scholarly journals On the Notion of 'Failure' in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Consideration of Joelle van Dyne's Character and the Figure of St. Teresa of Avila

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-151
Author(s):  
Matthew Alexander

David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, celebrated its 20th anniversary of publication in 2016. Yet in spite of two decades of critical analysis little attention is given to the female characters within. Delfino (2008) cites 'one or two strong [female] characters that cannot help but influence the male protagonists in the novel', without expanding upon this, whilst Freudenthal (2010) speaks of Wallace's female characters as having a 'political clout [that] goes no further than their domestic spheres'. Such failure on the part of critics leads to an incomplete consideration of Wallace's text. This paper sets about redressing the balance through a reading of Joelle van Dyne's character and Wallace's use of the veil, and the link that this has with an historical figure known for her donning of the veil: St. Teresa of Avila. Clare Hayes-Brady's recent work (2016) on 'failures' in Wallace's work will be used as a tool with which to analyse Joelle's/St. Teresa's inclusion in the text, and it will be argued that the issue of veiling, a practice that Hirschmann (1998) views as 'Other to most Westerners', helps to reveal the extent to which Wallace's female characters have indeed been overlooked by critics. In doing so, a new consideration of Wallace's texts may emerge.

1970 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-309
Author(s):  
Lailatul Khoiroh ◽  
Sulkhan Chakim

The novel of “Akulah Istri Teroris” is the 14th masterpiece from Abidah El Khalieqy as a man letter that raises the theme of terrorist wife life which is always stereotyped by society including for those who wear the veil. It results to them who are still trying in winning their rights as women. This novel is so attractive to be observed because it bases on the reality and most of people still do not it yet so that we can know about the ideology and discourse construction that wants to deliver by the author. This research used a qualitative research with discourse approach of Teun A. Van Dijk. Van Dijk divides it into three dimensions: Textual dimension that examines the structure of text, the view of social cognition, understanding and mental awareness of the author and also social context according to the discourse that grows among of society. The result shows that all the information within the sentences of the novel have coherence and unity so that it creates shape and meaning. In addition, all the information wrap with attractive and simple language style. Discourse analysis that developed by Van Dijk found that this novel becomes one of media for representing the condition of terrorist wife who always get the stigma from various complexities issues but these women show the reader about the fortitude and strength to raise them up from adversity. Novel “Akulah Istri Teroris” merupakan karya ke-14 dari seorang sastrawan Abidah El Khalieqy yang mengangkat tema kehidupan istri teroris yang selalu distereotipkan oleh masyarakat termasuk di dalamnya mereka yang menggunakan cadar. Sehingga mereka terus berusaha untuk merebut hak-haknya sebagai perempuan. Novel ini menarik untuk diteliti karena berdasarkan realitas yang terjadi dan belum banyak diketahui masyarakat  luas, sehingga dari sisi kita dapat mengetahui ideologi dan konstruksi wacana yang ingin disampaikan oleh pengarang.Penelitian ini menggunakan penelitian yang bersifat kualitatif dengan pendekatan wacana Teun A. Van Dijk. Van Dijk membaginya kedalam tiga dimensi, yaitu dimensi teks yakni meneliti struktur dalam teks, kognisi sosial yang merupakan pandangan, pemahama dan kesadaran mental pengarang, dan konteks sosial yakni terkait wacana yang berkembang dalam masyarakat.Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa setiap informasi dalam kalimat pada novel “Akulah Istri Teroris” adalah saling berhubungan dan memiliki unsur-unsur koherensi sehingga terbentuklah struktur wacana berupa bentuk dan makna. Selain itu informasi dikemas dalam gaya bahasa yang menarik dan sederhana. Tokoh digambarkan memiliki karakter yang kuat. Analisis wacana yang dikembangkan Van Dijk menemukan informasi bahwa novel “Akulah Istri Teroris” merupakan salah satu media untuk merepresentasikan tentang keadaan istri teroris yang selalu mendapat stigmatisasi dari berbagai rumitnya permasalahan yang terjadi, namun para perempuan ini memiliki ketegaran dan kekuatan untuk bangkit dari keterpurukan.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-292
Author(s):  
Yashika Bisht ◽  
Shweta Saxena
Keyword(s):  

Karna’s Wife is the first work of the writer, Kavita Kane who is “trying to portray a small chunk, a small aspect which has not been dealt with yet” in the Mahabharata. In Karna’s Wife, Kavita Kane portrays female characters like Uruvi and Vrushali who are victims at the hands of men and fate and how they still balance their lives and endure it all. Vrushali is the first wife of Karna and her husband married Uruvi and was deeply in love with her. Her rights, his attention, his love, everything is distributed. Uruvi who is Karna’s second wife is constantly seen striving throughout the novel to keep her husband away from Duryodhana’s evil camaraderie because she fears that this alliance will certainly lead to her husband’s catastrophe. It would be very interesting to see how these two women have come out of these gritty situations, faced the veracity and still lived mightily.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alia Afiyati ◽  
Divya Widyastuti ◽  
Yoga Pratama

In a literary work, two characters can be narrated as the attention center that contains the cultural identity from certain generation. Meanwhile, a symbol actually can cause an interaction within characters. This research discusses about cultural identity and symbolic interactionism reflected in a novel. There is a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife” by Karma Brown that tells about two female characters that are represented as a housewife from different generation. This research uses descriptive qualitative as the research methodology and content  analysis as the method in analyzing the object of the research, a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife”. This research also uses the intrinsic approach to analyze the characterization, plot, and setting. This research reveals two kinds of a housewife. They are a housewife and working woman, and a full-housewife. This research finds five cultural identities in the past and present time that is related with a housewife reflected by two female characters in the novel by using cultural identity theory by Stuart Hall. This research also reveals the symbol and memory even three concepts of symbolic interactionism that is mind, self, and society based on symbolic interactionism theory by George Herbert Mead.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>


Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut ◽  
Nuki Dhamayanti

The world of literature can be a medium of expressing the writer's expressions and ideas. Universal topics such as, love, death, and war often become subject mailers in the world of literature. In the novel, of The Color Purple. Alice Walker describes the oppression experienced by Afro American women in the female characters of Celie, Nellie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Mary Agnes who faced sexual discrimina!ions in a patriarchal society. Womanhood, education, and lesbianism are factors that help the Afro American women to free themselves from traditional values. The Color Purple puts into words the process of its main character, Celie, who tries to reject and escape from the male domination of her world. The other Afro American women characters that help Celie to find her selfidentity represent the manifestation of the rejection of the traditional values. This article. which uses the socio-historical alld feminism approach. is intended to analyse the Afro-American women's rejection of traditional values by focusing on the major character of' Walker's The Color Purple. Celie. as she develops from being a victim of traditional values to the rejoiceful discovery of her selfidentity.


Author(s):  
Lila Lamrous

The study of Maïssa Bey’s novel Surtout ne te retourne pas allows to examine how the Francophone novel represents an earthquake as a poetic, metaphorical and political shockwave. The novel is part of a literary tradition but also shows the singularity of the writing and the engagement of the Algerian novelist Maïssa Bey. It allows to examine the feminine agentivity in the context of the disaster camps in Algeria: from the ravaged space/country emerge the voices of women who enter into resistance to improvise, invent their lives and their identities. The earthquake allows them to free themselves, to take a subversive point of view at society and their status as women in an oppressive patriarchal society. The staged female characters arrogate to themselves the right to reread history and take their destiny back.


Lire Journal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164
Author(s):  
M Afifulloh

This paper aims to describe the female characters in the novel Kabar Bunga by Marsiraji Thahir, the conflicts and its causes, and the impact of the conflicts experienced by women in the novel Kabar Bunga by Marsiraji Thahir. This novel is examined by a psychological approach in literature, a literary approach that emphasizes the psychological aspects of the types and laws of psychology that can be applied to literary works. The data is qualitative since the purpose of this research is to explain or describe the phenomena of the researches deeply. The data were obtained by categorizing all the related dialogues in the story, then psychologically analyzed. Triangulation was used to validate the data.  After finishing all the steps of analyzing data, the interpretations were made based on the data and the theory. The results of the research were, psychologically, the main character in this novel is described as a person who often feels worried, frightened, keeping the reality up, and she is burdened by the problems faced. This portrayal is the representation of Wulan as a woman and woman emotionally and mentally is depicted as a weakness persona without having the ability to solve the problems.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Resti Nurfaidah

Naga merupakan hewan yang paling istimewa di antara kedua belas simbol hewan dalam penanggalan Cina. Jika binatang lain masih dapat dilihat dalam kehidupan nyata, naga merupakan hewan yang imajiner. Namun, naga dianggap sebagai sumber peruntungan yang luar biasa. Tahun naga dianggap sebagai tahun keberuntungan. Hanya saja, keberuntungan tersebut tidak lantas mengundang risiko kehancuran yang tidak kalah dahsyatnya. Novel Gelang Giok Naga  mengungkapkan representasi keagungan naga pada serangkaian tokoh perempuan. Perempuan-perempuan yang digambarkan dalam novel tersebut adalah perempuan yang pada awalnya mampu meraih keberuntungan dengan caranya sendiri, tetapi dalam kurun waktu tertentu mendapati kehancuran. Makalah berikut, dengan penggunaan teori representasi dari Stuart Hall, memaparkan representasi naga pada beberapa tokoh perempuan dalam novel Gelang Giok Naga. Tokoh perempuan itu dianggap merepresentasikan karakter naga dengan segala konsekuensinya.Abstract:Dragon is the most special animal among  twelve symbolical animals in the Chinese calendar. If other animals are found in the reality, the dragon is only  found in an imaginary world. However, it is considered as a source of the incredible fortune. The year of the dragon is considered a lucky year. Nevertheless, the luck  does not mean to give an incredible risk. Gelang Giok Naga novel reveals the representation of the dragon greatness on its female characters. The women in the novel are those  who initially got their great fortune in their own way, yet in the end they got  a certain period of  falling. The paper, applying the theory of the Stu ar t Ha ll ’s  repres en ta ti on , presents the dragon  representation on those female characters in in the novel. The women character is considered representing the dragon character with its consequences.


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