scholarly journals John Banville’s „Ghosts”: “A different way of being alive”

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

This article analyses the ontological status of the characters who inhabit the world of John Banville’s novel Ghosts. While the problem of volatile selfhood recurs in Banville’s fiction, in this novel the very existence of the characters within the fictional world remains doubtful. It is argued here that the numerous metafictional elements in the text are central to its interpretation. The novel itself should be treated as a work in progress or a design for a novel rather than a completed project. The narrative initiates and ultimately resists familiar patterns; the characters’ peculiar way of being alive seems to stem from an intersection of empirical reality and an obscure realm of fantasy, imagination as well as textual and artistic allusions. Correspondingly, the narrator’s status as a literary character is ambiguous. The article suggests that the narrator is the most likely creator of the characters within the fictional world and is himself a playful author-substitute in the novel. In conclusion, a reading that treats Ghosts as a postmodern artefact appears to provide a viable framework for resolving the apparent contradictions and ambiguities in the status of the characters.

scholarly journals Tradition Versus and Modernity in Laila al-Juhani’s The Waste Paradise: An Intertextual Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1197-1202
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr Alhusami
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saudi Women ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Story Writer

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of intertextuality in the novel Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) by the female Saudi novelist and short story writer Laila al-Juhani. Intertextuality is a rhetoric and literary technique defined as a textual reference deliberate or subtle to some other texts with a view of drawing more significance to the core text; and hence it is employed by an author to communicate and discuss ideas in a critical style. The narrative structure of Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) showcases references of religious, literary, historical, and folkloric intertextuality. In analyzing these references, the study follows the intertextual approach. In her novel The Waste Paradise, Laila al-Juhani portrays the suffering of Saudi women who are less tormented by social marginalization than by an inner conflict between openness to Western culture and conformity to cultural heritage. Intertextuality relates to words, texts, or discourses among each other. Moreover, the intertextual relations are subject to reader’s response to the text. The relation of one text with other texts or contexts never reduces the prestige of writing. Therefore, this study, does not diminish the status of the writer or the text; rather, it is in itself a kind of literary creativity. Finally, this paper aims to introduce Saudi writers in general and the female writers in particular to the world literature.

scholarly journals Baleia, de Graciliano Ramos: uma meditação sobre a vida sensível do animal

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Coutinho
Keyword(s):  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

In this essay, I examine the status of Baleia, the family dog in Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas (1938). My principal interest is to analyse the attenuation of distances and the differentiation of sensibility between humans and animals in the novel. I argue that Baleia allows Ramos to leave aside an absolute belief in human reasoning and think of the nonhuman animal as a being endowed with complexity. In this, Ramos deviates from a speciesist appreciation of history and sharpens the gaze of his readers with respect to the limitations of our understanding of the world and its beings.

The Inescapable Intertextuality of Blade Runner: The Video Game

2016 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
Source Materials

The video game adaptation of Blade Runner (1997) exemplifies the challenges of adapting narrative from traditional media into digital games. The key to the process of adaptation is the fictional world, which it borrows both from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Each of these works provides different access points to the world, creating an intertextual relationship that can be qualified as transmedia storytelling, as defined by Jenkins (2006). The game utilizes the properties of digital environments (Murray, 2001) in order to create a world that the player can explore and participate in; for this world to have the sort of complexity and richness that gives way to engaging interactions, the game resorts to the film to create a visual representation, and to the themes of the novel. Thus the game is inescapably intertextual, since it needs of both source materials in order to make the best of the medium of the video game.

Discourse and symbol in Le Minh Phong’s novel The Path

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 98-108
Author(s):  
Linh Phan Trong Hoang
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Study Results ◽  
The World ◽  
Vietnamese Literature ◽  
The Status

Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s poetics, the article approaches Le Minh Phong’s novel The Path from two characteristics including discourse and symbolization. The writer created the coexistence and dialogue between two symbols of awareness and body and used it to present the understanding of people’s lives in modern society. Surrounded by irrational taboos, people fell into the status of losing their voice power. Regaining that lost power, as for the character by Le Minh Phong, is a hopeless path. Hence, the world in the novel exhibited gloom, tearfulness, blood and death, along with the sound of screams, profanity and curses. With the achieved study results, the article contributes to assert Le Minh Phong’s position as a typical artistic style of contemporary Vietnamese literature.

scholarly journals An Analysis into the Travels of the Translated Self in V.S Naipaul’s Half A Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Gora Chand Das
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Life Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World

V.S.Naipaul expertly exhibited a great craftsmanship in literary pieces like fiction, travel and journalistic writing. His fictional world reveals a critical look on the world and also utilizes its traditions, customs and cultures. Naipaul’s writing express the ambivalence of the exile, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indies in England, and a nomadic intellectual in a post colonial world. Naipaul adhered to the form of the traditional narrative, and by doing away with the technical devices of the stream of consciousness; he exhibits his power of writing by making his readers share the inevitable irony and paradox of modern life form by its quintessential self-division and inner conflict. The protagonist of Naipaul’s fiction may be different persons but there may be sensed a thread of continuity in their fate and there “limbotic” status. He has described the theme of a quest for identity, a sense of displacement, alienation, exile of an individual in the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial period. The act of displacement, his trying efforts to organize his experience, and his gazing back to know about his roots and his continuing search for the desirable self can be clearly stated in his novel Half A Life (2001). In the novel Half A Life, Willie Chandran is a migrant from one place to another and then to another. And he keeps on doing that through both Half A Life, and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004).  

Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Ewa Skwara
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Quo Vadis ◽  
Colour Coding

Sienkiewicz had to dress the characters of Quo vadis in period garments. Their descriptions rarely appear, but they are highly suggestive of how the author understood ancient Rome and tried to recreate it in his work. Sienkiewicz gives detailed descriptions of costumes only when they concern the most important figures in his novel, or if clothing plays an important role in the plot. The rest of the protagonists are treated as collective characters whose clothing is identified only in terms of togas, stolae, or the robes of the poor. Beside the ubiquitous tunic, other Latin names of clothing primarily indicate the status of characters or are mentioned when Sienkiewicz uses clothes to disguise them. In those cases, the ubiquitous tunic receives an adjectival descriptor of colour or shade, which in the world of Quo vadis has a differentiating function. The names of the characters’ outfits have their origins in Roman literature. The terms introduced in the novel allow for an easy recreation of the author’s reading list, which consists of the basic works of a classical education—Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, Martial. Sometimes Sienkiewicz mixes his classical terminology with those of ecclesiastical Latin, creating an unintendedly humorous effect. However, the writer’s use of costume colour seems to have been inspired by the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Henryk Siemiradzki. This chapter will explore the very close relationship between text and paintings, and utilizes Sienkiewicz’s colour coding to pinpoint some of the images on which he drew.

scholarly journals Потенциал иронии в творчестве Людмилы Петрушевской (на примере романа Нас украли. История преступлений)

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Юлия Брюханова
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

Many researchers of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s works draw attention to the irony which is the significant element of her prose, drama and poetry. It is important that the ironic principle manifests itself not only as an artistic technique but also as a philosophical aspect. Irony demonstrates the ambivalence of reality. On the one hand, it ridicules and profanes everything. On the other hand, irony gives the certitude of the ontological status of reality. We can see a good example of this function of irony in the novel Nas ukrali. Istoriya prestupleniy (2017). This novel shows the common features of Petrushevskaya’s works – the unity of ironic potential and language. In this case, language is not only the style but first of all the ontological element. This is why the language becomes almost a character in Petrushevskaya’s novel. Irony opens the vital potential of the linguistic personality. As a result, one of the heroes imitates foreign speech but doesn’t speak a foreign language. Irony also helps to reveal the ambivalent nature of life. It shows that our “umora” in Sanskrit and in ancient Indian is “humour” and “death”. So, the game and profanity not only reduce the status of the hero, the image, or the reader’s expectations but, first of all, fill the gap between words, ideas, feelings, and people.

scholarly journals IRONY AND FANTASY

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-126
Author(s):  
D. Ajdačić
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The Real ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

The absence of a typology of irony in the theory of fiction stems from the fact that irony and fiction differently form and transform reality – fiction is a kind of fictional depiction of amazing worlds or phenomena. On the contrary, irony does not create worlds; in it, the subject comments on reality, adding another vision, a vision with a reassessment and deviation from what is said or presented. Irony can comment on the realities of different ontological status, that is, irony can relate to the real world and the fictional world, whether it is real or amazing. Fantasy transforms the world – it distorts, destroys or completes, or builds new worlds, and irony already adds a different vision to the ideas and views presented, regardless of whether they are real or fictional. The terminological and literary-theoretical aspects of the use of irony in works of literary fiction are discussed in the text. Dragan Stojanović’s book “Irony and Meaning” and the author’s terms “Ironical Focus” and “Meaning Pressure” are used as a theoretical starting point. After highlighting the touchpoints of irony and fiction and their special qualities and roles, is proposed a typology of the use of irony in fiction that separates ironic actions concerning the real world, the marvelous world and problematizing the relationship between the real and the marvelous world.

scholarly journals The linguocultural semantics of the anthroponyms and toponyms in G. Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones and the peculiarities of their translation into Ukrainain

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Single Strategy ◽  
Social Code ◽  
Game Of Thrones

The article analyses the linguocultural features of the anthroponyms and toponyms in fiction and their translation into Ukrainian (linguocultural factor taken into account) basing on G. Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones. The main differences between fiction onyms and real life onyms existing in language are defined. Fiction onyms are influenced by such factors as the cultural and social code, historical information, fiction space, the author’s attitude to this or that phenomenon. It is established that in the analysed novel, the characters’ names contain information about the status and place of living of their owners: the names of those who live in the North are based on old English, Scottish and Welsh names, the wildings get Scandinavian ones, those who live in the South get variants of Roman, Greek and Arabic names. The author often makes speaking names and allusions to real historic personalities. It is pointed out that the world in which the characters of the novel exist has a medieval English colouring, so the characters’ names often look like real names of that period or are their derivatives. Complex toponyms often contain parts of words that can be found among the toponyms of Great Britain and carry certain historic information. A conclusion is drawn about the expressive linguocultural features of the proper names of the novel by G. Martin A game of Thrones which reflect the nationally specific cultural and historic information. Choosing translation means in each case is up to the translator who has to consider the linguocultural factor too, as the translation of fiction onyms is much more difficult than the translation of real proper names. In certain cases, the translation can be called more or less successful but there is no single strategy for rendering authorial proper names that carry semantic and cultural information.

scholarly journals Work in Progress: Twenty-five Years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” The General Measures of Implementation Across the Globe

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Collins ◽  
Lisa Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
Important Measure ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Policies And Programs

Since its adoption twenty-five years ago, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has guided many actors and institutions around the world in relation to children. Yet, what influence has it had upon legislation, policies and programs, and what progress has occurred for children? An important measure of its impact is the status of the General Measures of the Implementation of the CRC, which the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has identified as a foundational requirement of the framework of action. Focusing on law reform, budgeting, monitoring, and independent human rights institutions, this paper describes the state ofthese general measures with examples in different countries around the world to confirm the CRC's significance in governance and public policy. It is submitted that the CRC has been influential in public policy and that there is much more room for progress guided by the CRC. The paper concludes with recommendations for CRC states parties.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document