scholarly journals Gendering Madness and Doubling Disability in Jane Eyre

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Sunanda Sinha

Jane Eyre has a well-designed structure of a bildungsroman that focuses on the pursuit of Jane’s desire and ignores the same for Bertha. The conceptual structure conveys a linear discourse to determine a prefixed understanding of Bertha, Jane, and Rochester. In Bertha’s context, the bildungsroman operates to deliver issues of race, gender, and disability in an existential quest to ascertain and establish her madness. There is a well-designed structural correspondence of bildungsroman, interplay of dark and light binary, the desire of Jane against the asexual Bertha, and the metaphor of fire in mapping the doubling. The literary devices serve as a dominant metaphorical barrier to normalcy in Thornfield. The paper considers this authorial viewpoint on Bertha’s sickness as a construct of a parallel gendered and a more potent conceptualisation of madness. In problematising madness, the paper argues a cultural narrative of representation that is affected by the impaired mind of Bertha. It will interrogate how the narrative systematically forges a doubling within which she is objectified, influenced, muted, bounded and characteristically disabled. 

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-53
Author(s):  
Yakov M. Kolker ◽  
Elena S. Ustinova

The paper examines the interaction of the poetic function with the emotive and expressive functions in belles-lettres texts. The authors attempt to prove that the poetic function should not be equated with the aesthetic one. The former overlaps all the above-mentioned func­tions, but alone bears the responsibility for the form-content fusion. The paper focuses on the less evident mechanisms of the poetic function, beyond the obvious effect of tropes and figures of speech. Not unlike meiosis, its allegedly weaker ‘voice’ is capable of producing a much strong­er effect, which can be discerned in rhythm and punctuation, in the absence of rhyme to in­duce an implicit rhymed word, in “elaborately monotonous” language, in textual opposi­tion of synonyms, in expressly neutral and unemotional final phrases to evoke a train of emo­tive or intellectual reactions. The authors also suggest a functional approach to the notion of “poetic device”, which gives the translator more freedom in selecting expressive means with­out dis­torting the conceptual sphere of the original. An inter-semiotic view of literary devices bor­rowed from cinematic art proves the inimitability of the effect of the same device within the total conceptual structure of each text. Some of the propositions suggested are il­lustrated by excerpts of poetic translation done by the authors of the paper.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Pfau

Thomas Pfau (Duke University) explores the radical transformation of the Bildungsroman - and of the image ( Bild ) as its narrative, speculative fuel - in ‘The Magic Mountain’. Contrasting Mann's narrative process with that of Goethe and Hegel, and drawing on the sociological writings of Georg Simmel and Arnold Gehlen, Pfau reads Mann's novel as decisively breaking with Romanticism's self-generating, organicist, and teleological conception of cultural narrative.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Evrea Ness-Bergstein

In Lewis’ transposition of Milton’s Paradise to a distant world where Adam and Eve do not succumb to Satan, the structure of Eden is radically different from the enclosed garden familiar to most readers. In the novel Perelandra (1944), C.S. Lewis represents the Garden of Eden as an open and ‘shifting’ place. The new Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve unfallen, is a place of indeterminate future, excitement, growth, and change, very unlike the static, safe, enclosed Garden—the hortus conclusus of traditional iconography—from which humanity is not just expelled but also, in some sense, escapes. The innovation is not in the theological underpinnings that Lewis claims to share with Milton but in the literary devices that make evil in Perelandra seem boring, dead-end, and repetitive, while goodness is the clear source of change and excitement.


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