in North America, the essay examines the history of translations in East Asia, using the example of greater China, where the two main translators, Lai Ming Chu (Taiwan) and Lin Shaohua (China), produce strikingly different versions of his writing. The essay then goes on to trace the main patterns of Murakami translation in Europe and into some Middle Eastern languages and Persian. In Europe there is a gradual shift away from indirect translations through English toward direct translations from the Japanese, and a greater degree of collaboration among translators. The essay analyzes the effects of these changes, offering a few examples from Murakami’s latest novels.

Dos estructuras simbólicas del mito de la Quintrala: la bruja y la femme fatale


 Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, best known as Quintrala, is a historical figure of the Chilean Colonial period. Within Chilean culture, she became a myth that developed into a literary character variously portraited as a witch, a murderer, and a parricide. To this day, these remain the portraits that have been reproduced in the literary narrative about the character.
 In this work I will analyse the symbolic structures of the witch and the femme fatale, which are essential and reiterative in the construction of the narrative discourse about this literary character. For this purpose, I have chosen the figurative structuralism that views a literary text as a sermo mythicus, that is to say, as a myth in which symbolic structures are a part of the mythical discourse advocated by this theory; this kind of discourse is likewise a fundamental and inherent component of the myth of Quintrala that has not been studied as such.
 This work aims to examine these symbolic structures embedded in the myth of La Quintrala by analysing and comparing Gustavo Frías’ latest novels, Tres nombres para Catalina: Catrala (2001) and Tres nombres para Catalina: la doña de Campofrío (2003), the work of Magdalena Petit, La Quintrala (2009), that of Mercedes Valdivieso, Maldita yo entre las mujeres (1991), as well as the historical essay Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna ([1877] 1944) in order to establish the existence through time of a rewriting and a transfiguration of the symbolic structures in these literary works.

Kritik Sastra Ekologis terhadap Novel-novel Terbaru Indonesia

Environmental literary works appear as a form of literary sensitivity to society and the environment which has specific environmental tendencies. Studies using the theory of ecological literature began in around 2008 and above with a very limited number. Therefore, the development of studies of literary works with this theory is very necessary. The creation of public opinion about the importance of protecting the environment to reduce the impact of global warming is very necessary. Later, through several novels, authors have done it. However, not all messages in the novel are clearly conveyed so that they still need ecological literary criticism to understand them. Based on this, the problem raised in this study is "What is the ecological literary criticism of Indonesia's latest novels?". Data collection and data analysis is done by descriptive and content analysis methods. Data are classified and analyzed with ecological literary concepts according to Garrard including (1) pollution; (2) wilderness; (3) disaster; (4) housing / residence; (5) animals; and (6) earth. The research findings and discussion show that Indonesia's latest novels are friendly with their environment, want to describe as much detail as possible about the universe, worship nature, and are always interested in natural changes. Ecological literary concepts are contained in Indonesia's latest novels to describe the natural situation as well as to criticize human treatment of nature. Indonesia's latest novels teach that an attitude of compassion for nature gives rise to desire and behavior to protect and preserve nature as well as possible.

DETERMINATION OF THE TIME OF CONTENTS UNDER DEFENSE IN THE TERM OF PURCHASED PUNISHMENT DEPENDING ON THE CONDITIONS OF INSULATION. CRITICAL THINKING OF CHANGES IN THE CRIMINAL LAW

The paper presents the author's assessment of the latest novels of the criminal law in the field of offsetting the time of detention in the term of the sentence imposed. The attention is drawn to the incompatibility of several provisions of the Article 72 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with the principle of justice, that is a consequence of the lack of a systematic approach to amending and supplementing the criminal law. On the one hand, the article 72 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in the new edition improved the situation of convicted persons, but on the other hand, the recent changes and additions put a number of convicts in an unequal position.

From Jay to Bee to Daughter Buffalo: Outlining ekphrasis in the work of Janet Frame

A thorough examination of Jay to Bee: Janet Frame’s Letters to William Theophilus Brown (2016), which provides a selection of Janet Frame’s letters to her American painter friend Bill Brown, confirms her propensity for viewing her own life-writing primarily as an instrument of fictionalization. Frame’s letters should then not be considered as a mere textual adjunct documenting a period in her life or a phase in her poetics. By dint of actually inventing, or imaginatively adding to, the story of her friendship with Brown, she constructed a complex corpus which proves formally and thematically consistent with the novels of her middle to late period. This is where she first explored intuited links between the arts of painting and fiction, which would lead to the enhanced metafictional self-consciousness characteristic of her latest novels.

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels by Jean Wyatt

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels by Jean Wyatt

INTERPRETATION OF DEATH IN THE CH. PALAHNIUK’S ARTISTIC WORLD

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the phenomenon of death in contemporary American literature on the example of Ch. Palahniuk’s novels. The article analyzes the approaches to the phenomenon of death in different fields of knowledge such as philosophy, sociology, medicine. We describe the overview of the “life after death” theme in native and foreign literature. The place of the phenomenon of death in the artistic world and the influence of this phenomenon on the attitude of the characters to each other are in the focus of our attention. Death in the artistic world defines the characters’ relations, their presence / absence on different levels of the artistic world, the process of transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead and vice versa. The process of heroes’ formation in the world of the living and in the world of the dead depends on the representation of the phenomenon of death in the works of Ch. Palahniuk. The boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is almost invisible and the transition between the worlds is done according to certain laws of the art world, followed by the characters of the novels. This article discusses several Ch. Palahniuk’s novels written in different periods of his oeuvre. The article examines the differences and similarities in the author's interpretation of the death and its significance in the early (“Fight Club”, “Lullaby”) and the latest (“Damned”, “Doomed”) novels. In the early novels of Charles Palahniuk death is a physiological process with anatomical details, but at the same time dying is the soul leaving the body. The latest novels of the author differ from the early ones as they demonstrate to the reader not only the life and its ending, but also the life after death.

The wanderings of a gay Moroccan: An interview with Abdellah Taïa

Abdellah Taïa is the first Moroccan writer to assume his homosexuality publicly. Born in Rabat in 1973, he spent his childhood and early youth in the small coastal Moroccan town of Salé, which features in many of his works. He has lived in France since around the turn of the 21st century, where he has written two books of short fiction and six novels in French. His autofictional novels Salvation Army and An Arab Melancholia were published by American publisher Semiotext(e) in 2009 and 2012; the same publishing house has recently combined Mon Maroc (My Morocco) and Le rouge du tarbouche (The red of the fez) into a single volume, entitled Another Morocco: Selected Stories, in 2017. His fictional novel Le jour du roi (The day of the king) was awarded the Prix de Flore in 2010, and his novel Infidels was published by New York publisher Seven Stories in 2016. His latest novels are Un pays pour mourir (A country to die in; 2016) and Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (He who is worthy to be loved; 2017). Taïa has also written and directed a film, Salvation Army (2013), inspired by his early life in Morocco and his migration to Switzerland. Taïa explores issues of non-normative sexuality, gender, class and postcolonialism, and his is one of the most important current voices in the francophone Arab world.