The Sacred Fount: The Narrator and the Vampires

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 407-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norma Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Human Relationships

Criticism of Henry James's controversial novel The Sacred Fount has tended rather insistently to take one of two interpretive directions. Since Edmund Wilson's famous essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” appeared in 1934 and made everyone more aware of the potential complexity of James's handling of the focus of narration, the perhaps more frequently encountered approach to the novel has been one which regards it, like The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, as principally another Jamesian experiment with a narrator of doubtful omniscience. The other approach, one still found in many treatments of the novel, tends rather to accept completely the narrator's version of events at Newmarch and looks for the meaning and significance of the work in his most obvious preoccupation during the weekend in which those events occur, the vampire theme of fulfillment and depletion in intense human relationships. Both approaches are valid. Indeed, one of the impressive aspects of the serious criticism of The Sacred Fount is that nearly all of the important attempts at analysis have been and remain true to some degree. Leon Edel, following and building on the hints of Wilson, has shown that the novel clearly is about “appearance and reality,” and R. P. Blackmur has pointed out the parabolic nature of the story and called attention to The Sacred Fount as the “nightmare nexus” in the Jamesian struggle “to portray the integrity of the artist and… the integrity of the self.” Even Rebecca West, in her witty dismissal of the book some years ago, was correct—more correct than she knew perhaps since she gives James no credit for a deliberate and skillfully manipulated irony—-in recognizing and mocking the disparity between the passion, pride, and labor expended by the incredibly egocentric, narcissistic narrator and the, if not completely trivial, at least gossamer issues involved. But the irony, like the ambiguity, is both constant and conscious. Unlike the narrator, to whom James has frequently been compared, James presides confidently over his fictional world like, in Lady John's words, “a real providence,” who “knows” (p. 176).

Identifying Ethics: Dysfunction as Representation of Societal Relationship in Ian McEwans’s Sweet Tooth

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Ian Mcewan

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.

scholarly journals Герменевтические подступы к русской литературе

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-257
Author(s):  
Roman Szubin
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
New Space ◽  
Methodological Studies

The article is devoted to the search for a new space in the methodological studies on Russian literature. The author takes as its basis the method of hermeneutics  of words by Vardan Hayrapetyan. Especially the basic categories such as the world man (homo mundi), the Other and its variants: the self (rus. самость), otherness (rus. дру­гость), the alien (rus. чужесть) and two triads, which postulate two types of intellectual situations. In this regard, the author identifies the concept of the hybrid man of the hero of Russian literature in which a small person is a representative of an impersonal collective personality of the world man, home, family, ideas, etc. The author demonstrates the type of a hybrid man on the example of the protagonist of the novel by Vasily Shukshin Stepan Razin.

scholarly journals Empowerment and Collaborative Agency in Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Maher Ben Moussa
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relation Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Child Agency ◽  
The Family

This article examines the issue of child agency and empowerment in Mildred’s D. Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. This theme is addressed by some critics who come to the conclusion that Taylor’s protagonist, the young girl Cassie Logan, develops agency and subversive subjectivity in the course of the novel. This study challenges such readings to argue that the ending of Taylor’s novel does not reflect empowerment; and consequently does not support such conclusions. Through expanding self-in-relation theory to feminism as an interpretive tool, this paper suggests that Cassie Logan’s subversive agency remains partial and incomplete because she fails to engage in an inter-connected and constructive relationship with the ‘other’. Cassie’s empowerment is partial because she fails to exert it in the larger community of African Americans and whites, that otherwise could have stimulated a greater impetus for activism. This study concludes that agency and subjectivity are constructed and empowered within the community which is larger than the self and the family.  

scholarly journals Othering and Selfing: Reading Gender Hierarchies and Social Categories in Michel Houellebecq's Novel Soumission

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Wening Udasmoro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
French Society ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Gender Hierarchies

In literature, questions of the self and the other are frequently presented. The identity politics that gained prominence after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 has occupied considerable space in this debate throughout the globe, including in France. One example of a novel dealing with the self and other is Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (2015). This article attempts to explore the processes of selfing and othering in this work. The politics of identity that seems to present Muslims and Islam as the other and French as the self is also extended to other identities and aspects involved in the novel. This article attempts to show, first, how the French author Houellebecq positions the self and other in Soumission; second, the type of self and other the novel focuses on; and third, how its selfing and othering processes reveal the gender hierarchy and social categorization of French society. It finds that the novel presents a hierarchy in its narrative through which characters are positioned based on their gender and sexual orientation, as well as their age and ethnic heritage.

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

Costume and the Self-Extension: The Functions of Costume in Elmer Gantry from the Perspective of Material Culture

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 474-478
Author(s):  
J.W. Luo ◽  
K. Yu
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
The Usa

As the other creation of material culture, clothes have concrete forms, and reflect the wearer’s taste and appreciation of beauty while provide certain social significance. This paper attempts to analyze the connection between the costume of the hero Elmer Gantry in the novel Elmer Gantry and his self-identity, then to discover how the novelist, Sinclair Lewis ,the first Nobel Prize winner in the USA, by describing the costume of the character, explores the different inner self-identities of one man.

scholarly journals Sacrilegious character of «The cross on Saturn» in the self-titled novel of Oles Ulianenko

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Methodology ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Professional Evaluation ◽  
The One

Oles Ulianenko, one of the most talented and controversial Ukrainian writers of these days, has been dead for ten years. His literary works did not receive any appropriate professional evaluation though because literary scholars and critics applied either the wrong or unproductive research methodology due to some objective and subjective reasons. The aim of the article is to suggest an alternative, in comparison to traditional variants, theoretical literary analysis which is grounded on the principles of the corporal-mimetic method to interpret fiction done on the extremely controversial novel “The Cross on Saturn” by O. Ulianenko. Having analyzed the idea and artistic content of the novel “The Cross on Saturn”, the conclusion is made that, first, the book characters seem to function as simulacra of their shallowness because they lack the depth of inner world. But despite this fact, despite parody, superficial dialogues and surrogate actions, the main characters of the novel and the peripeteia, they find themselves in, do not lose aesthetic appeal because these characters do not need deep inner world since their function is not determined by what these trivial characters reflect in the text mirror but by what the text mirror reflects in them. Second, the shallowness is filled with the content conditioned by the incest precedent which provides the basis of Oles Ulianenko’s novel to the degree to what the writer creates the tragedy in its exact, namely ancient Geek, meaning of the notion according to which tragedy is, on the one hand, a story determined by an utterly artificial form and content and, on the other hand, it is a story which does not simply end by death, it is a story which cannot end by anything else but death. It seems as if nothing but tragedy could make it impossible for a man to have their animal essence to supersede their human part.

COMMODITIES, OWNERSHIP, AND THE EUSTACE DIAMONDS: THE VALUE OF FEMININITY

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Sattaur
Keyword(s):  
Moral Worth ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Recent Commentary ◽  
Female Condition ◽  
Different Types

In an 1867 treatise on diamonds and precious stones, Harry Emanuel writes the following: [I]n the process of cutting, flaws and imperfections are often laid bare, which go much deeper than the appearance of the rough diamond would predict; and, on the other hand, the colour, apparent in the rough stone, is sometimes found to arise from the presence of flaws or specks, which are removed in cutting, thus leaving the stone white. (70) From such a description, it is easy to see the parallel to the female condition, and particularly the female condition, as it is popularly portrayed in the mid-nineteenth century. With the emphasis on purity and hidden flaws, it is not difficult to understand why the diamond could hold such symbolic significance for the female wearer, by functioning as an indicator not only of personal wealth, but of moral worth. Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1871), a novel which can be said to revolve around this metaphor, is essentially a novel about worth: absolute vs. transitory worth, actual vs. symbolic worth, and especially monetary vs. moral worth. Lizzie's character, the legal issues surrounding the diamonds, and the convoluted marriage arrangements which are perpetuated by or affected by the presence of the diamonds are all, in one way or another, concerned with the different types of value – moral, symbolic, monetary, etc. – placed upon commodity objects: objects which, by their very nature, can never be permanently owned, as their value lies in their exchangeability. I will return later to a discussion of the diamonds themselves. There has been considerable recent commentary on the role of commodities – whatever their worth – and of commodity culture within Trollope's novel; such readings, however, concentrate on the purely symbolic role played by commodity objects – and primarily the diamonds – in the novel; it is worth, by contrast, examining how Trollope utilizes the discourses and associations of actual commodity objects as he deploys them within his fictional world. This paper will examine the ways in which Trollope uses four commodity objects in particular – books of poetry, hunting horses, the safe box, and finally, the Eustace diamonds themselves – and the contemporary discourses surrounding them to defend the essentially mercenary character of Lizzie as a woman shaped by the demands that a commodity-driven society places upon her.

Reconceiving the Divine in Eliette Abécassis’ La répudiée

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-393
Author(s):  
Raquelle K Bostow
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Face ◽  
French Author

Abstract Eliette Abécassis’ La répudiée (2000) narrates a rare story of female mystical practice in the face of her impending repudiation from a Hasidic community, which excludes women from intellectual engagement with religious texts. Set in the fictionalised neighbourhood of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, the novel’s main character, Rachel, faces a divorce under the law of halakhah when she fails to become pregnant after ten years of marriage. Yet, throughout the novel, Rachel asserts her own individualised spiritual practice by locating the ‘divine’ within the love that she shares with her partner, placing her on the path of mysticism. To articulate Rachel’s intuition of the divine within human relationships, I rely on French author Hélène Cixous’ secularised notion of the juifemme: a woman who rewrites sacred texts, conceives of a God detached from dogmatic religion, and locates the divine within the other and the self.

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