Imagining the Afro-Caribbean in García Márquez’s Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-168
Author(s):  
Adelaida López-Mejía
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Dependent Relationship ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
Cien Anos De Soledad

In a few early short stories, Gabriel García Márquez created minor characters described as “mulattos” or “negros”; the memorable character of Petra Cotes in Cien años de soledad (1967) is a “mulatta.” In El otoño del patriarca (1975), El amor en los tiempos de cólera (1985), El general en su laberinto (1989), and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), the Colombian-born author develops a more historical vision of the Caribbean as a culture inseparable from the lived experiences of descendants of the African slave trade. This article addresses the problematic construction of Afro-Caribbean subjectivity in García Márquez’s fiction, with particular attention to work published after Cien años de soledad. The 1972 short story “Eréndira” takes the story of a mulatta child-prostitute from a brief episode in Cien años and effectively hypersexualizes the Afro-Caribbean body. So, too, does El otoño del patriarca, with its frequent use of the epithet “burdel de negros” to refer to an imaginary Caribbean nation. The hypersexualization of Afro-Caribbean female characters permeates El amor en los tiempos del cólera. A psychologically dependent relationship between Simón Bolívar and his mixed-race valet in El general en su laberinto and then the “triumph” of a Spanish Renaissance poetic voice over childhood memories of African languages in Del amor y otros demonios provide the backdrop for the author’s final attempts to imagine Afro-Caribbean subjectivity in his fiction.

Voice in a narrative: A trialogue with Ruth Finnegan

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Sarali Gintsburg ◽  
Luis Galván Moreno ◽  
Ruth Finnegan
Keyword(s):  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE (1933, Derry, Northern Ireland) took a DPhil in Anthropology at Oxford, then joined the Open University of which she is now an Emeritus Professor. Her publications include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011). Ruth Finnegan was interviewed by Sarali Gintsburg (ICS, University of Navarra) and Luis Galván Moreno (University of Navarra) on the occasion of an online lecture delivered at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. In this trialogue-like interview, Ruth tells about the childhood experiences that were decisive for her interest in orality and storytelling, about her education and training as a Classicist in Oxford, the beginnings of her fieldwork in Africa among the Limba of Sierra Leone, and her recent activity as a novelist. She stresses the importance of voice, of its physical, bodily dimensions, its pitch and cadence; and then affirms the essential role of audience in communication. The discussion then touches upon several features of African languages, classical Arabic and Greek, and authoritative texts of Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to the 19th century novel. Through discussing her childhood memories, her assessment of the development and challenges of anthropology, and her views on the digital transformation of the world, Ruth concludes that the notion of narrative, communication, and multimodality are inseparably linked.

Childhood memories

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-81
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grene
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family Home

Farming childhoods may be recalled, as in John Montague’s poems as a first formative world, or a historically foundational landscape in Polly Devlin’s memoir. Maura Laverty remembered an (imagined) childhood on a farm with her beloved grandmother, while Alice Taylor’s popular Through the Fields to School makes an idyll of her recollections. But equally there are traumatic memories of farmhood violence in the poetry of Jane Clarke or of sexual abuse in the family home, as in Claire Keegan’s short story ‘The Parting Gift’. The childhood farm milieu can also be a place of estrangement in Keegan’s novella Foster, and of alienation in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls.

scholarly journals Leo Tolstoy's novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”: on the question of creative history

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
Yevgeniya V. Nikolayeva
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The State ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Other Information ◽  
Children's Stories ◽  
Children's Reading ◽  
First Time

For the first time, the article presents a comparative analysis of Alexander. Pushkin's remarks about his poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and Leo Tolstoy's short story of the same name, written for children's reading and placed in "The Alphabet Book". In the second half of the 1850s, Leo Tolstoy carefully and with numerous notes read the biography of Pushkin, published by Pavel Annenkov for the collected works of the great author. We can assume that from this time the writer begins a conscious study of Pushkin's prose, which previously had not attracted him. In this book, Leo Tolstoy marks out in pencil, among other information, the unsent Pushkin’s letter to Nikolay Gnedich, in which the author of the poem critically examines its shortcomings. In the late 1860s and the early 1870s, Leo Tolstoy was experiencing a serious creative crisis caused by dissatisfaction with the state of fiction, especially language, of that time. He begins to focus on the language of "folkish literature", for the first time applying new "writing techniques" when creating children's stories for "The Alphabet Book". Comparison of Pushkin's critical remarks about his work with the content, images of the main characters, minor characters and their storylines in Leo Tolstoy's story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" convinces that the writer took into account Pushkin's remarks, having received from Puskin a genuine lesson in skill.

scholarly journals Writing, Aging and Death in Margaret Atwood’s The Door

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-156
Author(s):  
Pilar Sánchez Calle
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Poetry Collection

In The Door (2007) Margaret Atwood continues her movement from the trickster aesthetics of previous works (1965‒1986) towards the more human vision that she had developed in her poetry collection Morning in the Burned House (1995). The Door includes poems written between 1997 and 2007, and they trace similar concerns to other works published at this stage of Atwood’s career, such as The Blind Assassin (2002) and Moral Disorder (2007). My aim in this article is to explore the predominant themes in The Door, such as childhood memories, the writing process as a voyage into a dark underworld, death, aging, and the passing of time. Those reflections are accompanied by a formal analysis of the selected poems, where I discuss Atwood’s poetic voice, the different structures and rhythms of the poems, as well as the repeated presence of motifs such as the cellar, the underground world, and the well.

Laboratories of Universality

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-290
Author(s):  
Carlos Fonseca Suárez
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Local Center ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Socioeconomic Context ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
Cien Anos De Soledad ◽  
Informational Networks

Carlos Fonseca Suárez read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” as a reflection upon the limits of technological universalism as well as a reconfiguration of modern cosmopolitanism. Carlos Fonseca Suárez then explores the figure of José Arcadio Buendía—founder of Macondo in Cien años de soledad (1967)—who in his obsession with scientific innovation takes Borges’s exploration of technological modernity and the impasses of modern progressivism even further, proposing instead a new dialectical model of universalism. Finally, Carlos Fonseca Suárez concludes by adding a final star to this constellation by exploring how the character of Luca Belladona in Ricardo Piglia’s 2010 novel Blanco nocturno allows for a rereading of this Humboldt’s plainsman scene in the contemporary socioeconomic context, where the relation between the global and the local, center and periphery, becomes intertwined in the elusive informational networks of global capital.

scholarly journals Персонажная система и мотивная структура повести Г. Башкуева «Убить время»

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-392
Author(s):  
Olga V. Khandarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Character System ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Introduction. Gennady Bashkuev’s works attempt to comprehend the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and To Kill Time proves a most significant prose work of the writer. Goals. The article seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between the system of characters in the novel and its motif structure, which helps clarify the underlying idea of the work, eclectic in structure and close in form to a short story cycle. Methods. The study rests on the theses about a relationship between semantics of motif and character, predicativity of motif, and on the concept of motif complexes and leitmotif construction of the narrative. Results. The main character of the novel is the narrator, the narrative proper divided into childhood memories and those of recent past. The characters of childhood can be clustered into three groups: family, friends, adults —motifs of happiness, celebration, romantic dreams and that of loss are associated with them. The characters of adulthood are women and childhood friends who are associated with motifs of marginal life, betrayal, guilt, and that of romance. The motifs of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ memories are intertwined, and it is the motif structure that ensures the integrity of the narrative. The key role in the novel is played by the binary image — the saleswoman Inga and the city madwoman — that combines two main themes for the narrator’s self-reflection: childhood and women. The plot structure partly fits into the universal mythological scheme: a series of trials — sketches-events from the life of the autobiographical narrator — is built into somewhat a ‘mythological journey’ to finally end with the acquisition of ‘elixir’ — catharsis and spiritual liberation. Conclusions. The image of the protagonist, the narrator, is explicated in the text and is revealed in the system of motifs associated with characters of his memories. Analysis of the character system proves instrumental in revealing key ideas of the novel and interpreting its title: those are reflections about time that become a focus of the author’s viewpoint uniting the seemingly disparate stories.

scholarly journals Speaking Silence in 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janka Kaščáková
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First World War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
World War ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Contemporary Reality ◽  
First World

Detachment from meaningful movement in time; the gradual development of history disrupted by absurdity and the cruelty of the First World War; the wasteland of European civilization and the reduction of individuals into ghastly numbers; human existence no longer firmly attached with regard to meaning: all this, in Modernist texts, translates into both scattered bits and conflicted yet meaningful juxtapositions. To use T.S. Eliot’s famous line, literature becomes a “heap of broken images” and all authors wish to express this disruption and deal with it in their own particular way. One of the direct representations of the inability of writers to cope with contemporary reality is the fragmentation of the text, often accompanied by the frequent use of ellipses. This is especially noticeable in the works of the New Zealand Modernist Katherine Mansfield; her short stories build on what is said as much as on what is left unsaid; they make use of empty spaces bearing meaning, speaking silence- all this requires an active reader, drawn into the creation of the story. This paper discusses Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” with an emphasis on the unexpressed, or implied, the use of ellipses and omissions; it analyzes their interactions with the content of the story; and concludes that what has been omitted is as important as what has been included.

Early Lessing, Commitment, the World

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Guy
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
World System ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
The World

This chapter begins by looking at the notions of writerly commitment formulated in Lessing’s essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957). Lessing’s ideas on commitment are then compared to those emerging from Jean-Paul Sartre’s post-1945 writing, which became an important frame not only for Sartre’s actions as a public figure, but also for the work of contemporaries such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Despite Lessing’s critique of Sartre in ‘The Small Personal Voice’, she is shown to share an emphasis on the place of the committed writer within a broad and unfolding world-system; she also shares with Sartre the same rhetorical means to establish such an emphasis. Lessing’s 1963 short story, ‘A Letter from Home’, is then read against the background of her notions of commitment and their Sartrean resonances. Tracking Lessing’s ideas about commitment from her non-fictional to her fictional writing, a consistent problematic is detected, of the manner in which a global location for the writer might be conveyed. In particular, Lessing addresses this problematic through frequent use of number. For Lessing (as for Sartre), number is less a means of enabling measurement and accuracy, than a gestural means to convey enormous scale.

«Climbing The Alps»: Symbolic Toponymy as aFactor of the Cycles Formationin I.A. Bunin’s Oeuvre

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
Yana Bazhenova
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
The Third ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Alps ◽  
The One

The article analyzes the unassembled cycle of I.A. Bunin’sthree texts with the same title «In the Alps». The poem and the chronologically first short story with the same title were written at the beginning of the writer’s literary career. At that time Bunin learned from outstanding predecessors in order to find his own poetic voice and place in the field of literature. The result of the searches showed the invention of a unique genre – the genre of prosaic miniature. Then, half a century after publication of the first texts «In the Alps»,the third short story with the same titleappeared. The meaning of the toponym «The Alps» in the title of the short stories is explained by appealing to Bunin’s memoirs and self-describing notes. The concept «The Alps» in his literary works is initiated, on the one hand, by the writer’s first trip to Switzerland, and, on the other hand, by the parallel reception of the so-called «Swiss myth» in the works of European and Russian romantic poets and writers: G. G. Byron and V.A. Zhukovsky. While the motifs and imagery system of Bunin’s «alpine » cycle is inherited from his predecessors, the innovations of his literary method are demonstrated in the narrative organization of the texts.

Convergent-beam thickness determination: The advantages of digital imaging

1994 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 420-421
Author(s):  
Stuart McKernan ◽  
C. Barry Carter
Keyword(s):  
Intensity Variation ◽  
Convergent Beam Electron Diffraction ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Thickness Determination ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Automated Processing ◽  
Beam Thickness ◽  
Convergent Beam ◽  
Remarkable Agreement

Convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) patterns contain an immense amount of information relating to the structure of the material from which they are obtained. The analysis of these patterns has progressed to the point that under appropriate, well specified conditions, the intensity variation within the CBED discs may be understood in a quantitative sense. Rossouw et al for example, have produced numerical simulations of zone-axis CBED patterns which show remarkable agreement with experimental patterns. Spence and co-workers have obtained the structure factor parameters for lowindex reflections using the intensity variation in 2-beam CBED patterns. Both of these examples involve the use of digital data. Perhaps the most frequent use for quantitative CBED analysis is the thickness determination described by Kelly et al. This analysis has been implemented in a variety of different ways; from real-time, in-situ analysis using the microscope controls, to measurements of photographic prints with a ruler, to automated processing of digitally acquired images. The potential advantages of this latter process will be presented.

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