scholarly journals La forma de la falacia. Una relectura del tópico de la cetrería en la novela Nocturno de Chile de Roberto Bolaño

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 221-233
Author(s):  
Aleksander Trojanowski
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Formal Aspect ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Roberto Bolano

The form of fallacy. A rereading of the falconry motif in Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de ChileThe aim of the article is a rereading of the falconry motif in Roberto Bolaño’s novel Nocturno de Chile, based on an analysis of the critical reception existing so far. The study combines the traditional methods of narratology with a close-reading-orientated approach on the textual, narrative and intertextual level. As a result, the formal aspect of the novel, based on the techniques of incongruity and indetermination, is seen as a narrative tool to discredit the fallacies of the narrator’s monologue. By positioning the allegoric and symbolic readings of the motif in the context of the narrative technique, it seems that the main focus of the novel is a deconstruction of the testimonial mode of enunciation and, as a consequence, a critical revaluation of the actual debate on the history and memory in Chile and Latin America.

scholarly journals Refutación de nostalgia. Memoria y cuerpo en „El Tercer Reich y La parte de los crímenes de Roberto Bolaño”

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 121-131
Author(s):  
Aleksander Trojanowski
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roberto Bolano

Refutation of Nostalgia. Memory and Body in Roberto Bolaño’s El Tercer Reich and La parte de los crímenesThe aim of the article is to show that Roberto Bolaño reestablishes the continuity of the his­torical process in his prose, which contradicts the dominant postmodern tendency based on the aesthetics of nostalgia. The article analyzes the corporal construction of the protagonist of the novel El Tercer Reich. The analysis is based on the methodology of close reading and then comparative analysis, when it comes to put the results in the context of the representation of body in La parte de los crímenes. The construction of the body emphasizes its deformation and mutilation in order to make it a bearer of memory of the violence of the past. Bolaño’s reflection on history undermines the aesthetics of nostalgia due to ethical concerns related to the process of representation of the past. In his own narrative strategy he follows Walter Benjamin’s principle to preserve the memory of the oppressed. Bolaño understands it as the ethical task of literature.

Little Dorrit

2018 ◽  
pp. 244-259
Author(s):  
Francesca Orestano
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Visual Studies ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Enquiry ◽  
Narrative Function

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.

scholarly journals On freedom in the times of Economic Crisis – A Close Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Experiment ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Times ◽  
Far Future

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous experimental project enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire.

scholarly journals Epilepsy, Forgetting, and Convalescence in Ondaatje’s Warlight

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Do So

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.

scholarly journals Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camilotti
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elsa Morante ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

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

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

2017 ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Unknown Source ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

Color and Casta in the Andean Silver Industry

2020 ◽  
pp. 259-293
Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Colonial Latin America ◽  
Traditional Methods ◽  
Refractory Ores ◽  
Shed Light

Amalgamation technologies allowed refiners throughout colonial Latin America to profitably extract silver from a wider variety of metals, including even the most refractory ores. These expanded processing capabilities meant that mineral classification and sorting became even more important, as metallurgists had to identify which silver metals to treat with traditional methods and which ones to refine by amalgamation. The vocabularies used to classify metals provide critical evidence of Indigenous contributions to silver refining in the seventeenth century. By tracing the incorporation and removal of Andean color and spatial vocabularies, this chapter shows how scientific writers and translators replaced Indigenous classifications of matter with a racialized language of metallic “castas” that included “pacos,” “mulatos,” and “negrillos.” The chapter concludes by suggesting how a reading of color signatures in khipus might shed light on Andean miners’ experiences in ways that traditional historiographic methods have not yet allowed.

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