The end of the affair: Catholic plots and sinful detectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Simão Valente
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Human Choice ◽  
Double System ◽  
Private Detective ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
The One

AbstractThe first paragraph of Greene’s The End of the Affair establishes a clear link between two of the major themes of the novel: storytelling and Catholicism. Maurice Bendrix, the first-person narrator, considers whether it is his craft as a professional writer that leads him to begin telling his story the way he does, or, were he a believer, whether the hand of God played a role in organizing the events that he retells. The order in which a story is told is pitted against the chronological order of the events depicted, this contrast in turn masking the one between human choice and divine intervention. The gist of the story is the affair Bendrix conducted with Sarah Miles, and its unexpected and unexplained end at her behest a year before the opening scene, at the height of the Blitz. That mystery is the crux of the plot, for Bendrix’s obsession with uncovering it leads him to hire a private detective, Parkis, whose exploits allow Greene to appropriate the narrative structure of detective fiction to frame his work, especially in what concerns what Franco Moretti called a “double system of meanings”, following Todorov’s work on detective fiction: the superficial level of investigation hides the deeper level of the crime which is only revealed at the end. My suggestion is that Greene’s novel operates under this system, superimposing it to his concerns with jealousy, religion, and how to tell it. The concern with God, however posits issues of authorship and narrative that go beyond the classical detective story. The interplay between narrative time and experienced time expressed in the novel’s initial paragraph is in this way rendered more complicated by a detective story’s reliance on its conclusion for it to “work”. Although the The End of the Affair opens by emphasizing its own opening, both title and structure point to the source of meaning: the end.

Threads of Transmission in Muḥammad Barrāda’s Luʿbat al-nisyān

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Writings

Literary critic and novelist Muḥammad Barrāda’s (b.1938) experimental 1987 Luʿbat al-Nisyān [the Game of Forgetting] is considered the Arabic postmodernist novel par excellence. The “nuṣ riwāʾī” [novelistic text] oscillates between historical, narrative, and meta-narrative time, as well as between diegetic and meta-textual narrators. Rather than aligning its authorial decentering and rhizomatic narrative structure with the collapsing of theological discourse as a totalizing force, this chapter reads Luʿbat al-Nisyān through Qurʾanic narratology and intertextuality. It situates the novel, on the one hand, in relation to Barrāda’s extensive critical writings on literary experimentation [tajrīb] and translation of Mikhail Bakhtin. On the other, it theorizes the work through narrative and formal modes and inflected by the Qurʾan—such as iltifāt, or rhetorical code-switching. Moreover, Luʿbat al-Nisyān’s use of multiple narrative perspectives and genealogies critically interrogates the hermeneutical practices surrounding the documentation, verification, and transmission of the apostolic tradition of hadith.

scholarly journals Breaking the Circle

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-113
Author(s):  
Bozhou Men
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Sociohistorical Context

Abstract First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.

scholarly journals THE CHARACTERIZATION OF MARGIO IN NOVEL ENTITLED LELAKI HARIMAU BY EKA KURNIAWAN

JURNAL BASIS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Ellif Shiffiyn Khairaa
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Good Communication ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One ◽  
Gerard Genette

This researched aims to analyze the characterization of Margio as the main character of the novel entitled Lelaki Harimau by Eka Kurniawan. This study used narrative structure by Gerard Genette which focused on frequency concept to analyze the characterization. The descriptive qualitative method used to reveal and make a deep analysis of the characterization of Margio. The data is taken by reread the novel and written the quotations of the dialogue which focused on the characterization of Margio. The result of this study is Margio has strong characterization and he is the one who connected to the other characters in the novel. He is known as a lovable, obedient to their parents, and a strong man. The moral value of this novel is the key to a perfect family is the good communication of each member of the family. This study is important in how we learned the complexity of human relations, especially in the family.

scholarly journals A Snare in the Narrative Structure: An Exploration of Hermeneutic Code in "The Kite Runner"

2020 ◽  
Vol V (II) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Syed Maqsood Alam ◽  
Amir Jamil ◽  
Abdul Khaliq
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Code Theory ◽  
Semantic Code ◽  
Symbolic Code ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
The One

The present paper studies the novel The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini through the lens of Barthe's narrative code theory. The paper primarily focuses on the Hermeneutic code works underlyingly to the narrative. The researchers in the present chapter analyze the mysterious and puzzling elements in the novel, which help in the formation of the text: the current study, the novel The Kite Runner through the Hermeneutic code of Barthes. Barthes gives the five codes theory in his book S/Z. The codes are Hermeneutic code, Proairetic code, Symbolic code, Cultural code and Semantic code. The Hermeneutic code is also termed as jamming, snare and delay or enigma code. The present study is important in the field of narratology because it minutely focusses on the one thread of the narrative to understand the role played by Hermeneutic code in the formation of the narrative structure.

scholarly journals E.L. Doctorow’s fictional autobiography: World’s Fair (1985) as a carnivalesque Bildungsroman

Literator ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Van der Merwe ◽  
Ian Bekker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Clear Link ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
Book Of Daniel ◽  
The One

In World’s Fair (1985) E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow (1931–) artistically transforms autobiographical and historical facts and memories of the actual world of his childhood into a Bildungsroman. Doctorow was in his fifties when he wrote this novel, which is widely regarded as more autobiographic than his other Bildungsromane, namely The Book of Daniel (1971), Loon Lake (1980) and Billy Bathgate (1989). This fictionalisation takes place through the use of a retrospective narrator who depicts the memories of his formative experiences as a nine-year-old boy. The novel is marked by a striking structural feature, namely that positive and sombre or serious events alternate. The question therefore arises: Why does Doctorow construct his childhood memoir in this manner? In brief, the answer is that the narrator’s Bildung depends on a carnivalesque dialectic of dangerous and/or threatening events and the relief and/or repair of these same events. This article therefore attempts to make sense of World’s Fair in terms of selected aspects of M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’. It shows a clear link between, on the one hand, this novel’s status as a Bildungsroman along with the personal growth of the narrator and central character and, on the other hand, a carnivalesque dialectic of seriousness and amelioration. It thus shows that the main theme of the book is, in fact, the reliance of growth on this dialectic. The article begins with a brief analysis of the novel in terms of its semi-autobiographic character and then provides an equally brief overview of Bakhtin’s (1984, 1985) notion of carnival. The main body of the text provides examples from the novel and thus evidence for the above-mentioned dialectic.E.L. Doctorow se fiktiewe outobiografie: World’s Fair (1985), as ’n karnavaleske Bildungsroman. In World’s Fair (1985) omvorm E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow (1931–) outobiografiese en geskiedkundige feite en herinneringe van die werklike wêreld van sy kindertyd op ‘n artistieke wyse in ’n Bildungsroman. Doctorow was in sy vyftigs toe hy hierdie roman geskryf het, wat oor die algemeen as meer outobiografies beskou word as sy ander Bildungsromane, naamlik The Book of Daniel (1971), Loon Lake (1980) en Billy Bathgate (1989). Hierdie fiksionalisering vind plaas deur ’n retrospektiewe verteller wat sy herinneringe aan sy lewensvormende ervaringe as ’n negejarige seun skilder. ’n Opvallende strukturele eienskap kenmerk hierdie roman, naamlik dat positiewe en somber of ernstige gebeurtenisse mekaar afwissel. Die vraag ontstaan dus: Waarom konstrueer Doctorow die memoir van sy kindertyd op hierdie wyse? Die antwoord is kortliks dat die verteller, Edgar Altschuler, se Bildung op ’n karnevalistiese dialektiek van gevaarlike en/of bedreigende gebeurtenisse en die verligting en/of herstel van dieselfde gebeurtenisse berus. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om World’s Fair in terme van geselekteerde aspekte van M.M. Bakhtin se idee van ‘karnaval’ te verstaan. Dit toon aan dat daar ʼn duidelike verband bestaan tussen, aan die een kant, die roman se posisie as ʼn Bildungroman tesame met die persoonlike ontwikkeling van die verteller en die sentrale karakter en, aan die ander kant, die karnavaleske dialektiek van erns en verbetering. Persoonlike groei wat op hierdie dialektiek gebaseer is, is dus die sentrale tema van hierdie boek. Die artikel begin met ʼn kort ontleding van die semi-outobiografiese aard van die roman en verskaf dan ʼn ewe kort oorsig van Bakhtin (1984, 1985) se konsep ‘karnaval’. Die hoofdeel van die artikel bestaan uit voorbeelde en daarmee bewyse van bogenoemde dialektiek.

Joyce’s Literary Tradition in Mikhail Shishkin’s Prose and Its Evocation in the Story “The Blind Musician”

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-59
Author(s):  
Ludmila V. Comuzzi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
20Th Century Literature ◽  
Large Excess ◽  
The One ◽  
Century Literature

In this article, Mikhail Shishkin is presented as a literary successor to James Joyce’s modernist tradition of writing. The nature of the ties connecting his creative method with that of Joyce is considered in two aspects which also qualify the narrative structure of his texts, namely the autobiographical and intertextual ones. While the autobiographical features of Joyce’s works can be estimated by his numerous biographies and archives, the facts from Shishkin’s life, the writer being our contemporary, can mostly be judged on by their creative interpretations in his own literary works. However, in its degree of truthiness, Shishkin’s autobiographical prose is in large excess over that of Joyce’s who would rather tend to aesthetic transformations of his life in the art forms. The two writers’ life stories themselves demonstrate a noticeable parallelism: both are linguistically sensitive; both did similar jobs along with their primary, literary occupation (a teacher, a journalist, a lecturer, a translator); for both, mother’s death of cancer and the child’s illness are reflected in recurrent literary motifs; both left for Switzerland to write about homeland from the meta-distance of the artist. Shishkin follows Joyce’s strategy of interlacing the intimate, painful episodes of his personal life into the literary texture of his writings. The very episodes of the lives of the two writers belonging to different national and historical cultures are quite identical, too. It is only that Shishkin goes further than Joyce in directness and candour, thus putting Joyce’s principle of mimesis on edge. This ultimate autobiographicity makes Shishkin, on the one hand, a successor to the tradition of Russian classical literature (remember his “love for Akaki Akakievitch”), as well as the tradition of truth in the 20th-century literature. On the other hand, it attaches him to the postmodern trend of transforming text into reality. Anyway, unlike postmodernists who are destroying literary discourse together with the characters articulating it, Shishkin “plays” with it in order to bring the novel back to life. Aesthetically, Shishkin reproduces and expounds Joyce’s theory of the “rhythm of beauty”, his technique of radical intertextuality and anastomosis connections of “all in all”. The story “The Blind Musician” has every trait of modernist poetics outlined above. The plays with light and darkness set by the cyclic rhythm of the day/night alternation and by regular shifts from mimetic to mythopoetic (intertextual) discourse are the structural narrative devices similar to those used by Joyce. Joyce’s characters, like Minotaurs, are wandering blindly through the labyrinth of Dublin until they arrive at the visionary moment of epiphany, when the beauty of a trivial truth lights up in their minds. Shishkin’s ideology is also modernist in character, since his “new linguoworld” is created as a mode of reconciling man with this world’s imperfections and as a mode of clarifying its sense.

scholarly journals OVERCOMING THE BOUNDARIES OF EVERYDAYNESS IN NIALL GRIFFITHS`S NOVEL «STUMP»

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Ganna Stovba
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

The paper presents the research of poetics of the fourth novel «Stump» (2004) written by contemporary Welsh Anglophone author Niall Griffiths. The early works of Niall Griffiths have long been associated with the off-center tendency in contemporary British fiction, with novels written by Scottish authors such as Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, John King. This study attempts to demonstrate that Welsh writer doesn’t merely articulate the problems of the fringe groups of the society as well as shocking and taboo topics. Also to overcome the common postcolonial approach to Griffiths`s works which focuses on the concepts of «colonial othering», «forms of disability» etc. in the novels, the author of the article proposes the existential philosophy as methodological basis for this research. The study concentrates over the central problem of the human Being-in-the-world, the human life in the world of everydayness in Griffiths`s novel «Stump». Understanding «the everyday life», «everydayness» as common, routine life, full of daily automatic human actions (according to B. Waldenfels) the author aims to consider the boundaries of everyday life and the experience of overcoming the borders of everydayness in the novel discussed.The analysis demonstrates that narrative structure of the novel combines several modes and forms of narration. Interior monologue with steam of consciousness fragments is the form of representing the first plot line focusing on the one day of nameless recovering alcoholic who has lost his left arm to gangrene. «Style indirect libre» in first person plural form is used to finish each of the chapter devoted to one-armed hero and expresses his contradictory point of view on the «12 steps addiction recovery» program. The non-diegetic impersonal narrator (according to V. Shmid classification) introduces the second plot line devoted to the two gangsters who have set out from Liverpool on a mission to find and punish the one-armed man for a past misdeed. Their continual dialog sometimes is interrupted by the omnipresent narrator voice who conveys in form of indirect speech one of the gangster`s thoughts and his perceptive and ideological «point of view». A Griffiths`s fictional space can be divided on close/open, secular/sacral, everyday/non-everyday types. In the novel Wales natural world is opposed to any closed and narrow spaces. One-armed protagonist fills himself free and happy in the open space, where he communicates with birds, animals and meets a pantheistic God. Oppositely, two gangsters are afraid of open space in the middle of dangerous nature of Wales, when they leave native Liverpool. Having the works of K. Jaspers and M. Merleau-Ponty as the basis for our research, we conclude that the body for one-armed hero is an existential and temporal border, which transforms each moment of his life into an endless «boundary situation» (germ. Grenzsituation, according to K. Jaspers). A journey to unknown Wales gives a start to personal transformations for one of the gangsters – Alastair. Crossing the geographical border becomes a time of «boundarysituation» in Alastair`s existence. Consequently, the motives of the real Being, existential self-identity, meeting with the transcendent are concerned with the experience of overcoming the everydayness, crossing its boundaries.

scholarly journals On Double Narration in Wuthering Heights

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Mr. Omar Ezzaoua
Keyword(s):  
Structural Study ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Complex Organization ◽  
The Status ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is characterized by the narrative mechanisms and techniques it employs. Building on its structure, the novel is obviously rich in its underlying elements that are worth examining. One of these elements is the choice of multiple narrators and the complex organization of narrative time. This theoretical framework deals mainly with narration and narrative techniques as approached by structuralist narratology. As an approach that examines narration and its major hybrids, narratology delves into a structural study of Wuthering Heights allowing for a deep examination of the underlying narrative elements in the novel. Having said that, it is believed that the study of narratology is pertaining in the sense that it sheds light on how the narrative structure of the novel puts into question the status of the narrators as reliable sources. This structure also mystifies the story giving the reader a chance to decipher the intent of the characters involved as both narrators and characters. Without taking such structure into account, the readers are missing some key elements in understanding and interpreting the stories told by the narrators

Elementy poetyki ludowej w powieści Rzeczy uprzyjemniające. Utopia T. Bołdak-Janowskiej

2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The One ◽  
Cultural Features

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.

STRUKTUR NARASI NOVEL CA BAU KAN, KARYA REMY SYLADO ANALISIS SEMIOTIK

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Sri Sabakti
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Basic Scheme ◽  
Library Research ◽  
The Mean

This research is aimed to expose the narrative structure of the novel Ca Bau Kan by using semiotical theory. The source of the data is the novel Ca Bau kan written by Remy Silado and published by KPG, eight edition, 2004. The data is collected by doing the library research. The teory applied in this research is the emiotical theory, especially the literary analysis of Subur Laksono Wardoyo that the analysis of the text of prose can be applied by using three fases; the analysis of the basic scheme narrative, the analysis of mean signifier, and the analysis of syntagmatics and pragmatics. The result of this research showed that the narrative structure in the novel CBK that (1) the life of Tinung before being a ca bau kan, (2) the life of Tinung as a ca bau kan, and (3) the life of Tinung after not being a ca bau kan anymore. Based on the narrative structure, it was found that “ Love is only one. No measurement is needed” is the mean signifier and able to be clarified by the analysis of syntagmatics-paradigmatics based on the biner oposition of weak x strong.AbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan mengungkapkan stuktur narasi dalam novel Ca Bau Kan (CBK) dengan menggunakan teori semiotika. Penelitian ini menggunakan sumber data novel CBK karya Remy Silado yang diterbitkan oleh KPG, cetakan kedelapan tahun 2004. Pengumpulan data dilaksanakan dengan teknik kepustakaan. Teori yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah teori semiotika, khususnya analisis sastra menurut Subur Laksono Wardoyo bahwa analisis teks prosa dapat dilakukan melalui tiga tahap, yaitu: analisis skema naratif dasar, analisis signifier utama, dan analisis sintagmatik-paradigmatik. Hasil penelitian menggambarkan bahwa struktur narasi pada novel CBK adalah sebagai berikut: 1) kehidupan Tinung sebelum menjadi ca bau kan, 2) kehidupan Tinung sebagai ca bau kan, dan 3) kehidupan Tinung setelah tidak menjadi ca bau kan. Berdasarkan struktur narasi, maka didapatkan bahwa “Cinta cuma satu, kagak perlu takaran” merupakan penanda utama dan dapat diperjelas melalui analisis sintagmatik-paradigmatik yang didasarkan atas sebuah oposisi biner lemah x kuat.

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