scholarly journals Filho natural e pai ausente: As colónias africanas no imaginário do império português em Os Maias

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Soric
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Potential Solution ◽  
The Future

This article analyzes the role of Africa in José Maria de Eça de Queirós’s Os Maias (1888), despite what appears to be a lack of explicit African presence in the novel. By connecting the generations of Maia men with nineteenth-century Portuguese history, Os Maias presents the allegorical depiction of Portugal’s struggle for inclusion on the imperial stage after the loss of Brazil, as well as the empire’s subsequent turn to Africa as a potential solution. The novel likewise details the abstraction of the African colonies and their subjects within the Portuguese imaginary, in which Africa not only symbolizes the future of the empire and theoretically broadens the borders of the tiny nation, but also becomes the object of paternalistic attitudes that reinforce Portuguese claims to a place among the rest of the modern “civilizing” empires of Europe.

Von den Lesewelten zur Lebenswelt. Überlegungen zu der Frage, warum uns fiktionale Literatur berührt

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-278
Author(s):  
Christoph Demmerling
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Life World ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One

Abstract The following article argues that fictional texts can be distinguished from non-fictional texts in a prototypical way, even if the concept of the fictional cannot be defined in classical terms. In order to be able to characterize fictional texts, semantic, pragmatic, and reader-conditioned factors have to be taken into account. With reference to Frege, Searle, and Gabriel, the article recalls some proposals for how we might define fictional speech. Underscored in particular is the role of reception for the classification of a text as fictional. I make the case, from a philosophical perspective, for the view that fictional texts represent worlds that do not exist even though these worlds obviously can, and de facto do, contain many elements that are familiar to us from our world. I call these worlds reading worlds and explain the relationship between reading worlds and the life world of readers. This will help support the argument that the encounter with fictional literature can invoke real feelings and that such feelings are by no means irrational, as some defenders of the paradox of fiction would like us to believe. It is the exemplary character of fictional texts that enables us to make connections between the reading worlds and the life world. First and foremost, the article discusses the question of what it is that readers’ feelings are in fact related to. The widespread view that these feelings are primarily related to the characters or events represented in a text proves too simple and needs to be amended. Whoever is sad because of the fate of a fictive character imagines how he or she would fare if in a similar situation. He or she would feel sad as it relates to his or her own situation. And it is this feeling on behalf of one’s self that is the presupposition of sympathy for a fictive character. While reading, the feelings related to fictive characters and content are intertwined with the feelings related to one’s own personal concerns. The feelings one has on his or her own behalf belong to the feelings related to fictive characters; the former are the presupposition of the latter. If we look at the matter in this way, a new perspective opens up on the paradox of fiction. Generally speaking, the discussion surrounding the paradox of fiction is really about readers’ feelings as they relate to fictive persons or content. The question is then how it is possible to have them, since fictive persons and situations do not exist. If, however, the emotional relation to fictive characters and situations is conceived of as mediated by the feelings one has on one’s own behalf, the paradox loses its confusing effect since the imputation of existence no longer plays a central role. Instead, the conjecture that the events in a fictional story could have happened in one’s own life is important. The reader imagines that a story had or could have happened to him or herself. Readers are therefore often moved by a fictive event because they relate what happened in a story to themselves. They have understood the literary event as something that is humanly relevant in a general sense, and they see it as exemplary for human life as such. This is the decisive factor which gives rise to a connection between fiction and reality. The emotional relation to fictive characters happens on the basis of emotions that we would have for our own sake were we confronted with an occurrence like the one being narrated. What happens to the characters in a fictional text could also happen to readers. This is enough to stimulate corresponding feelings. We neither have to assume the existence of fictive characters nor do we have to suspend our knowledge about the fictive character of events or take part in a game of make-believe. But we do have to be able to regard the events in a fictional text as exemplary for human life. The representation of an occurrence in a novel exhibits a number of commonalities with the representation of something that could happen in the future. Consciousness of the future would seem to be a presupposition for developing feelings for something that is only represented. This requires the power of imagination. One has to be able to imagine what is happening to the characters involved in the occurrence being narrated in a fictional text, ›empathize‹ with them, and ultimately one has to be able to imagine that he or she could also be entangled in the same event and what it would be like. Without the use of these skills, it would remain a mystery how reading a fictional text can lead to feelings and how fictive occurrences can be related to reality. The fate of Anna Karenina can move us, we can sympathize with her, because reading the novel confronts us with possibilities that could affect our own lives. The imagination of such possibilities stimulates feelings that are related to us and to our lives. On that basis, we can participate in the fate of fictive characters without having to imagine that they really exist.

How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner, Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 659-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Category

This essay complements Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the political category of the person by outlining the role of literature, and especially the genre of the novel, in consolidating this category and allowing it to do its political and affective work. The essay shows how Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 dismantles three central features of the traditional novel’s poetics of the person: its investment in the notion of literary character, its use of fictionality, and its structural reliance on the narrative future. Lerner’s novel, like Esposito’s biopolitical work, aims to overcome the hierarchical divisions within human life that are endemic to the category of the person and that have historically fostered biopolitical violence. Both projects intimate a less destructive politics—what Lerner calls “the transpersonal” and Esposito “the impersonal.”

Travellers, Tourists and Texts1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Talbot ◽  
Tahir Kamran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Suez Canal ◽  
North India ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
The Future ◽  
The City

The chapter discusses the growth of western tourism to Lahore in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Tourism was made possible by the emergence of steam ships and railways and the opening of the Suez Canal. The pioneering role of the Thomas Cook Company is highlighted. The 1906 Royal visit of the future George V and the writings of Rudyard Kipling further increased interest in the city amongst the wealthy and leisured western classes. Travel perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of the city. The chapter examines a range of guidebooks, including the Newell Guide and later motorists’ guides produced by the Automobile Association of North India revealing how they reproduced the colonial official accounts of Lahore’s history that played down its wider commercial connections. The chapter concludes with an examination of the more discerning view of the city in the 1912 unpublished travel account of the Fabian socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb.

A Space for Time

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Sandra Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Temporal Organization ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Essay Tests

This essay analyses the role of museums in the creation of futures imaginaries and the ways in which these are embedded in socio-political narratives over time (narratives of nation, empire, power, consumption, and home). The essay tests its hypotheses through charting the evolution of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the soirée—exhibitions and events showcasing technological, scientific, and cultural innovations of the future—from their heyday in the mid nineteenth century to their demise in the early twentieth century. In particular, the essay explores the social, spatial, and temporal organization of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century soirée display spaces as carriers of future worlds. It argues that the creation of futures imaginaries depends on interrelationships between people and objects across space and time, and that the complex web of relations established between words, objects, spaces, and people in exhibitions provides catalysts for ideas, ideologies, and narratives of the future.

Long Live Anachronism

2016 ◽  
pp. 281-304
Author(s):  
Mieke Bal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Collaborative Art

‘Long Live Anachronism’, written by Mieke Bal, is the first essay in the ‘Novel Rereadings’ section and provides a self-conscious analysis of Bal’s own collaborative art practice and its outcomes. In the essay, Bal makes a passionate plea for the essential role of anachronism in our understanding of contemporaneity in art, and suggests that her collaborative audio-visual installation project ‘Madame B’ (what she calls an ‘unfaithful’ adaptation of Flaubert’s novel) ‘actualizes’ the nineteenth-century text to release ‘its political thrust,’ demonstrating the work’s durable ‘aliveness.’

Aspects of the Novel

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-212
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
British Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels ◽  
Modern British Literature ◽  
First World

This chapter addresses the debates about the future of the British novel in the years leading up the First World War. The initial focus is Ford Madox Ford’s English Review. By reading the magazine forward from the ‘Art of Fiction’ debates of the 1880s, rather than—as is usual—back through canonical modernism, we see how Ford deliberated staged comparisons between what he saw as the two distinct possibilities for the future of modern British literature: the ‘artists’ drawing on a French, specifically Flaubertian, tradition with which Ford aligned his own ‘impressionism’, and the ‘propagandists’ deriving from English and Russian nineteenth-century novels. The literary relevance of the anti-tsarist politics of the magazine is discussed, and the chapter concludes by analysing Joseph Conrad’s work of the period.

The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Losano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Transition ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

Critics of Anne Brontëë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) have frequently noted the artistic endeavors of the novel's heroine, Helen Graham, yet they have not fully considered the historical and narratological ramifications of Helen's career as a painter. This essay argues that Helen's artworks cannot be considered as mere background to the novel or as simply symbolic reflections of the heroine's (or the author's) emotions. Instead, we must see the scenes of painting in Tenant as indicators of the novel's radical view of women's role as creative producers during a particularly complex moment in art history, one in which early-nineteenth-century female amateurism began its gradual transition from amateur "accomplished" woman to the professional female artist——a historical transition that, as is suggested in readings of various nineteenth-century novels, is in its earliest stages at precisely the moment of the writing and publication of Tenant. At the narrative level, the novel's many scenes of painting provide its readers with detailed, if oblique, guidelines for interpretation; the novel is formally and ideologically impacted by the presence of its painter-heroine. Most particularly, such a reevaluation of the role of painting in the novel resolves a central critical debate over the novel's problematic narrative structure.

scholarly journals Ecofeminism in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Najla R. Aldeeb
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Future ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberal Culture

Doris Lessing's Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) is a fantasy novel with focus on nature. Lessing portrays a world in which oppression by a male-dominated society is at the root of countless problems. It depicts the effects of global warming in the future emphasizing that the domination of women is the core of all crises in the environment. The novel implies that women are able to lead as most of the female characters in the novel play the role of the leader starting from Daima, the woman who protects Mara and Dann as children, to Orphne the woman who heals Dann from addiction. Applying Greta Claire Gaard’s (1993) principles of ecofeminism to literature classifies and justifies the cause of the movement (p. 20). This paper sheds light on Gaard’s four types of ecofeminism in Lessing’s Rama and Dann: An Adventure: liberal, culture, social and socialist by discussing the apocalypses, patriarchal legacy, pathetic fallacy and radical orthodoxies as features of ecofeminism.

An Age of Risk, a Liberalism of Anxiety

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Difference

This chapter returns to the lessons of the eighteenth century in discussing risk, in particular exploring the role of liberalism in early modern Britain's preoccupation with risk. Preoccupation with uncertainty, a view of risk as hazard, and profound feelings of insecurity marked eighteenth-century efforts to understand the present and imagine the future. While this perspective, which frequently elides the difference between risk and loss, would go on to find firmer footing in the nineteenth century, it gained a toehold in the eighteenth century, as shown by work on probability, risk, and political economy. The chapter also argues that the in this study who accept uncertainty are also the ones who are able to embrace and develop a notion of risk as central to politics and political economy.

The Jesuit as Villain in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 308-320
Author(s):  
John Wolffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Peninsular War ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
The Devil

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

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