Pat Barker Research Articles

A Psychoanalytic Study of the Novel The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

A Psychoanalytic Study of the Novel The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

War from the Margins: Metalepsis and Metonymy in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch

Dans leurs romans de guerre historiques, Toby’s Room et The Night Watch, Pat Barker et Sarah Waters posent la question de la fidélité de la représentation. Cet article entend montrer comment, par le biais de la métalepse et de la métonymie, les deux écrivaines proposent une appréhension de la guerre fondée sur l’expérience des destructions qu’elle entraîne plutôt que sur la conformité aux faits historiques. Barker et Waters interrogent ainsi nos perceptions et nos représentations de ce qui, dans un événement individuel, collectif ou historique, mérite d’être mis en lumière, et nous font percevoir les processus d’invisibilisation qui sont le corolaire de ces « coups de projecteur ». Leurs récits sont relatés depuis des points de vue marginaux, mettant ainsi en évidence la façon dont certaines vies sont disqualifiées, perçues comme indignes ou « ungrievable » (Butler 2004). La métalepse et la métonymie deviennent des moyens de repenser le pouvoir politique de la représentation et de proposer des récits des et depuis les marges, qui tentent de réhabiliter les histoires oubliées des guerres .

Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

This article compares cultural production about 1980s working-class industrial England with that of contemporary, middle-class rural Ireland in order to identify aesthetic through lines in the portrayal of social reproductive violence across both early- and later-stage neoliberalism. It argues that, despite their differences in setting and demographic, novels by Pat Barker and Mike McCormack use peripheral political experience to show the bodies of women bearing the brunt of late capitalism's horrors. Barker's Union Street (1982) serves as an early warning of the neoliberal consensus-to-come, bringing to life the geographic peripheralisation that would accompany deindustrialisation. It portrays the conflicted dynamic between childhood and capital, also anticipating the ways in which care work would increasingly be externalised onto women in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. This overlaps with the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too's portrayal of childhood sexual vulnerability, as well as Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and its rendering of capitalism's consumption of women. Instead of the realism for which these films are known, Union Street uses gothic modes and the motif of vomiting in ‘irrealist’ fashion. So too, Mike McCormack's Mayo-set 2016 novel Solar Bones employs spectrality, as well as ideas of contamination, to evoke the damage wrought by a now-entrenched neoliberalism as it imperils the middle classes. The novel's recognition of female social reproductive labour is more oblique, but women are again shown to be at the coalface of neoliberal violence, their very bodies marshalled to detect and, crucially, resist gendered precarity. In this, I draw parallel with the Dundalk-set film Kissing Candice (2017) , which uses gothic tropes to show rural dispossession writ large through the body of a teenage girl.

An interpretation of the imagery symbol of the Panopticon in The Eye in the Door

Abstract The Eye in the Door is one of the masterpieces of Pat Barker, a famous contemporary British female writer. In this novel the image of the Panopticon stands out because of its high frequency and detailed descriptions, and it also becomes the key to the interpretation of the novel because of its relation to the fates of many characters and its metaphorical meanings. From the perspective of semiotics, this paper makes a progressive interpretation of this imagery symbol from three aspects: the features of the Panopticon in the surface sense, the surveillance function and power mechanism of the Panopticon in the deeper sense, and the Panopticon as the metaphor of the British society during the First World War in the social and cultural sense, then points out that the imagery symbol of the Panopticon is the encoding and embodiment of the writer’s ideas. Through this imagery symbol, the writer criticizes the disciplinary characteristics and totalitarian tendency of the British society during the First World War and expresses her reflection on the First World War and its causes.

Artificial Memory in Pat Barker's Double Vision

Questions about artificial memory have become particularly urgent in recent years since memory is so crucial. it must show up in modern art. Artists question its practical role and attempt to unravel the complex web of societal and personal expectations surrounding it. Pat Barker's Double Vision (2003) actively explores such concern in which she tries to reflect the effect of the artificial memory throughout her characters in their actions by using their experiences in the war to be beneficial for people who didn't experience war before. Whereas the critical conversation has often boiled the complexity of the relationship between the traumas that the characters had experienced during the war and the artificial memory down to a debate for or against the view of not facing reality and pretending that the world is more secure than it is, That is, when the burden of the memory becomes too much to bear, a person may seek temporary relief by escaping to his mind by creating an imaginary world. Barker's quintessentially narrative and dialogic solution suggests a new and unusual way to come to terms with the problem. Rather than simply rehashing the debate, The novel underlines both the need of putting into words what was formerly unutterable and the immense impact that the system of memory has on one's life and surroundings.

Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Union Street

Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Union Street

Feminist literary revisionism and the #MeToo movement

In the years since the #MeToo movement began, there has been a resurgence of feminist retellings of ancient myth. Novels such as Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne (2021) form a cohort of books regularly appearing on bestseller charts and award shortlists. This paper traces the rising popularity of contemporary feminist revisions of classical myth and explores the ways in which such works utilise myth to depict modern concerns. Revisionary mythmaking is defined against other retellings of traditional literature, such as biblical narratives and fairytales, locating the appeal of classical myth in the “origin-figure” of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca and wife to Odysseus. Identifying Barbara Clayton’s A Penelopean Poetics (2004) and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) as two works – one theoretical, one creative – that expound the methodology of feminist revisionism, this paper demonstrates how the feminist revisionist mode presents writers with a rich and rewarding vehicle for engaging with the #MeToo conversation, particularly when mining the material of classical myth. This paper also argues for examining novels over short stories and poetry collections because of the form’s connections to and emergence from the epic.

Художественные особенности романа Пэт Баркер «Безмолвие девушек»

The article attempts to analyse the literary features of the novel “The Silence of the Girls” by English writer Pat Barker as an "anti-Iliad". The author considers which works form the basis of the plot of Barker's novel. The features that oppose the novel to the "Iliad" and Euripides' tragedy "The Trojans" are noted.

BREAKING THE SILENCE: WOMAN AS A SUBJECT IN PAT BARKER’S THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS

Pat Barker’s latest novel The Silence of the Girls (2018) retells the events taking place in The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, Achilles’ bed-slave. The aim of this paper is to analyse The Silence of the Girls in the light of écriture feminine, a term coined by Hélène Cixous in her essay, “The Laugh of Medusa” first published in 1975. It is found out that in her novel, The Silence of the Girls, Barker foregrounds the notions of the female body, female voice and experience, and thus, problematises the dominant and hegemonic systems of representation in language and culture by focusing on the female body, female voice and experience. Moreover, this study asserts that the concept of bisexuality, one of the important features of écriture feminine, is also evident in the novel as the author also writes from the perspectives of male characters, Achilles and Patroclus. In that sense, the depiction of male perspective and experience also helps to challenge and undermine the notions of heroism and masculinity that are one of the most persisting elements in Western myths and culture. It is concluded that The Silence of the Girls challenges and debunks the age-old patriarchal systems of representation that subdue the female body, voice, perspective and experience by proposing a new kind of female subjectivity that frustrates the phallocentric representations of female characters in the works of literature drawing their sources from myths, age-old cultural assumptions and practices.

Thanatos in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer and Barker’s Achilles, Barnes and Saunders: Warding off Death before Release into the Unknown

This paper offers an existential approach to writers’ responses to death, evaluating their different views regarding our ultimate destiny, Thanatos. It considers the deliberations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the archetypal death-ponderer, and Homer’s Achilles, approaching our own time through contemporaries like Julian Barnes, George Saunders and Pat Barker. These writings spanning hundreds of years demonstrate our desire to evade or control death, while anticipating ultimate judgment for behaviour in this life, before loosening our attachment to life in accepting our final fate. We watch Hamlet’s concern for his father’s ghost tortured in purgatory and his wish for revenge, as it became surpassed by Hamlet’s interrogations concerning his own mortality, still obsessed by death, to which force he finally surrenders. While Achilles had initially embraced a gloriously heroic, youthful death, Homer subsequently shows him mourning the loss of his life in Hades; Pat Barker shows Achilles as reconciled to death, even while attached to life in considering his child’s future. The contemporary George Saunders presents Lincoln’s young son caught in a liminal bardo of the dead, who are trapped in attachment to their mortal state, while Willie is enabled to transition to his final state of possible judgment and closure. Julian Barnes’ wish-fulfilment dream or desire of heaven offers this ideal as a debased, corporeal paradise, leaving his character longing for meaning, even while trapped in the limitations of his own personality. Visions and dreams from Homer and Shakespeare onwards offer cryptic clues regarding unknown future states. These literary reflections through disparate eras indicate the human aspiration to evade death and whatever lies beyond it, while often positing a final surrender to death, alongside a wish for it to make sense of life through karmic resolution.

Thinking in Archipelagic Terms: An Interview with John Brannigan

John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.

Manti kakon: The Uncanny Prophecies of Calchas in the Iliad and Beyond

Abstract This article examines the practice of prophecy, delivered both through interpretation of signs and direct (enthusiastic) means, and how this practice relates to the uncanny. It discusses the relation of Freud's “The Uncanny,” along with Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, in reference to both what is known of ancient practice and how this is presented in ancient epic and reception texts. The key focus is Calchas, the prophet of the Iliad, and how he is rendered in ancient and modern reception, with specific attention to Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, Seneca's Trojan Women, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings, Michael Hughes's Country, and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. This article also considers how prophecy in mythology is portrayed as uncanny, and how elements of enthusiastic prophecy heighten this uncanny aspect.

Breaking the Silence of Homer’s Women in Pat Barker’s the Silence of The Girls

Since time immemorial, women have been silenced by patriarchal societies in most, if not all, cultures. Women voices are ignored, belittled, mocked, interrupted or shouted down. The aim of this study examines how the contemporary writer Pat Barker breaks the silence of Homer’s women in her novel The Silence of The Girl (2018). A semantic interplay will be conducted with the themes in an attempt to show how Pat Barker’s novel fit into the Greek context of the Trojan War. The Trojan War begins with the conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece. Homer’s The Iliad, a popular story in the mythological of ancient Greece, gives us the story from the perspective of the Greeks, whereas Pat Barker’s new novel gives us the story from the perspective of the queen- turned slave Briseis. Pat Barker’s, The Silence of the Girls, written in 2018, readdresses The Iliad to uncover the unvoiced tale of Achilles’ captive, who is none other than Briseis. In the Greek saga, Briseis is the wife of King Mynes of Lyrnessus, an ally of Troy. Pat Barker as a Postmodernist writer, readdresses the Trojan War in his novel through the representation of World War One, with dominant ideologies. The novel illustrates not only how Briseis’s has tolerated and survived her traumatic experiences, but also, how she has healed and composed her fragmented life together. Homer’s poem prognosticates the fall of Troy, whereas Barker’s novel begins with the fall Lyrnessus, Briseis’ home that was destroyed by Achilles and his men. Hence, Pat Barker uses intertextuality in her novel, engages both the tradition of the great epic and the brutality of the contemporary world. She revives the Trojan War with graphic pictorial vividness by fictionalizing World War in her novel. Through her novel, she gives Briseis a voice, illuminates the passiveness of women and exposes the negative traits of a patriarchal society.

"Enemies Within": Pat Barker's Great War and Margaret Thatcher's New Right

"Enemies Within": Pat Barker's Great War and Margaret Thatcher's New Right

Of mice and women: Pat Barker’s retelling of the “Iliad”

The article discusses Pat Barker’s latest novel, The Silence of the Girls (2018), which follows the events of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis and other women abducted and reduced to sex-slaves during the Trojan conflict. The main focus of the analysis are the ways in which Barker challenges the ellipses of the Homeric original. By freeing the silenced voices of unwilling and powerless participants in the epic events, she deconstructs one of the key myths of the Western civilization, exposing its inglorious, misogynistic underpinnings. Additionally, what comes under scrutiny is Barker’s exploration of the immediacy of sensory experience as she describes the viscera of war, as well as the messy realities of life in a rat-infested army camp. Artykuł omawia najnowszą powieść Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls (2018), która stanowi przepisanie wydarzeń Iliady z perspektywy Bryzejdy i innych kobiet wziętych w niewolę i sprowadzonych do roli nałożnic w trakcie wojny trojańskiej. Głównym celem analizy jest prześledzenie sposobów, w jaki Barker rozprawia się z przemilczeniami homeryckiej opowieści. Uwalniając stłumione głosy bezsilnych kobiet, wplątanych wbrew woli w przedstawione w eposie konflikty, pisarka dekonstruuje jeden z kluczowych mitów zachodniej cywilizacji, odsłaniając jego niechlubne, mizoginiczne podstawy. Ponadto artykuł zwraca uwagę na wyeksponowanie bezpośredniości doznań zmysłowych podczas opisów okropności wojny, a także w obrazach życia w obozowisku wojskowym dotkniętym przez plagę szczurów.

Madness and the Social Link

ABSTRACT In this paper, I contend the necessity of a feminine agency in order to survive deshumanization. Examples are taken from Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen, anthropologist and psychoanalyst William Rivers in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, who was called a male mother by traumatized officers returning from the front, Diotima for Socrates in the Symposium, Dulcinea for Don Quixote, and my experience in a psychiatric hospital situated on the battle fields of the previous war in the north of France.

Shell Shock and the Legacy of the Victorian Past in the Present: Remembering WWI in Pat Barker’s Another World

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success—the First World War and the experiences of its combatants—and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of ‘shell shock’, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture.

Linguistic Revelations: A Stylistic Study of Sassoon’s Post-Traumatic Experience in Barker’s Regeneration

This paper adopts Halliday‟s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to study Siegfried Sassoon, a major character in Pat Barker‟s Regeneration. SFG shows the relationships between various process types and the participants who participate in the action. Accordingly, Barker`s characterization of Sassoon is better understood through the analysis of the linguistic choices they make. Therefore, the study claims that Barker‟s and Sassoon‟s linguistic choices can reveal many aspects of the latter‟s world view and psychology. One such issue demonstrated by Regeneration a psychological disorder inflicting the soldiers is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Linguistic Revelations: A Stylistic Study of Sassoon’s Post-Traumatic Experience in Barker’s Regeneration

This paper adopts Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to study Siegfried Sassoon, a major character in Pat Barker’s Regeneration. SFG shows the relationships between various process types and the participants who participate in the action. Accordingly, Barker`s characterization of Sassoon is better understood through the analysis of the linguistic choices they make. Therefore, the study claims that Barker’s and Sassoon’s linguistic choices can reveal many aspects of the latter’s world view and psychology. One such issue demonstrated by Regeneration a psychological disorder inflicting the soldiers is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Women writers and the fictionalisation of the classics

ABSTRACTTranslation studies scholars have traditionally studied texts that are called translations in the receiving cultures. But in the age of mass media, blogs, online journals, reader reviews, and fan fiction, the latest generation has taken translation to a new stage. Linguistic accuracy, once the primary criterion for analysis, recedes in importance; creativity and innovation are valued, and social and political factors move to the fore. This paper discusses the gender politics of such a movement. In my book Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (2017), I looked at film, theatre, and music adaptations, focusing on how rewritings can effect social change. This essay turns to the fictionalisation of classical texts by contemporary women writers, including Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, and Madeline Miller. I suggest that translation scholars be open to new forms being introduced by such women writers and focus on more social arena where political change is already underway.