scholarly journals PYGMALION: A STUDY OF SOCIO-SEMANTICS

Author(s):  
Mirjam Anugerahwati

This article discusses the novel Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw (1957) which depicts Eliza, a flower girl from East London, who became the subject of an “experiment” by a Professor of Phonetics who vowed to change the way she spoke. The story is an excellent example of a very real and contextual portrait of how language, particularly socio-semantics, play a role in the achievement of communicative competence.

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Katherine Scheil

The Dark Lady evoked in Shakespeare’s Sonnets has been the subject of numerous speculations since the Victorian period. Several male writers and critics – George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, A. L. Rowse and Anthony Burgess, for example – have undertaken extended imaginative explorations of this alternative woman. More recently, the Dark Lady has become a central figure in millennial novels by women writers, designed primarily for a female reading audience. This article considers what’s at stake by placing this imaginary woman at the heart of Shakespeare’s artistic inspiration, and what this tells us about the meaning(s) of ‘Shakespeare’ for contemporary women writers and readers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-21
Author(s):  
Sadaf Mushtaq Nasti

Literature has always been a mighty weapon in bringing reality to surface. It is the reflection of mirror in the form of print that actually ushers to forefront the reality of life. The main aim of art is to revolutionize the world in general and society in particular. “Art for the Sake of Life” generally refers to the notion that art makes us understand the conduct of everyday life. Although art encompasses literature yet it is more than that because it deals with every aspect of our life. It is the way to justify the grim realities of life while beautifying them. As a famous writer James Baldwin accords that “one can’t write a line without a message”. Art is a way of expressing oneself. Many people use it to express boundless emotions and thoughts, from turbulence to euphoria to bewilderment that everyone has within the heart, mind and soul. The authors have discovered an escape through art to seek meaning via truth, not just for the sake of art, but for the sake of life. Writers tweak the image of specific challenges so that a reader can see them through the same lens. George Bernard Shaw also avows that “For art’s sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence”. So, an artist should be moralist encumbered with a reforming zeal. Thus “Art for the sake of life” is a maxim that should be applied to all art; art with style, sophistication, pathos, and psychological resonance. It is not thus for the art’s sake rather it is for the life’s sake or social sake. Art is a medicine or elixir of pain which makes life bearable. The main aim of this paper is to showcase how art in general as well as in particular is only for life’s sake and not for art’s sake. Art thus has a cosmic phenomenon with a universal impact.


2018 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-109
Author(s):  
Allison S. Curseen

Abstract Focusing on the minor details of suffering cats, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as an exemplary illustration of the way in which American novels of individual development destabilize around the movement of minor bodies and minor characters. This destabilization allows not only an interrogation of the limits of US citizenship but also an exploration of how narratives may register something in excess of the citizen and the subject. Distinguishing between the antebellum (boy) characters’ violent play with cats and the postbellum narrator’s ludic play as cat, I argue that cats emerge in Tom Sawyer as captive bodies (among many hard-to-see captives). In the constrained but spectacular movements of these captive bodies, the novel troubles the particularly American freedom actualized in Tom’s play and gestures to a fugitive or feral movement that, though necessary to Tom’s development, always leaps beyond and in the way of efforts to produce a free, individual subject.


Janus Head ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Jessi Snider ◽  

Laughter takes a great many forms in the novel of manners, signifying different things at different times for different characters in different situations. Linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, poetry, art, and film have all attempted to tackle the subject of laughter, yet in relation to manners, and the novel of manners, the matter remains fraught and underexplored. By examining laughter in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), this paper attempts to show how laughter on a micro level mirrors the simulacra and simulations that comprise manners, characters, and even the progression of the novel on a macro level. What the study of laughter in The Custom of the Country reveals about knowledge, sign systems, and commodity and exchange, could nuance the way in which we read laughter in the novel of manners, a type literature built upon knowing and understanding the conditions of the personal and social simultaneously.


2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nahid Aslanbeigui ◽  
Guy Oakes

In the winter of 1934–35, when John Maynard Keynes was beginning to circulate proofs of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he indulged in a playful exchange of letters with George Bernard Shaw devoted mainly to the merits of Karl Marx as an economist. At the end of his letter of January 1, 1935, Keynes's observations took a more serious turn, documenting fundamental changes in his theoretical ambitions following the publication of his Treatise on Money in 1930: “To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems” (Keynes 1973a, p. 492).


1970 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Hermanowicz Joseph C. Hermanowicz

The present work represents an extrapolation of Wiliam I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, on behalf of the development of sociological theory. The subject consists of careers and institutions in higher education. The curriculum vitae serves as the novel human document by which to investigate both social and personal change. Academic careers are studied by virtue of their objective and subjective dimensions. Objectively, the institution of education is revealed for the shifting expectations that govern work in academia in specific historical times (indicated by the cohort in which academics earned their Ph.D.s) and in specific socially bound places (indicated by the type of university in which academics work). Major social change in education likely spells personal change for the way in which people subjectively experience the contemporary academic career. The data come from U.S.-based academics; parallel transformational changes are observable globally. The global change discussed in the work centers on diffusion and institutionalization of the research role. The sources and consequences of this change are problematic. Akin to Thomas and Znaniecki’s larger analytic aims, patterns of change are used inductively to formulate theory: the paper culminates by postulating a theory of increasing tendencies in the way knowledge is produced in higher education institutions throughout the world.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
María Jesús Hernáez Lerena

The Stone Diaries (1993), a novel by Carol Shields, examines the strategies characters use to render their selves accountable: they turn life into an ensemble made up of historical, scientific, novelistic or biographical discourse. In contrast, Daisy Goodwill, who is the subject-matter of this fictional autobiography, remains close to the epistemology of the short story, whose potential has been described by critics as a challenge to knowledge or synthesis (Cortázar 1973; Bayley 1988; Leitch 1989, May 1994; Trussler 1996). There seems to be agreement that the only condition of coherence necessary for the short story is a pointing to the evasion of meaning in life, also that the genre allies itself to the way in which the past is attached to our memory (Kosinski 1978; Hallet 1998; Lohafer 1998; Wolff 2000). This essay will analyze the implications of its protagonist’s stance with a view to pinning down some of the ideological grounds of the novel and of the short story in their approach to the question of identity.


Author(s):  
Javad Momeni ◽  
Rasoul Mohsenzadeh

In his Discipline and Punish (1995), Foucault describes the plague-stricken city where authorities exercised surveillance to control the contagion of the disease. As Foucault states, the first precaution to take was the strict division of space which led to the isolation of dwellers; this spatial partitioning reinforced the notion of pervasive surveillance and paved the way for the modern disciplinary society of which Panopticon was an ideal architectural embodiment. In this paper, we try to show how a combination of the plague-ridden city’s discipline diagrams and Panopticism make the whole scene of Auster’s Ghosts. By focusing on the role of writing in power mechanisms depicted in the novel, we illustrate the power-knowledge relations which involve the characters in the process of subjectification and which construct the subject position of the author (Blue) who acts as the (in) visible eye of authority. Then, we argue that Blue’s dilemma aggravates mainly because he identifies his individual life with his Foucauldian “author function”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (5 Zeszyt specjalny) ◽  
pp. 171-185
Author(s):  
Joanna Włodarczyk-Kaziród

This article is an attempt to present the image of the family that is contained in two novels, Boerenpsalm (A Peasant’s Psalm) by Felix Timmermans and Placówka (The Outpost) by Bolesław Prus. The article begins with an introduction, explaining the phenomenon of regional prose which was present at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in both Dutch and Polish literature. Following this, aspects such as time, space and the subject of the novel, as well as the way of presenting the family theme, are discussed. The article ends with a summary and discussion of the conclusions drawn. The family community is the eternal and basic structure of interpersonal relationships. The family presented in the novels analysed is a large, multi-generational community, based on relationships. However, it can be unequivocally stated that the manner of presenting this community is different in the two novels discussed.


1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-542
Author(s):  
Ken Bragan

Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw are introduced as great exponents of the cult of individuality and as providing examples of the two poles of the self as defined by Kohut. Wilde's need for mirroring, and his use of defensive strategies to support the self, is contrasted with Shaw's compensatory use of idealisation to create a strong and stable self. While acknowledging the way self psychology can explain some aspects of the personalities of these great men, it is also suggested that it does not explain all, and in particular does not explain the economic aspect. Questions about the latter are raised in conclusion.


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