scholarly journals The depressed text

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-199
Author(s):  
Diego A. H. Ortega dos Santos ◽  
Claudio E. M. Banzato
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
North American ◽  
Psychiatric Practice ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Depressed Person ◽  
Literary Techniques

North American writer David Foster Wallace wrote two short stories - The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing and The Depressed Person - that depict depression, in each one taking different yet complementary perspectives on this subject. Our aim is to analyze these texts and to discuss the role literature can have in regard to the apprehension of subjective experiences of others. Whereas the first text attempts to describe depression objectively, the second one describes the impossibility of doing so, focusing on literary techniques that create distressing subjective experiences in the reader, possibly resembling those felt by depressed persons. We suggest that literature might be helpful to comprehend some aspects of the experience of being depressed and that such an understanding may enrich psychiatric practice.

scholarly journals The Composition of 'The Depressed Person'

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott Morsia
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
Genetic Criticism ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Traditional Notion ◽  
Depressed Person ◽  
The Relationship

Despite moving away from a predominant focus upon his most renowned novel Infinite Jest (1996) in recent years, David Foster Wallace studies has yet to broach more far-reaching questions regarding the textual status of Wallace’s work. This essay introduces the methodology of genetic criticism to Wallace studies, studying the composition of the short story ‘The Depressed Person’ in order to provide a template for much further genetic enquiry into Wallace’s canon. Genetic criticism involves the study of manuscripts and rough drafts with the aim of describing a process of writing. By treating text as process rather than as product, genetic criticism critiques the traditional notion of “the text itself.” Wallace’s writing shares a resistance to “finished products,” particularly after the publication of Infinite Jest, beginning with the volume of short stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), in which the ‘The Depressed Person’ is collected; this is most emphatically the case for Wallace’s “unfinished” and posthumously published final novel The Pale King (2011), “the text” of which exists only in draft form. While reflecting on the relationship between the eponymous depressed person’s predicament and the story’s mode of composition, this essay moves on to consider the context for Wallace’s writing process in relation to influential modes of revision in modernism.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

scholarly journals The language of wounds and scars in Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" : a case in trauma symptoms and the recovery process

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendáriz
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Recovery Process ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Trauma Symptoms ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Past ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Haitian American ◽  
To Come

This article examines the representation of a violent and traumatizing past in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004), a collection of short stories that depicts the effects of a torturer’s atrocious crimes on the lives of his victims and their descendants. The contribution argues that this work of fiction by the Haitian-American writer is structured upon the principle that traumatic experiences can only become intelligible – and, therefore, “representable” – by considering the severe psychical wounds and scars they leave on the victims. These scars habitually take the form of paranoia, nightmares, ghostly presences, schizophrenia, and “dead spots” that have a very difficult time finding their place in the protagonists’ consciousness and language. In spite of the fragmented and discontinuous character of these representations, the writer manages to unveil the kind of psychological and social dysfunctions that often surface when people have not fully accepted or assimilated aspects of the past that keep itching in their unconscious. However, despite the prevailingly bleak tone of the stories, Danticat still leaves some room for hope and recovery, as many of the victims find ways to come to terms with and overcome those individual and collective dysfunctions.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Implicatures in the Persian and Turkish Translations of Four American Short Stories

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 2026
Author(s):  
Esmail Faghih ◽  
Fatemeh Abbasi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
Qualitative Descriptive

Translation of implicature as a challenging issue in Translation Studies is addressed in the present study. Considering this notion, the researchers’ main concern after extracting implicatures was to investigate the translation procedures proposed by Molina and Hurtado Albir (2002) and also Newmark (1988) in translating implicatures including: 1. Linguistic amplification, 2. Linguistic compression, 3. Literal translation, 4. Transposition, 5. Established equivalence, and 6. Free translation.  To achieve the aims of the study, six questions were proposed to examine the translation procedures adopted by the translators and to find out the most frequent translation procedures utilized in rendering the relevant implicatures.  To this end, four short stories entitled “Cat in the Rain”, “Indian Camp”, “Killers”, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by American writer Ernest Hemingway and their two best-seller Persian and Turkish translations by Ahmad Golshiri and Shirmohammad Qudratoghlu were chosen to be analyzed.  Through a contrastive analysis in this qualitative descriptive study, sixty-nine implicatures were identified and extracted from all these short stories according to the maxims defined by Grice (1975) and compared with their corresponding translations.  The results indicated that the Turkish translator has used linguistic amplification and free translation that do not lead to reproduce the implicatures in the target text; therefore, the Persian translator was more successful in recreating the implicatures in the target text (see Abbasi, 2016).

Epic Stone Butch

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
K. Allison Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Professor's House ◽  
First World

Abstract Through application of the contemporary term transmasculinity and the more historical stone butch, the author questions the critical tendency to perceive American writer Willa Cather only as lesbian while ignoring or undertheorizing a transgender longing at play in her fiction, short stories, and letters. While biographical evidence must not be approached as simply coterminous with literary production, as literature often exceeds or resists such alignments, Cather's letters in particular suggest a strong identification with her male fictional alliances. Analysis of her letters alongside two of her most treasured, and disparaged, novels, One of Ours (1922) and The Professor's House (1925), conveys Cather's wish for an idealized masculinity, both for herself and for Western culture, that would survive two coeval historical processes and events: the closing of the American frontier and the First World War. Through what the author calls a stone butch “armature,” she and her characters retained masculine dignity despite historical foreclosure of Cather's manly ideal, Winston Churchill's Great Man, who was for her the artistic and intellectual casualty of the period. Cather expressed the peculiar nostalgic longing present in stone butch, and in the explosion of new forms of transmasculinity in the present. This suggests that historical transgender styles don't disappear entirely, even as new categories emerge.

scholarly journals NORTH AMERICAN THYSANURA.—II

1893 ◽  
Vol 25 (7) ◽  
pp. 173-174
Author(s):  
Alex. D. Macgillivray
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Important Paper ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Abdominal Appendages

The genus Japyx has been of particular interest because of the apparent absence of rudimentary abdominal appendages. One American* writer says very decidedly. “Japyx has none”; a well-known English † writer considers these appendages as “represented by mere groups of stiff hairs.” The presence of these appendages was indicated as early as 1869, by Brauer, ‡ in his description of Japyx gigas. In 1889 there appeared a very important paper by Haase§, in which the rudimentary appendages are distinctly shown. These appendages can easily be seen in either of the species described below.

Representative Man: John Brown and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter

2006 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY HUTCHISON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
David Foster Wallace ◽  
American Writer ◽  
White American ◽  
The Past ◽  
John Brown ◽  
Russell Banks ◽  
American Authors

Aside from William Faulkner it is difficult to think of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as sustained, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks. Whilst the impulse to produce novels on the grand scale shows little sign of diminishing, authors opting to place race at the very centre of their great American fictions remain relatively rare. With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the major works produced by white American authors over the past decade – whether by elder statesmen such as Updike, DeLillo or Pynchon or younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – appear to quarantine the topic.

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