scholarly journals Pastoral Bric-a-brac: Joseph Cornell’s Artistic Responses to Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Jurado Bonilla
Keyword(s):  
Slot Machine ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Glass Panel ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Pastoral Mode ◽  
Assemblage Art ◽  
Strong Attachment ◽  
Joseph Cornell

It has become a staple when Joseph Cornell’s art is analyzed and commented on to mention the novel Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier. The novel is referred to many times in Cornell’s diaries and projects. It is well-known that Joseph Cornell felt a strong attachment to anything French (especially from the fin-de-siècle period), but such is too broad an explanation for his interest on that particular novel. In this article we analyze the bond between Cornell’s art and Alain-Fournier’s novel, taking them as two artistic examples of the pastoral mode. We try to explicate the connection between Alain-Fournier’s novel and many of Cornell’s most relevant assemblage boxes, such as the Palace series, the Medici Slot Machine boxes and Untitled (Bébé Marie). This relation can be traced both in the themes and the assemblage technique used by Cornell: they seem to replicate Meaulnes’s experiences during the narration in the novel, and to reproduce, with Cornell’s use of the glass panel, the narrative strategies of denouement delay that Alain-Fournier employed in Le Grand Meaulnes.Keywords: Joseph Cornell, Alain-Fournier, pastoral, art and literature relation, assemblage art.

Dichtung und Wahrheit – und Recht

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ingeborg Bachmann ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Dichtung Und Wahrheit

Art and literature are seismographs: they sense changes. And often they are ahead of their time and anticipate new truths. This volume attempts to show the significance of such artistic advances in knowledge and perception for the study of law by means of examples. The articles by nine authors collected here range from an introduction to the thematic connection of poetry, truth and law to an analysis of works of William Shakespeare, Charles Reade, Alexander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin, George Orwell, Peter Kurczek, Ingeborg Bachmann, an excerpt from the novel "Justizpalast" by Petra Morsbach and a study on the TV crime series „Tatort“.

Helping the novel: Neoliberalism, self-help, and the narrating of the self in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelia Poon
Keyword(s):  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Vantage Points

Self-help books sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises itself as a satire. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and complete agency. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy, since the means to achieving material affluence is seen simply as a matter of individual choice and personal will. In the novel, Hamid brings into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre with those of the more traditional realist novel in order to interrogate not just the neoliberal self but the very ways in which the self is narrated and constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid appropriates the vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the solipsistic self of the self-help book. He further exploits the narrative energies of the novel form to foreground a sense of historical contingency to lay bare various modes of self-constitution and self-narration. Through his use of metatextual narrative strategies, Hamid raises fundamental questions about the genre of the novel itself and the ways in which it is intimately invested in the insinuation of the development of a self. These questions, I argue, ultimately underline his affirmation of the novel’s important place and the ethical role it can play at this contemporary moment of late and global capitalism.

scholarly journals “Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazan ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazán ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

scholarly journals Dracula – Hybridity and Metafiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Anca Andriescu Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Clear Definition ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Good And Evil

AbstractDue to his supernatural nature, but also to his place of origin, Bram Stoker’s well-known character, Dracula, is the embodiment of Otherness. He is an image of an alterity that refuses a clear definition and a strict geographical or ontological placement and thus becomes terrifying. This refusal has determined critics from across the spectrum to place the novel in various categories from a psychoanalytical novel to a Gothic one, from a class novel to a postcolonial one, yet the discussion is far from being over. My article aims to examine this multitude of interpretations and investigate their possible convergence. It will also explore the ambivalence or even plurivalence of the character who is situated between the limit of life and death, myth and reality, historical character and demon, stereotype and fear of Otherness and attraction to the intriguing stranger, colonized and colonizer, sensationalism and palpable fin-de-siècle desperation, victim and victimizer, host and parasite, etc. In addition, it will investigate the mythical perspective that results from the confrontation between good and evil, which can be interpreted not only in the postcolonial terms mentioned above, but also in terms of the metatextual narrative technique, which converts into a meditation on how history and myth interact. Finally, it will demonstrate that, instead of being a representation of history, Bram Stoker’s novel represents a masterpiece of intergeneric hybridity that combines, among others, elements of history, myth, folktale and historical novel.1

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailise Bulfin
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

This chapter analyses the relationship between Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and colonial politics, placing The Beetle within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns. The chapter provides a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. The chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Multiple Narratives in the Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Deepra Dandekar
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Important Case ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Strong Statement ◽  
Emotional Representations

The politics of a multilayered text like The Subhedar’s Son does not lie in its strong statement of ideological issues but in its silences and its emotional representations. Dinkar Shankar Sawarkar, the author of The Subhedar’s Son, deliberately connected Christian morality with specific social groups, according them relative political significance, while disregarding others as morally and spiritually bankrupt. This chapter discusses the various narrative strategies employed by Sawakar in the Marathi novel. It explores how The Subhedar’s Son is simultaneously a Christian narrative and a Brahmin narrative that makes an important case for the Brahmin-Christian contribution to vernacular nativism and nationalism, against colonialism. The chapter describes how the novel stages religious conversion to Christianity as a modern and individualist Brahmin and upper-caste decision, the analysis of which cannot be afforded within structural explorations, but personal motivations and life stories.

Unfähigkeit

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Welge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Provincial City ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Novel

AbstractThe employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo’s early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-de-siécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo’s own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo’s novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeois intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new kind of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel.

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