No Forgiveness in Heaven, No Forgetting in Hell

Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ferraro

Chapter 7 argues that the word which brings the “nasty, grim little tale” of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House to the surface is “sin” and that the hermeneutic that makes sense of the Professor’s love-driven crisis of will is German-American Catholic. The starting point of this revisionist reading is non-controversial; The Professor’s House frames one great homosocial, alternatively domestic, putatively anti-capitalist intergenerational romance (Tom Outland’s reminiscences of his cowpoke buddy, Roddy Blake) inside another (Professor St. Peter’s idealization and idolization of Tom Outland), both of which seem to be as pure of heart—and of fluid exchange—as the pristine air and water of Outland’s Blue Mesa. But the women of the novel, especially wife Lillian and the two daughters, would seem to have a different story to tell, regarding the Professor’s investments in Outland and Outland’s retreat with Roddy and what male-male romance has in it for women—a subtext of feminist perspective and women’s values that emerges, in remarkable clarity, as if by miracle, from the fractured yet relentless Catholic insinuations of the novel: a veritable catechism of silent revelations and muted insistences beginning, in fact, with the reclamation of the discourse and provenance of sin. It comes as a surprise, then, that a novel as sophisticated in sociological inquiry, sexual wisdom, and experimental form as The Professor’s House—one of the most academically revered, or at least attended to, novels in the current modernist canon—can and does have a moral—indeed, it tests for morality.

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.


2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.


Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Samuel Steinberg

This essay takes as its starting point the relative lack of a contender to the “novel of ′68” in Mexico. I argue that Jorge Volpi's 2003 El fin de la locura constitutes the final writing of such a novel, to appear some 35 years after the original events of that year. The double “renewal” pursued by this work is explored both as an intended restoration of the literary to a place of social privilege after a period of decline, and also as a conservative restoration of order following the revolutionary sequences of the 20th century. However, I argue, the novel cannot finally commit to artistic renewal without also confirming the “madness” of the century; the literary renewal pursued in Volpi's text thus becomes the very political renewal that the author seeks to avoid.


Author(s):  
Siti Hafsah

Azab dan Sengsara is an Indonesian novel written by Merari Siregar (1921), one of the famous roman novelists in Indonesia in Balai Pustaka era. The novel is a material object of the present study. The study aims at revealing oppression, violence, exploitation of woman and all varieties of injustice to woman, revealing social symptoms ideological forms containing in the novel as a manifestation of a company condition in old era. This research uses a qualitative method and approaches of literary feminist and literary sociology as its support. This research succeeds in answering the problems of woman life, as manifestation of real life which reflects kinds of woman’s life in society of Indonesian, for example: marriage, custom, violence, etc. for the hero “Mariamin” (a woman). She is the manifestation of the authority life, besides talking on oppression of woman images of its community lives. The author succeeded offering solutions with various contradictions, conflicts, handling down the novel as manifestation in real life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Sorcha De Brún

Abstract The publication of the Irish-language translation of Dracula in 1933 by Seán Ó Cuirrín was a landmark moment in the history of Irish-language letters. This article takes as its starting point the idea that language is a central theme in Dracula. However, the representation of Transylvania in the translation marked a departure from Bram Stoker’s original. A masterful translation, one of its most salient features is Ó Cuirrín’s complex use of the Irish language, particularly in relation to Eastern European language, character, and landscapes. The article examines Ó Cuirrín’s prose and will explore how his approaches to concrete and abstract elements of the novel affect plot, character, and narration. The first section explores how Dracula is treated by Ó Cuirrín in the Irish translation and how this impacts the Count’s persona and his identity as Transylvanian. Through Ó Cuirrín’s use of idiom, alliteration, and proverb, it will be shown how Dracula’s character is reimagined, creating a more nuanced narrative than the original. The second section shows how Ó Cuirrín translates Jonathan Harker’s point of view in relation to Dracula. It shows that, through the use of figurative language, Ó Cuirrín develops the gothic element to Dracula’s character. The article then examines Ó Cuirrín’s translations of Transylvanian landscapes and soundscapes. It will show how Ó Cuirrín’s translation matched Stoker’s original work to near perfection, but with additional poetic techniques, and how Ó Cuirrín created a soundscape of horror throughout the entirety of the translation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Kozłowski

Kozłowski Krzysztof, Wiersz o jesieni. O Frantzu François Ozona [A Poem on Autumn. Frantz by François Ozon]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 77–92. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.3. The film Broken Lullaby ([1932] Ernst Lubitsch) and the novel L’Homme que j’ai tué ([1921, 1925, 1930] Maurice Rostand) are seen to be the main inspirations for Frantz (2016) by François Ozon. On the basis of methodology broadly understood as the concept of bringing into relief (Domański, 1992, 2002), this article aims to demonstrate the means by which the French director expanded upon the literary-film material, imbuing it with a totally singular meaning. Ozon’s inventiveness did notlimit itself to transformations typical for adaptations, but ventured towards feature film understood as a synthetic work of art that by exploiting the audiovisual properties of the medium itself, acts as a unifying force of poetry (Verlaine, Banville), music (Chopin, Debussy) and painting (Manet). The famous poem recited by the heroine, Ann, Chanson d’automne (Paul Verlaine), serves as the analytical starting point for the above. It is thus used as a pivot for the entire film, a veritable lodestarfor guiding motifs, allowing important aspects of the film to be highlighted and consequently, bring its main theme to the fore.


Author(s):  
Elke Van Nieuwenhuyze

The aim of this article is to trace the referential value of juffrouw Lina (1888)as part of its narrative organisation by means of the narrativist historical theoryof Frank Ankersmit. This starting point demands a confrontation of thisnaturalist novel by Marcellus Emants with the contemporary medical biographyof the French writer and politician Chateaubriand by the Belgian physicianErnest Masoin on the one hand and with some case studies of hystericsby the famous French docter Jean-Martin Charcot on the other hand. lt willbe argued that the narrativity of the novel plays a key-role in the constructionof its referential value on various levels.


Author(s):  
Andreas Blümel

AbstractThis article makes the novel observation that in German, CPs functioning as complements to nouns can appear to the left of their associated DP-internal gap position. It surveys the phenomenon and, based on a number of diagnostics, argues that the noun complement clause exhibits properties as if its surface position is movement-derived. Based on parallel observations in PP-extraction from DP, I show that the same constraints on movement apply modulo construction-specific properties of DPs with a noun complement clause. The findings buttress previous approaches to extraction from DPs that highlight differentiating and controlling lexical factors. Given the delicacy of the judgments involved in this phenomenon, the article is mostly devoted to laying out its descriptive properties. Tentative suggestions as to an analysis are offered in the end.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203
Author(s):  
Stephan Feldhaus

Abstract In 2012 Georg Diez provoked a literary scandal with his review of Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium. Since then, almost ninety informed studies which show an ongoing academic interest in the book have been published. Many of these studies attempted to explain the apparently failing analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt that the novel claimed in an irritating manner. Nevertheless, none of them took an esoteric approach which Kracht himself suggested in an interview with Denis Scheck as a starting point for their analyses, although esoteric references seem to be an ignored constant in Kracht’s oeuvre since Tristesse Royale. Hence, by tracing this esoteric intertextuality in the whole of Kracht’s oeuvre and linking it to the references which Kracht makes to right-wing ideologies since Faserland, it will be shown that there actually does exist an analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt in Imperium which aims to deconstruct Hitler mythemes by ridiculizing Engelhardt. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the interrelations between Kracht’s texts create a rhizomatic network of intertextuality that dissolves the boarders between external references and self-references.


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