‘You Felt Disembodied’: Reconfiguring Vulnerabilities Through Metalepsis in Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Marcellin
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
To Come

Abstract Harry Parker’s first novel, Anatomy of a Soldier (2016), is a trauma narrative intermingling several timelines and told from the perspectives of forty-four object-narrators. This produces temporal and focal shifts in the narrative, which occur through stylistic metalepsis, that is, through discrepancies that blur the boundaries between causes and effects or between entities. This article proposes to examine how the use of metalepsis in this novel reconfigures the representation of trauma. Through metalepsis, Parker’s novel seeks to come as close as possible to the reality of the traumatized psyche, to materialize the space left blank by the shattering force of the traumatic event. Yet, beyond that representational issue, metalepsis also fulfils an ethical function in the novel: by performing rather than showing the workings of trauma, the narrative produces, and includes the reader in, a fragile yet tangible community of shared vulnerabilities.

scholarly journals “You are the victims, not the perpetrators”: Narrating Violence and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-257
Author(s):  
Anja Mrak
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Small Things

In her 1997 novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts the problem of caste violence, inextricably bound up with other practices of social domination such as patriarchy, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, through a complex narrative structure. The conventional story about a tragic love between a woman from a higher caste and a member of the untouchables skilfully evades cliché patterns by employing eccentric focalisers, as we experience most of the story through the lenses of multiple-person narrators, twin brother and sister, Rahel and Estha, magical realism, and a disjointed narrative full of prolepses and analepses which subtly renders traumatic memories. The novel is structured as a prototypical trauma narrative and stages a confrontation with an unresolved traumatic event from which Rahel and Estha have been recovering since childhood. Roy deftly transposes the dualism of caste purity and impurity onto the narrative structure. The narrative is caught within a duality (symbolised already by the twins) and a perpetual repetition which represents not only the eternal return of trauma but also the constant tension which derives from the hegemony of the caste system and the violence it produces. The biopolitics of social mechanisms and structures which disciplines the individual’s body, controls his actions, rectifies and sanctions transgressions is at the heart of the novel. It raises the individual into obedience and restraint with the help of state institutions, and regulates them into an inconspicuous collective body in the name of security, unity and higher common goals. Socio-political mechanisms are legitimised and reaffirmed through violence as well, which is not understood as such, but rather as a necessary “measure” and “duty” to uphold the law.

scholarly journals Traumatic Experiences in Eka Kurniawan's Novel Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Endang Sartika
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
The Media ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Negative Feelings ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

The emergence of trauma study with the publication of Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History have gained significant interest in analyzing traumatic experiences in literary works. Literary trauma is seen as the media and alternative to read the wound and trauma through narration and fiction in the form of an anxiety plot. This study aims to analyze the traumatic experiences in Eka Kurniawan's novel entitled Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas. This research is descriptive qualitative in nature. The objects of this research are the traumatic events and experiences in Kurniawan's novel. The data were collected by note taking and highlighting the relevant traumatic event and analyzed using the concept of trauma and memory of Cathy Caruth. The result shows that the characters in this novel respond to trauma differently such as having intrusive thoughts, re-experiencing the trauma through flashbacks and dreams, avoidance, and having negative feelings and moods. The novel shows that the socio-cultural environment can become the greatest source of trauma as well as offer the healing process for the traumatized through compassion and understanding. The characters' traumatic experience is narrated by the unknown godlike narrator. Through the portrayal of the characters, Kurniawan reveals how pain, suffering, and traumatic experiences lead the characters to gain high self-esteem, self-knowledge, and philosophical understanding of social reality.

scholarly journals “You are the victims, not the perpetrators”: Narrating Violence and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-257
Author(s):  
Anja Mrak
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Small Things

In her 1997 novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts the problem of caste violence, inextricably bound up with other practices of social domination such as patriarchy, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, through a complex narrative structure. The conventional story about a tragic love between a woman from a higher caste and a member of the untouchables skilfully evades cliché patterns by employing eccentric focalisers, as we experience most of the story through the lenses of multiple-person narrators, twin brother and sister, Rahel and Estha, magical realism, and a disjointed narrative full of prolepses and analepses which subtly renders traumatic memories. The novel is structured as a prototypical trauma narrative and stages a confrontation with an unresolved traumatic event from which Rahel and Estha have been recovering since childhood. Roy deftly transposes the dualism of caste purity and impurity onto the narrative structure. The narrative is caught within a duality (symbolised already by the twins) and a perpetual repetition which represents not only the eternal return of trauma but also the constant tension which derives from the hegemony of the caste system and the violence it produces. The biopolitics of social mechanisms and structures which disciplines the individual’s body, controls his actions, rectifies and sanctions transgressions is at the heart of the novel. It raises the individual into obedience and restraint with the help of state institutions, and regulates them into an inconspicuous collective body in the name of security, unity and higher common goals. Socio-political mechanisms are legitimised and reaffirmed through violence as well, which is not understood as such, but rather as a necessary “measure” and “duty” to uphold the law.

Vision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Holt
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Strategic Vision ◽  
Henry Mintzberg ◽  
To Come

If knowledge does not create a sustained and unified sense of organizational self (skepticism is rife) then strategic inquiry can turn to vision, a move advocated by Henry Mintzberg amongst others. The chapter considers what it is to author a strategic vision, using the novel The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells as an indicative and provocative example of an organizational attempt to present its own form to itself and others. The risks associated with propaganda and dogmatic assertion are discussed, as are the strategy documents by which many modern organizations attempt to instil an equivalent vision to that envisaged by Wells.

scholarly journals Belonging in the Coronaverse: Will There Be Time?

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-115
Author(s):  
Kate Fischer ◽  
Malika Rakhmonova ◽  
Mike Tran
Keyword(s):  
College Experience ◽  
The United States ◽  
Limited Time ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Residential University ◽  
To Come ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
University Experience ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Older Siblings

Abstract Since the spring of 2020 SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, has upended lives and caused a rethinking of nearly all social behaviors in the United States. This paper examines the ways in which the pandemic, shutdown, and gradual move towards “normal” have laid bare and obfuscated societal pressures regarding running out of time as it pertains to the residential university experience. Promised by movies, television, and older siblings and friends as a limited-time offer, the “typical” college experience is baked into the U.S. imaginary, reinforcing a host of notions of who “belongs” on campus along lines of race, class, and age. Fed a vision of what their whole lives “should be”, students who enter a residential four-year college are already imbued with a nostalgia for what is yet to come, hailed, in Althusser’s (2006[1977]) sense, as university subjects even before their first class. The upheaval of that subjecthood during the pandemic has raised important questions about the purpose of the college experience as well as how to belong to a place that is no longer there.

scholarly journals Critiquing Anthropocentrism in Henry Ole Kulet’s Vanishing Herds

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-55
Author(s):  
Pushpa Raj Jaishi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
East African ◽  
To Come

Vanishing Herds (2011) is Henry Ole Kulet’s novel that hovers around the ecological depletion caused by the anthropocentric attitude of the human beings. Set in the East African Savannah, the novel grapples with the critical issue of anthropogenic environmental degradation. The novel is based on the tribulations of a young Maasai couple –Kedoki and Norpisia whose epic journey through the wilderness provides a window through which the destruction of the physical environment can be viewed. Additionally, the text catalogues the challenges faced by a pastoralist community’s attempt to come to terms with the socio-economic realities of a fast-evolving contemporary society. The paper is an attempt to study this novel under the surveillance of green lens and throw light on the ecological destruction especially the clearing of the forest by human self centered endeavors and to critique the anthropocentric attitude of the human beings that render the environment at the verge of destruction.

Queer Masculinities: Gender Roles, the Abject and Bottomhood in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-757
Author(s):  
Christina Slopek
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
White American ◽  
Sexual Orientations ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

Abstract This article analyzes queerness in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), teasing out how the queer relationship at the core of the novel is framed. Ocean Vuong’s novel mobilizes queerness to straddle boundaries between cultures, gender roles and bodies. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous places the queer sexual orientations and gender performances of its protagonists, one Vietnamese American, one white American, in firm relation to the formative force of cultural contexts. Zooming in on two young boys’ queerness, the novel diversifies gender roles and makes room especially for non-normative masculinities. What is more, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous mobilizes the abject to showcase how queer sexual intimacy straddles boundaries between bodies and subjects. The article attends to language politics in connection with the novel’s coming-out performance, striated constructions of gender roles and their interplay with the abject and “bottomhood” (Nguyen 2014: 2) to come to grips with the novel’s diversification of queer masculinities.

scholarly journals Indestructible Pasts and Paranoid Presents: John Franzen against Active Forgetting in Purity

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Cristina Garrigós
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Archives ◽  
Conscious Process ◽  
Unconscious Desire ◽  
Selection Of

Forgetting and remembering are as inevitably linked as lifeand death. Sometimes, forgetting is motivated by a biological disorder, brain damage, or it is the product of an unconscious desire derived from a traumatic event (psychological repression). But in some cases, we can motivate forgetting consciously (thought suppression). It is through the conscious repression of memories that we can find self-preservation and move forward, although this means that we create a fable of our lives, as Nietzsche says in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1997). In Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Purity (2015), forgetting is an active and conscious process by which the characters choose to forget certain episodes of their lives to be able to construct new identities. The erased memories include murder, economical privileges derived from illegal or unethical commercial processes, or dark sexual episodes. The obsession with forgetting the past links the lives of the main characters, and structures the narrative of the novel. The motivated erasure of memories becomes, thus, a way that the characters have to survive and face the present according to a (fake) narrative that they have constructed. But is motivated forgetting possible? Can one completely suppress facts in an active way? This paper analyses the role of forgetting in Franzen’s novel in relation to the need in our contemporary society to deny, hide, or erase uncomfortable data from our historical or personal archives; the need to make disappear stories which we do not want to accept, recognize, and much less make known to the public. This is related to how we manage information in the age of technology, the “selection” of what is to be the official story, and how we rewrite our own history

scholarly journals Quando o silêncio narra o que aconteceu: a morte em "To the Lighthouse"

Scriptorium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 33180
Author(s):  
Adriana Madeira Coutinho
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Empirical Perspective ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Concrete Reality

Este artigo reflete sobre a condição humana e seu fim último, a morte, através do romance “To the Lighthouse”, de Virginia Woolf, em que a narrativa se desenvolve na relação entre a vida e a morte. Nas três partes do romance os acontecimentos giram em torno da morte, não só da morte física mas também de uma morte simbólica. Para tanto são apontadas algumas observações sobre subjetivismo e realidade objetiva, sobre temporalidade e sobre a própria prosa moderna nas formulações de Erich Auerbach. Em uma perspectiva empírica a autora aproxima o romance de sua realidade concreta, desnuda a dificuldade da escrita após um evento traumático além de apresentar aos leitores a fragilidade humana diante do inesperado. O presente trabalho foi realizado com apoio da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 001.  *** When silence tells what happened: death in "To the Lighthouse" ***This article reflects on the human condition and its ultimate end, death, through Virginia Woolf's novel "To the Lighthouse," where the narrative unfolds in the relationship between life and death. In the three parts of the novel, events revolve around death, not only physical death but also a symbolic death. To this end, some observations on subjectivism and objective reality, on temporality, and on modern prose itself in the formulations of Erich Auerbach are pointed out. In an empirical perspective, the author brings the novel closer to its concrete reality, exposes the difficulty of writing after a traumatic event, as well as presenting the human frailty before the unexpected. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.Keywords: Virginia Woolf; Death; Human condition; Literary criticism.

scholarly journals Gæst hos virkeligheden. Sprogets landflygtighed i "Løgneren" af Martin A. Hansen og "Det svundne er en drøm" af Aksel Sandemose

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-131
Author(s):  
Jørgen Veisland
Keyword(s):  
Migratory Birds ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Central motifs and episodes form interesting and significant links between Aksel Sandemose’s novel Det svundne er en drøm, published in 1946, and Martin A. Hansen’s novel from 1950, Løgneren. The motifs of truth versus lie, and the intermingling of the two, and of the split subject, manifest themselves in the protagonists who share a common first name, Johannes. The texts are an attempt to write diaries that transcend the borderline between past and present, fiction and reality, truth and lying. The diary form, composed in the first person as an alternative to the novel form proper, is viewed by both protagonists as an experiment that questions the ability of language to portray reality accurately and truthfully. Furthermore, the diaries break with chronology in order to come to terms with a darkness within, an essentially unknown, demonic territory that prevents knowledge and truth from emerging. Central episodes in the two diaries are practically identical, e.g. the drowning accident that takes place in both texts, the absence of the ‘I’ of the diary from home, and the sense of alienation from home. Additionally, significant symbols recur in both texts, e.g. a necklace and migratory birds. The protagonists’ relationships to women are all but identical and involve an examination of the past and of guilt that becomes a potential key to resolving what constitutes guilt, conscience, home and exile. The two texts form an intertext and there is compelling evidence pointing to Sandemose’s diary having profoundly influenced Hansen’s narrative.

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