“Aleksei Alekseichi” of Bunin’s short stories: integration elements of an unassembled cycle

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-157
Author(s):  
Ya. V. Bazhenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Specific Theme ◽  
The One ◽  
Unique Ability ◽  
Experimental Attitude

The paper analyzes I. A. Bunin’s short story “Alexey Alekseich,” which is the central element of the unassembled cycle with a hero named Alexey Alekseevich. The cycle also includes short stories “The Archival File” and “Inscriptions.” A reconstruction of the writer’s strategy of composing the cycle expressed in Bunin’s metaposition towards literature as an aesthetic activity is carried out. Bunin actualizes the expressiveness of the authors’ proper noun (patronymic name) to hold a dialogue with his predecessors and intensify a debate with contemporaries in the literary field. On the one hand, in “Alexey Alekseich,” Bunin diminishes the role of a literary word in culture by parodying authoritative pretexts and polemics with them (L. N. Tolstoy). In this way, the writer invokes the specific theme of modernists – experimental attitude to the literary sign (Potekhin’s character). In addition, he introduces motifs of tomfoolery and oratorical behavior (with allusions to M. Gorky). On the other hand, comparing the different editions of “Alexey Alekseich” and its linkage with other two texts of the unassembled cycle shows that Bunin rehabilitates an artistic word and literary activity by applying onomatopoetic and narrative devices in the poetics of his short story. In this aspect, the role of the literary sign in culture is justified by its unique ability to confront death and oblivion. Thus, Bunin’s short story “Alexey Alekseich” reveals extensive use of the meaningforming possibilities of the proper name.

POLIVARIABILITY OF THE BASTARD MOTIF IN THE SHORT STORIES BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT: CHARACTER IN SEARCH OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION

2018 ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Oksana Galchuk
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Guy De Maupassant ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Of It ◽  
Structural Methods

The theme of illegitimacy Guy de Maupassant evolved in his works this article perceives as one of the factors of the author’s concept of a person and the plane of intersection of the most typical motifs of his short stories. The study of the author’s concept of a person through the prism of polivariability of the motif of a bastard is relevant in today’s revision of traditional values, transformation of the usual social institutions and search for identities, etc. The purpose of the study is to give a definition to the existence specifics of the bastard motif in the Maupassant’s short stories by using historical and literary, comparative, structural methods of analysis as dominant. To do this, I analyze the content, variability and the role of this motive in the formation of the Maupassant’s concept of a person, the author’s innovations in its interpretation from the point of view of literary diachrony. Maupassant interprets the bastard motif in the social, psychological and metaphorical-symbolic sense. For the short stories with the presentation of this motif, I suggest the typology based on the role of it in the structure of the work and the ideological and thematic content: the short stories with a motif-fragment, the ones with the bastard’s leitmotif and the group where the bastard motif becomes a central theme. The Maupassant’s interpretation of the bastard motif combines the general tendencies of its existence in the world’s literary tradition and individual reading. The latter is the result of the author’s understanding of the relevant for the era issues: the transformation of the family model, the interest in the theory of heredity, the strengthening of atheistic sentiments, the growth of frustration in the system of traditional social and moral values etc. This study sets the ground for a prospective analysis of the evolution the bastard motif in the short-story collections of different years or a comparative study of the motif in short stories and novels by Maupassant.

‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Verbal Abuse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Parental Rejection ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
The One

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

scholarly journals PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EVENT

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-104
Author(s):  
RUZAN TADEVOSYAN
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The One

Lev Tolstoy’s short story “Khodynka”reflects the tragical events of Nikolay II’s coronation. The story was written during a day but it had been prepared for a long time. Tolstoy put down notes in his Diary, read lots of publications about Khodynka, listened to the eyewitnesses.He underlined that “The psychology of this event is very complicated” – the current entertainment changed into tragedy. The protagonist who hurried into Khodynka, at first dreamt only of winning a ticket, afterwards he became embittered and tried to release from the crowd. But the child’s rescue and then the one of Rina caused some new feeling in his soul which exalted him from the daily routine. The article studies the literary peculiarities of the story, the development of the motif of joy, originalityof the portrait, the role of the details, of irony, etc. Some parallels are marked between the stories ofV.Krasnov and F.Sologub.

Regionalist short fiction as humble fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alda Correia
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Regional Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Connections

The representation of the world cannot be separated from its spatial context. Making the effort to understand how space and landscape influence short stories and their structure, and are represented in them, can help us to make sense of the role of this formerly underestimated subgenre, its social and cultural connections and dissonances, its relation to storytelling and popular narratives, and its alleged low importance. How does the short story genre relate to regional and landscape literature? Can we see it as humble fiction and, in this case, how does the humbleness of this subgenre play a part in the growth of the modernist short story? The oral, mythic and fantastic sources of the short story, together with the travel memoir tradition that brought the love for landscape description and the interest in the narration of brief and easily publishable episodes of local life, helped to consolidate a connection between the short story form and regional literature. ‘Humbleness’ is used here in association with the absence of complexity, plainness, simplicity of approach to a complex reality, straightforwardness. From this perspective, aesthetic value was usually absent from regionalist fiction as its only aim was to render the local truth faithfully. However, this ‘aesthetic humbleness’, which should not be used as a generalization, has been increasingly questioned in regard to modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism and also when we consider specific works.

Kerima Polotan-Tuvera: An Analysis of Her Style and Craft as Reviewed from Her Short Stories The Virgin and the Sounds Of Sunday

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emeliza Torrento Estimo
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Simple Sentences ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

This study is an attempt at describing and analyzing Kerima Polotan-Tuvera’s style and craft as a short story writer. This attempt is anchored on the combined constructs of Short (1996), Hayes (1966) and Chapman (1973) which emphasize that analyzing text style must be done by examining linguistic choices which are intrinsically connected with meaning. This paper also borrows Hayes’ (1966) concept of writing style as a characteristic, habitual, and recurrent use of the apparatuses of language which must be amenable to statistical measurement in order to reveal the writer’s craft. Combining both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study revealed prevalent use of simple and complex structures where the use of simple sentences is more predominant and lengthened only by an extensive use of a variety of modifiers. Tuvera’s writing revealed a dominant use of single word adjectives or “true adjectives”---a term borrowed from Gibson (1966). Furthermore, her simple, natural, and spontaneous use of description was perceived to be used as a foregrounding device for characterization and theme-building, as a withholding technique, and as a strategy to imply meanings and to highlight the setting of the story. Further analysis of the stories revealed social realities during Tuvera’s time particularly on the changing role of women in the society.   Keywords - Kerima-Polotan Tuvera, short stories, The Virgin, Sounds of Sunday

Lexical reduplication and affective contents

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 148-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Linguistic Form ◽  
Affective Content ◽  
Basic Meaning ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The One

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the use of a linguistic form (lexical reduplication) can communicate affective contents. Lexical reduplication, understood as the intentional repetition of a word, is defined as a pattern XX used to convey, on the one hand, a content which differs from the “basic” meaning of X by involving, for instance, intensification, narrowing, or expansion, and, on the other hand, an affective content that results from the evaluation of the state of affairs at hand. To test reduplication as well as the derivation of affective contents linked to its use, I have relied on a recognition task: after hearing a short story, participants were asked if the items presented on the screen occurred in the story or not. The results obtained suggest that the formal pattern of reduplication plays the role of a trigger.

scholarly journals Musical code and musical ecfrasis in the novel by I. Franco “William Tell”

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Verbal Description ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Litmus Test ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of

The article analyzes the novel by I. Franco “William Tell” through the prism of musical code and musical ecfrasis. So far, none of the French scholars has paid attention to the plot-forming role of the Rossini’s opera in the short story, but in the first part of the four-part short story the young couple is going to the opera, in the following parts Franco gradually reveals the heroine’s perception of the overture to the opera, and then its individual scenes. After the end of the opera, Olya novelistically unexpectedly, on the external-eventual plane of the novel, declares that she is not in love with Volodko, but on the internal, spiritual and psychological - thanks to the verbal description of the music and its perception by the heroes - this becomes natural. With the help of musical ecfrasis, the depth of Olya’s impression of the Rossini’s opera and the heroine’s psychological sensitivity to what she heard become clear. Moreover, Franco finds his “niche” in the image of the heroine's understanding of opera music: while foreign writers of the mid-19th century most often describe the feelings and emotions that heroes evoke in music, Franco, relying on picture programmability (landscapes of his native land and ideal representations of the heroine about family happiness), which Olya accompanies the heard music, reveals the rich inner world of the girl and her ideals. Rossini’s romantic heroic-patriotic opera “Wilhelm Tell”, her musical images and stage performance become a litmus test in the novel: the relationship of the characters to the opera performance, impressions of it become an important way of revealing their characters. Volodka’s superficial attitude to music as entertainment, on the one hand, and Olya’s ability under the influence of music to see the true meaning of life, correcting her worldview from pastorally romantic to heroic-romantic, on the other hand, make it possible to understand the different life positions of the heroes - the intellectual adaptive Volodka’s service to the people of Olya, and, in fact, the ideological and artistic concept of the writer himself.

scholarly journals The irony as a sense of reality (on the example of the short stories of O. Konyskyi)

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
Nadiia Boiko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Empirical Research Methods ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

The article deals with the analysis of the short stories by O. Konyskyi from the point of view of irony functioning in them. S. Kierkegaard compared irony to divine madness, which, like Tamerlane, did not leave a stone unturned, because “in the irony, negativity takes precedence over positivity, freedom over necessity”. In the modern literary criticism, irony is seen, on the one hand, as an aesthetic category, the characteristic feature of which is the lack of care to make the reader laugh; it is primarily a matter of marking of the author’s perception of reality (“Ironic meaning” by S. Pokhodnia). On the other hand — irony is viewed as a stylistic figure, which is based on allegory and which testifies to the potential of the individual authorial style. However, in both cases, to understand the true meaning of an ironic statement, it is necessary to have a context, which is its main semantic background. In a number of works by O. Konyskyi, irony serves as a means to express certain traits of character and behaviour of the character and is exemplified through epithets and comparisons. Less often, it becomes a means to construct the text and a plot-forming factor, as is in the story “And we are people!” The subject of the study is irony as a complex (two-tier) message, the purpose to understand the hidden content of which requires context. The object of the literary analysis is comprised of the short stories by O. Konyskyi, that have not yet been considered from this point of view. The latter fact informs the novelty of the study. The purpose of the article is to clarify the place and the role of irony in the bulk of short stories by this writer. The outlined goal determines reaching the following objectives: to trace the dynamics of the apperiance of different types of irony in the short stories by O. Konyskyi; to identity the dependence of the frequency and the form the ironic expression; to find out the influence of the author’s ironic approach on the form the work. As a result of the analysis by means of the approaches of biographical, historical-literary and empirical research methods, it was possible to find out: despite the fact that irony is not a dominant feature of O. Konyskyi’s worldview, in his short stories works with textual irony stand out.

scholarly journals Karen Bixen reads the Olaf Tryggvason saga: Reseption of the saga and narrative strategies in “The Bear and the Kiss”

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Anastasia Lomagina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The Other ◽  
Semantic Gap ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
European Modernism

The article analyses the reception of the Norse sagas in Karen Blixen’s short story “The Bear and the Kiss” written in 1958 with the main focus on the “saga of Olaf Tryggvason”. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory, the article explores the hierarchy of the pre-texts that are traceable in the text of the considered story and suggests a system of markers that are meant to include interaction with the precedent texts. The typology of markers includes the characters’ names, metaphorical use of mythological or historical personas, the identified cited texts or stories, identical attributes (in this particular text — a glove thrown into a person’s face), the characters’ appearance, and similarity or contrast with the storyline of the other unidentified text. The analysis shows that there are two possible effects of the use of references: semantic compression and, conversely, symbolist and Neoplatonic circling around the event, which creates a semantic gap. The reader can either find himself aware of a riddle yet being unable to understand how the events or reactions fit into the plot or assume the role of an investigator creating his own interpretation of the storyline. The examined strategy of circling around the truth in order to indicate an idea or a fact by using metaphors, comparisons, and allusions in combination with Walter Benjamin’s and Edward Forster’s philosophy of oral storytelling allows Blixen’s short stories to fit neatly into the context of European modernism.

scholarly journals Developing Authentic Assessment Instrument on Short Story Appreciation and Production for Senior High School Students

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Purwadi Susilo ◽  
Ratu Wardarita
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Authentic Assessment ◽  
Senior High School ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Assessment Instruments ◽  
The One

This study was conducted as the follow-up action toward the result of a preliminary study which showed that Indonesian Language teachers in Senior High School (mentioned as “SMA”) YPI Tunas Bangsa Palembang had not yet implemented any standardized, objective, accurate nor appropriate assessment instruments as demanded by the 2013 curriculum. Based on this problem, the research question in this study was “How are teachers’ necessities of an authentic assessment instrument to assess understanding on the short stories production and appreciation in SMA YPI Tunas Bangsa Palembang?”. This study employed the research and development method adapted from the one proposed by Akker which consisted of several steps: (1) analysis, (2) design, (3) evaluation, and the one by Tessmer: (1) self-evaluation, (2) expert judgment, (3) one-to-one, (4) small group, (5) revision, and (6) field test. The implementation of the authentic assessment for short stories production and appreciation was analyzed by using the inter-rater agreement. The inter-rater reliability was measured using the Cronbach’s Alfa. The data were also analyzed using the SPSS 16 program which resulted to a level of significance at 0.5. Therefore, it is found that the evaluation given by the experts and the respondents reached a similar perception. Based on the result of the Cronbach’s Alpha test, a value of 0.99 was obtained above 0.70 which implies that the authentic assessment instruments developed in this study are highly reliable.

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