The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Chase
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Double Reading ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Plot Structure

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.

Marilyn Orr. George Eliot’s religious imagination: A theopoetical evolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 290-295
Author(s):  
E. I. Samorodnitskaya
Keyword(s):  
Social Role ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
Religious Influence ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Adam Bede

The monograph by the Canadian scholar Marilyn Orr examines George Eliot’s oeuvre from the viewpoint of theopoetics. The author analyses the writer’s novels in chronological order, paying special attention to the problem of religious influence. The search of the form in the novel Adam Bede is interpreted as a search for ways to implement the writer’s own ideas, while Felix Holt, the Radicalis shown as an attempt to create a non-religious saint; in Middlemarch, the scholar continues, Eliot concentrated on depiction of a priest’s social role in a novel; finally, in Daniel Deronda we see an emphasized prevalence of the characters’ spiritual life over accuracy and truthfulness of narration, breaking the mold of realism. Orr’s methodology opens up new ways to look at the familiar classical texts, but it is not free of certain limitations (detailed examples provided in the review).

L’absence chez Michel Butor. L’Emploi du temps et Degrés

2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Michel Butor ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
The City

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

HUNTING GWENDOLEN: ANIMETAPHOR INDANIEL DERONDA

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase Pielak
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Animal Representations

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example inDaniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.

“Tlatelolco me bautizó”: Literary Renewal and the Neoliberal Transition

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Samuel Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Conservative Restoration ◽  
Social Privilege

This essay takes as its starting point the relative lack of a contender to the “novel of ′68” in Mexico. I argue that Jorge Volpi's 2003 El fin de la locura constitutes the final writing of such a novel, to appear some 35 years after the original events of that year. The double “renewal” pursued by this work is explored both as an intended restoration of the literary to a place of social privilege after a period of decline, and also as a conservative restoration of order following the revolutionary sequences of the 20th century. However, I argue, the novel cannot finally commit to artistic renewal without also confirming the “madness” of the century; the literary renewal pursued in Volpi's text thus becomes the very political renewal that the author seeks to avoid.

scholarly journals “In a Sea of Wonders:” Eastern Europe and Transylvania in the Irish-Language Translation of Dracula

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Sorcha De Brún
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
European Language ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

Abstract The publication of the Irish-language translation of Dracula in 1933 by Seán Ó Cuirrín was a landmark moment in the history of Irish-language letters. This article takes as its starting point the idea that language is a central theme in Dracula. However, the representation of Transylvania in the translation marked a departure from Bram Stoker’s original. A masterful translation, one of its most salient features is Ó Cuirrín’s complex use of the Irish language, particularly in relation to Eastern European language, character, and landscapes. The article examines Ó Cuirrín’s prose and will explore how his approaches to concrete and abstract elements of the novel affect plot, character, and narration. The first section explores how Dracula is treated by Ó Cuirrín in the Irish translation and how this impacts the Count’s persona and his identity as Transylvanian. Through Ó Cuirrín’s use of idiom, alliteration, and proverb, it will be shown how Dracula’s character is reimagined, creating a more nuanced narrative than the original. The second section shows how Ó Cuirrín translates Jonathan Harker’s point of view in relation to Dracula. It shows that, through the use of figurative language, Ó Cuirrín develops the gothic element to Dracula’s character. The article then examines Ó Cuirrín’s translations of Transylvanian landscapes and soundscapes. It will show how Ó Cuirrín’s translation matched Stoker’s original work to near perfection, but with additional poetic techniques, and how Ó Cuirrín created a soundscape of horror throughout the entirety of the translation.

scholarly journals Wiersz o jesieni. O Frantzu François Ozona

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Kozłowski
Keyword(s):  
Main Theme ◽  
Film Material ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Paul Verlaine ◽  
Ernst Lubitsch ◽  
Synthetic Work ◽  
Adam Mickiewicz

Kozłowski Krzysztof, Wiersz o jesieni. O Frantzu François Ozona [A Poem on Autumn. Frantz by François Ozon]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 77–92. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.3. The film Broken Lullaby ([1932] Ernst Lubitsch) and the novel L’Homme que j’ai tué ([1921, 1925, 1930] Maurice Rostand) are seen to be the main inspirations for Frantz (2016) by François Ozon. On the basis of methodology broadly understood as the concept of bringing into relief (Domański, 1992, 2002), this article aims to demonstrate the means by which the French director expanded upon the literary-film material, imbuing it with a totally singular meaning. Ozon’s inventiveness did notlimit itself to transformations typical for adaptations, but ventured towards feature film understood as a synthetic work of art that by exploiting the audiovisual properties of the medium itself, acts as a unifying force of poetry (Verlaine, Banville), music (Chopin, Debussy) and painting (Manet). The famous poem recited by the heroine, Ann, Chanson d’automne (Paul Verlaine), serves as the analytical starting point for the above. It is thus used as a pivot for the entire film, a veritable lodestarfor guiding motifs, allowing important aspects of the film to be highlighted and consequently, bring its main theme to the fore.

scholarly journals Over de referentiële waarde van Juffrouw Lina (1888) van M. Emants, van Chateaubriand (1908) van E. Masoin en van de gevalsstudies van J.M. Charcot

1970 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 273-288
Author(s):  
Elke Van Nieuwenhuyze
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
Jean Martin Charcot

The aim of this article is to trace the referential value of juffrouw Lina (1888)as part of its narrative organisation by means of the narrativist historical theoryof Frank Ankersmit. This starting point demands a confrontation of thisnaturalist novel by Marcellus Emants with the contemporary medical biographyof the French writer and politician Chateaubriand by the Belgian physicianErnest Masoin on the one hand and with some case studies of hystericsby the famous French docter Jean-Martin Charcot on the other hand. lt willbe argued that the narrativity of the novel plays a key-role in the constructionof its referential value on various levels.

Double-Reading Daniel Deronda - Reply

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (5) ◽  
pp. 1013-1014
Author(s):  
Cynthia Chase
Keyword(s):  
Double Reading ◽  
Daniel Deronda

„Wir Nichtgnostiker“: Die Hitler-Engelhardt-Parallele in Christian Krachts Imperium

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203
Author(s):  
Stephan Feldhaus
Keyword(s):  
Right Wing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Starting Point

Abstract In 2012 Georg Diez provoked a literary scandal with his review of Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium. Since then, almost ninety informed studies which show an ongoing academic interest in the book have been published. Many of these studies attempted to explain the apparently failing analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt that the novel claimed in an irritating manner. Nevertheless, none of them took an esoteric approach which Kracht himself suggested in an interview with Denis Scheck as a starting point for their analyses, although esoteric references seem to be an ignored constant in Kracht’s oeuvre since Tristesse Royale. Hence, by tracing this esoteric intertextuality in the whole of Kracht’s oeuvre and linking it to the references which Kracht makes to right-wing ideologies since Faserland, it will be shown that there actually does exist an analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt in Imperium which aims to deconstruct Hitler mythemes by ridiculizing Engelhardt. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the interrelations between Kracht’s texts create a rhizomatic network of intertextuality that dissolves the boarders between external references and self-references.

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