Altered Texts, Altered Worlds, Altered Styles

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Hoover
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
The World ◽  
Textual Features ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Paragraph

This article uses text alteration to illuminate literary style, the creation of the fictional world within literary texts, and the connections between textual features and interpretation. After briefly examining some previous uses of this technique, it discusses some recent work on how the world of the text is created and understood and then argues that altering texts can help us to understand text world creation and mind style. A series of changes of different kinds in the opening paragraph of Henry James’s The Ambassadors illustrates some of the uses of text alteration in the characterization of authorial style. The results are sometimes surprising and suggest that making focused alterations in texts can be an effective analytic tool for stylistic study more generally. Finally, I briefly re-examine the question of the connection between stylistic features and interpretation through the lens of text alteration.

scholarly journals Character of Vasyl Stus as Basis of Writer’s Psychotype

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Olha Punina
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
World Order ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Psychological Type ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Psychological Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Features ◽  
The Individual

In the present paper the scholar refers to the first part of her theoretical concept “psychotype – creator – image” and focuses on the peculiarities of Vasyl Stus’s character. This approach helps to defi ne the psychological type of the poet. Psychic ways of adaptation always leave a mark on the character of the individual. The coincidence between indirect observations of friends, acquaintances and psychological self-characteristics of the writer gives especially important information for the researcher. The analyzed materials include literary texts and different everyday life records that contain psychologically mediated observations and self-observations on the character of Vasyl Stus. These data allow identifying the specific psychological structure of personality based on many characteristics. The attributes ‘strong-willed’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘sensitive’, ‘quicktempered’, ‘uncompromising’, and ‘intellectual’ may be recognized as key features of this personality. The psychological exclusivity of Vasyl Stus is presented by the characteristics ‘self-suffi cient’, ‘intellectually deep man of strong will’, ‘inclined to expansive reaction and unsuited for compromise’. The scrupulous attention to the moral, volitional, emotional and intellectual components of Vasyl Stus’s character brings the researcher closer to determining the author’s model of the world order. The defined psychotype of the writer helps to understand the interdependence of the psychological nature of the author and his literary style

Discursive Silence: A Tool to Read between the Lines in Persian Stories

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Sadeghi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Special Function ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Class 1 ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Universal Pattern

<p class="1">According to Hemingway, if a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may be silent about seven-eighth of the text (1996: 192). This silence as a notable absence leaves a meaningful trace, which is a marker of written silence. Such silence has an interactive role, employed as a discursive technique in literature to produce a fictional world. Based on this theory, the reader seeks to fill the empty places in the fictional text to understand the story completely. An appropriate device for filling the blanks would be possible through understanding the different six types of silence and its functions. To be exact, the narrative silence is represented in structural, semantic and pragmatic types discussed respectively in three syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and interactive axes. This paper examines these variations of narrative silence in five Persian short stories to analyze the structure of narrative and the creation of the elements of a story by means of silence. The purpose of studying silence is to establish how the narrative structure is based on untold or omitted parts in subtly differing ways, so each kind of silence has its special function in these five stories. Generally, the theory of silence not only proposes a universal pattern for studying fiction, but also suggests a comprehensive analytic tool to study the structuring of narrative that will then allow scholars to differentiate the different silences that constitute styles of fiction writing.</p><div> </div>

scholarly journals Trackless mourning: the mobilities of love and loss

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Related Line ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

In response to recent work in cultural geography on the spatial practices of mourning and remembrance, I draw upon my own research on the discourse of romantic love (in the field of literary and cultural theory) in order to theorise a connection between the memorial practices associated with the ‘life’ of a relationship and those pursued in retrospect. Through a focus on embodied mobility, I propose that there are implicit links between the way in which we create and store memories ( à propos Bergson), the way we protect and project them (the processes commonly associated with nostalgia) and the way we activate them in later years (memorialisation). A secondary – but related – line of argument concerns the distinction between public (and ‘spectacular’) and private (and ‘invisible’) memorial practices and the function of mobilities of various kinds within each. With reference to a small selection of autobiographical and literary texts, I reflect upon the way in which burials (in the Christian tradition) have, for centuries, been inscribed by spectacular hypermobility (for the deceased as well as the bereaved) and how, by contrast, our more private memorial practices are often invisible precisely because they exist only as micro-mobilities of some kind. For while mourning may involve visits to memorials in the landscape (as explored in the work of Avril Maddrell and others), it may equally take the form of walks (or drives) devoid of both destination and visible trace (what I refer to here as a ‘trackless mourning’) or express itself in the smallest of gestures that, unbeknown to the world, unite the deceased and the bereaved.

“Created Space”: Mapping America as Poem in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End and Susan Howe's Secret History of the Dividing Line

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICK SELBY
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Space Mapping ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Structuralist Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Covert Operations ◽  
Secret History

Maps, recent cultural geographers are fond of reminding us, are products of the specific ideology from which they are written. A proper reading of a map, one that attends to it as a cultural product, can discover – even deconstruct – the ideological and cultural assumptions upon which its act of mapping is grounded. For Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, the metaphor of the map provides a crucially important analytic tool for disentangling the ways in which systems of power may be seen to work within – and through – a text. They note that, under the influence of post-structuralist theory, it has become commonplace to think of a text as a “discursive ‘terrain’ across which ‘sites’ of power may be ‘mapped’.” Clearly, then, cartographic metaphors are useful in discussing literary texts in that they can accommodate an examination of both the overt and covert operations of those texts in their representations of the cultural and ideological landscape from which they are produced. Indeed, to map the world is to make that world readable, to make it familiar; but, like any text – or, in the particular case of this essay, Gary Snyder's poetic sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) – a map does more than simply describe a discursive terrain. Such descriptions also enact the conditions of their cultural production.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

“You Were Not There,” The Creation of Humility and Knowledge in Qur?anic Stories: A Rhetorical and Narratological Analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leyla Ozgur Alhassen
Keyword(s):  
Second Person ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Lack Of Knowledge

In this study, I explore verses in the Qur?an that come towards the end of stories and use a second-person address to say, “you were not there” when this happened. I seek to understand what literary function in the story it serves to address the second person and her/ his lack of knowledge, whomever s/he is. I locate all of these verses (3:44, 11:49, 12:102 and 28:44–46) and analyze them in order to obtain a better understanding and analysis of Qur?anic literary style. I focus on what these stories have in common and how the verses function. In addition, I analyze the verses and their roles in their respective stories. Through this analysis, we see that these verses are generally seen by commentators and modern scholars as asserting the Prophet’s authority and the Qur?an’s authenticity. However, I argue that these verses function as a sophisticated Qur?anic literary and rhetorical device that works to put people in their place: Prophet Mu?ammad, his contemporaries, and all of the Qur?an’s audience, by showing them their lack of knowledge and their temporality.

Text Prophetism

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Elvira Lumi ◽  
Lediona Lumi
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Poetic Diction ◽  
Life On Earth

"Utterance universalism" as a phrase is unclear, but it is enough to include the term "prophetism". As a metaphysical concept, it refers to a text written with inspiration which confirms visions of a "divine inspiration", "poetic" - "legal", that contains trace, revelation or interpretation of the origin of the creation of the world and life on earth but it warns and prospects their future in the form of a projection, literary paradigm, religious doctrine and law. Prophetic texts reformulate "toll-telling" with messages, ideas, which put forth (lat. "Utters Forth" gr. "Forthteller") hidden facts from fiction and imagination. Prometheus, gr. Prometheus (/ prəmiθprə-mee-mo means "forethought") is a Titan in Greek mythology, best known as the deity in Greek mythology who was the creator of humanity and charity of its largest, who stole fire from the mount Olympus and gave it to the mankind. Prophetic texts derive from a range of artifacts and prophetic elements, as the creative magic or the miracle of literary texts, symbolism, musicality, rhythm, images, poetic rhetoric, valence of meaning of the text, code of poetic diction that refers to either a singer in a trance or a person inspired in delirium, who believes he is sent by his God with a message to tell about events and figures that have existed, or the imaginary ancient and modern world. Text Prophetism is a combination of artifacts and platonic idealism. Key words: text Prophetism, holy text, poetic text, law text, vision, image, figure

CHARACTERIZATION OF RELIGIOUS STYLE AS A FUNCTIONAL STYLE IN LINGUISTICS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-242
Author(s):  
Barnokhon Kushakova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
World Outlook ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Functional Features ◽  
The Creation

This article discusses the conditions, reasons and factors of characterization of religious style as a functional style in the field of linguistics. In addition, religious style and its main peculiarities, its importance in the social life, and the functional features of religious style are highlighted in the article. As a result of our investigation, the following results were obtained: a) the increase in the need for the creation and significance of religious language, particularly religious texts has been scientifically proved; b) the possibility of religious texts to represent the thoughts of the people, culture and world outlook has been verified; c) the specificity of religious language, religious texts has been revealed; d) the development of religious style as a functional style has been grounded.

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