Race and Imaginary Intimacy in Jack

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-182
Author(s):  
Laura E. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Black Woman ◽  
Eminent Domain ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Interracial Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Second World

Through its focus on an interracial relationship in St. Louis after the Second World War, Jack interrogates the imaginative privilege of a white character whose seeming transcendence of the ordinary occurs at the expense of the black woman he romances. Jack’s aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him in an imaginative landscape; his desire to have Della, a black woman, accompany him there, however, implicates him in the literal destruction of her everyday world. This chapter uses phenomenological race theory and everyday life studies to highlight the way that the historical, material, and political pressures of the period, including the threat of eminent domain that looms over the abstracted landscape of the novel, disrupt Jack’s literary and symbolic rendering of this love story. By inviting the reader to pursue Jack’s imaginative interests, the novel constructs an uncomfortable romance troubled by the encroachments of the wider world it would exclude.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Second World

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

scholarly journals Dokia Humenna’s Depiction of the Second World War and the OUN in Khreshchatyi iar: How Readers Responded

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Ukrainian Academy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Emigre Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Second World

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.

How Hitler Nearly Destroyed the Great American Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Ryan Holiday
Keyword(s):  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
John Fante ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Second World

Investigative journalist Holiday scrutinizes the archival record to clarify the collision of historical forces that long haunted the trajectory of Ask the Dust. Informed by primary research into the John Fante papers at UCLA Library Special Collections and beyond, this essay explains how in falling victim to political pressures of the Second World War, the novel gains significance that remains relevant to our own age today. Before Mussolini’s fascist censors targeted Fante’s writings, agents of Adolf Hitler were hijacking the attention of Fante’s editor and draining the assets of his publisher for releasing an unauthorized, unexpurgated edition of the dictator’s notorious Mein Kampf in a legal case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The issues involved in that case and their effects upon Ask the Dust teach us as much about Fante’s day and age as about our own era of alt-right provocateurship and #atnoplatform.

scholarly journals Friends in war: Sweden between solidarity and self-help, 1939–1945

2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Winter War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.

Hiroshima and the Place of the Narrator

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Whittier Treat
Keyword(s):  
Medical Profession ◽  
Severe Depression ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Psychological Problems ◽  
Good Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Writer ◽  
Second World

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.

John Barth's Chimera and the Strictures of Reality

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
Ursula Mackenzie
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Novel ◽  
True Purpose ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Collective Creation ◽  
John Hawkes ◽  
Second World

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

scholarly journals Exploiting Ambiguity: Murder! and the Meanings of Cross-Dressing in Interwar British Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Chris O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Second World

The crime film Murder! (1930), directed by Alfred Hitchcock for British International Pictures and based on the novel Enter Sir John (1929) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, has long been cited in debates about the treatment of queer sexuality in Hitchcock's films. Central to these debates is the character of Handel Fane and the depiction of his cross-dressed appearances as a theatre and circus performer, which many critics have understood as a coded reference to homosexuality. This article explores such critical interpretations by situating Murder! more firmly in its historical context. In particular, it examines Fane's cross-dressed performances in relation to other cultural representations of men's cross-dressing in interwar Britain. These include examples from other British and American films, stories in the popular press and the publicity surrounding the aerial performer and female impersonator Barbette (Vander Clyde). The article argues that Murder! reflects and exploits a broader fascination with gender ambiguity in British popular culture, and that it anticipates the more insistent vilification of queer men in the decades after the Second World War.

scholarly journals THE MYTH OF SACRIFICE AND THE MYTH OF TRUTH IN SLOVAK LITERATURE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR (J. C. HRONSKÝ: ANDREAS BÚR MAJSTER AND DOMINIK TATARKA: FARSKÁ REPUBLIKA AND ESSAYS)

Porównania ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mária Bátorová
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
The People ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Second World

Hronský’s work was written in Rome at the beginning of his journey until emigration in 1947/48. This, in terms of genre and content, is a distinctive form: an autobiographical tale through which the author erected a memorial. Andreas Búr embodies the capabilities and tragedy of the author. The sacrifice for the people who kill him bears in itself a Christian pathos and at the same time the extinction of everything the author was. His character remains in the memory of the people as the myth of an ethical act. Tatarka’s work was written in Slovakia in 1948. This critique of conventional Christianity, which has tragic consequences for a defenceless woman and her children, is linked with criticism of the author Hronský in the novel Andreas Búr Majster. The movement towards the myth of truth begins in Tatarka immediately at the time of thawing after Stalin’s death in the essay “Démon súhlasu” (The Demon of Conformity) and ends in the author’s 19 years of “life in truth” and the victim of a life without civil rights.

scholarly journals Polska literatura najnowsza i Holokaust – edukacyjny potencjał fikcji?

2020 ◽  
pp. 372-388
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Czyżak
Keyword(s):  
Mental Hospital ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The article contains considerations regarding memory of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary prose and analyses the arguments for and against fictitious representations of theShoah. The author discusses the changes in treating fiction which narrates the history of Jewish people during the Second World War – from works of fiction published after the war (e.g. Wielki Tydzień by Jerzy Andrzejewski) to popular thrillers written in the 21st century. The main part of this article is devoted to a novel Tworki written by Marek Bieńczyk in 1999, telling a story of young people – Poles and Jews – employed in a mental hospital during German occupation. The novel was at the centre stage of discussion about relationship between fiction and the Shoah theme, yet the author of the article argues that it may serve as an important stepping stone in exemplifying history. This literary vision of the Holocaust (defined as “pastoral thriller”) shows educational possibilities of fiction.

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