The graveyard and the garden: Reading connectivities in Rana Dasgupta’s “The Changeling”

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-206
Author(s):  
Helle Schulz Bildsøe ◽  
Ulla Rahbek
Keyword(s):  
Global City ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Garden ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Systemic Network ◽  
Organic Networks

In the novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), Rana Dasgupta explores the contemporary age of globalization as a time of chaotic change. Tokyo Cancelled is composed as a story cycle of 13 tales. This article focuses on one of these tales in particular, “The Changeling”. “The Changeling” relates the tumultuous experiences of Bernard, who is a changeling and archetypal stranger in the pestilence-ridden city of contemporary Paris. The article explores the juxtaposition of systemic and organic networks as the central trope through which Dasgupta explores change and connectivities in a global twenty-first-century moment. We argue that the story presents a process of symbolic transformation whereby the national capital changes into a global city. This change signifies a shift from a national towards a planetary perspective. “The Changeling” comprises at least two different kinds of networks which converge and conflate into one overarching web that is the metropolis: there is a systemic network of control materialized in Montparnasse graveyard and an organic network out of control manifested in a community garden where people congregate to tell stories. Indeed, Dasgupta revisits Benjaminian storytelling as a global networking practice which, while locally contextualized in an impromptu garden in Paris, hints at an awareness of worldwide connectivity.

scholarly journals “Ae Thoosand Tongues”: Language and Identity in Psychoraag

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Ashley
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Language And Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Twenty First Century

Suhayl Saadi’s 2004 novel, Psychoraag, asks important questions about language, nation, and identity in twenty-first century Scotland.This article analyzes the ways in which language and music shape identity in the novel; explores the tensions that exist between the novel’s competing languages; studies the narrator’s personae; and examines his search for psychic, emotional, and linguistic wholeness. It argues that Psychoraag is an effective commentary on the inherent limitations of exclusionary conceptions of Scottishness, for the novel demonstrates that it is only by transcending traditional notions of Scottishness and embracing linguistic disorder that contemporary Scottish identity can be fully articulated.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

Loving Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rivlin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016), a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew published in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, to explore how the novel and the series seek to create affective ‘middlebrow’ communities that purport to keep Shakespeare alive through love. Counter-intuitively, Tyler chose to adapt a play whose gender politics are unlovable to many twenty-first-century American readers, including the author. But although Tyler has said that she ‘hates’ Shakespeare, her solution is surprisingly to inspire mild, positive feelings in her readers. In mediating Shakespeare in this way, Tyler effectively strengthens bonds of empathy and affection between herself and her readers. Extending its claim, the article argues that the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is a ‘middlebrow’ publishing enterprise, in the sense that it uses Shakespeare to cultivate communities built on the relationship between the adapting author and her readers.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Kaisidou
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Twenty First Century

Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market. This raises important questions as to why the burden of the civil conflict weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. This article begins by offering an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s. Then it uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to illustrate the authors’ ethical commitment to ‘unsilence’ and redress the past through the use of archival evidence and testimonies. The case studies of ThomasSkassis’Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000), Nikos Davvetas’ Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στορινγκ (2006),and SophiaNikolaidou's Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) serve to illustrate my argument.

scholarly journals When Earth Matters: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-455
Author(s):  
Gerd Bayer
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

Reflections on Soviet Novels

1960 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Gerschenkron
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Russian Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Soviet Russia

There is every likelihood that future historians of the Russian novel will praise the Soviet period for the record number of volumes produced and blame it for an equally unprecedented decline in artistic standards. Yet one may hope that the twenty-first-century critic, in fairness to an unhappy past, will not overlook a redeeming feature of the Soviet novel, i.e., its considerable anthropological value. The present reflections about a few recent or fairly recent Soviet novels do not deal with their literary qualities. They are concerned exclusively with the light these novels cast upon various aspects of everyday life in Soviet Russia, including, it may be added, the life of the novel makers themselves.

Godan, The Film: What It Replicates and What It Hides

IJOHMN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 71-76
Author(s):  
Pallavi Taru Ishwarrao ◽  
DR. Rajpalsingh Chikhlikar
Keyword(s):  
Research Paper ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tremendous Amount ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
Literary Classics

The present research paper compares the novel Godan by Munshi Premchand written in 1936 in pre independence era and the film directed by Trilok Jetly in 1962 in post independence era. It simply underlines the scene, plot, persons and events etc. the cinema replicates or hides. Literature and cinema seems to have one similar motif or seems to work on the similar ground that is to reflect society. Literature doesn’t lie but “not mentioning something” or “saying it in different way” also ruins history. Generally we consider literature as a piece of history and what is written in it, we take it as a reality or truth. And if this literature dosent mentions anything we don’t think it ever exit or nothing worthy of considering. But is this the only truth? isn’t there  not a world beyond literature? There is a very big scenario outside the frame of literature, which the so called literary persons forget to mention.  About the cinema also we have the same formation, we think that what it shows reflects reality or is strongly influenced by the reality. And cinema has one big advantage of reaching out to the largest amount of people. It has the tremendous amount of audience compared to literature. It can influence people in a great amount. The adaptation of literary classics to films has surged as one of the most appealing topics in the twenty-first century in interdisciplinary studies. Literature and Cinema both are an inevitable part like the heart of the society. They are known as the mirror which reflects the true and somehow in some extent the actual image of the society. They are always influenced by and to the society. The book Godan, a masterpiece in which the theme of social evil’s is successfully depicted and marvelously knitted around the novel is all about the sensibility of lack of humanity, famine, poverty and exploitation of Indian peasantry.

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