Clothing and the oceanic identity in Melville’s Redburn

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Traber
Keyword(s):  
Outer Layer ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Visible Sign ◽  
The Way

Herman Melville’s Redburn approaches the topic of corporeal coding via the outer layer of clothing. Throughout the novel, the young protagonist consciously uses clothing as a means of self-representation and expression, deploying fashion to create and position himself in different contexts; for example, taking pride in his ragged clothes amongst well-dressed ship passengers becomes a form of social protest. But Redburn is also used to comic effect because his choices are often based on incorrect assumptions of propriety, such as his notion of the way a sailor is supposed to dress not matching the onboard reality. The rules of appearance that construct and restrain an identity are paradoxically bolstered at the same time they are broken, which allows Melville the opportunity to explore rebellion alongside the performative aspect of the self as a body constituting both a visible sign and a living vehicle for the mores, beliefs and ideologies that shape a society.

scholarly journals As mulheres do império: uma leitura de Ana de Amsterdam / Women’s Empire: A Reading of Ana de Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (61) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Naira Almeida Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Work Narratives ◽  
The Way

Resumo: Enquadrado no bojo da produção identificada como “literatura dos retornados”, o interesse principal de Ana de Amsterdam (2016a), de Ana Cássia Rebelo, não recai nas imagens traumáticas do retorno ou na violência praticada entre colonizadores e colonizados, como é recorrente no gênero. De forma até sintomática, as lembranças de África são esporádicas na menina de cinco anos que deixou Moçambique junto à família. Em seu lugar, a exuberância de uma Índia portuguesa sonhada e projetada por ela ocupam as lacunas de um presente insatisfatório, dividido entre a criação dos três filhos de um casamento em crise e o emprego burocrático desempenhado numa Lisboa pouco atrativa. Em ambos, tanto na Goa portuguesa como no trajeto para o trabalho, despontam narrativas de mulheres que constituem a síntese entre o diário íntimo de Ana e a escrita testemunhal da diáspora. Numa primeira parte do estudo, recupera-se a gênese do romance no formato do blog assinado pela autora, evidenciando a “escrita do eu”, nos moldes dos estudos de autobiografias, diários e afins. O segundo momento volta-se para a escrita testemunhal no lastro da narrativa pós-colonial e também da pós-memória. Em comum, os dois planos tratam da perspectiva feminina, seja na batalha contemporânea da cosmopolita Lisboa, seja nos desdobramentos silenciados do pós-colonialismo, em meio às histórias duplicadas de outras tantas Anas.Palavras-chave: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diário íntimo; literatura de testemunho; blogs.Abstract: Framed in the center of the production identified as “literature of the returnees”, the main focus of Ana de Amsterdam (2016a) by Ana Cássia Rebelo, does not lie in the traumatic images of the return or in the violence practiced between colonizers and colonized, as it is usually the case in this genre. Somehow, even symptomatically, African memories are sporadic in the five-year-old girl who left Mozambique with her family. Instead, the exuberance of a Portuguese India, dreamed and projected by her, occupies the gaps of an unsatisfactory present, dividing herself to raise three children of a marriage in crisis and work in the bureaucratic employment situated in an unattractive Lisbon. In both, Portuguese Goa and on the way to work, narratives of women emerge and represent the synthesis between Ana’s private diary and the testimonial writing of the diaspora. In a first part of the study, the genesis of the novel is recovered in the form of a blog signed by the author, emphasizing the “writing of the self”, in the molds of autobiographies, journals and etc. The second moment turns to the testimonial writing in the basis of the postcolonial narrative and also of the post-memory. In common, the two plans deal with the feminine perspective, whether in the contemporary battle of cosmopolitan Lisbon or in the silenced developments of postcolonialism, in the middle of the duplicate stories of so many Anas.Keywords: Ana de Amsterdam; Ana Cássia Rebelo; diary; testimonial literature; blogs.

scholarly journals Conjunctive Adverbials Used by Charlotte Brontë in the Novel “Jane Eyre”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Eva Leláková ◽  
Nikola Šavelová
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Semantic Coherence ◽  
The Way

Conjunctive adverbials or simply conjuncts represent specific sentence elements contributing to the overall semantic coherence of a text. Their use or omission depends entirely on the decision of the author of the text, the way he or she perceives and intends to convey a particular type of connection between its individual parts. In the present linguistic study of the literary work—the self-selected novel “Jane Eyre”—we observe and subsequently specify and evaluate occurrence of conjunctive adverbials in the text with the focus on their particular semantic categories and positions within a sentence.

Netta Syrett, Nobody’s Fault, and Female Decadence: The Story of a Wagnerite

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Crescent Rainwater
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The Way

Abstract Scholars have traditionally associated decadence with misogyny, and therefore it has typically been perceived as antithetical to feminism. Nobody’s Fault (1896), Netta Syrett’s first novel, complicates this perception through the way in which the self-assertive protagonist, Bridget Ruan, finds in the decadent music of Richard Wagner a liberating form of aesthetic experience. In this essay, I argue that encountering Wagner’s music marks Bridget’s immersion into a form of decadent culture that affirms her aesthetic longings and awakens her erotic desires. At the same time, the novel condemns an antifeminist form of decadence that is associated with elitist male artists who indulge in a superficial manipulation of language and treat women as art objects. The novel’s resistance to exclusionary forms of aesthetic experience is modelled in its straightforward narrative style and strategic engagement with familiar New Woman themes. This middlebrow narrative thus made Syrett’s intervention into debates about women and decadence accessible to a middle-class female audience. When we recognize that the history of decadence includes its appeal to feminist writers such as Syrett rather than an exclusively antifeminist legacy, we can begin to uncover a more nuanced history of feminism and decadence in England at the fin de siècle.

“Alas, Poor Yorick!”: Elegiac Friendship in Tristram Shandy

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (5) ◽  
pp. 1450-1456
Author(s):  
George E. Haggerty
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Direct Reflection ◽  
The Way

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

Assessing the Dilemma of a Nation at the Crossroads Protest as Landscape in Chinua Achebe's

Matatu ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe
Keyword(s):  
Social Protest ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This essay interrogates the mediation of protest and literature in Chinua Achebe's . It further evaluates the preoccupation of the novel as a veritable record of various forms of protest. Protest and literature are seen to be closely related in the way in which human beings perceive of their society and the actions that they take as a result of those perceptions. Social protest can be said to refer to those mass movements, private initiatives, demonstrations, and other activities which support or oppose specific developments or situations in a given society, with a view to changing it for the better. Literature, for its part, refers to that body of written, verbal, or performed work which exercises the imagination and seeks to offer insights into the nature of the world and the place of humans in it.

scholarly journals Dualistic Vision in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Loran Gami
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Entire Structure ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Way

Abstract The article focuses on Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, a sui generis work, in which the writer explores metaphysical and epistemological issues such as the meaning of selfhood, time and identity as flux, silence and language, the self as defined by language, and other fundamental concerns. These topics are explored through a dualistic perspective. This duality permeates the entire structure of the novel through binary oppositions: the self as one/the self as plural; the lyrical/the novelistic; the mystical/the rational; narrative/formlessness; the embodied/the disembodied; potentiality/actuality; language/silence. Woolf’s ambivalent approach is also at work in the way she uses language in the novel. The urge towards a teleological existence prompts her characters to turn events into a narrative that would arrange and combine them into one thread. The present article, however, shows that in The Waves the very human propensity to turn experience into a coherent story is countered by the opposite perception that this narrativizing drive is only an illusion.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Vérités et Mensonges

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-224
Author(s):  
Erik Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Faithful Representation ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Concrete Reality ◽  
Hermeneutic Process ◽  
The Way

This is a survey of some of the problems surrounding imperial panegyric. It includes discussions of both the theory and practice of imperial praise. The evidence is derived from readings of Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, the Panegyrici Latini, Menander Rhetor, and Julian the Apostate. Of particular interest is insincere speech that would be appreciated as insincere. What sort of hermeneutic process is best suited to texts that are politically consequential and yet relatively disconnected from any obligation to offer a faithful representation of concrete reality? We first look at epideictic as a genre. The next topic is imperial praise and its situation “beyond belief” as well as the self-positioning of a political subject who delivers such praise. This leads to a meditation on the exculpatory fictions that these speakers might tell themselves about their act. A cynical philosophy of Caesarism, its arbitrariness, and its constructedness abets these fictions. Julian the Apostate receives the most attention: he wrote about Caesars, he delivered extant panegyrics, and he is also the man addressed by still another panegyric. And in the end we find ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the way that power feeds off of insincerity and grows stronger in its presence.

Identifying Ethics: Dysfunction as Representation of Societal Relationship in Ian McEwans’s Sweet Tooth

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Ian Mcewan

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.

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