scholarly journals Psychoanalytic Reading of Love and Desire in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Amin Ettehadi ◽  
Roohollah Reesi Sistani

<p><em>The present study was a comprehensive psychoanalysis of the idea of love and desire in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. The study explored the relationship Philip Carey, the main character, develops with Other people throughout the novel. To further enrich the analysis, Lacan’s theory of human love and desire was employed to provide a psychoanalytic examination of Philip Carey’s bond of love for Mildred, on the one hand, and his gradual loss of identity in his desire towards her, on the other. The study inspected the nature of Philip’s desire for Mildred and shows how he turnd to a desiring subject in his bond to her and finally reached a state of selflessness and depended heavily on Mildred as the object of his desire which drove him towards self-contempt and a masochistic denial of real facts in his life.</em></p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kerry Alistair Nitz

<p>Iris Hanika’s commercially and critically successful novel Treffen sich zwei makes use of several techniques in the characterisation of its protagonists. Many of its reviews focus on the author’s deliberate placement of links to a wider literary context. Their interest extends from questions of genre-mixing through to the identification of direct quotes from other authors’ works. The critical preoccupation with intertexts demonstrates their importance for the readers’ response to the novel. More specifically, certain reviews highlight the important role intertexts play in the characterisation of the protagonists. This study catalogues the intertexts, metaphors and parodies in Treffen sich zwei and, by means of quantitative analysis, identifies high-level patterns in the use of these techniques. In particular, patterns are identified between, on the one hand, the different narrative functions of the intertexts and, on the other hand, the different ways in which they are interwoven in the text. The data also shows that distinct patterns are associated with each of the two protagonists and that certain patterns change in the course of the novel in parallel with the changes in the relationship between them. This quantitative evidence is supported by a more detailed, qualitative approach, which examines how specific intertexts or metaphors are used for the purposes of characterisation. In addition, variations in voice are used to distinguish the two main protagonists in a manner consistent with the intertexts and metaphors. It is thanks to the combination of these techniques that the theme of meeting encapsulated in the title, Treffen sich zwei, is woven into the textual fabric of the novel.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (70) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Brix Jacobsen ◽  
Henrik Skov Nielsen ◽  
Rikke Andersen Kraglund

Louise Brix Jacobsen, Rikke Andersen Kraglund & Henrik Skov Nielsen: “Selfsacrifice. On Right and Reasonableness among Foes and Friends, and on Judging the Living and the Dead in Max Kestner’s film I am Fiction”In 2011, the performance artist Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech lost a lawsuit against his former friend and collaborator Helge Bille Nielsen and the publishing house of Gyldendal. This led to a debate about copyright, freedom of expression, identity, and the line between fiction and reality. In 2008, Nielsen or Das Beckwerk published the novel The Sovereign where Strøbech – seemingly without his knowledge and apparently against his will – is the main character. About a year after losing the lawsuit Strøbech and film director Max Kestner gives his version of the events before, during, and after the trial in the film I am Fiction (Identitetstyveriet). This article analyzes I am fiction in order to show how the film on the one hand outlines Strøbech’s version of the events as a story about a victim but on the other hand undermines this version with humor and irony and points towards an artistic collaboration between alleged victim and villain.


Author(s):  
Ilaria Magnani

They are in a raft – real or metaphorical – and from there they try to rescue their lives and their stories, the characters of Sobrevivientes (2012), a novel by Argentine writer and journalist Fernando Monacelli awarded with the Clarín Prize. The text is inserted in the group not very extensive, but at this point not negligible by number and literary quality, of narratives that thematise the Falkland Islands war and, like the previous ones, presents a strong anti-heroic vein. The novel combines the years of military dictatorship and the war that ended it and looks at the consequences of the two events from a private and intimate environment. It not only denies the heroism of the combatants but tacitly equates them, as victims, with the opponents of the regime. The analysis is proposed, on the one hand, to consider this new ideological position, on the other hand, to emphasise the formal aspects of the novel – located between epistolary writing and intimate diary – and in the relationship with the other narratives of the war of the South Atlantic.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kerry Alistair Nitz

<p>Iris Hanika’s commercially and critically successful novel Treffen sich zwei makes use of several techniques in the characterisation of its protagonists. Many of its reviews focus on the author’s deliberate placement of links to a wider literary context. Their interest extends from questions of genre-mixing through to the identification of direct quotes from other authors’ works. The critical preoccupation with intertexts demonstrates their importance for the readers’ response to the novel. More specifically, certain reviews highlight the important role intertexts play in the characterisation of the protagonists. This study catalogues the intertexts, metaphors and parodies in Treffen sich zwei and, by means of quantitative analysis, identifies high-level patterns in the use of these techniques. In particular, patterns are identified between, on the one hand, the different narrative functions of the intertexts and, on the other hand, the different ways in which they are interwoven in the text. The data also shows that distinct patterns are associated with each of the two protagonists and that certain patterns change in the course of the novel in parallel with the changes in the relationship between them. This quantitative evidence is supported by a more detailed, qualitative approach, which examines how specific intertexts or metaphors are used for the purposes of characterisation. In addition, variations in voice are used to distinguish the two main protagonists in a manner consistent with the intertexts and metaphors. It is thanks to the combination of these techniques that the theme of meeting encapsulated in the title, Treffen sich zwei, is woven into the textual fabric of the novel.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4(17)) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Melida Travančić

This paperwork presents the literary constructions of Kulin Ban's personality in contemporary Bosnian literature on the example of three novels: Zlatko Topčić Kulin (1994), Mirsad Sinanović Kulin (2007), and Irfan Hrozović Sokolarov sonnet (2016). The themes of these novels are real historical events and historical figures, and we try to present the way(s) of narration and shape the image of the past and the way the past-history-literature triangle works. Documentary discourse is often involved in the relationship between faction and fiction in the novel. Yet, as can be seen from all three novels, it is a subjective discourse on the perception of Kulin Ban today and the period of his reign, a period that could be characterized as a mimetic time in which great, sudden, and radical changes take place. If the poetic extremes of postmodernist prose are on the one hand flirting with trivia, and on the other sophisticated meta- and intertextual prose, then the Bosnian-Herzegovinian romance of the personality of Kulina Ban fully confirms just such a range of stylistic-narrative tendencies of narrative texts of today's era.


Author(s):  
Feng Zhu

The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) is a game that self-reflexively meditates on the relationship between the structure in which choices are presented to the player in first-person exploration games and contemporary concerns over freedom. It takes, as its subject matter, its own ‘variable expressiveness’, yet must also delimit that expressiveness in order to direct the player towards a self-reflexive mindset. The article proposes, by analysing three of the endings in the game, that this endeavour necessitates the game to compromise its ‘gameness’ and to move towards being a Lukácsian novel caught in an endless interiority; it must maintain a tension between giving the player freedom and room for expression, on the one hand, and being tightly focused on reflections concerning freedom and meaning, on the other. This reveals something about what computer games must sacrifice in order to grasp at meaning and also what would be required for a work to indicate that in which freedom consists. It will be argued that neither of the two kinds of subjectivity that are detailed by Lukács ((1971) The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) – the Homeric subject without interiority and the alienated modern subject on a Sisyphean quest for meaning – are compatible with freedom. Instead, the carefully conceived tensions to which The Stanley Parable gives rise initiates a ‘dance’ that gestures towards freedom inhering in a subjectivity which avoids these possibilities. This could only be accomplished by being more than both a game and a novel. The implications bear upon the form of a medium that can most suitably function as a homology for the aforementioned subjectivity that transcends the two Lukácsian poles.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Nando Zikir Mahattir ◽  
Novi Anoegrajekti ◽  
Abu Bakar Ramadhan Muhamad

This research use Mas Marco's novel Student Hidjo as material object. The Postcolonial theory will be used to analys Student Hidjo novel’s by Mas Marco. Postcolonial is a set of theories to explore the effects of colonialism in various documents and behaviors, including literature. This study uses qualitative methods to obtain the necessary data from the novel. This type of analysis uses descriptive analysis. The analysis will use deconstruction method. This is in accordance with postcolonialism which is a reversal of the colonial discourse. Such a method is useful for reversing the colonial discourse which presents the relationship between colonizers >< colonized in the novel.. The relationship that seemed stable was undermined by the subjectivity of the colonized through their resistance. The various resistances presented by the colonized were understood by the postcolonialists as a form of an ambivalent legacy of colonialism. The ambivalent side occurs because the resulting resistance strikes both sides. On the one side attacking the invaders, but on the other side attacking resisting subject. Keywords: postcolonial, deconstruction, colonizers, colonized, ambivalent


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-141
Author(s):  
Ana Karlstedt

Abstract Looking back, my memories seem like distant, made­up stories. These words of the main character are to be found all over Jan Koneffkes novel. A foreigner on the run, Felix Kannmacher is forced to tell stories in order to survive. He is at the mercy of a teenager who is avid for constantly new and different bedtime stories. Felix gives in, as he has no other choice but to be a slaveto this child. The following article analyses the fine line between the stories Felix invents for Virginia and two narratological aspects: the actual plot of the novel on the one hand, and the actual course of history, on the other. The entire novel is built on stories-within-stories that twist and turn the course of Story and History alike. Because each one of us writes their own (hi)story.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Johanna Skibsrud

This paper argues that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart reflects what Giorgio Agamben refers to as the “sovereign paradox” on two levels: first—as reflected by the subject of the novel—on the juridico-political level, and second, on the level of the language and structure of the novel itself.  The relationship between these two levels is made clear by Agamben, who uses language as the prime example of the “sovereign paradox” implicit to the juridical order.  “Language,” he writes, “is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself” (21).  Obeirika’s words in Things Fall Apart: “There is no story that is not true” (Achebe 14), illustrates this “sovereign paradox” by pointing on the one hand to the omniscient authority of the narrative text, while on the other directly undermining that authority.  I argue that it is by doing away with the binary system of what can and should be considered true and untrue that the reflexive narrative – of which Achebe’s novel is a prime example – positions itself in a “permanent state of exception” (Agamben 21). Things Fall Apart establishes for itself “a zone of indistinction” (Agamben 47) characterized by the very impossibility of arriving at the “truth” as such, or “of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception” (37). A “zone of indistinction” is constructed on a textual as well as a political-historical level by the novel’s transgression of its own narrative borders.


2020 ◽  
pp. 164-194
Author(s):  
Nataliia Nikoriak

The article under studies reveals the terminological polymodality of the concept of “cinemanovel” as a screened novel; film genre; an original narrative work that tends to a screenplay; literary text written on the basis of the film and the screenplay to it (film “novelization”). An overview of modern theoretical and practical discourse of the cinemanovel genre is presented in the paper. It has been emphasized that some researchers try to find out the origins of this genre by analyzing the samples in a comparative and intermediate way, while others focus on clarifying the specifics of individual novels, concluding on the synthetic and hybrid nature of this genre. In particular, in this aspect, the cinemanovel-prequel by A. Kokotiukha “The Red. Without a Front Line” (2019) has been analyzed. This text, based on a film screenplay, appears to be a rather complex construct that acquires a double coding – cinematic and literary – hence the genre of the novel (as a product of the synthesis of two arts) contains the key features of both. On the one hand, we have to deal with the preservation of the cinematic codes that pass from the screenplay: fragmentation, word visualization, documentalism, eventfulness, editing, alternation of angles and plans, time reduction, dialogues, character formation in action, characterization through speech, conciseness of phrases in certain scenes to create the effect of maximum tension, image condensation, accumulation of internal tension in the episode. On the other hand (as a result of the so-called “novelization”), the text acquires genre features of the novel. These are: the scale of the narration (although fragmented and condensed), the description of characters’ lives is presented in line with historical events, with the disclosure of their psychology and inner world. Finally, the work is also marked with specifically architectonic, i.e. the author connects his cinemanovels together by means of a plot, the main character and a general artistic idea.


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