Realist Text Research Articles

Real Domesticity

Real Domesticity

‘Things We’d Rather Forget’: Trauma, the Troubles, and Magical Realism in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Women’s Short Stories

The post-Good Friday/Belfast Agreement period has witnessed an efflorescence of magical realist fiction by Northern Irish women authors. Although these texts were published during an ostensibly ‘post-conflict’ moment, recurrent trauma linked to the Troubles manifests in the form of magical realist narrative elements such as surrealist, fantastic, and phantasmal events and characters. This essay considers the ways in which the magical realist mode is useful to women writers within the context of contemporary Northern Irish culture. The dialectical structure of magical realism makes this mode well-suited to post-Agreement, ‘post-conflict’ literature, which ricochets back and forth across the ‘post-’ marker in order to explore how the past impinges upon the present. This study analyses work by Jan Carson, Bernie McGill, and Roisin O’Donnell, authors whose magical realist texts address the ‘living ghosts’ of the Troubles. Their stories investigate the transgenerational memory of trauma and the ‘legacy’ of the conflict and consider the ways in which these are transmitted. They examine the impact of this transmission on the family unit – particularly upon younger generations – and contemplate the nature of the society that they will inherit. These writers utilise the magical realist mode as a means to challenge received narratives about Northern Ireland and to engage with the memory of trauma, which has been sublimated by the progressivist discourse of the Agreement.

ON THE ISSUE ABOUT LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING OF A LITERARY TEXT

In the article the problem of plurality of interpretations of a literary text is investigated. The article develops new aspects of typology of understanding, according to which linguoconceptual analysis of the short story by V. Shukshin «I want to live» is carried out. The plurality of interpretations of a literary text is explained by the objective properties of the text itself and by the peculiarities of the perceiving consciousness.The principal properties of a literary text are the presence of implicit meanings, subtext and the ability of linguistic units to a semantic increment: the word in the work of art expresses more than it means in thesystem of language, acquires a symbolic or individual author’s meaning or actualizes several of its meanings. The possibility of discovering and understanding of these features depends on the degree of social, mentaland linguistic development of the individual. The relationship between the level of understanding and the generation of different interpretations of the same text is established. At the semantic level of understanding, the reader is limited to the event series of the literary text. At the cognitive level of understanding, a more developed linguistic personality focuses not so much on the factual as on the conceptual information explicated in the text. The highest level of understanding of the literary text – approaching to the author’s idea – is determined by the reader’s ability to catch not only explicit conceptual information, but also implicit, which is hidden behind repetitive details and images and reflects the author’s experience of mastering reality. The plurality of interpretations often reveals a semantic inversion, which can be manifested even in the interpretation of realistic texts. The typology of understanding reflects the degree of complexity of the process of interpretation of a literary text and opens up opportunities for the development of a linguistic personality.

Między istotnością dzieła a konkretyzacją czytelniczą ucznia... Miejsce teorii literatury w szkolnym kształceniu literackim (zarys problemu)

Between the sense of work and students’ reading concretisation. The significance of theory of literature in school education of literature (the outline of problem) The article depicts a synthesis of views on the role and significance of theory of literature in school practice of reading from the interwar period to contemporary times. It consists of three parts. In the first one the authors discuss the view of S. Skwarczyńska who sees theory of literature as fundamental in developing the analytical and interpretative skills of high school students. A reflection of textual reality in reader’s consciousness depends on the sense of literary work and its concretisation (or individuality, which is independent from reader’s perception). This view (and other scholars’ beliefs) did not solve more difficult issues, such as how to combine the analysis of the work structure with the involvement of student’s emotions. In later stages of the development of didactics of literature, the rift between the methods of text interpretation and theory of cognition, the aim of which is an aesthetic experience, did not offer satisfying methodological solutions. In the second part of the article the authors discuss a variety of methods serving to “improve”/modify the structural concept (of B. Chrząstowska), retaining its most significant elements: systematisation and organisation of students’ literary experience. These activities were inspired by new trends in the development of humanities thought (hermeneutics, cultural theory of literature, anthropology, poetics of experience). They recognize the primacy of reading over poetics, and interpretation over theory of literature which is given an important, anthropo-cognitive role. One of such proposals, which was fully used in I like it!, the series of course books (of Z.A. Kłakówna and others) designed for all levels of school Polish language and literature education, was discussed in the third part of the article. The place of theory of literature in the system of science of literature was changed over many years; as a result, its role in school education decreased. Contemporary didactic discourse demonstrates the complexity of the problem but it does not solve it unambiguously. It does not offer a “readymade” knowledge on the universal order of analytical and interpretation practices, but it obligates Polish philology teachers to be creative and to search for best solutions for their students. As such, it requires a professional philological preparation during the time of studies.

The Popularization of Environmental Rights in TED Talks

Abstract Knowledge about the discursive strategies employed in environmental communication when addressing social practices is fundamental in order to understand how the public’s active engagement and behavioral change can be brought about, encouraged or discouraged through environmental discourse. This paper purports to investigate the representation and popularization of environmental rights in media texts, with particular focus on TED talks. More specifically, the analysis aims to explore which and how communicative meanings are continuously constructed around environmental issues. The popularization strategies present in a collection of TED talks are investigated, and processes of accommodation and simplification are analyzed with the aim to point out any discrepancies between the nature of rights in legal texts, and their textual realization in non-legal examples. The analysis traces the malleability of terminology related to environmental rights and shows how the selective usage of qualifying words like “sustainability” and “solidarity” can contribute to the fungibility of the concept of “environmental right” itself. The paper also emphasizes the broad social importance assumed by the mismatch between the need for clear legal definitions and the leverage of vague terminology to favor specific policies.

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

When social knowledge turns mathematical – The role of formalisation in the sociology of time

The paper argues that a mathematical approach might contribute to the consolidation of time as an epistemic object, while strengthening the sociology of time as a more influential domain in social sciences. This might be accomplished due to the performative role of mathematical formalisations. Also, it means appropriating the textual reality resulted in formalising processes as a space which researchers act through and upon. Thus, mathematical formalisations should be understood not only as modelling and data processing devices but also as relevant actors in networks of knowledge production. In this context, we reassess the practice of formalisation by proposing a vocabulary through which mathematical language might be used to meaningfully approach the socio-temporal order, with positive consequences in the reinforcement of a scientific community of practice.

Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann

Reviewed by: Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory by Jonathan B. Edelmann Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (bio) Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory. By Jonathan B. Edelmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 251. isbn 78-0-19-964154-3. Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory is a conceptually ambitious book, because it seeks to articulate a program and a position so novel that there is scarcely any extant literature to draw on. The reader with a background in the study of Hinduism and Indian philosophy is likely to be puzzled by the juxtaposition of topics indicated by the title of the book. But what Jonathan Edelmann is setting out to do is to create an area of work in the study of Hindu thought that is almost entirely missing in comparison to the work that has been done on Christianity (and to a lesser extent on other religious traditions): how should a person or community committed to a particular sacred narrative and transcendental reality engage with the methods, epistemic processes, findings, and truth claims of contemporary science? Part of the puzzlement is over the choice of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as the locus of the Hindu worldview in this dialogue. It would be understandable if one were to think that the systematic philosophical writings of Vedāntins of various schools—a Vedānta Deṣika or a Madhusūdana Sarasvati—were more appropriate because of their self-evident objective of developing a single coherent position on devotion, epistemology, metaphysics, and action. But Edelmann suggests (although he does not explicitly argue for his choice of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa) that this text offers a "world-view" that can be compared to "contemporary Darwinism," being a comprehensive existential position. For him, this text "is a devotional crystallization" of "Vedic, Upaniṣadic, Vedāntic, Tantric, and Indian philosophical thought, such as Sāṃkhya and yoga" (p. 1), a sort of maximal textual realization of how to think and exist in a God-given world. Although the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is in fact important to all the many Vaiṣṇava traditions, Edelmann's remarks throughout the book point to an approach to it through the Gauḍiya stream of Vaiṣṇavism. When he talks of a Bhāgavata Theory [End Page 648] of Knowledge, it turns out that in fact the text by itself does not explicitly offer one; rather, within its capacious bounds it adverts didactically to philosophical ideas that Edelmann can then trace back, in a way broadly influenced by Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇava teachers, to more explicit arguments in Nyāya, Vedānta, and other systems. This is entirely consistent with the Gauḍiya intepretation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a compendious statement of doctrine, but it would have helped for this methodology to be made explicit in order to not be vulnerable to an unsympathetic critic, who might quibble at the presumption of a historical and philosophical relationship between the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and, say, the Nyāya Sūtras. The other part of the puzzle will have to do with "biology," by which, it turns out, Edelmann mostly means evolutionary biology. But, in fact, for much of the book, even evolutionary biology stands in for a discussion of the larger implications of modern and contemporary science itself, for it is that which is juxtaposed with the Bhāgavata Purāṇa's treatment of "nature" or "world." With this in mind, my remarks will mostly concern the scientific episteme as a whole. Edelmann starts with an introduction to the framework of the book, on the relationship between religion and science, the nature of a worldview, and the two worldviews that he wants to bring into dialogue, the biological/scientific and the Bhāgavata. The first chapter provides an overview of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and an outline of the contemporary evolutionary reading of Darwinian theory. Chapter 2 sets up the tensions between the ontology of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and contemporary physicalism, and, taking a cue from some Christian responses to physicalism, suggests...

Об акциональности / неакциональности семантического компонента имени и его актуализации в адъективном словосочетании

The article considers peculiarities of linguistic expression and textual realization of the category of attributive. Certain semantic regularities of attributive word combination are investigated from the point of view of the presence of the action component in the structure of meaning of substantive and factors of its actualization. The question of the fruitfulness of semantic atomization to identify the nature and success of the process of matching attributive and substantive is raised. Special attention is paid to the ways of semantic inventory of components. It is emphasized that the discourse-speech actualization of attributives undergoes various modifications, manifested in the diversity and ambiguity of semantic links of interacting words. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the perspective of consideration and scientific approach to the analysis of semantic relations arising between adjective and substantive word may vary. The novelty of the study is seen simultaneously in the proposed systematic approach to the interpretation of principles of actualization of semantic features of the members of the adjective-substantive phrase, and in the provision of evidence base that demonstrates and confirms the conditions of implementation of the action component. The determinism of functional-semantic diversity by factors associated with the characteristics of the component structures of the matched tokens is proved. It is concluded that it is possible to identify the relevant mechanism of actualization of actionality / non-actionality in an attributive phrase under the condition of semantic atomization not only at the level of a substantive element.

The Present Pasts: Image and Text in the Fiction of W.G. Sebald

In her Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag suggests that contemporary culture draws on photography to a historically unprecedented degree. This ubiquity of images, she claims, especially images of violence, imposes itself even on those who seek to express the specifc post-Holocaust nature of reality through textual medium. Her major example is the German writer, W.G. Sebald. In his novels, text is accompanied by images whose role, in Sontag’s reading, is reduced to that of an illustration. In my article, I suggest that the position of the photographic image in Sebald’s novels cannot be approached from the perspective proposed by Sontag. Rather, it invites reading in terms of the spectral presence of images whose intrusion into textual reality is as haunting as it is unavoidable. Referring to recent theories of photography, I discuss how in Sebald’s novels the relationship between text and image can be explained as that of parallel structures whose linearity is always already interrupted (haunted) by past events. I refer to recent theoretical perspectives on photography in order to account for the interactions between different media in Sebald’s works and for their visual/textual engagement with the interplay of temporalities that characterizes the working of memory.

Wind's Element in the Artistic World of Ivan Bunin: Semantic Strategies and Dominants

The article considers the principles of systematization of the outer world in the author’s individual consciousness of I.A. Bunin and presents the description of personal imaginative nominations of elemental phenomena of nature. The research is based on the synthesis of traditional and modern methods of analysis for realization of a literary word: component, discourse-text analysis of names, as well as cognitive-hermeneutic text analysis, which made it possible to set up a correspondence existing between the units of the text, the information coded by them and the mental structures behind this information, or their elements by studying the character of the connections between them. The analyzed ways of verbalization of the author’s meanings at the level of contact and distant connections allow to reveal the cognitive-mental and emotive spheres of the writer’s consciousness, and also to interpret the phenomenon of Bunin’s Universe as a complex phenomenon that determines its uniqueness and originality in Russian literature. It is noted that the textual realization of words in literary discourse leads to the integration of various aspects of reality and recreates the author’s perception of the world, based on the inseparable, interpenetrating unity of the objective and subjective, the logical and sensual, the rational and emotional. The presented paradigm of the images of wind elicits the properties of its prototype and explicates new properties and attributes of the denotation on the basis of its systemic and non-systemic relationships arisen in the author’s consciousness. On the basis of the considered complex of associativesingsof the element of wind, the authors reveal Bunin’s understanding of the semantic multidimensionality of being, the complexity and versatile relations between man and the world.

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Translating Ancient Alchemy: Fragments of Graeco-Egyptian Alchemy in Arabic Compendia

Translation played a vital role in the development and transfer of alchemy in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Since its origins in Graeco-Roman Egypt, alchemy was encapsulated in Greek texts which allegedly relied on Persian or Egyptian sources. Later, a variety of Greek and Byzantine writings were translated into Syriac and Arabic, and these translations were in turn fragmented and disseminated in later Arabic compendia. This paper will first review the main phases of this historical process of transmission of alchemy from one language and culture to another. Second, this process will be examined using two significant case studies: a close analysis of various quotations from Graeco-Egyptian authors (Pseudo-Democritus, Zosimus of Panopolis, and Synesius) as presented in two Arabic dialogues on alchemy, The Tome of Images and The Dialogue between Āras and the King Caesar. These sources demonstrate some of the concrete textual realities that underlie general patterns of translation and reception.

Critical realism, psychology and the legacies of psychoanalysis

ABSTRACTThe discipline of psychology has been poorly represented in critical realist texts to date. This is despite Bhaskar’s use of psychoanalytical concepts to underpin his concept of the dialectic. By comparison, other aspects of social science, such as sociology and economics, have a well-established body of critical realist texts. The original approach to psychoanalysis was analogous to the critical realist ontological-axiological chain. It moved from an ontological problem (what is) to an axiological solution (talking cure). Freud’s eagerness to reframe psychoanalysis within a scientistic, objective framework was perhaps due in part to the difficulties that he faced as European Jew in the fin-de-siècle. The application of the critical realist explanatory critique can contribute to our understanding of how and why the fragmentation of Freud’s legacies emerged. Critical realists should avoid the assumption that psychoanalysis is a unitary body of knowledge; as such, they should consider its various legacies separately.

Apartheid's Immorality Act and the fiction of heteronormative whiteness

This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.

Haunting Poe’s Maze: Investigative Obsessions in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabiński and H. P. Lovecraft

The article is a comparative reading and analysis of selected works by two eminent authors of weird fiction, Stefan Grabinski and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the goal of which is to trace two (independent) trajectories of development of ideas concerning “weird” story writing, as established, in pre-modern context, by Edgar Allan Poe. The two authors appear to suffer from a combination of tragically inherent inability to write “like” Poe, with a haunting desire to do so. Exhibiting understanding of the Poesque discourse, they are driven to invent strategies to cope with the resulting textual neuroses—a way out of the discursive “maze” of Poe’s craft, a way that is always already shut. Where Lovecraft’s “mechanistic materialism” finds its expression in an indifferent cosmos, populated by alien beings, whose influence seems to be inscribed in the fabric of his textual realities, Grabinski’s sense of “amazement” is deployed internally, with psychological constructs overshadowing the “objective” reality. Both discourses, however, spring from one tradition of horror, and from the unexorcised trace of Poe’s spectre. The two authors’ ambivalent relation with modern sensibilities results in a series of obsessive investigations into the ideological underpinnings of art, philosophy and science.

Nad kartami prac Profesora Witolda Mańczaka. Notatki z marginesów

Studying the Works of Professor Witold Mańczak. Marginal NotesIn the works written in the last period of his life, Professor Witold Mańczak often emphasized the need to formulate a criterion of truth in linguistics. He pursued it in textual reality (in “what is written and what is said”) and in statistical, frequentative and quantitative data which describe it. On the margin of this search, this author shares his own experiences in the field of ethnolinguistics, related to attempts to determine the actual (and, in this sense, true) ontological status of analyzed objects. He postulates that the diversification of the objects of analysis should be complemented by an adequate diversification of how their names are recorded in the narration, i.e. by a precise and consistent descriptive metalanguage.

Strategien des realistischen Universalismus: Raabe, Storm, Stifter

Abstract Programmatic accounts of realism specify the tasks of authors of fiction in terms of the production conditions of a work, its structural features, or its effects on readers. Concerning the conditions of production the poet is supposed to observe the life surrounding him or her and note its law-like regularities. What is presented in the work is then supposed to match these regularities, thus resulting in particular structural features. Finally, readers should be able to read those regularities from the work. I call this program ›realistic universalism‹ (›realistischer Universalismus‹). The programmatic accounts do not specify how reading the regularities from the fiction is supposed to work, however. This is why I examine three prominent realistic texts according to how they implement this program of realistic universalism. Raabe’s Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse contains explicit versions of said regularities, while Storm’s Immensee exemplifies them. The most subtle version of realistic universalism is to be found in Stifter’s Der Hochwald. This text asks its readers to employ a mode of reading which expresses the norms to be learned from the text.

Improbable Figures: Realist Fictions of Insecurity in Contemporary African Fiction

This article discusses the chronotope of humanitarian emergencies in realist fiction. Novels that depict the effects of prolonged and extreme insecurity often include improbable figures, characters in which they invest a hope for the future and who are presented as inventive improvisers of the new. Characters such as Toloki in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995), Ahl in Nuruddin Farah's Crossbones (2011), and Kotchikpa, the boy narrator in Uwem Akpan's “Fattening for Gabon” (2008), each navigate a terrain of insecurity to improbable ends. They challenge us to rethink our assumptions about historical contingency and how they operate in realist texts. The narrative model of emergency devised by such novels has antecedents in articulations of the improbable in canonical theorists of realism such as Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, and Njabulo S. Ndebele. The novelists' embrace of a realist aesthetics stages a critique of key assumptions of the narratives of emergency, which place the victims in an overly determined condition where meaningful action is impossible. The works of Mda, Farah, and Akpan restore historical agency to characters who experience extreme insecurity and provoke us to think anew about our readerly expectations for typicality and the quotidian.

Прошлое как текстовая реальность: методологические возможности лингвистического анализа исторического нарратива

Прошлое как текстовая реальность: методологические возможности лингвистического анализа исторического нарратива