scholarly journals Revealing Humanity: the Flexible Language of Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
K. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Russian Universities

The article features the linguistic peculiarities of four novels the author uses in her course on Contemporary English Fiction: Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate, Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Graham Swift’s Last Orders, and Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. The novels probe deeply into some of the stranger aspects of human experience. Hilary Mantel writes of people who try to behave as balanced, rational beings, but to whom irrational and terrible things happen that have to be dealt with. The metaphorical language illuminates this philosophical exploration, which would otherwise be dull or unconvincing. The novel might seem strange for English readers, but the language carries the conviction of the true storyteller. J. Crace has a wonderful sense of exact words for an exact rhythm. Graham Swift’s novel is written as though it were the thoughts and memories of seven different characters. The language here is the colloquial vernacular, the language of elderly and middle-aged men and women with little education from south-eastLondon. The most extraordinary book of these four is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. It consists of twelve chapters, which are a chronological set separate ‘stories’ that happened between 1650 and 1988. Each chapter uses a different literary genre for the story-telling: for example, a simple first-person narrative, a sermon, a journal, letters to a lover, lecture notes, an internal monologue, and – ending the novel – a television script. Thorpe has therefore set himself a colossal task: to render into lively readable English, the concerns and passions of individuals, often illiterate individuals, while retaining a sense of the language appropriate to a particular era and a particular genre.Literature is an act of communication between writer and reader which does justice to humanity through expressive, imaginative language. Nobody would be so arrogant as to say that reading literature is the only way of ‘being human’ but more than most activities it forces us to think about people other than ourselves.Readers who would like to read more have available many other fine examples of contemporary English literature, provided by the Oxford Russia Fund for those taking part in the project on Contemporary English Literature in Russian Universities.

Narrar (sobre) abismos. De puentes y poéticas en Rayuela de Julio Cortázar y El túnel de Ernesto Sábato

2020 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-192
Author(s):  
Lena Abraham
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Julio Cortazar ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Julio Cortázar

In their narrative and their essayistic œuvre, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar display their concern for the solitude assailing modern subjectivities and, at the same time, grapple with the possibilities offered by art – in particular by literary art – to overcome said isolation In El túnel and Rayuela, both authors use the architectonic image of the bridge to illustrate the novel's expressive potential and how it can bridge the chasm between the alienated existences of the 20th century As a literary genre delving into human experience, the novel does not only narrate through the existential abyss, but also becomes a communicating bridge itself

Material Interiority in Charlotte Brontëë's The Professor

2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Human Embodiment

In The Professor (1845–– 46) Charlotte Brontëë dwells on the paradox of a material human body containing immaterial essences, such as mind, self, and soul. The novel at once dramatizes and estranges the condition of human embodiment by portraying these ethereal inner qualities with images of enclosure in a rigid carapace. Paying particular attention to sensory experiences, The Professor presents the body as the vehicle through which the exterior world and human interiors come into contact. By construing interiority in material terms, Brontëë emphasizes aspects of human experience ordinarily considered dirty and degrading, involving debased bodily functions, including masochistic sexuality. The novel invites a rethinking of prevailing approaches to masochism because it insists on the fleshy materiality of psychological entities (such as desire and conflict) that psychoanalysis usually treats as abstractions. For Brontëë relations between people are embodied even before they are gendered; the male first-person narrative voice she adopts in this work affords her the opportunity to consider the strangeness of the idea of inhabiting any body at all. The novel's vaunted attention to surveillance is consequently better understood as bodily penetration than as subjective domination.

FIRST-IN-HUMAN EXPERIENCE OF THE NOVEL CRYOBALLOON SWIPE 180 ABLATION SYSTEM IN PATIENTS WITH DYSPLASTIC BARRETT’S ESOPHAGUS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Overwater ◽  
SN van Munster ◽  
G Mihaela Raicu ◽  
CA Seldenrijk ◽  
JJGHM Bergman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Barrett’S Esophagus ◽  
Barrett's Esophagus ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Novel

Who’s holding up the sky? On Rymba, a novel by A. Bushkovsky

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
A. V. Zhuchkova
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Flood Zone ◽  
The Social ◽  
Russian North ◽  
And Gender

The article deals with A. Bushkovsky’s novel Rymba that goes beyond the topics typical of Russian North prose. Rather than limiting himself to admiring nature and Russian character, the author portrays the northern Russian village of Rymba in the larger context of the country’s mentality, history, mythology, and gender politics. In the novel, myth clashes with reality, history with the present day, and an individual with the state. The critic draws a comparison between the novel and the traditions of village prose and Russian North prose. In particular, Bushkovsky’s Rymba is discussed alongside V. Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora [ Proshchanie s Matyoroy ] and R. Senchin’s The Flood Zone [ Zona zatopleniya ]. The novel’s central question is: what keeps the Russian world afloat? Depicting the Christian faith as such a bulwark, Bushkovsky links atheism with the social and spiritual roles played by contemporary men and women. The critic argues, however, that the reliance on Christianity in the novel verges on an affectation. The book’s main symbol is a drowning hawk: it perishes despite people’s efforts to save it.

Leading Determinants of Healthy Ageing in Community-Dwelling Middle-Aged Men and Women: A Cohort Study

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianwen Shang ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Stuart Keel ◽  
Jinrong Wu ◽  
Mingguang He ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cohort Study ◽  
Community Dwelling ◽  
Healthy Ageing ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Men And Women

The Castle of Otranto

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace Walpole
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Game Changer ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Grotesque

‘Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride–to–be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel's first readers. In this new edition Nick Groom examines the reasons for its extraordinary impact and the Gothic culture from which it sprang. The Castle of Otranto was a game-changer, and Walpole the writer who paved the way for modern horror exponents.

The Monk

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lewis
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Black Magic ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Profound Insight

‘He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price.’ The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young girl; once having abandoned his monastic vows he begins a terrible descent into immorality and violence. His appalling fall from grace embraces blasphemy, black magic, torture, rape, and murder, and places his very soul in jeopardy. Lewis’s extraordinary tale drew on folklore, legendary ghost stories, and contemporary dread inspired by the terrors of the French Revolution. Its excesses shocked the reading public and it was condemned as obscene. The novel continues to beguile and shock readers today with its gruesome catalogue of iniquities, while at the same time giving a profound insight into the deep anxieties experienced by British citizens during one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history.

The use of second person pronouns in a literary work

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop ◽  
Lotte Hogeweg
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Pronoun

AbstractFor this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself.

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