The singular effect of brevity: Why Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ could not have been a novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Feklistova
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Emotional Effect ◽  
The Relationship

It is noteworthy that critics who come to very different conclusions about the symbolic meaning of Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story ‘The Fly’ respond to the text in much the same way emotionally. In examining why exactly ‘The Fly’ is so disturbing, this article interrogates the relationship between feeling and literary form, arguing that the emotional effect of any work of prose fiction is decisively influenced by narrative length. Drawing upon the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe and Frank O’Connor, the article examines how the effect of elaborate description differs from the effect of summary and deliberate omission. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ typifies how, due to its brevity, the short story as a literary form can present one single, minor incident as major, to great emotional effect and without recourse to symbolism, which is something that the longer prose form of the novel cannot do.

The Self-Erasing Word

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-139
Author(s):  
Michael LeMahieu
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Relationship

Don DeLillo’s early novels explore the relationship between formal logic and literary form. In End Zone, DeLillo uses tautology as a linguistic tactic of diminishment to advance a larger aesthetic strategy of repleteness. The novel says less to show more. As a result, End Zone, like many of DeLillo’s other early novels, frequently represents states of silence and unspeakability. DeLillo’s early fiction shares these concerns with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, particularly the remarks on tautology, silence, and the limits of language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In their conclusions, End Zone and the Tractatus analogously seek to undo themselves to overcome the inherent limitations of logic and language.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Eoin Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

scholarly journals «Вечный муж» и традиция мениппеи

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (7) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Nina Segal-Rudnik
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romantic Drama ◽  
Love Triangle ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The article examines the motif structure of the main characters in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband against the background of menippea and its various genres. The parodic transformations of the images and motifs of Dostoevsky's previous texts, especially the novel The Idiot, modify the traditional love triangle of the short story. The relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist reflects the ambivalence of the archetypal scheme “king vs jester” and the way it appears in Hugo’s romantic drama Le Roi s’amuse and Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. The plot of revenge and vindication of trampled dignity dates back to the genre of medieval mock mystery (R. Jakobson) and its narrative of the Easter resurrection, posing the problem of Christianity and its values in the Russian society of the time.

scholarly journals Ivanhoe by Walter Scott in the Creative Perception of Ivan Turgenev. Article One

2020 ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Ivan O. Volkov ◽  
◽  
Emma M. Zhilyakova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Speech Characteristics ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Universal Nature ◽  
Obvious Similarity

In the article, on the material of Ivan Turgenev’s library and his short story “The Jew”, the issue of reading and creative perception is examined. Turgenev’s perception of Ivanhoe by Walter Scott is in the focus. The research attention is developing from the interpretation of several Turgenev’s notes left in the English version of the novel to the analysis of the creative perception of the images of Isaac and Rebecca, which became the ideological and semantic basis of “The Jew”. The reading of Ivanhoe in the original in the early 1840s became for the writer a penetration into Scott’s individual writing system. Turgenev’s few notes indicate that he became acquainted with Scott’s creative manner: the ability to voluminously weave comic elements into the pathetic-heroic atmosphere of action, the combination of historical and artistic material, the boldness of the ironic tone, and the mastery of speech characteristics. The reader’s perception of Scott’s novel was soon replaced by its creative interpretation, as a result of which “The Jew” appeared. Following the example of the English novelist, the object of Turgenev’s artistic reflection is a Jewish father and his daughter, who find themselves in a socio-historical and moral-psychological crisis — the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Foreign Campaigns of the Russian Army. There is an obvious similarity between Scott’s Rebecca and Turgenev’s Sarah: from the elements of the external description and the details of the portrait to the moral and psychological characteristics. The two young girls are especially united by the sense of pride and the awareness of their dignity, which clearly manifest themselves in the moments of danger that threatens them. Besides, the relationship between the Jewish girl and the Russian officer in Turgenev’s story vaguely resembles the situation of Rebecca and Ivanhoe. But the love line in “The Jew” does not develop in full. Considering William Shakespeare’s and Gotthold Lessing’s experience, following Walter Scott, Turgenev reflects on the universal nature of the “humiliated tribe”. The Russian writer depicts the psychology of the experiences of the Jew Girshel, accused of spying for the French. In the tradition of objectivity and epic literature, inherited from Scott, Turgenev draws a tragic line related to the position of an ordinary person. But, unlike the English novelist, Turgenev brings the torment of the character to the highest limit – the death penalty. At the same time, the Russian writer explicates sharp contradictions in the image of his character that turns out to be a carrier of suffering, on the one hand, and a source of laughter, on the other. This shows Turgenev’s orientation on the features of Shakespeare’s image of a person, in which the tragic invariably coexists with the comic. Walter Scott sensitively learned the law of ambivalence from Shakespeare, too.

scholarly journals The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

The Short Story, the New Weird, and the Literary Market

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Raphael Zähringer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Literary Market

Abstract The short story is commonly – and very productively – treated in the spirit of critical terms such as marginality and liminality. Quite surprisingly, though, New Weird Fiction, which postulates similar interests in, e.g., formal and aesthetic innovation as well as literary ambition, is primarily associated with the novel. The underlying lack of interest in the New Weird Short Story in both popular culture and academic work is scrutinised in this article. In a first step, it will survey the short story as a liminal form, both formally and aesthetically, and contextualize it by drawing upon the state of the literary market in the twenty-first century. The contribution’s main argument is that the short story has always either been considered to be too ‘popular’ or too ‘literary’ in order to contest the novel as the prevalent literary form. Step two will perform a similar move regarding Weird Fiction, thus highlighting the parallels between the short and the Weird, and the need for more academic attention dedicated to the New Weird short story.

scholarly journals Reversed Myth and Negative Symbols of Narcissus in Mother-Son Relationship in Hayashi Fumiko’s Narcissus

IZUMI ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-361
Author(s):  
Ratna Asmarani
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Library Research ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Hayashi Fumiko ◽  
Psychological Concepts

The famous myth of Narcissus is about a mythical handsome young man who indifferently rejects the love of the nymph Echo leading to Echo’s broken heart and untimely death and his being cursed to excessively adore his own handsome reflection on the pond till his death. The short story entitled Narcissus written by Hayashi Fumiko is intriguing because its title calls to mind the famous myth of Narcissus. However, this short story portrays the myth of Narcissus from a unique perspective. Thus, the aims of this paper are to analyse the reversed myth and negative symbols of Narcissus as reflected in the mother-son relationship in the short story. To support the analysis various psychological understandings of the myth of Narcissus are used as well as various understandings of the symbols of the flowers called Narcissus. The methods of research used are a comprehensive combination of textual-contextual methods as well as library research and qualitative research. The textual method focuses on the intrinsic aspects relevant to the focus of analysis, such as character, conflict, and setting, while the contextual method borrows the psychological concepts of the term Narcissus and the symbolic meaning of the flowers named Narcissus. The result shows that the mother-son relationship clearly portrays the reversed myth in the matter of the gender roles, the type of relationship, and the ending of the relationship. Another result shows that all the symbols related to the flowers of Narcissus turn into negative meanings in the sort of story entitled Narcissus by Hayashi Fumiko. In short, the short story writer turns upside down both the myth and the symbols resulting in an engaging story full of hidden meanings to be interpreted

William Blake and the Myth of America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Relationship

This book tells the story of William Blake’s literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake’s poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid-twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake’s America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralized the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.

scholarly journals Персонажная система и мотивная структура повести Г. Башкуева «Убить время»

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-392
Author(s):  
Olga V. Khandarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Character System ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Introduction. Gennady Bashkuev’s works attempt to comprehend the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and To Kill Time proves a most significant prose work of the writer. Goals. The article seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between the system of characters in the novel and its motif structure, which helps clarify the underlying idea of the work, eclectic in structure and close in form to a short story cycle. Methods. The study rests on the theses about a relationship between semantics of motif and character, predicativity of motif, and on the concept of motif complexes and leitmotif construction of the narrative. Results. The main character of the novel is the narrator, the narrative proper divided into childhood memories and those of recent past. The characters of childhood can be clustered into three groups: family, friends, adults —motifs of happiness, celebration, romantic dreams and that of loss are associated with them. The characters of adulthood are women and childhood friends who are associated with motifs of marginal life, betrayal, guilt, and that of romance. The motifs of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ memories are intertwined, and it is the motif structure that ensures the integrity of the narrative. The key role in the novel is played by the binary image — the saleswoman Inga and the city madwoman — that combines two main themes for the narrator’s self-reflection: childhood and women. The plot structure partly fits into the universal mythological scheme: a series of trials — sketches-events from the life of the autobiographical narrator — is built into somewhat a ‘mythological journey’ to finally end with the acquisition of ‘elixir’ — catharsis and spiritual liberation. Conclusions. The image of the protagonist, the narrator, is explicated in the text and is revealed in the system of motifs associated with characters of his memories. Analysis of the character system proves instrumental in revealing key ideas of the novel and interpreting its title: those are reflections about time that become a focus of the author’s viewpoint uniting the seemingly disparate stories.

scholarly journals C. C. Martindale (1879–1963), the History of Religions, and the Theological Imagination of David Jones (1895–1974)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-584
Author(s):  
Anna Svendsen
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Crisis ◽  
The Church ◽  
Theological Thinking

Abstract Although the work of his Jesuit contemporaries Ronald Knox and Martin D’Arcy is perhaps better known today, C. C. [Cyril Charlie] Martindale’s (1879–1963) thinking about “the relationship between paganism and Christianity” in the early twentieth-century theological debates surrounding the field of “History of Religions” would have a profound effect on the unique intersection of theological thinking and artistic form in the work of the British Catholic poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974). Jones’s reading of Martindale’s short story collection The Goddess of Ghosts (1915) in 1919 would help to resolve a “religious crisis” Jones experienced in his exposure to the arguments of the skeptical scholar of “History of Religions,” James Frazer. Martindale’s presentation of his ideas in a literary form not only provided Jones with a hermeneutic (derived from the church fathers) for thinking about the relationship between paganism and Christianity, but also suggested an artistic model for exploring theological ideas with literary language.

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