Julian Barnes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Guignery
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Julian Barnes ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
Story Writer

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

Discrepant Solace

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David James
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Joan Didion ◽  
Julian Barnes ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
Affective Meanings

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature’s work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation’s kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing.

‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-219
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

scholarly journals Breaking the Rules: Innovation and Narrative Strategies in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
Carmen Haydée Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Sandra Cisneros ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Story Line ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Stage Direction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Length

Conventional approaches to literary genres conspicuously imply definition and classification. From the very beginning of our incursions into the literary world we learn to identify and differentiate a poem from a play, a short story from a novel. As readers we classify each written work into one of these neatly defined literary genres by following basic guidelines. Either we classify according to the structure of the work (stanza; stage direction/dialogue; narrative) or the length (short story; novelette; novel). What happens though when a reader encounters a work of considerable length made up of individual short pieces or vignettes that include rhythm and rhyme and is framed by an underlying, unifying story line linking the vignettes together? Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? Why does it sound and, at times, look like a poem? To further complicate classifications, what happens when a reader comes across an epistolary format with instructions on which letters to read first: letters made up of one-word lines, poetic stanzas, or italicized stream of consciousness; letters that narrate the history of two women's friendship? Is this a novel or a mere collection of letters?

scholarly journals Entre a Literatura e o Jornalismo: Itinerários do Escritor Baiano Anísio Melhor (1885-1955)

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Ionã Carqueijo Scarante
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The City ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Day By Day

Anísio Melhor was born in the city of Nazaré, located in the Recôncavo da Bahia, on May 7, 1885. From reading his work, the most important source of information found about the writer, it is clear that journalism is one with his life. Self-taught, it was in the newspapers that he directed and collaborated that he became a poet, novelist, short-story writer, literary critic, folklorist and chronicler. Among the literary genres he published in periodicals, chronicles are the texts that most show his modus scribendi, as well as pointing out clues to his intellectual path and his evolution as a writer. In some of his texts, he discusses the journalist's solitary work, combining his experiences as a reader of the most varied newspapers and, especially, as a journalist in his small town. According to the writer, the provincial newspaper values every reader in its small town, knows its audience very closely, writes down the events day by day: now it is the chronicle of social nature, now it is the commentary on the deaths, now it is telluric poetry, now it is the birth of another child, now it is the chapter of another novel or novella. Thus, in the newspaper he founded and directed for a few decades, O Conservador (1912-1945), Melhor every day (re)constructed the history of his people, recording their traditions, stories and memories. The researches carried out in literary archives for the composition of this article contributed to revive the memory of this writer and to divulge his literary production and his work as a journalist.

Cope, (Robert Knox) Jack (1913–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Hall
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
South African ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Racial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Guardian

‘Jack’ Cope was a South African novelist, poet, editor, and short story writer. Born June 3, 1913 in Mooi River, Natal, South Africa, he spent his early career as a local journalist in Durban before moving to London, England as a foreign political correspondent. As a pacifist, he met with hostility there during the years of World War II and returned demoralized to South Africa to work as a cultural critic and editor for an anti-apartheid newspaper, The Guardian, in Cape Town until 1955. After leaving the newspaper, he separated from his wife of sixteen years and began his infamous affair with South African poet Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s. During this time he also became the editor of Contrast, a bilingual literary magazine in English and Afrikaans, continuing as editor there for twenty years until 1980. During that time, he was also the editor of several volumes of South African poetry, and his book The Dawn Comes Twice (1969) was banned by the government. Best known for his novels and short stories, he wrote about the racial history of South Africa, focusing on events such as the Bambata Rebellion in 1906 in The Fair House (1955).

scholarly journals Experiment(ing) on the Double with Julian Barnes

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 139-150
Author(s):  
Miquel Pomar Amer
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Self ◽  
Julian Barnes ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

The theme of the double has been recurrent in the history of literature. In “Experiment” (1995), Julian Barnes adapts this myth to Postmodernism: multiplicity of voices, reflection on the identity, rewriting of (hi)story, scepticism, irony, experimentation and a need of active readership. Indeed, active readership will be required to see the double but also to dismantle it. For this purpose, this paper analyses the characters of this short story and categorises them following the hypothesis of the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio concerning the construction of the self. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct this short story in order to see how Barnes has been able to create the paradox of a double with only one body and one self.

scholarly journals French-language reception of Vasyl Stefanyk’s creativive work

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Наталія Яцків
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
French Literature ◽  
French Language ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Scientific Investigations ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
Story Writer

The article deals with analysis of the history of V. Stefanyk’s appearance in the artistic dimension of the French literature, starting from the first references in French-language periodicals by virtue of translations and ending with solid scientific investigations. The aim of the research is to systematize critical reviews, trace the evolution of critical interpretation and prove the agreement of the creative method of the Ukrainian short story writer with the development of the Western European literary process. The French public’s acquaintance with Stefanyk’s creative work took its rise in 1899 and lasts up to this day, just as we approach the celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The extraordinary talent of the Pokuttia word-painter, who treated the story as a canvas, painting it with words, fascinates us with its scanty emotionalism, intense expressiveness and impressionistic picturesqueness of the works.

scholarly journals Man’s Helplessness Against Destiny in Ernest Hemingway’s The Oldman and The Sea

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dr Mayurkumar Mukund Bhai Solanki
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Sun Also Rises ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Farewell To Arms

Ernest Hemingway, an American writer, produced considerable novels in the history of English literature. Hemingway’s The Oldman and the Sea is a story of an old man's struggle and his helplessness against destiny. Like Greek tragedians, Hemingway accepts the harshness of destiny in man’s life. It is very well said “Man proposes and God disposes" that denotes the role of destiny in man's life. The story of The Oldman and the Sea is universal because it reveals how human beings struggle to get something in life but sometimes crushed under the wheels of destiny. The old man has an indomitable spirit and sea experience yet he is unable to catch the fish for a few days. One day, he caught the big fish called the Marlin but it was too big for him to drag to the shore. The Old man tried to drag the Marlin to the shore but in a midway, its blood attracted the Sharks and he brought only its skeleton on the shore. So Hemingway talks about the helplessness of man against destiny through the character of an old man. This paper is a sincere effort to display man's helplessness against destiny through the character of an old man.  Ernest Miller Hemingway is known as Ernest Hemingway in English literature, was an American journalist, novelist, short story writer and sportsman. Hemingway wrote seven novels during his lifetime and among them, the popular novels are The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and The Old man and the Sea. The Old man and the Sea brought him a good name and fame in literature. Hemingway’s works mainly deal with the themes of love, war, wilderness, and loss. Farewell to Arms deals with the theme of the futility of war. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway says, "The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong in broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest _ Hemingway) It seems that there is always conflict between good and evil in this world but some people remain strong in broken places. The greater power called destiny crushes everyone under its wheels impartially. In this connection, Omar Khayyam writes:

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