Death Styles

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Douglas Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Love Story ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Horror Story

Malina demonstrates the paradoxical struggle that characterizes any attempt at reflecting on the uncanny relationship between the embodiment of language and the expression of pain. As Elaine Scarry (1985) notes, pain can be used to both make and unmake an identity; pain’s destructuring force can be complemented by the reconstructive potential of the imagination. Yet what happens when the identity to be reconstructed leads only to a fragmentary regeneration; what if the only whole that can be constructed remains incomplete and internally divided? This article focuses on reading Malina as an allegory of the process of writing itself: that is, a means of exploring the attempted expression of the pain and fragmentation of the embodied subject that resulted from the atrocities of World War II. Using Blanchot’s reflections on anguish and language, I argue that the novel—part love story, part horror story, part detective story—is a riddle that the reader must solve, but that in doing so the reader becomes infected with the same fragmentary force that disembodies the protagonist. As such, the heuristic consequence of the novel is to instruct the reader on the influence of language and imagining on the attempted reembodiment or, in this case, eventual disembodiment, of the body in pain.

scholarly journals Ciało, trup, śmierć w utworze Götz i Meyer Davida Albahariego

2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 553-564
Author(s):  
Sabina Giergiel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
City Center ◽  
Independent State ◽  
The City

Body, corpse and death in David Albahari’s Gotz and MeyerThe article investigates the broadly understood record of Jewish death that emerges from the text of the Serbian prose writer David Albahari. Emphasizing the dominance of economy in the Nazi system, the author indicates those procedures described in Albahari’s book which justify such an assessment e.g. human reification, the body as debris, technical syntax used by German officials. Additionally, these considerations on death representation are supplemented with an endeavor to establish the Belgrade dwellers’ attitude towards the fortunes of the Jews. According to the author, the novel explicitly marks the spatial opposition enclosure vs. opening, the camp vs. the city center that is reinforced by the river, which during World War II divided the capital into Zemun belonging to the Independent State of Croatia, also the place where the camp was situated and Belgrade’s Serbian center. This demarcation intensifies the victims’ feelings of separation and loneliness, at the same time enabling the capital’s dwellers to occupy a comfortable position of bystanders.  Telo, mrtvac, smrt u romanu Gec i Majer Davida AlbaharijaRad se bavi vidovima smrti u romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija. Pokazuje mehanizme koje potvrđuju opštepoznatu činjenicu da je u nacističkom sistemu dominirala ekonomija. U te mehanizme se ubrajaju, između ostalih: reifikacija čoveka, tretiranje tela kao otpada i tehnička leksika koju upotrebljavaju nemački funkcioneri. Analiza uključuje i pokušaj odgovora na pitanje kakav je bio odnos stanovnika Beograda prema sudbini Jevreja. Istraživanje pokazuje prostornu opoziciju zatvoren i otvoren prostor, logor i centar grada. Nju naglašava reka koja je za vreme Drugog svetskog rata delila srpsku prestonicu na Zemun, gde je bio smešten logor, a koji je pripadao NDH, i srpski centar Beograda. Ova granica je vezana za osećaj separacije i usamljenost žrtava, s jedne starne, i udobnost i bajstander-efekat stanovnika prestonice, s druge strane

scholarly journals Easterine Kire Iralu’s Mari: A Historical Narrative of the Forgotten Battle of Kohima

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 24-34
Author(s):  
Veena Gour ◽  
Dr. Shubhra Tripathi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
World War ◽  
Love Story ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Journey ◽  
The Impact

Most of the Indians now have forgotten that Kohima was the scene of an Allied victory in the World War II; the victory was so decisive that it changed the contours of the war in Asia. In this significant battle of Kohima, the Japanese force tried to enter India from Naga Hills, advancing progressively into Asia after the success of their Burma campaign in 1941-42. But in Kohima they were defeated convincingly by the British Allied Forces which were helped by local inhabitants in the battle. The Japanese had broken down equally by disease and hunger thus left their plan to enter in India. The Battle of Kohima often refers by Nagas as a ‘forgotten battle’ and its heroes as the ‘forgotten heroes’. Easterine Kire Iralu’s Mari stands as a distinct novel as it commemorates the forgotten Battle of Kohima of 1944. The novel is a fascinating love story set in the midst of this war. It is an enchanting tale of Iralu’s aunt Khrielievu Mari O’ Leary who was engaged to a British sergeant Victor. The novel is written in form of a diary which Mari maintained during the war meticulously registering every event of her life. Mari is not just a story of a young girl falling in love but it’s a story of all those people who lived that war- time. This paper examines the impact of the battle of Kohima on the culture, identity and traditional values of Naga society which the writer has described in the backdrop of Mari’s life journey in the novel.  

scholarly journals Genre, Computation, and the Varieties of Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wilkens
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Textual Content

Is "literary fiction" a useful genre label in the post-World War II United States? In some sense, the answer is obviously yes; there are sections marked "literary fiction" on Amazon, in bookstores, and on Goodreads, all of which contain many postwar and contemporary titles. Much of what is taught in contemporary fiction classes also falls under the heading of literary fiction, even if that label isn't always used explicitly. On the other hand, literary fiction, if it hangs together at all, may be defined as much by its (or its consumers') resistance to genre as by its positive textual content. That is, where conventional genres like the detective story or the erotic romance are recognizable by the presence of certain character types, plot events, and narrative styles, it is difficult to find any broadly agreeable set of such features by which literary fiction might be consistently identified.

scholarly journals Moving Lightly over the Earth

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Spissu
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Ethnographic Observation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
The Town

In the novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), the German writer W. G. Sebald recounts his solitary journey to the town of Suffolk (UK) at the end of his years, while he also reflects on some of the dramatic events that shaped World War II and his personal memories. In this work, he takes on a particular narrative tactic defined by the interaction between the text and images that creates a special type of montage in which he seems to draw from cinematic language. I argue that, drawing on Sebald’s work, we can imagine a form of ethnographic observation that involves the creation of a cinematic map through which to explore the memories and imagination of individuals in relation to places where they live. I explore the day-to-day lived experiences of unemployed people of Sulcis Iglesiente, through their everyday engagement with, and situated perceptions of, their territory. I describe the process that led me to build Moving Lightly over the Earth, a cinematic map of Sulcis Iglesiente through which I explored how women and men in the area who lost their jobs as a result of the process of its deindustrialization give specific meaning to the territory, relating it to memories of their past and hopes and desires for the future.

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947): singular experiences

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
World War ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Under The Volcano

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly-individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of World War II. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.

Oil For the Lamps of China: Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Dark Novel of American Capitalism and Chinese Revolution

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sherman Cochran
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
American Corporation ◽  
Standard Oil Company ◽  
Oil Company

Among American works of fiction about China before World War II, Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1933) was second only to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) in influence and sales. Hobart’s novel, evidently set during the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, also inspired a Warner Brothers film by the same name in 1935. Unlike the film, Hobart’s novel did not give a boosterish picture of American capitalism. In portraying the leading character, Steven Chase, a field agent for an American oil firm in China, Hobart drew on the experience of her husband, a field agent for Standard Oil Company. Her husband, like Chase, was callously fired after loyally serving the company and adapting to Chinese culture and protecting company property from anti-imperialist mobs. The novel is memorable for its vivid characterizations of Americans and Chinese working for an American corporation in China and for its dark view of American capitalism and Chinese revolution.

China's New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang Zizhong

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 945-978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Waldron
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Left Breast ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Spring ◽  
World War ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Senior Officers ◽  
Fine Gold

General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the eight divisions that constituted the Chinese 33rd Army Group, was killed at approximately 4:00 P.M. on May 16, 1940, in fighting at Shilichangshan (‘Ten li mountain’) near Nanguadian in Northern Hubei. The battle was one engagement of the Zaoyang-Yichang campaign that rumbled through late spring of that year. Surrounded by the Japanese, his forces had refused either to retreat or to surrender. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, General Zhang had been wounded seven times in all, by grenade, bullet, and finally by bayonet. The victorious Japanese realized Zhang's identity only when a major discovered, in the left breast pocket of his blood-soaked yellow uniform, a fine gold pen engraved with his name. The major quickly summoned senior officers; they ordered a stretcher brought and the body was carried away from the battlefield. (This was observed, through half-opened eyes, by Zhang's long-time associate, the Chinese major Ma Xiaotang, who lay nearby, bleeding from a bayonet wound, and who later gasped out the story to Chinese as he died).

scholarly journals The Body as a Source of Meaning in the Culture of Remembrance: The Reputational Entrepreneurship of the Characters of Yugoslav National Heroes

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Lučić Todosić
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
World War ◽  
Group Memory ◽  
Collective Group ◽  
Political Myth ◽  
Wartime Experience

The aim of this paper is to explore the patterns and meanings to be found in the characters of Yugoslav national heroes who met a violent death in World War II. These are heroes who belong to the type of martyr heroes, and their sacrifice is highly rated in all patriotic mythologies. Created to denote the heroism of the chosen, they have sublimated the meaning and symbolism of one remembrance of the war. The death of these national heroes will be analyzed through their official biographies, which served to represent the characters of the National Heroes of Yugoslavia and keep the heroic symbol-names ever present in the collective group memory. Through their characters, a specific wartime experience and the martyr’s death of the national hero who died for the freedom of the Yugoslav peoples, as seen by the victors in this war drama, were transmitted to the citizens of Yugoslavia. Various patterns of wartime heroism (warrior, martyr, leader heroism) were represented as national patriotism, and the fighters and martyrs of the war of national liberation were named. The characteristics of  the reputational entrepreneurship of these heroes’ characters are specifically explored, taking into account the characteristics of the discourse through which they were interpreted and presented. On the other hand, the limitations of this discourse provide an opportunity to deconstruct certain common traits of a certain hero type and discover the latent meanings conveyed by the characters of Yugoslav national heroes as actors of a historical-political myth.

scholarly journals “Like being trapped in a drum”: The Poetics of Resonance in Frances Itani’s Deafening

2018 ◽  
pp. 201-232
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Theoretical Reasoning ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

This paper considers how Frances Itani’s Deafening imaginatively rethinks our understanding of the Great War in the age of postmemory. Seeing as the novel is set in Canada and Europe during the First World War and takes as its protagonist a deaf woman, the poetic attention given to the senses as a horizon of phenomenological experience magnifies the moral bonds that the characters establish in defi ance of both deafness and death. Guided by the theoretical reasoning of Marianne Hirsch, Elaine Scarry, and Alison Landsberg as well as contemporary phenomenological thinking, most significantly that of Edward S. Casey, Steven Connor, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, this paper examines how the novel’s attentiveness to the materiality of the body in regard to the ethical collisions of sound and silence as well as life and death contributes to a poetics of resonance that generates prosthetic memories, turning the anonymous record of war into a private experience of moral endurance inscribed on the ear of historical legacy.

scholarly journals Painful Neutrality: Screening the Extradition of the Balts from Sweden

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Lars Kristensen ◽  
Christo Burman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.

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