Literary Mode Research Articles

აბსურდის კონცეპტი და მისი რეფლექსია ქართულ მწერლობაში

The concept of absurdity appears in world literature even with the authors of the ancient era (Aristophanes, Plautus, etc.), howe­ver, in a more established form it occurs iv later works ("Gulliver's Travels", "Tristram Shandy", "Alice in Wonderland") and Calderon's dramaturgy ("Life is a dream"). In the above-mentioned texts, the characteristic features of the concept of the absurd begin to be rea­lized which in the 20th century landed in the philosophy of absurd, and the theater of absurd. French existentialists – Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are at the head of absurd philosophy: It was in their philosophy that the theory of absurd was formed, which, in both cases, took an individual form. Albert Ca­mus dedicated to this issue a brilliant essay – "The myth of Sisy­phus", in which he formulated his views on the philosophy of absurd. The most intense manifestation of the philo­sophy of absurd in literature became the Theatre of Absurd, which was for­med in Europe in the 1950s due to the creative work of Samuel Beckett and his dramaturgy. Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov and other play-writers broke a new page in the world dramaturgy and writing. It is significant that the Georgian literature even being within the framework of the Soviet ideology was able to reflect this event and give different forms to the literary mode of the absurd. From this point of view, particular attention deserves the creative work of Georgian writers – Guram Rcheulishvili and Revaz Chei­shvili. The “special term Soviet Absurd” is implemented by the author of the essay in relation to their novels as a manifestation of resis­tance against the totalitarian ideology.

An unmethodical method: Contextualising the critical essay

This paper charts a theoretical and literary genealogy for what I term the critical essay, which I define as a literary essay that includes analysis of an artwork amongst its objects of inquiry. After briefly outlining the increasing prevalence of the critical essay in contemporary letters, I review theoretical schemas surrounding the critical essay, and grapple with the terminological slippage of labels like “essay” and “criticism”. Drawing from Marxist and feminist schools of literary studies, I argue that alternative forms of critical writing have generally been propounded not as literary modes but rather as scholarly revolts against disciplinary strictures. I argue that such alternative forms of critical writing share a desire to invent modes of analysis and expression capable of challenging dominant class, race and/or gendered ideologies. I go on to propose that the critical essay may be capable of disrupting the epistemological frameworks undergirding public criticism, making space for writers who, due to their subject positions, have not historically been conferred critical authority.

An Exploration of Shakespeare’s Portrayal of “Reason” and of “the Mind” in Sonnets Based on Literary Modes Theory

This paper provides a window for understanding Shakespeare’s relationships with reason and with the mind in his sonnets. It selects eight poems via the indexes of “reason” and of “the mind” from the 154 Shakespeare’s sonnets for close reading. It shows that Shakespeare writes about “reason” and “the mind” in three literary modes: narrative, lyrical and dramatic. This literary-mode-based analysis of the eight poems leads to the discovery of the unique performance of “reason” and of “the mind” in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In specific, Shakespeare suggests that reason is the opposite of lust or of desire and that the mind, on the one hand, becomes weaker when it meets the eyes; the mind, on the other hand, becomes stronger when it meets another mind. In addition, the mind contradicts with the body, yet the power of the mind grows as the power of the body grows. Last but not least, through the poems on the themes of reason and of the mind, Shakespeare argues that love is dateless, nonsexual and preservable.

Shameful Specters: Remembering Spanish Slavery in Àngels Aymar’s La Indiana

Abstract This article reveals a new figure in the contemporary Spanish imaginary, the indiana, and a new literary mode, the indiana melodrama. It argues that the incarnation of the indiana as a virtuous, melodramatic heroine in Àngels Aymar’s 2007 play La indiana rebukes Spanish participation in transatlantic slavery and counters the historical amnesia that Spanish culture frequently displays toward its colonial past. An early forerunner in Spain’s long-delayed path to recognizing its history of slavery, La indiana forms part of activist efforts in Catalonia, the autonomous community in which the play premiered. Applying theories of memory and melodrama, the article explains how many factors in the play—the actors, their voices, the stage space, the soundscape, and the mixing of the Catalan and Spanish languages—transmit memory across racial, temporal, and spatial boundaries. This effect, “theatrical postmemory,” minimizes the distance between past and present, Cuba and Catalonia, memory and history. The article focuses on Aymar’s transformation of two symbols of Spanish (post)imperial nostalgia, the indiano home and the Catalan habanera, a popular musical genre. La indiana deconstructs the melodramatic convention of a happy ending and the concomitant restoration of innocence.

Mistakes Were Made: Overthinking and the Contemporary Woman Writer

Abstract: This essay gives a literary account of "overthinking" women in the autofictional forms of the Brexlit era. In Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk , the protagonists, both avatars for the authors, frequently find themselves having imperfect or even failed political conversations with strangers and then ruminating on their sense of their own mistakes. But rather than dismissing their sometimes cringe-inducing self-indictments, this essay suggests that overthinking, as a literary mode, is a reparative experiment in counterfactual thought.

Tapestry of Tales: Women’s Collative Writings as Legal Storytelling

This article presents an exploration of the storytelling as a feminist practice generating a counternarrative to law, with particular focus on narrative forms that center the collation of women’s stories, examining the practice from the 1400s to contemporary microbiographies on TikTok. I focus on the literary mode of biographical collection. In doing so, I assert that it is the weaving and compounding of multitudes of stories that give rise to the challenging of law’s normative, masculinized narratives. Seemingly inconsequential, isolated biographical narratives are given larger social meaning when read together.

Technoscientific speculations: the anti-mimeticism of Japanese science fiction in the literary context of the late Meiji period

This article proposes that Japanese science fiction emerged as an escape from the limits of the realistic representation of the world proposed by Naturalism. It reads three science fiction short stories published in the magazines Tanken sekai (World of Exploration) and Bōken sekai (World of Adventure) between 1907 and 1910 to discuss early science fiction in which authors utilised technoscientific discourse. Engaging in a set of textual practices centred on developments of modern science and technology, these authors developed one of science fiction’s distinctive features: anti-mimeticism, a literary mode focused on the depiction of anything that cannot happen in real life. This article focuses on the modalities by which these stories—Tenkūkaikatsu Dōjin’s ‘Gessekai shinkon ryokō’ (Lunar Honeymoon), Ishii Kendō’s ‘Gessekai dokuryoku tanken’ (Self-made Exploration to the Moon), and Hakui Michihito’s ‘Yukai to benri wo kiwametaru ōgon jidai no tokai seikatsu’ (The Extremely Amusing and Comfortable Golden Age of Urban Life) 1 —employ a rationalistic view of the phenomenal realm to generate fictional worlds that relinquish the dominance of a mimetic representation of reality. An analysis of early Japanese science fiction from the late Meiji period reveals two elements that eschewed the realistic literature such as Naturalism: objective narration and an anti-mimetic base for the fictional world.

The Postmodern Rewritings of Great Expectations to Reinvent Antipodean identities; A Study on Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

The present study pivots on the individual analysis of the antipodean writers` novels Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones the retellings of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paper concentrates on the approaches based on its perception towards ideological, historical, authorial, cultural, narrative and geographical representations of Australia in literature. The select novels are under analysis for their employment of postmodern narrative strategies such as intertextuality and carnivalesque. By applying these theories, the writers are successful in generating new ideologies, varying perspectives and reframing the status of canon. The fictionist takes cues from the fictional world which is a rhetorical construct, by having the possibility of adding and filling gaps to complete it by using intertextuality. In a postmodern scenario, the literary mode of carnivalesque is utilized to reverse the conviction of realism. The novelists give liberty to their protagonists Maggs and Matilda to vindicate their rights by unearthing the voices as well as to vocalize their stories in a way of deconstructing artificial stereotypes. One of the ideologies of postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives” (p. xxiv) propound by Lyotard, it replaces by mini or local narratives. Thus, oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendering from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim. Objective: The paper strives to analyze its antipodean characters and their continuum with historical equivalents in Australia. The novelists try to imply and recontextualize rewritings from a broader spectrum of cultural reproductions. The article also endeavors to readdress nineteenth-century texts into their contemporary postmodern relevance. Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework of the study is to look through the lens of postmodernism. Postmodernism believes that every text carries the fragment or traces of other texts and every work can be read against the relation or background to each other texts. In Jack Maggs the story gives the background to why and how the eponymous character becomes a convict and thus offering him a voice and re-centering him in the center like an Englishman Pip. Mister Pip is about the journey of an indigenous girl named Matilda who dives into the fictional world of Dickens amidst war and personal losses. The select novels have the ability of genre-blurring intersecting with historical novel, fictional biography, and metafiction. The point of departure from the existing research about the novels Jack Maggs and Mister Pip is that there is an alteration of focus from political resistance towards foregrounding postmodern literary struggle in rewriting. Method: The paper discusses with a postmodern study of the novel Jack Maggs and Mister Pip as a retelling of Dickens` Great Expectations. The methodology of the study is qualitative textual analysis with a postmodern approach. The theories that are applied to the select texts are, Julia Kristeva`s Intertextuality and Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnivalesque. The select novels are written to subvert Eurocentric metanarratives, which is further explained by Jean-Françoise Lyotard that, ‘those totalizing narratives are to be replaced with mini or local narratives.’ The framework of the paper is restricted to study the textual, intertextual, thematic and contextual analysis. Results and Discussion: This article investigates the way in which Australian identities are remodeled using fictional constructs. Finally, by reading these novels the readers get to know the multiple perceptions of the canon. The novel`s self-reflexivity has subdued any fixed, totalizing or final assertion towards any narrative. These novels foreground the importance of storytelling, writing, each creating their own story amid falsehood and misrepresentation. Postmodern novels are concerned with the representation of reality. It is cynical towards versions of history and reminds the readers that history itself is an artificial construct. The oral narratives/ storytelling take dominion and unfold a space for a new authentic narrative rendered from the indigenous other, by a subaltern voice and a cast-out victim. The fictional reinvention of the antipodean authors not only questions the ambiguous status of representation, but they are successful in recreating their autonomous versions of their self-supporting narratives. Thus, by reading Careys` and Jones` novels through the lens of postmodernism have attempted to evaluate the validity of western metanarratives and cultural conventions.

Visibility, Precarity and Public Spaces: Reading Matthew Arnold’s “West London” in an Indian Classroom

This essay is an account of my experience of teaching Matthew Arnold's "West London" in an Indian classroom through the conceptual prism of vulnerability. The essay argues that the configuration of public space in Arnold's poem in terms of differential class relations in Victorian society offers a literary mode of visualizing vulnerablity and prompts an ethical recognition of the humanness of marginalized characters. It further demonstrates how the peadgogic exercise of 'reading' such poetry in the contemporary urban Indian context can alert students to the politics of occupying and negotiating public spaces in terms of (the lack of) class position and privilege across diverse cultural and historical contexts.

Rewriting the Myth of Atalanta: Cross-Dressing and Gender Equality in Emily Hauser’s For the Winner

This article studies Emily Hauser’s For the Winner (2017), a contemporary reimagining of the myth of Atalanta. This novel belongs to a women-authored literary mode that gives prominence and a voice to classical female characters and myths. Close examination of the politics of cross-dressing, as well as how Atalanta’s mythic identity is reconstructed as a heroine undaunted by gender lines reveals that Hauser’s approach constitutes a central site for ascribing meanings of determination, agency, and gender equality, thus culturally repositioning the male-centredness of her canonical representations and providing a feminist reinscription of the myth.

Significant Absences: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Silence and Joyce’s Poetics of the Unspoken


 
 
 This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken.
 Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures.
 
 

Immigrant Exclusion Acts: On Early Chinese Labor and Domestic Matriarchal Agency in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.

Literary nature and socio-environmental reality in early modern French critical writing about the pastoral

Seventeenth-century French authors produced some of the first critical works devoted entirely to the pastoral. In this article, the author argues that examining these critical works allows us to add a socio-environmental layer to our understanding of this literary mode. This article explores Rapin’s Dissertatio de carmine pastorali (1659) and Fontenelle’s Discours sur la nature de l’églogue (1688). As they debate which aspects of rural life should be included or excluded from this classical literary form, Rapin and Fontenelle give centre stage to a problem raised in later class-conscious as well as ecocritical critiques: idealized representations of rural spaces have the capacity to hide the issues of social and environmental change. This article focuses on how their theories of the pastoral address this problem. While the challenges of rural labour and environmental change may be obscured by pastoral fiction, they are given visibility in critical writing about this literary mode.

Utopie contra Ideologie – Ingeborg Bachmanns Textstrategien zwischen Sprachethik und literarischer Ethik

Focusing on Ingeborg Bachmann's Musil essay Utopia versus Ideology, the article outlines aspects of literary and language ethics. Both Robert Musil's and Ingeborg Bachmann's works are characterized by transdisciplinary, philosophical-literary thought centered on ethical con-cerns. The literary form is appreciated in its critique of ideologies; Bachmann, with Musil, speaks about literature as formulating open ideologies instead of closed ones, and according to both, this means: utopias. Due to the polyphony of literary texts and the linking of ethical statements to character perspectives, these statements appear in their intrinsic connection to experience and to moments of cognition – Musil's anderer Zustand – and therein as a philo-sophically precise representation of a true-to-life ethics that puts situational contexts as well as application- and motivation-problems in the foreground. In the search for the right expression, which is particularly noticeable in Musil and Bachmann, e.g. through the variation of literary modes like essay, poetry and novel as well as through the metaphoricity of speech, a language ethics manifests itself.

Circularity and Circulation in Peter Ackroyd’s Life Narratives: Chatterton, English Music and The House of Doctor Dee

Through the rewriting of the lives of famous past British writers (or characters), contemporary author Peter Ackroyd’s works explore fictional elements while preserving a high level of referential accuracy. This implies a form of circularity as past texts are used again in the present providing access to the British literary canon. The past leaves a mark in and on the present that is permanent—as it keeps coming back, it almost becomes circular. This disruption of time is a key characteristic of the mode of the romance. The inheritance and re-enactment of the past call for circularity while the mode of the romance entitles an old literary mode to be used in modern times. Moreover, Ackroyd only writes about vulnerable people enabling the reader to open to the ethical dimension of the notion. Vulnerability calls for circularity through the characters’ going backwards owing to traumatic temporality as well as circulation—conveying the characters’ affects and the ethical dimension of the notion.

Construction, Deconstruction, and the Question of Authorship in Magical Realist Narratives

Colonial discourse in particular has constructed fixed frames and grids in which to place and separate individuals according to their class, race, gender, culture, nationality and ethnic models of unified and stereotypical representation of otherness and difference which postcolonial writers challenge. Writers from across the globe have adopted and adapted magical realism to fit their own cultures and within their own frame of reference. As a dominant literary mode, it can be considered as a decolonizing agent in a postmodern context. What the narrative mode offers is a way to discuss alternative approaches to reality to that of Western philosophy, expressed in contemporary fiction. Specifically, this paper argues how magical realism is positioned in relation to the two contrasting operations of construction and deconstruction. What is its capacity to affect either or both of these outcomes? A prominent view has developed which understands the mode as one that structures an exclusively deconstructive narratology. I explore the narratives of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirit, Tony Morrison’s Beloved and Hashem Garaibeh’s The Cat Who Taught Me How To Fly that reiterate realist narrative conventions subversively to critique the effects of colonialism as a decolonizing device in the contemporary literary scholarship. This study utilizes the ideas from Stephen Slemon’s “resistance to colonialism,” Theo D’haen’s “decenter privileged centers,”, Wendy B. Faris’s “Questioning the colonial subjugation,” and Christopher Warnes’s ‘deconstructive notions of subjectivity” and “recover and affirm identities.” Thus, the narratives in opposition to the notion of absolute history emphasize the possibility of simultaneous existence of multiple truths and plural meanings.

Realism, Myth and Spiritual Mestizaje in Las malas by Camila Sosa Villada

Abstract: By reclaiming the power of self-definition and the use of the term travesti to designate their unique experience within the Latin American cultural, economic, and political context, travesti intellectuals have fought the dehumanization of their personhood. In her novel Las malas , the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada not only reclaims the right to self-definition but also connects the realistic accounts of human rights violations against travesti subjects with the spiritual, mythical, and religious roots of the travesti experience. To make these connections, Sosa Villada appropriates magical realism, a literary mode that provides the space to naturalize the presence of travesti subjects as protagonists of folktales, miracles, and religious narratives while denouncing violence against travesti bodies. In this way, the author unveils and corrects the dichotomic nature of cultural narratives that exclude travesti and trans subjects from religious and cultural spaces in Latin America. Moreover, by rewriting folktales and religious narratives, and by situating travestis as protagonists of narratives of miracles, Sosa Villada deploys "spiritual mestizaje" that dignifies and humanizes travesti personhood, opening previously proscribed spaces for these agents. In this way, Sosa Villada not only disrupts and expands the literary tradition of magical realism by adding the travesti experience to the predominantly heteronormative corpus of magical-realist narratives but exercises religious agency.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.

An Exploration of Gender Discrimination and the Quest for Feministic Identity in Angami Culture in Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy and Mari

Nagaland is one of the significant political divisions of India, which is geographically divided into eight states. The cultures of India's northeastern states are distinctive. Each state is discrete regarding its custom, diverse culture, and language. As such, Nagaland, too, is rich and varied in cultural heritage, housing 16 distinct tribes, each with its lingo-African language. Extending the premise of social realism, this paper critically examines the fictional works of Easterine Kire, namely Mari and A Terrible Matriarchy. It brings out the social disparity and injustices meted out to the women's community of the Angami tribes. This research paper focuses on social injustice, matriarchal oppression, and sexual molestation as prevalent in the Angami tribal culture. This work ventures to spread awareness and educate the Angami tribal community on their enshrined prerogatives and the restitution of their emancipation in northeast India while unearthing some of the squalid working conditions of the tribal labour community. The novels Mari and A Terrible Matriarchy deal with social realism, the literary mode of choice in the nineteenth century. It also vividly portrays how the Nagaland community has been plundered and smeared by battle and bloodshed.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

Abstract In Postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two sub-genres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (White) world narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This paper reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar post-colonial culture—South Africa—and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture existed and thrived. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging “codes of recognition”. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to new emerging cultural forms.