Novels Research Articles

Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism

This article approaches the narration of catastrophe by focusing on the aerial bombing of cities during the Second World War as represented in German, French, and British modernist novels. It makes two claims. First, of all the literary modes available for representing bombing as a catastrophic event, modernism seems to be the most adequate for conveying its complexity and multiple dimensions. Second, the modernism of experimental works on aerial bombing is a function of the catastrophe that they depict. For this reason, this paper argues for the existence of a catastrophic modernism; its main family resemblances are analyzed throughout its pages.

Revisiting the Eastern European Provinces

In order to uncover the fictional strategies that project Florescu's native Romania – particularly the former Habsburg region of Banat – as a homeland, an exploration of the consistency and particularities of the tropes of exile, displacement and homecoming, as revealed in his earlier novels, is an essential prerequisite. Given the relevance of autobiographical elements in this writer's work, this paper will focus on the author's first three novels,Wunderzeit(2001),Der kurze Weg nach Hause(2002) andDer blinde Masseur(2006), investigating the themes and dynamics of his exilic discourse. Drawing from contemporary theories concerning displacement and the search for real and imaginary homelands, the article explores the specific ways in which these issues surface as subjective reflections on the recent Eastern European past.

Van het pad af

Abstract Strayed from the path. The portrayal of lesbian love in Edith Werkendam’s and Johan de Meester’s prose Walmende lampen (1921) by Johan de Meester (1860-1931) is one of the first few literary novels that has descriptions of lesbian love. Although the novel addresses several sensitive matters, it was received relatively positive. The appreciation for the depiction of sexually deviant behaviour or perversions in literature was not self-evident: works of contemporary writer Edith Werkendam (1896-1952) received no such acclaim. That difference in reception raises a few questions, to which this article will try to find answers. Aided by the discourse analysis by Dominique Maingueneau both writers’ choice of scenography for the description of their topic, which normative position they take in choosing so and how this suits the contemporary societal discourse regarding homosexuality, will be analysed.

‘Highly Conscious’ Individual and the ‘Materialistic’ Language: The Comparative Reading of the English Modernists’ and Kafka’s Novels

본 논문은 울프와 로렌스의 소설과 카프카의 소설을 비교함으로써 몇 개의 키워드―의식의 흐름, 기억, 정신적 현실―로 거의 자동적으로 규정되는 모더니즘 문학이 사실 훨씬 다양하고 이질적인 문학사조였음을 밝히고자 한다. 일반적으로 영국 모더니즘 소설들은 “고도로 의식적인 개인”을 주인공으로 삼아 서사가 진행되기 때문에 주인공의 내면의식과 화자의 역할이 부각된다. 그런데 동시대의 체코 작가였던 카프카의 소설 『변신』과 「유형지에서」는 매우 무기력하고 제한적인 주인공이 등장할 뿐만 아니라, 서사의 초점이 인간의 내면의식이 아니라 벌레로 변한 몸이나 기계에 대한 묘사에 집중한다는 점에서 흥미롭다. 벤야민을 비롯한 비평가들은 카프카의 서사가 ‘즉물적 소설언어’로 구성되었음을 지적해 왔다. 본 논문은 사뭇 달라 보이는 영국 모더니즘 작가들의 소설과 카프카의 소설을 나란히 읽어봄으로써, 20세기 초반의 모더니즘 문학의 다양성뿐만 아니라 영문학 담론 내에서 자주 사용되는 내면의식, 은유, 상징 등의 용어를 인간의 의식 바깥에서 생각해보는 기회를 갖고자 한다. 카프카의 소설 언어가 지닌 ‘즉물적’ 특성은 영문학연구에서 당연시해온 문학개념들에 대해 ‘낯설게 보기’를 가능하게 한다.This article seeks to do the comparative reading of English modernists’ and Kafka’s novels. The modernist literature of the early 20th century, almost automatically defined by a few key words such as the stream of consciousness, memory, and spiritual reality, is quite heterogeneous. The inner world of the protagonist and the role of the narrator are significant in the English modernist novels where the protagonist is usually a ‘highly conscious’ individual. And yet it is intriguing to find out that characters in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and “In the Penal Colony,” published in the 1910s, are very helpless individuals while the narratives focus on the body of the cockroach and of the machine, and not on the character’s inner world. Critics including Walter Benjamin have argued that Kafka’s novels are composed of the ‘materialistic’ language. This comparative reading will give us a chance to think about things outside the human consciousness. In addition, Kafka’s materialistic narratives enable us to see differently the literary terms of metaphor or symbol, very often employed in English literature.

Two Smokers in Search of Identity: Comparing the Representations of Tobacco Use in Alastalon salissa and Der Zauberberg

The essay compares the representations of tobacco use in two modernist novels. By analyzing the smoker characters from Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon salissa and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg the essay considers particular literary representations of tobacco use and, in terms of that, also particular cultural meanings of tobacco. The comparison is between pipe smoking and cigar smoking and the analysis focuses on how they differ in terms of constructing the identities of the fictitious characters. As a result, it is stated that the pipe represents the stability of identity whereas the cigar represents the instability of identity.

A Study on Female Image Representated in Lee, Byung-ju’s Popular Novels

이 글은이병주대중소설에서여성인물이재현되는방식을살펴보는 데목적을둔다. 이병주에대한기존의논의들은이병주문학이가지는의의를역사의기록이라는데초점을두어조명하거나비판하고있다. 그러나이병주의소설에서대중소설역시상당부분을차지하 고있어이병주의소설에대한정당한평가를위해서는대중소설에대한논의도필요하리라 생각한다. 특히작가이병주와당대독서대중의욕망을적극적으로반영하고있는방식으로 재현되는...

Cultural and educational mission of the "Ukrainian Library" by I. Tyktor in national and ideological space Ukrainian

Book series "Ukrainska Biblioteka" is a cultural and national-educational project of the publishing concern of Ivan Tyktor "Ukrainska Pressa". It was a monthly addition to the newspaper "Nash Prapor" during 1933-1939. Generally, 80 names of these books were issued, which can be divided by the period of formation our state: the princely age, Cossacks and hetmans period, modern age. A separate unit - humour literatures and philosophical-psychological works. "Ukrainska Biblioteka" received from opponents a lot of criticism both positive and negative. Many questions were caused by the rules standardization of printing whose purpose was to make the book more accessible to Ukrainian. Despite the censorship oversight, I. Tyktor was able to increased the amount of printed materials in the native language, and his publishing series found supporters among intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, peasants, young people who "required" not only popular literature, but also highly artistic works.The creative team of "Ukrainska Biblioteka" carefully selected literary novels for publication and spread works of little known writers. Most of them were first published and distributed among Ukrainian people. Ivan Tyktor published books which repeatedly won literary awards established by Galician civic organizations. These were works by H. Zhurba, Yu. Kosach, I. Olbrakht. All these novels disseminated Ukrainian diversity of our culture, helped to emerge into the treasury of human values, self-improvement, performed patriotic and educational function, helped to understand the place and role of our country in history.In this paper the author analyzes library repertoire, work of scientific and editorial team, artistic and compositional component of books and justifies their role in the national-ideological space of Ukrainian based on the literary stories, criticism reviews and notes on the pages of newspapers.

John Lurz, The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading

John Lurz, <i>The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading</i>

Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam

Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism ( Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capitalist modernity. In contrast, in his last novel ( Submission, 2015) and interventions, Houellebecq makes a post-secular turn largely driven by the radicalization of positivist ideas relying on evolutionary biology. This turn is opposed to modernity and favourable to a reconsideration of Islam as the religion of submission and a remedy to personal crisis and Europe’s decline. I show that, evaluative differences notwithstanding, Houellebecq’s stereotyping of Islam has remained constant in his literary work.

Humor Interventions in Faulkner’s Novels

Humor Interventions in Faulkner’s Novels

The politics of punctuation in Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts

ABSTRACTWhile much critical analysis explores modernist poets’ experiments with the printed page, the print innovations of prose writers have been largely overlooked. Punctuation offered many modernist novelists a way to engage visually with marginalised or non-normative experiences of embodiment; many chose to remove punctuation in order to minimise ‘obstructions’ or impediments for characters and readers, but Virginia Woolf instead employed specific marks and space breaks to divide and animate her novels’ printed spaces. This article demonstrates how the pages of Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts integrate punctuation and spacing into the novels’ fraught representations of disability and gender. While Jacob’s Room frames blank space as a narrative resource for grappling with the difficulty of representing the ‘unseizable’ components of embodied life, the parentheses and ellipses of Between the Acts visually mark the opacity and ambiguity of each character’s social performance, placing visible pressure on any easy reading of Albert, a disabled pageant performer, or of Miss La Trobe, the marginalised artist-figure. Unpacking how punctuation and space affect these novels’ representations of characters’ embodied experiences, I argue, emphasises the importance of attending to bibliographic materiality as well as linguistic complexity when analysing modernist novels’ narrative innovations.

Blue eyes and porcelain cheeks: Computational extraction of physical descriptions from Dutch chick lit and literary novels

Attentiveness to physical appearance is seen as an important motif in chick lit. However, this has never been researched in an actual comparison with literary novels. Our goal is to make a comparison between the two genres concerning the importance of physical appearance of characters. In this article, as a first step in researching this topic, we consider the task of identifying sentences that contain descriptions of a character’s physical appearance in a set of novels in both genres. We manually annotate sentences where the appearance of a character is described. We then apply a machine learning methodology and manually written lexical–syntactic queries to automate the extraction of these sentences. Contrary to our expectations, the queries outperform the classifier. When we use a combination of the two automated methods, the extraction of physical descriptions from chick lit is more successful. This suggests that such descriptions are more uniform in character.

Walking down the Borderline: Hybridity and the Modulation of the Self in Three Canonical Chicano Novels

Abstract:This paper presents an analysis of three Chicano novels considered canonical, in which the concept of “hybridity” is discussed in relation with the individual: Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Última, Tomás Rivera’s …Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra, and Rolando Hinojosa’s Los Amigos de Becky. The paper proposes an additional application of “hybridity”, key concept of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, in the cultural context of the Chicano identity. The final aim is to prove, by means of the texts, the interaction between the individual and his/her context via their “hybridity” as a resulting phenomenon of a cultural multiplicity.Keywords: Chicano, novel, hybridity, individual, cultural context.Resumen:Este trabajo presenta un análisis de tres novelas de autores chicanos considerados canónicos, en el que se discute el concepto de ‘hibridación’ y su interacción con el individuo: Bless Me Última, de Rudolfo Anaya, …Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra, de Tomás Rivera y Los Amigos de Becky, de Rolando Hinojosa. Se propone una aplicación adicional de “hibridación”, concepto clave de los Estudios Culturales y Postcoloniales, en el contexto cultural de la identidad chicana. El objetivo es demostrar la interacción entre el individuo y su contexto a través de la “hibridación” como fenómeno de multiplicidad cultural.Palabras clave: Chicano, novela, hibridación, individuo, contexto cultural

Will we become more compassionate or empathic intensive care professionals by watching films and documentaries about suffering?

Will we become more compassionate or empathic intensive care professionals by watching films and documentaries about suffering?

An Encounter with Faulkner’s Southern Personae

This essay is trying to explore the relationship between American modern novelists. William Faulkner and his culture quality and character of Southernism. Except for the unique individuality of American Deep South, as a descendant of distinguished southern farm-owner, Faulkner has his plentiful and unparalleled understanding towards South. The first part of this essay deals with the thematic explanations of Southernism in Faulkner's works. Using his thematic consistent series of works, Faulkner created a Yoknapatawpha World. Behind the background of Faulkner's family, not only the saga of Satoris, Sutpen, McCullers, Compson and Snopes, but also the southern living scenes of Frenchman's Bend, railways, wild forests are all vividly depicted. Furthermore, using the themaric explanations Faulkner expressed his ambiguous and complicated cultural criticism towards racial discrimination, living conditions of Southern descendants and the history, actuality and future of Deep South.

Busan and Americanism in Yom Sangseop’s Novels in the 1950s

Busan and Americanism in Yom Sangseop’s Novels in the 1950s

Modernity of Confession in Hyun Jin-geon’s Novels - Centered on Early Autobiographical Trilogy -

Modernity of Confession in Hyun Jin-geon’s Novels - Centered on Early Autobiographical Trilogy -

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 5 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z ‘‘It was the first day of my humiliation.’’ When Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) begins, its protagonist-narrator brims with hurt and shame. She has inflicted pain on, and been brutally rejected by, someone she loved. To make things worse, their miscommunications are out in public for everyone to see. What will happen now, she asks herself, as she hesitantly checks her email. In place of an answer, the server yields a hateful, anonymous note that she instantly recognizes as coming from another estranged intimate. ‘‘The body of the message,’’ she tells us, ‘‘was a single sentence: Now everyone knows who you really are.’’ In essays and interviews, Smith derives her writing from a strand of high modernism whose main proponent was E. M. Forster . It is the modernism of what Forster called ‘‘muddled’’ lives: of Zelda rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Catherine Mansfield and Charlotte Perkins Gilman rather than Ernest Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence. With these earlier writers, Smith shares an aesthetic and a√ective intensity that the literary critic James Wood has S w i n g T i m e , by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 464 pp., $27) 1 5 5 R ungenerously described as hysteria. She also continues these marginal modernists’ critique of a√ectively contained, manicured art as inaccurate for the messy ways human relationships actually work. Smith is an artist of the meltdown. She pursues epiphanies that come not after a long walk by the ocean but after catching a glimpse of oneself in the eyes of others as one is crying in public: ‘‘This being Manhattan, nobody paused to watch what must have looked like a staged reenactment: a weeping woman, sat on a step, under that Lazarus plaque, huddled by boxes, far from home.’’ The interpersonal dramas from which these embarrassing epiphanies issue tend to be what the Marxist literary critic Franco Moretti calls middle-class crimes: betrayals of mutual intimacies and agreements that the law does not directly proscribe, but that are not thereby any less devastating to those a√ected by them. Her protagonists reel from the relationships they lose during such crises but also from their own confusing incapacity to articulate these relationships’ exact terms or measure the degree of guilt and resentment they ought to feel about their dissolution. Such ine√able bonds, clarified to their bearers only in moments of abandon or disappointment, have long been the subject of Smith’s writing. She explores them through the unexpectedly deep friendships and shaky marriages of White Teeth’s Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal (2000); through Alex-Li Tandem’s earnest, selfless obsessions with stardom in The Autograph Man (2002); through the heady intellectual and a√ective exchanges of On Beauty (2005) and the more sordid marital betrayals of NW (2012). She also names them as her personal and aesthetic obsessions in the essays collected in Changing My Mind (2010). Like Smith’s earlier novels, Swing Time depicts fluctuating, long-term bonds for which her characters cannot find appropriate names or rules. It also explores how these confusions are multiplied by incompatibilities or liminalities of race, gender, and class. Compared to these earlier novels, however, Swing Time is much darker and more polemical. It is animated by a fascination with the blurring of a√ective and social categories, as well as by a sharp indictment – which White Teeth or even On Beauty still curtailed, or blunted with humor – of more individualized notions of selfcontrol and self-fulfillment. Swing Time is told from the perspective of an unnamed thirty- 1 5 6 F I G L E R O W I C Z Y something female narrator who grows up in a working-class neighborhood of London with her white father and Jamaican mother. Her best friend until young adulthood is another biracial girl named Tracey, who is raised by a single mom and occasionally visited by an absentee dad. Both girls attend dance classes as children, and...

Some Aspects of Ju Yo‐han’s Novels of Translation and Adaptation

Some Aspects of Ju Yo‐han’s Novels of Translation and Adaptation

Faulkner and the Native South ed. by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and the Native Southed. by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr. Anne C. MacMaster Faulkner and the Native South, edited by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas Jr., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 256 pp. $70.00. T his volume, like one ofF aulkner' s modernist novels, presents itssubject from a number of perspectives. And the subject is a dual one: Faulkner and the Native Southfocuses on the Native Americans created by Faulkner's imagination and on the experience of the historical Chickasaw and Choctaw who originated (and in some cases remained) in the southeastern region of the United States. The collection brings together a dozen scholars from an array of fields—literary studies, anthropology, history, and Native American (or Indigenous) studies—to address common questions: (1) How do Faulkner's fictions about Native Americans compare with life as lived by Chickasaws and Choctaws and with novels written by authors who are themselves Native American? (2) Are Faulkner's Native American characters "mere stereotypes" (Howe 11) or do they transcend stereotype? (3) Do Native Americans have "a special relationship" to the land or is the "Ecological Indian" (Ethridge 135) another stereotype used "to justify dispossession" (Osburn 129)? And (4) what larger implications do the discussions in this volume have for future collaboration among the fields of southern studies, Indigenous studies, and African American studies? Several chapters measure Faulkner's Indians against external evidence, historical or literary. Ethnohistorian Patricia Galloway compares descriptions of Indian clothing in Faulkner's stories to the reports of nineteenth-century missionaries, observing that in "neither [Faulkner nor the missionaries] do we find an effort to understand how the Indian people who lived the outcomes of colonization . . . experienced those drastic changes." By reading "subtle gestures and non-Anglo habitus" in photographs of nineteenth-century Native Americans alongside archival and other historical evidence (67), Galloway attempts to recover some picture of the real experiences on which Faulkner's fictions are based. Similarly, historian Katherine M. B. Osburn sets Faulkner's stories in the context of the "stories that Mississippi Choctaws crafted about themselves" and of her own account of the Choctaw resurgence in [End Page 375]Mississippi (117). Osburn reads Faulkner's 1934 short story "Lo!"—a tall tale of Chickasaws traveling from Mississippi to Washington, DC, in the 1830s to petition Andrew Jackson—in the context of the ceremony that the Mississippi Choctaws held in 1934 to "celebrate their tribal rebirth" (123). "If Faulkner read any of the state's major papers," Osburn notes, "he knew that the allegedly vanishing Choctaws were in the process of resurrecting their tribal government" (124). Far from vanishing, the Choctaws were pressing their case by turning "the stereotypes proffered by Faulkner . . . to their political advantage" (122), as one Depression-era leader did in quoting a speech from Samuel Cobb, another Choctaw leader from a century earlier: "When you took our country, you promised us land. There is your promise in the book. Twelve times the trees have dropped their leaves, and yet we have received no land. . . . Brother: Is this truth?" (122, 128). Against such rhetoric even Faulkner's rhetoric pales, and Osburn's chapter (like Galloway's) uses Faulkner's work to reveal the perspectives of real people whom Faulkner treats in his fiction. The literary critics, unlike the historians, tend to focus on Faulkner's art, although they, too, often measure Faulkner's fictions against Native American sources. John Wharton Lowe, for example, finds parallels between Native American humor and Faulkner's in his two comic tales about Indians ("Lo!" and "A Courtship"), arguing that Faulkner uses the joke "as a 'temporary visa,' as [Sherman] Alexie puts it, into a culture he knew was alien to most of his readers" (182). While the literary critics (Lowe, Trefzer, Melanie Benson Taylor, Eric Gary Anderson, and Melanie Anderson) produce what are at times dazzlingly nuanced readings of Faulkner's portraits, the historians, anthropologists, and cultural theorists tend to see Faulkner as perpetuating "dehumanizing" stereotypes—of the vanishing Indian and/or the "ignoble savage" (Osburn 120). Conversely, Lowe describes Faulkner's Indians as "multifaceted characters who range from the...