The “in-betweens” and the “hatadaiva”: Oscillating, fantastic realities in Tashan Mehta’s The Liar’s Weave

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942094075
Author(s):  
E Dawson Varughese
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Indian Writing In English ◽  
Unique Ability ◽  
Literary Ground

This article explores the idea of movement, namely oscillation, in Tashan Mehta’s The Liar’s Weave (2017). I trace this idea through an oscillation of locations (as “real” and “unreal”), of language (as familiar terms and as invented terms), and of free will (against a fixed destiny). Specifically, I explore how Zahan Merchant, the novel’s protagonist, is intricately engaged with all three manifestations of oscillation. With his unique ability to verbally lie new realities into existence, Zahan is able to move between the real and unreal, the known and the unknown, as well as act as an agent of free will within a system that precludes such agency. There is an overarching interest in the novel’s employment of the speculative genre — primarily articulated through Zahan’s ability to lie new realities into being and through the wild forest of Vidroha — although the focus of this article is not on arguing a specific case for the novel as speculative fiction. Instead, through a close reading of the text and with a focus on the idea of oscillation, I argue that the novel negotiates familiar as well as unfamiliar literary ground in relation to Indian writing in English and in turn, relates to the Indian post-millennial contemporary.

scholarly journals CHALLENGING INGARDEN’S “RADICAL” DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE LITERARY

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 703-728
Author(s):  
HEATH WILLIAMS ◽  
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Intentional Object ◽  
Real Object ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ontological Approach ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
Truth Value

Ingarden’s phenomenology of aesthetics is characterised primarily as a realist ontological approach which is secondarily concerned with acts of consciousness. This approach leads to a stark contrast between spatiotemporal objects and literary objects. Ontologically, the former is autonomous, totally determined, and in possession of infinite attributes, whilst the latter is a heteronomous intentional object that has only limited determinations and infinitely many “spots of indeterminacy.” Although spots of indeterminacy are often discussed, the role they play in contrasting the real and literary object is not often disputed. Through a close reading of Ingarden’s ontological works and texts on aesthetics, this essay contests the purity of Ingarden’s ontological approach and the ensuing disparity between real and literary object, particularly on the question of spots of indeterminacy. I do this by demonstrating the following five theses: 1) Ingarden’s claim that the real object has an infinitude of properties belies an epistemology, and we should instead conclude that ontologically the real object’s properties are finite. 2) Ingarden’s a priori argument that absent properties of real objects are ontologically determined is unsound. 3) The radical difference between the infinitude and finitude of givenness and absence of the real and the literary object ought to be relativised. 4) Indeterminacies within the novel are concretised in much the same way that absent properties of real objects are intended. 5) Literature makes claims that have a truth value that we can attribute to their author.

A Space Odyssey: Decoding the Reality of Dictatorship in Carolina de Robertis’s Cantoras

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Sreeparna Das
Keyword(s):  
Social Isolation ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
The Real ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
Different Ages

By turns brutal and beautiful, Carolina de Robertis’s 2019 novel Cantoras explores twelve years of violent Uruguayan dictatorship where five women of different ages, social, economic, and familial circumstances are yet all equally affected by misogyny, homophobia, and political repression. The women come together to create a haven of freedom wherein to navigate their sexuality without being criminalized, in the middle of a place where freedom for a better future seems to belong to “another bohemian era of dreams.” Pieced together from the real-life oral narratives and testimonies of hundreds, lost or silenced in the mainstream din, the novel brings to life a portrait of queer love and forgotten history unlike any other. This essay aims a close reading of the socio-political environment of the novel from dictatorship to the revolution which makes the journey that these women take from social isolation to widespread acceptance, their achievements, losses, and resilience shine all the more.

scholarly journals Improving the Downwind Sail Design Process by Means of a Novel FSI Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 624
Author(s):  
Antonino Cirello ◽  
Tommaso Ingrassia ◽  
Antonio Mancuso ◽  
Vincenzo Nigrelli ◽  
Davide Tumino
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Methods ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Weakly Coupled ◽  
Design And Manufacturing ◽  
Sailing Yacht ◽  
Computational Resources ◽  
Effective Use

The process of designing a sail can be a challenging task because of the difficulties in predicting the real aerodynamic performance. This is especially true in the case of downwind sails, where the evaluation of the real shapes and aerodynamic forces can be very complex because of turbulent and detached flows and the high-deformable behavior of structures. Of course, numerical methods are very useful and reliable tools to investigate sail performances, and their use, also as a result of the exponential growth of computational resources at a very low cost, is spreading more and more, even in not highly competitive fields. This paper presents a new methodology to support sail designers in evaluating and optimizing downwind sail performance and manufacturing. A new weakly coupled fluid–structure interaction (FSI) procedure has been developed to study downwind sails. The proposed method is parametric and automated and allows for investigating multiple kinds of sails under different sailing conditions. The study of a gennaker of a small sailing yacht is presented as a case study. Based on the numerical results obtained, an analytical formulation for calculating the sail corner loads has been also proposed. The novel proposed methodology could represent a promising approach to allow for the widespread and effective use of numerical methods in the design and manufacturing of yacht sails.

scholarly journals Vuoret ja kaupunki vastakohtaisina tiloina Alisa Ganijevan teoksissa

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Anni Lappela
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Real ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Space

Mountains and City as Contrary Spaces in the Prose of Alisa Ganieva I analyze Alisa Ganieva’s novel Prazdnichnaia gora (2012) and her novella Salam tebe, Dalgat! (2010) from a geocritical (Westphal, Tally) point of view. Ganieva was born in 1985 in Moscow, but she grew up in Dagestan, in North Caucasia. Since 2002, she has lived in Moscow. All Ganieva’s novels are set in present-day Dagestan, not only in the capital Makhachkala but also in the countryside.  I study the ways the two main spaces and main milieus, the mountains and the city, oppose each other in Prazdnichnaia gora. I also analyze how this opposition constructs the utopian and dystopian discourses of the novel. In this high/low opposition, the mountains appear as the utopian place of a better future, and the city in the lowlands is depicted as a dystopian place of the present-day life. The texts’ multilayered time is also part of my analysis, which follows Westphal’s idea of the stratigraphy of time. Furthermore, the mountains are associated with the traditional way of life and the Soviet past. In this way, the mountains have two kinds of roles in the texts. Nevertheless, the city is a central element of the postcolonial dystopian discourse of Prazdnichnaia gora. In my opinion, Ganieva’s texts problematize referentiality, one of the key concepts of geocriticism. Whilst the city tends to be very referential, the mountains escape the referential relationship to the “real” geographical space.

scholarly journals On freedom in the times of Economic Crisis – A Close Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Experiment ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Times ◽  
Far Future

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous experimental project enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire.

scholarly journals Epilepsy, Forgetting, and Convalescence in Ondaatje’s Warlight

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Do So

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.

scholarly journals Corpus Assisted Approach To Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Samuel Kwesi Nkansah
Keyword(s):  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Numerical Data ◽  
Qualitative Description ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Context Of Use ◽  
Objective Investigation

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born is a novel known for its extensive portrayal of the ills and anomalies in the Ghanaian society right after independence. The majority of studies on the novel have overwhelmingly concluded that corruption is the preoccupation of the text. This view appears skewed in many respects. This paper argues that the corpus assisted approach can contribute methodologies to support objective investigation of the subject matters of the text. This study, adopting the corpus-assisted approach in a mix of numerical data and qualitative description of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, used frequencies of the occurrence of pejorative terms in the text to determine the dominant subject matters in the novel. The approach reveals that “rot” and “decay” are the most dominant motifs used, followed by “filth”, “corruption”, and “bribery”. It suggests that clusters, i.e., recurrence of words, characters’ association with the words, and context of use serve as textual cues in thematic exploration. The approach aids in revealing that the real intent of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that the total breakdown of the society rests on seemingly insignificant characters. The paper has implications for methodological approaches to thematic analysis of literary texts, particularly, the novel.

scholarly journals ABOUT THE MEANING OF THEATRE “THE MASTER AND MARGARITA”

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-310
Author(s):  
E.A. Ivanshina ◽  
V.V. Zyatkova
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
The Real ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Master And Margarita ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Master And Margarita ◽  
Literary Codes

The article deals with the semantic field of the theater in "The master and Margarita", which extends to all novel chronotopes and can be structured as a two-level one. Considering different cases of theatricalization of space and different signs of theatricality in the novel, the authors correlate the real theater (theatre as a historical reality ) and the literary theater (the art of acting ) and actualize the confrontation of literature and historical reality in "The Master and Margarita". The text of the novel is considered as a model of counterculture, from the standpoint of which the author chooses those literary codes from which his own model of theatrical behavior is built. At the same time, special attention is paid to the actualization of the metaphor "theater - court" and the semantics of exposure, and the novel itself is an act of vengeance of the author and the implementation of his inner freedom. As an example of such an artistic concept of the relationship between art and life, the film "Once upon a time... in Hollywood" by Tarantino is considered.

scholarly journals Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camilotti
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elsa Morante ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

scholarly journals Chronotope of Russian Works about Robinson

2021 ◽  
pp. 287-302
Author(s):  
T. V. Shvetsova ◽  
V. E. Shakhova
Keyword(s):  
Russian Language ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Language Interpretation ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Russian Language

The results of the study of the chronotope in Russian-language compositions based on the novel about Robinson’s adventures are presented. The material for the work was A. E. Razin’s novel “The Real Robinson” (1860) and Lev Tolstoy’s story “Robinson” (1862). The issues of the specifics of the representation of the chronotopic in the works of Russian writers are considered. The relevance of the study is due to the appeal to the universal of the chronotope, which contains an exhaustive toolkit for the artistic embodiment of images of space and time; as well as the search for new methods of literary analysis of the text. It is shown that in the analyzed texts, a kind of fusion of Russianlanguage compositions with a foreigncultural text in the aspect of a chronotope is realized. The similarities and differences in the rethinking of the story of Robinson are shown on the example of the model of textual connexity, the national specifics of the representation of the image of Robinson are indicated. It is noted that the external and internal chronotopes are retransmitted from work to work and create the basis for the emergence of the author’s intentions. It is proved that chronotopic analysis allows one to form an idea of the peculiarities of the Russian-language interpretation of the story of Robinson.

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