Literary Portrait Research Articles

Литературный портрет В.Г. Шершеневича в творчестве барнаульских писателей

Imaginist poet V.G. Shershenevich died and was buried in 1942 in Barnaul. The fact of the death and burial of the capital’s author in a provincial town has become a landmark event for regional self-identification, and initiated a particular thematic line in local history and fiction. For the first time the article reveals the image of V.G. Shershenevich, which was developed in the work of Barnaul writers. The analysis of poetic and prose texts shows how the reconstruction of the last days of the poet’s life fits him into the urban landscape, how the grave becomes a semantically productive element of the locus. The basic motifs that model the image of the writer are associated with the change of poles of the oppositions “center — periphery,” “glory — oblivion,” “friend — alien (foreign),” “genius – mediocrity,” “friendship — enmity” with S.A. Yesenin. Literary portrait of Shershenevich comes from the synthesis of the features of his poetics, aesthetic attitudes, life events and the realities of the city. Altai writers tend to project literary and historical facts related to the imagist onto their own work and destiny. There is a tendency to turn the poet into a genius loci.

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Fear and Loathing in Zarahemla: The Viper on the Hearth and the Book of Mormon as Denominational Attack

Fear and Loathing in Zarahemla: <i>The Viper on the Hearth</i> and the Book of Mormon as Denominational Attack

Le miroir déformant de la littérature: portraits dans La Force du Désir de Marie Krysinska

The Distorting Mirror of Literature: Character Portraits in "La Force du Désir" by Marie Krysinska A roman à clef, where the presence of fictional and nonfictional elements is obvious, is a powerful framework for literary portraits of the author’s contemporaries. The degree of deformation, be it glamorizing or devaluing, depends on several factors, among which the pleasure of playing hide and seek is not the least. Each reference, even a demeaning one, brings out of the shadow of the past both prominent and background characters, as well as important events, all from the author’s point of view. Through this display, an image of a very complex environment emerges, where the worst rubs shoulders with the best, and where the constraints of daily life or loyalty to ideals impose difficult choices with very serious consequences. The author observes the sociological phenomena that affect her environment and, while making sharp criticisms, seeks to find a remedy for the wound that destroys Art and the Artist.

Commemorative Literary Portrait of V. M. Shukshin

The article focuses on the memorial lyrics about V. M. Shukshin as a way to model his image as a writer, director and actor. The focus is on the poetic obituaries by V. Vysotsky, A. Voznesensky, E. Yevtushenko, R. Rozhdestvensky as precedent texts for the subsequent memorial tradition which developed into a corpus of works by less known poets. The memorial "supertext" on Shukshin includes a regional component associated with the "native place" of the writer, as well as more universal motifs of life and cinema in their contradictory unity, creative method (author “from grassroots”), literary evolution (ancestors and successors). The literary portrait of Shukshin is built on symbolic details: cheekbones, kersey boots, guilder rose, birch, etc. The poets mention the films that are significant in his biography: the prophetic “Kalina Krasnaya”, the fatal “They Fought for the Motherland”, unfilmed “Stepan Razin”. The pragmatic aspect of commemorative practices reveals a negative component: a parasitic self-affirmation in culture through a public commemoration of a departed celebrity.

A Tale of Two Bureaucracies

Daniel Jenkin-Smith, “A Tale of Two Bureaucracies: The Formal Development of Mid-Nineteenth-Century French and British Office Novels” (pp. 93–123) The history of British and French society over the long nineteenth century can be framed as two contrasting histories of bureaucratization. In France, a “rational” body of organizational rules and procedures coalesced quickly around the state, taking their paradigmatic form during the First Republic and Empire (1792–1814) but stagnating thereafter. In Britain, these structures developed piecemeal, and over a longer time, gaining relative coherence by the midcentury. In both cases, however, office work became a major social, ideological, and cultural phenomenon, one that warranted literary portrayal despite its apparent unconduciveness to conventional narrative forms. In this article I illustrate the shifting character of “office novels” within these contexts, and I accordingly operate from both a comparative and a longitudinal perspective: comparing novels from France and Britain produced during the midcentury period (pivotal in the history of bureaucracy and of the novel) that focus on office life. I argue that the changing role of the office career between William Makepeace Thackeray’s abortive office Bildungsroman The History of Samuel Titmarsh (1841) and Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1858) reflects the reform, saturation, and ideological legitimation of bureaucratic forms in Britain over this period. Meanwhile, the transition from Honoré de Balzac’s highly reflexive satirical novel Les Employés (1844) to Émile Gaboriau’s office-hopping Picaresque Les Gens de Bureau (1862) reflects an increasing jadedness in France about the ability of these structures to change.

Między więzami rodzinnymi a obowiązkami wasala. Aymon z Dordogne w dwóch wersjach Renaut de Montauban – pieśni epickiej i prozatorskiej przeróbce

Between the Family Ties and a Vassal’s Obligations: Aymon of Dordogne in the Two Versions of Renaut de Montauban – chanson de geste and Its Prose Adaptation This article attempts to answer the questions concerning ways of resolving conflicts between two types of obligations: those owed to one’s family and those resulting from feudal relations. An analysis of literary portrayals such a conflict of obligation and its solutions is carried out here on the basis of the heroic epic (chanson de geste) Renaut de Montauban, with Aymon, the father of rebellious brothers opposing Charles the Great as a protagonist who has to make a choice between his loyalty to the monarch and taking the side of his own children. The article compared two versions of the story: the one from the 13th-century manuscript Douce 121 and its 15th-century prose adaptation, included in the manuscript Sloane 960. The two versions are juxtaposed in order to find out if Aymon’s attitude to his obligations is depicted differently depending on the time of creating the text. First, an analysis is presented of the oath (forjurement) made by Aymon before the monarch, in which he accepts the obligation not to help his children, and to fight against them. Then, on the basis of selected fragments of both versions, the protagonist’s understanding of material support and the duty to fight against his own children is discussed. The comparative analyses of the two versions indicate that much as Aymon does not exclude the possibility of offering material support to his sons, e.g. by supplying them with food or money, he never considers the possibility of providing a military support. On the contrary, he is actively engaged in a fight against them, which may be a consequence of the oath. According to the law, breaking the oath by offering military support was penalized by death, whereas material support could result in a less grievous punishment. It is also demonstrated that the duties with respect to one’s family are treated much more seriously in the later version of the epic, with a clear suggestion that they should outweigh the obligations to the feudal lord.

Образы писателей-современников в литературных портретах удмуртского прозаика С. Самсонова

The aim of the study is to determine the genre features of the literary portrait in the creative work of the Udmurt prose writer S. Samsonov (1931-1991) from the viewpoint of the development of new principles in constructing the image of a person of a creative profession in Russian publicism. Scientific novelty of the paper is accounted for by the fact that the genre of literary portrait in S. Samsonov’s essay writings has not yet been the subject of a separate study. It is the first time that S. Samsonov’s literary-publicistic texts on Udmurt writers have been introduced into scientific use and the process of transformation of the traditional type of topical and portrait essays into the genre of literary portrait in the national literature has been shown using S. Samsonov’s works as an example. The paper describes the principles used in the genre of literary portrait dedicated to the authentic recreation of the images of the most significant Udmurt writers of the second half of the XX century. Unlike traditional biographical narratives and portrait essays, Samsonov’s genre of literary portrait focuses on the image of an intellectual character recreated on the basis of the author’s memories and observations. The results of the study indicate the emergence of a new genre entity, i.e. the literary portrait, in the Udmurt literature of the late XX century. By analysing S. Samsonov’s essay texts it is possible to identify the genre-forming features of the literary portrait, which are determined by the author’s desire to show the creative appearance and personal traits of a contemporary writer.

Mark Twain’s Rival Washoe Correspondents: William Wright and J. Ross Browne

Abstract As a contribution to a literary portrait of Nevada that can provide background for Roughing It, this article examines two newspaper correspondents who were contemporaries of Sam Clemens to discern similarities and differences in their travel writings: William Wright, who also worked for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise; and J. Ross Browne, who traveled to Virginia City to report on the beginning of the Comstock silver strike for Harper’s Monthly. Both writers evince the vividness, intimacy, and accurate detail Mark Twain said defined a good correspondent. Though both writers employ comic elements, Browne comes closer to the Mark Twain persona in his willingness to burlesque and satirize.

Echoes behaving badly? Rhetorical and acoustic experimentalism in the echo fantasias of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and his contemporaries

Abstract The 17th-century ‘echo fantasia’ for keyboard has long posed problems of classification and attribution. This article focuses on a particularly problematic example of the genre, the Echo Fantasia in d attributed to Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (d4). Once expurgated from the Sweelinck canon, d4 differs substantially from its compatriots, most notably in its erratic echo scheme in which some echoes are marked louder than their antecedents, and others take the shape of improvisatory variants. Viewing d4 from a wider perspective, this article positions the echo fantasia at the intersection of early 17th-century rhetorical and acoustic experimentalism. On the one hand, literary portrayals of the figure of Echo relied on rhetorical devices—such as anadiplosis—that also characterize d4. On the other hand, d4’s misbehaving echoes evoke the playful experimentalism of early scientists investigating echoes, including Francis Bacon, Isaac Beeckman and Marin Mersenne. Akin to a miniature musical laboratory, the echo fantasia was a genre in which the strangest echo effects could be replicated at the organ.

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn's<i>Ibsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Works</i>and Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

Contributors

Contributors

On a Literary Portrait of Fascism

On a Literary Portrait of Fascism

Perceptions of Teenage Psychological Disorder

The twenty-first century brought unprecedented rates of teenage psychological disorder (PD), with conditions such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia reaching all-time highs. Young adolescents, despite having been recognized as a psychologically vulnerable demographic, are constantly excluded in their own mental health evaluations, and teachers in the American education system play a pivotal role in addressing this gap. Thus, in this paper, I specifically explore how high school students and teachers perceive teenage PD by examining their opinions on literary portrayals of mentally ill adolescents. This article thoroughly investigates this inquiry by utilizing quantitative, open-ended survey research followed by a thematic and comparative analysis. A total of 43 students and 24 teachers participated in the study, and I identified five recurring themes throughout their responses: the validity of teenagers’ struggles, PD’s relation to teenagers’ school life, PD’s relation to teenagers’ social life, trust in professional treatment, and the potential of recovery. My findings demonstrated that although both groups showed a mutual concern for the mental welfare of teenagers, there were stark differences between students’ and teachers’ perceptions of teenage PD. These results present a fundamental ideological dichotomy that must be bridged in order to help adolescents benefit from their schools, and an implementation of comprehensive mental health and social and emotional well-being (SEWB) training for all teachers may be the first step to achieving this goal.

Crossing the Boundary: An Investigation of Transnationalism, Transculturalism and Transracial Marriages in Jane Katjavivi’s Undisciplined Heart and Trudie Amulungu’s Taming My Elephant

ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is to explore the literary portrayal of transnational identities, transculturalism and transracial marriages as presented by two expatriate female writers who have made their niche in the postcolonial Namibian autobiographical (sub) genre, namely, Taming My Elephant by Amulungu (2016) and Undisciplined Heart by Katjavivi (2010). The paper explores the different challenges faced by two migrant and transracial couples from different backgrounds which include issues of communication breakdown, a lack of understanding of the partner’s background, racial differences and indifference in the communities. The couples’ families hesitated to welcome the spouses into their families, whereas the couples’ relationships and motivations varied and are couched in shifting arenas, yet their interactions created opportunities for the circulation, promotion, and adaptation of a wide range of cultural, political, and social influences. Amulungu and Katjavivi are tracing their interactions within and among liberation movements, being hosted as a transmigrants, whilst facing a wider set of external actors, revealing the lasting legacies that have too often been eclipsed by dominant national histories. The paper postulates that the selected autobiographers allied with more than a single culture, and are pioneers as transracial couples in a newly independent Namibia as well as persistent beings who are portrayed as compassionate, assertive, and enduring people.

Rendering visible through language: writing drawings and the literary portrait in Anne Carson’s Men in the Off Hours

In 1992, Anne Carson published Short Talks, her first book of poetry. According to her, the book was initially conceived as a collection of drawings. In the process of its being creafted, however, the titles for these drawings gradually expanded until they became forty-five prose poems that ended up displacing the drawings from the final publication. Such displacement not only marked the beginning of a fruitful career, but also foreshadowed an enigmatic relationship which would be constantly addressed in her later work: that between drawing and writing. Even when Carson’s meditations on verbal and visual media are not constrained to the relationship between drawing and poetry, this connection is crucial to understanding her poetics, since, as she has stated many times, she considers her poems more as drawings than as texts. In this article, I embrace this interartistic provocation and, by analyzing poems from her work Men in the Off Hours (2000), I examine in which sense she considers her poems as drawings. The poems are read in the light of her theoretical proposals, especially the ones set out in her academic study, Economy of the Unlost (1999), in which she explores the relationship between visual arts and poetry.

The Fluctuations in Self-Narration in 1930s Colonial Taiwan：On Zhang Wen-huan’s “Father’s Demand” and Conversion Literature

This paper re-appraises the Taiwanese colonial writer Zhang Wen-huan’s Japanese novel, “Father’s Demand” (Chichi No Yōkyū), published in 1935, as a form of “conversion literature” in terms of its narrative style and in relation to the nexus of ideas in the literary field of its time. First, I examine the difference between the contemporary autobiography and the literary portrayal of popular life on the basis of the prevailing literary discourses in 1930s Taiwan, and I then show the threshold or hybrid status of Zhang Wen-huan’s texts, positioned between the two genres. Next, I examine the discourse of “conversion literature” and of the “I-novel” in 1930s Japan and clarify how Zhang’s “Father’s Demand” reflected the perspective of the literary elite but also differentiated itself from their work. Furthermore, by paying attention to the representation of prisoners in the work, I clarify the difference between the depiction of intellectual subjectivity in “Father’s Demand” and in other Japanese works of conversion literature. By analyzing the letters in the final section of the novel, I present the contradictions in the subject formation of colonial intellectuals and identify their prior state. Through these analyses, I reconsider the so-called “conversion” in “Father’s Demand,” viewing it not as a return to a specific identity, but as a focus on the body and other pre-subjective entities.

Жанровые особенности мемориальных произведений

Research relevance: this article discusses memoirs features, one of the novel genres, which is a kind of epic in literature. Research purpose: to reveal originality and features of memoirs by comparing them with the forms of autobiographies, letters, literary portraits, memoirs and other similar documentary works of art. Research methods and materials: in this article, comparative-historical and descriptive research methods were used. Research results: according to scientists, memoirs are a branch of non-fiction, as well as a form of fiction. Conclusions: signs of memories are presented, the distinctive features of memoirs were listed, a detailed analysis was carried out, as a result of which an attempt is made to reveal the nature of memoirs as a genre, indicating their distinctive features.

Complicity at a distance: commemorating problematic involvement in perpetration in contemporary Central and Eastern European literatures.

Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in 'the West' from the portrayed violence in 'the East', and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.

Textual Infection: Syphilis in Grimmelshausen’s Courasche

Scholarship on seventeenth-century concerns about print has highlighted how writers drew on diseases like syphilis as metaphors to criticize the spread of dangerous ideas through print. This essay argues that, in certain texts, the epidemiological threat of the printed text goes beyond the metaphorical and becomes literal. By examining the way Grimmelshausen presents syphilis in his 1669 novel, Courasche, and outlining how ideas of infection in the work intersect with concerns about printing, circulating, and reading texts, this essay demonstrates how literary portrayals of syphilis can also claim to have real, material effects on their readers.