scholarly journals "Smuggling in Accidental Poetry": Cognitive and Stylistic Strategies of a Stammering Teen in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-248
Author(s):  
Constance Robert-Murail
Keyword(s):  
Middle School ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
The Core ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
Fragmented Identity ◽  
Physical Reaction

In this article, Constance Robert-Murail will explore the poetic »accidents« at work in two extracts of Black Swan Green (2006) by David Mitchell. The novel tells the trials and musings of Jason Taylor, a thoughtful 13-year-old growing up in a backwater town full of strange neighbours and middle-school bullies. Throughout the year 1982, the reader witnesses Jason mediating between the various personae of his fragmented identity: Unborn Twin, his faint-hearted alter ego; Eliot Bolivar, the nom-de-plume he uses to write poems for the local parish newspaper; and, most importantly, Hangman, a malignant personification of his stammer. According to Garan Holcombe, David Mitchell's own experience of stammering has provided the novelist with a particular »sensitivity toward the formal necessity of coherence and structure« (Holcombe, 2013). The extract I have decided to focus on dramatises the onset of Jason's speech impediment and acts as a »high emotional intensity passage« (Toolan, 2012) within the structure of the coming-of-age narrative. A close stylistic reading of this particular text highlights the juxtaposition of Jason's pathological speechlessness and his bustling, bubbling inner monologue. This opposition elicits a physical reaction within the reader, caught between frustration and delectation. I would argue that the multimodal nature of the extract generates what Pierre-Louis Patoine has called a »somesthetic« effect on the reader (Patoine, 2016). Stuttering, according to Professor Mark Onslow, is »an idiosyncratic disorder.« (Onslow, 2017). Word avoidance has led Jason to create his own grammar and lexicon: his youthful voice and palliative strategies allow Mitchell to smuggle in moments of »accidental« poetry. The cognitive exploration of Jason's stammer stands both at the core of the reader's response and at the centre of Mitchell's powerful poetics-and it is, last but not least, devastatingly funny.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Karla Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Emerging Adult ◽  
School Shootings ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Societal Factors ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

The “Introduction” chapter of Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11 describes the book’s premise: Current emerging adults (ages 18 to 29) have faced an unprecedented level of cumulative stressors throughout their lives, including the post-9/11 wars, school shootings and other disasters, climate change, and the pandemic. These threats are compounded by societal factors like a struggling economy, political divisiveness, and the impact of social media. The chapter outlines the book’s methodology and presents the core questions that will be addressed about the developmental impact of growing up in such a complex world, including how the many stressors they face will shape the cohort as they move through emerging adult and beyond.

Love, Honour, and Jealousy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Cullen
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Forced Marriage ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
The Core ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Post War ◽  
Ways Of Life

This book investigates how the intimate lives of Italians were transformed during the post-war ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, during which millions of Italians migrated to the cities, leaving behind rural ways of life and transforming how people thought about love, marriage, gender, and family. At the core of this book lies the investigation of almost 150 unpublished diaries and memoirs written by ordinary men and women who were growing up and coming of age during these years. The book weaves these personal stories together with the Italian popular culture of the time, which was saturated with both new and old ideas of romance. Films and magazines encouraged young Italians to put romantic love and individual desire over family, contributing to changing expectations about marriage, and sometimes tensions within families. At the same time popular love stories were frequently laced with jealousy, hinting at the darker emotions that were linked, in many minds, to love. Through its exploration of courtship, marriage, honour crime, forced marriage, jealousy, and marriage breakdown, this book traces the ways in which the lives both of individuals and of the nation itself were shaped by changing understandings of romantic love and its darker companions, honour and jealousy.

scholarly journals The Story of Coraline(s): A Gothic Coming of Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-40
Author(s):  
J. Javier Torres-Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The Creation

This study deals with Coraline (2002), the novel by Neil Gaiman, and Coraline (2009), the animated adaptation directed by Henry Selick based on Gaiman’s book. While Gothic stories often emphasize and question human morality, children’s literature usually holds a moralizing value. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline presents a story within the genre of children’s literature that seems to be deeply rooted in the Gothic tradition. Some of the fundamental gothic elements in Coraline’s story are the presence of ghosts, grotesque beings, and the existence of a parallel and dark universe that serves as the setting for the story. Coraline deals with anxieties related with personal development, growing up, and the environments that surround her. Gothic content within both the book and the film contribute to the undermining of the idealization of Coraline’s family, her own process of growing up, and her coping with moving to a completely different place. The creation of the gothic world is exploited in both works to represent Coraline’s coming-of-age experience and her conflict with her family. However, despite Selick’s film being a faithful and well-delivered adaptation of Gaiman’s novel, there are considerable differences that affect how the audience interprets Coraline as a character and her story, which this analysis will highlight.

Patterns: Rosamond Lehmann

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann

This chapter analyzes the role of fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1932 coming-of-age novel Invitation to the Waltz. Reading the novel alongside such fashion magazines as Vogue, it demonstrates Lehmann’s awareness that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of originality, emphasized the importance of following preconceived (dress) patterns in the successful construction of modern feminine types. Invitation to the Waltz, it argues, opposes the production of patterned types and celebrates difference and disobedience in its stead. At the same time, the novel’s formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes. On closer scrutiny, it is seen to reveal its resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). A tension between imitation and originality determines sartorial fashion choices. This chapter shows that female authorship in the inter-war period was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

scholarly journals Hård sentimentalisme og seksualiseret middelalder i Tom Kristensens En Kavaler i Spanien

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
Rasmus Vangshardt
Keyword(s):  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Medieval Spain ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Erotic

AbstractTom Kristensen’s travel book En Kavaler i Spanien (1926) was the result of a stay at the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen’s house, where Kristensen not only met his physical and psychological superior, he also began his artistic development and personal breakdown towards the novel Hærværk (1930). The article argues that with a departure from this context, En Kavaler i Spanien can be read as an original and complex subgenre of the sentimental novel and it suggests that the work might best be categorized as ‘hard sentimentalism’. This subgenre of the travel novel can be identified in the intertwinement of the core thematic of the book — eroticism, medieval Spain and identity loss — with style and form. The paradoxical generic notion of ‘hard sentimentalism’ is used to connect medieval Spain with the erotic, but in an increasingly dangerous way, which threatens the traveler’s identity by increasing homosexual attraction and opening an abyss of degeneration and distorted emptiness behind the flirt.

scholarly journals Presuppositions, implicatures, and contextual equivalence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Marty ◽  
Jacopo Romoli
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Empirical Adequacy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Systematic Comparison ◽  
The Core ◽  
New Information ◽  
Maximize Presupposition ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Contextual Equivalence

AbstractMaximize Presupposition! (MP), as originally proposed in Heim (Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, pp. 487–535, 1991) and developed in subsequent works, offers an account of the otherwise mysterious unassertability of a variety of sentences. At the core of MP is the idea that speakers are urged to use a sentence ψ over a sentence ϕ if ψ contributes the same new information as ϕ, yet carries a stronger presupposition. While MP has been refined in many ways throughout the years, most (if not all) of its formulations have retained this characterisation of the MP-competition. Recently, however, the empirical adequacy of this characterisation has been questioned in light of certain newly discovered cases that are infelicitous, despite meeting MP-competition conditions. This has led some researchers to broaden the scope of MP, extending it to competition between sentences which are not contextually equivalent (Spector and Sudo in Linguistics and Philosophy 40(5):473–517, 2017) and whose presuppositions are not satisfied in the context (Anvari in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 28, pp. 711–726, 2018; Manuscript, IJN-ENS, 2019). In this paper, we present a body of evidence showing that these formulations of MP are sometimes too liberal, sometimes too restrictive: they overgenerate infelicity for a variety of felicitous cases while leaving the infelicity of minimally different cases unaccounted for. We propose an alternative, implicature-based approach stemming from Magri (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2009), Meyer (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2013), and Marty (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2017), which reintroduces contextual equivalence and presupposition satisfaction in some form through the notion of relevance. This approach is shown to account for the classical and most of the novel cases. Yet some of the latter remain problematic for this approach as well. We end the paper with a systematic comparison of the different approaches to MP and MP-like phenomena, covering both the classical and the novel cases. All in all, the issue of how to properly restrict the competition for MP-like phenomena remains an important challenge for all accounts in the literature.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE ARCHETYPE OF THE WAY ON THE FORMATION OF THE PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL PAPER TOWNS BY JOHN GREEN

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (97) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Наталія Юріївна Бондар
Keyword(s):  
Skin Color ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Holistic Analysis ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Metaphorical Extension ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Way

The article deals with the influence of the archetype of the way on the formation of the personality in the novel Paper Towns by John Green. The purpose of this article is to determine the originality of the image of an American teenager and to identify the influence of the archetype of the way on the formation of the personality, as well as to consider the archetype of the way as a real path of the character in the novel Paper Towns by John Green, taking into account the individual author’s interpretation. This object of research has been chosen because through it one can comprehend the specifics of the psychology of a teenager and define the artistic features that distinguish the author’s stylistics and worldview. The comprehensive research methodology has been used in the work: the synthesis of the comparative historical method, holistic analysis, elements of mythopoetic and hermeneutic methods. In the novel Paper Towns by John Green mythopoetic consciousness presupposes ontological ambivalent intentions in the archetype of the child / teenager (good and evil children). The metaphorical extension of the archetype of the child / teenager has been revealed in this article. All the images of teenagers are given in the development, on the way to growing up. The originality of the archetype of the way here lies in the fact that it merges with the concepts of Space and Chaos, confirming the idea of the unity of mankind. The metaphors themselves are also peculiar, associated with the archetype of the way: inanimate strings, gradually turning into living blades of grass, intertwined with roots with all that exists. During the search for Margo, Quentin grows up significantly, becomes more tolerant to their friends, and he learns to take responsibility for him. The image of Margo is the image of a rebel against any lack of freedom that it is inevitable in the “golden cage”. It is also revealed how Quentin is influenced by the new world opened during his trips, and his personal environment: for example, Radar opens his eyes to the fact that he does not need to demand too much from others. Both Margo is changed (from a “paper” girl – to a real one) and Ben and Radar are changed (false interests go into the background; everyone learns to expose himself to risks and troubles for the sake of friendship and human salvation). Ben and Radar are also shown in the development, in a short time they learn to understand each other and distinguish false values from true ones. These changes occur with all the teenagers, regardless of their skin color and nationality, and such an interpretation of the insignificance of formal differences is also a new word of the author.

Literary Geographies in Balzac and Proust

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Conroy
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Geographical Analysis ◽  
The Core ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Literary Geography ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Literary Cartography

Literary geography is one of the core aspects of the study of the novel, both in its realist and post-realist incarnations. Literary geography is not just about connecting place-names to locations on the map; literary geographers also explore how spaces interact in fictional worlds and the imaginary of physical space as seen through the lens of characters' perceptions. The tools of literary cartography and geographical analysis can be particularly useful in seeing how places relate to one another and how characters are associated with specific places. This Element explores the literary geographies of Balzac and Proust as exemplary of realist and post-realist traditions of place-making in novelistic spaces. The central concern of this Element is how literary cartography, or the mapping of place-names, can contribute to our understanding of place-making in the novel.

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