scholarly journals Otherness, Cloning, and Morality in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solveig Lena Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
Embryo Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spatial Order ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractThe British writer John Wyndham (1903–1969) explored societal effects of surprising or mystical events. A paradigmatic example is The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which portrays identical-looking children born without sexual intercourse. I propose a reading strategy that focuses on the fictional spatial order and analyses how the construction of the children’s otherness interferes with the village’s demarcation. Furthermore, I interpret the mysterious pregnancies as a reference to basic embryo research in the 1950s – cloning. Finally, I scrutinize Wyndham’s negotiation of utilitarianism throughout the novel and his critique of truly utilitarian decisions that are based on constructions of Otherness.

scholarly journals Deconstructing the Portrayal of Adults’ Superiority towards Children in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s "A Little Princess"

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-31
Author(s):  
NUR INAYAH ◽  
Bambang Purwanto
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This study discusses how the portrayal of adults’ superiority towards children in the novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett is deconstructed by the work itself. The adults’ superiority is portrayed in the novel, in which the adults are depicted as more superior figure than children. However, the perfect descriptions of the children as portrayed by Sara in the novel show that the hierarchy in child-adult relationship is able to be reversed. This study uses descriptive qualitative method supported by Structuralism’s binary opposition and Derrida’s Deconstruction reading strategy. The aim of this study is to destabilize the novel, A Little Princess, by applying Deconstruction reading strategy. This study shows that the novel deconstructs its portrayal of adults’ superiority towards children. So, by destabilizing the binary opposition in the novel, that is an adult opposes a child, the child-adult hierarchy is reversed. Keywords: adults, children, deconstruction, superiority

The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-225
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Translation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Original Source ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
Universal Reason

The conclusion historicizes these translations in the story of the Arabic novel before the 1950s, after which the novel becomes canonised. Colonial translation promised facts and truths based on the European master-text, and some Arab reformists confirmed the superiority of philosophy to religion, and hence science to Islam, but the translations complicate such neat cultural translation. The novel is born somewhere in between the original and translation, obfuscating intentionally the original source of which becomes secondary to the process of its adaptation and transmission. The reformist aspirations of the authors remain unrealised much like a perfect emulation of the prophet. Finally, it interrogates the dominant critical approach to these modernist intellectuals as secularising liberals who intentionally separated religion from literature by adopting the reductive Western humanisation of the prophet. The translations reveal how they trespass the separation between literary and religious interpretation bringing the stakes of narrative representation to bear on European ideals of subjectivity and universal reason. In this transgressive space, precisely the incubator of “modern” Egyptian literature, translation becomes neither domesticating nor foreignising but a space where various representational claims are simultaneously adapted and contested.

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl E. Pletsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

scholarly journals WAR, SOLDIER AND NATION IN 1950s JAPAN

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Class B ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Military ◽  
Cultural Hero

AbstractThe 1950s in Japan are usually considered to be marked by pacifism or a “victim consciousness” related to World War II, together with a rejection of war and of the military. Yet attention to the popular press and other sources designed to reflect and appeal to a mass audience, rather than magazines carrying debates among intellectuals, shows that throughout the 1950s the recent war was a much more dynamic issue than typically has been recognized, and that former soldiers were far from universally reviled. Connections with the war, in turn, remained an integral part of the evolving sense of nation in Japan. This article examines the vitality of the war as a major and direct theme in political, social and cultural discourse in the 1950s, focusing on soldiers' involvement in politics, issues relating to Class B and C war criminals, films about the war, and the emergence of a new cultural hero in the form of Kaji, the soldier who is the central figure in the novel and film The Human Condition.

Postcolonial Memory, Postmodern Intertextuality: Anton Shammas's Arabesques Revisited

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael S. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Reading Strategy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Minority Discourse ◽  
Screen Memories

This article challenges the interpretive consensus on Anton Shammas's 1986 Hebrew novel Arabesques. A narrow application of theoretical postcolonial constructs (e.g., making the events of 1948 the historical trauma that defines the collective memory of Shammas's narrative) misrepresents the complexity of the text as a whole. Analyzing the limitations of readings based solely on minority-discourse assumptions, the essay offers a counterreading, balancing the postcolonial grid with a postmodernist one. Tracing the novel's screen memories and its most daring (yet well-camouflaged) intertextuality opens up possibilities of representation and redefines the minority-majority relations in the novel. This reading strategy, attentive to the text's “difference from itself,” allows for a nuanced redefinition of the identities constructed in Arabesque and suggests a new explanation for the choice of Hebrew as the language for this remembrance of lost Arab time.

scholarly journals Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Charlotte Findlay
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Lesbian Couple ◽  
Gay Literature ◽  
Gays And Lesbians ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s.  The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text.  In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

scholarly journals The Real America: Representation of American Society in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Based on Michel Foucault’s Notions of Institutions, Normalization, and Surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iraj Soleymanjahan ◽  
Nasser Maleki ◽  
Hiwa Weisi
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Government ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Fitting In

This study aimed to scrutinize and analyze the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac in the light of the political theory of Michel Foucault. The focus, however, would be specifically on the concepts of normalization, institutions and surveillance put forward in his book Discipline and Punish (1995), coupled with some other works that wrestle with the close links of power, society, and institutions. This research seeked to describe the real America in the 1950s, a decade that witnessed both conformism and radicality, represented in the novel. The study pointed out that the novel was a depiction of the American society in the 1950s in which distinct, overlapping institutions did a great deal in restricting the freedom of individuals who seeked liberation and authenticity. The American government draws on the power of the law, police, prison, academia, family, and different other overlapping and satellite institutions, working hand in hand to create a matrix. The concept of matrix, therefore, highlights the nexus through which the normalization and conformity of the individuals are guaranteed, leading to the creation of perfect institutionalized men who are reduced to the level of simpletons. The whole novel becomes the story of some men who advocate abnormality as their credo to live a free life. Quite the contrary, they are transitioned into meek and docile bodies whose identity hinges on being like others in fitting in and following the norms through different dominant fragmenting institutions.

scholarly journals Радянський джентльмен: український професор супроти викликів історії

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Oksana Blashkiv
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Academic Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Professor ◽  
The 1950S

The emphasis is placed on the main character’s personal, national and academic identity. A university professor and a linguist, the protagonist constructed his identity through combining the elements of Sovietness, Englishness, and Ukrainianness. While focusing on the protagonist’s identity quest, the author also identifies historical context of the novel, which is rooted in Ukrainian socio-historic reality throughout the 1950s-2010s.

scholarly journals Patricia Highsmith's Queer Disruption: Subverting Gay Tragedy in the 1950s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Charlotte Findlay
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Lesbian Couple ◽  
Gay Literature ◽  
Gays And Lesbians ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society

<p>Published in a time when tragedy was pervasive in gay literature, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, published later as Carol, was the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. It was unusual for depicting lesbians as sympathetic, ordinary women, whose sexuality did not consign them to a life of misery. The novel criticises how 1950s American society worked to suppress lesbianism and women’s agency. It also refuses to let that suppression succeed by giving its lesbian couple a future together. My thesis assesses the extent to which the novel broke the conventions of gay literature, and how Highsmith was able to publish such a radical text in the conservative 1950s.  The Talented Mr Ripley, a crime novel published in 1955, is more representative of both Highsmith’s work and 1950s homophobia. Tom Ripley is coded as gay through a number of often pejorative stereotypes, though the novel never confirms his sexuality. This makes it appear far more conventional than The Price of Salt. And yet, it treats Tom sympathetically and gives him a happy ending. Underneath the surface level homophobia is a story of gay survival and success, and once again Highsmith subverts the tradition of gay tragedy. However, because homophobic tropes are central to its narrative, it remains difficult to call Ripley a radical text.  In placing the two novels side by side, my thesis draws out the complexity of Highsmith’s relationship with the gay canon. I find commonalities in the novels based on Highsmith’s interest in disrupting conventional morality. She achieves this disruption by humanising outsiders such as gays and lesbians, and constructing narratives in which they are able to find the freedom and happiness that the literature of the period usually denied them.</p>

CONTEMPORARY LEBANESE FICTION: MODERNIZATION WITHOUT MODERNITY

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-580
Author(s):  
Samira Aghacy
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The Impact

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

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