The genealogy of the boukoloi: how Greek literature appropriated an Egyptian narrative-motif

2000 ◽  
Vol 120 ◽  
pp. 106-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Single Motif ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Greek Novel

The subject of this paper is the relationship between the Demotic Egyptian Inaros-Petubastis Cycle and the Greek novel. I will not argue that the Greek novel as a whole arose from Egyptian literature; that theory has been rightly laid to rest by scholars working in the area, most recently by Susan Stephens and the late Jack Winkler in their edition of the fragments of the novel. What I want to do, rather, is to draw attention to a single motif that might have made its way from Egyptian narrative fiction to the Greek novel; to explore the background of this motif in Egyptian literature; and to discuss the mode through which this motif was appropriated by the Greek novelists. This motif concerns the boukoloi, outlaw shepherds who inhabit the Egyptian Delta and oppose central Egyptian authority.

The Coptic Church in Popular Fiction on the Eve of the Arab Spring:Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nichole Perera
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Coptic Church ◽  
Significant Addition ◽  
Theological Controversy ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

The 5th century CE was a period of intense theological controversy concerning the relationship between the human and divine in Christ. This dispute led to the permanent separation of the Egyptian Coptic church from Imperial Orthodoxy. The events of the 5th century, previously confined to academic scholarship, have recently become the subject of popularizing works like Agora (2009), The Jesus Wars (2010), and 428 AD (2009). The Arabic novel Azazeel (2009), written by the Egyptian Islamic scholar Youseff Ziedan, is a significant addition to these other works. Like The Da Vinci Code in its use of “actual” historical evidence, Azazeel purports to be a compilation of newly discovered Syriac scrolls written by the Coptic monk Hypa, which detail his spiritual trials between 411 and 437 CE. The novel sparked great controversy in Egypt among Coptic Christians for creating a misleading picture of important figures and events in their early history. Copts felt that a Muslim scholar was appropriating the voice of a Coptic monk without clearly signalling it was a work of fiction in order to produce a false account of Coptic origins. Though published before the Arab Spring, it soon became further evidence of the oppressive intentions of the Muslim majority against a Coptic minority in Egypt. Azazeel is different from other similar works in English because the events of the 5th century are still part of the living identity of Copts.

THE SATYRICA AND THE GOSPELS IN THE SECOND CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 356-367
Author(s):  
Robyn Faith Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Circumstantial Evidence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
Pliny The Younger ◽  
Terminus Post Quem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Greek Novel

The Satyrica has long been associated with a Neronian courtier named Petronius, mentioned by Tacitus in his Annals. As such, the text is usually dated to the mid first century c.e. This view is so established that certain scholars have suggested it is ‘little short of perverse not to accept the general consensus and read the Satyrica as a Neronian text of the mid-60s ad’. In recent years, however, there has been a groundswell of support for re-evaluating this long-held position. Laird, after comparing the ‘form and content’ of the text to the Greek novel, came to the ‘unattractive’ conclusion that the text may be second century. Similarly, in two recent pieces in CQ, Roth argues that the manumission scene in the Cena establishes a new terminus post quem for the text; she suggests that the freedoms granted by Trimalchio closely parallel—and parody—descriptions of awarding ciuitas found in the letters of Pliny the Younger. Indeed, the three slaves manumitted in the novel are associated with a boar (Sat. 40.3–41.4), Dionysus (Sat. 41.6–7) and a falling star (Sat. 54.1–5); likewise, the three slaves that are the subject of Pliny's letter are C. Valerius Aper (boar), C. Valerius Dionysius (god of wine) and C. Valerius Astraeus (stars). Roth's argument suggests that the author of the Satyrica was not Nero's contemporary but a member of Pliny's intellectual circle, offering strong circumstantial evidence that troubles the accepted tradition on the work's authorship and date.

scholarly journals An exploration of place and its representations: an intertextual/ dialogical reading of the photographs of AB Ovenstone and the novel Gillespie by John MacDougall Hay.

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Fiona Blair
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Shipping Company ◽  
Private Collection ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

“An intertextual/ dialogical reading of place through photography and fiction” The article is an exploration of place and its representations based on the intertextual reading of a series of photographs (1880-82) of Tarbert, Loch Fyne by Andrew Begbie Ovenstone (1851-1935) and the dialogical reading of a novel, Gillespie (1914), by John MacDougall Hay (1881-1919) which is set in Tarbert. The proposed article is inspired by a sense that a semiotic approach to the subject will reveal far more than has been discovered within the tradition of hermeneutics and patrimony and that much will be gained by a study of the contrast between written and visual signifiers. The article raises questions about the (unexamined) coded readings of place especially in relation to the photograph, and the lack of an adequately theorized tradition for the novel. The literary text is well known - if not well understood - but the images are from a rare, unpublished, private collection of photographs from Scotland, India and the furthest reaches of Empire (Ovenstone was the Atlantic Freight Manager of Anchor Line Ltd, the Glasgow shipping company). The paper emphasizes the need for the use of codes to decipher the texts. When we “read” the photographs we need to be aware of the intertextual relationship between the photograph and the landscape painting tradition as well as the common practice of the created tableau – there is then overlaid upon the image the sense of a set of conventions, a system which operates much like a language. We are able to discover through the notion of the “long quotation from appearances” the potential for more complex “synchronic” readings. Likewise, in the case of Gillespie, the novel operates within a genre which determines a “reading”. When we are aware of a code, we become aware of the way that Hay manoeuvres adroitly to thwart the reader’s best efforts to settle upon a preferred reading – especially one shaped by an authoritative narrator - which thereby allows for the genuine experience of “heteroglossia” to emerge. The notion of truth in Gillespie is interrogated in the light of Heidegger’s essay “The Origins of a Work of Art” in order that the relationship between representation and reality be clarified.

scholarly journals SPACE OF DEATH IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL “SUN OF THE DEAD” BY I.S. SHMELEV

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 887-891
Author(s):  
Xue Chen
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

The subject of analysis is the space of death in the “Sun of the Dead,” considered as an existential reality opposite to the vital intentions of a person, a manifestation of social voluntarism, a being category that does not intersect with the space of life. Conclusions are drawn about the relationship between temporal and spatial features in the narrative structure. The parameters of the space of death are presented as characteristics of the discreteness of the artistic space of the story. The boundaries of the space of death, its dominance over time, the influence on the tempo-rhythmic features of the text, the types of character consciousness are described.

scholarly journals O fausto de Helena no convento de Manoel de Oliveira

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (43) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Maria Cecília De Miranda Nogueira Coelho
Keyword(s):  
Interesting Case ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
The Relationship

<p>O objetivo do artigo é analisar alguns aspectos da  caracterização da personagem Hélène, no filme <em>O Convento </em>(1995), de Manoel de Oliveira, comparando-a a personagem  Précieuse, no livro <em>As terras do risco </em>(1994), de Agustina  Bessa-Luís. Embora o filme tenha sido lançado em 1995,  ele não é uma adaptação do livro. Este é um caso  interessante na relação entre literatura e cinema. O  argumento do romance originou o filme, mas são obras  independentes. Em ambos, porém, busco mostrar como  as protagonistas foram construídas a partir de referências  às personagens de Helena de Tróia tanto de obras da  literatura grega clássica como do <em>Fausto</em>, de Goethe.</p> <p>The aim of this article is to analyse some aspects of the  characterization of the figure of Hélène in the film The  Convent (1995), by Manoel de Oliveira, comparing her to  the character Précieuse from the novel <em>As terras do risco </em>(<em>Dangerous Lands</em>, 1994) by Agustina Bessa-Luís. While  the film was released in 1995, it is not an adaptation of  the book, and this is an interesting case in the relationship  between literature and cinema. The story of the novel  formed the basis for the film, but they are independent  works. In both, however, I seek to show how the  protagonists were constructed from references to the  character Helen of Troy, drawing as much from works of  classical Greek literature as from Goethe’s <em>Faust</em>.</p>

‘Pushing the envelope’: The Representation of Jazz, Sex and Violence in Fred Khumalo’s Bitches’ Brew

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-95
Author(s):  
Jabulani Mkhize
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Bitches Brew ◽  
Jazz Performance ◽  
The Relationship

This paper, primarily, explores the extent to which Fred Khumalo’s novel, Bitches’ Brew, can be considered a jazz novel by looking at both its subject matter and form. It argues that the transgressive power of Khumalo’s novel lies in its use of epistolary form as a narrative strategy that is akin to a jazz solo, marked as it is by a dialogical narrative that is similar to the call and response pattern that bears an affinity to a jazz performance. In terms of the subject matter, the central thrust of the argument is that the over-arching predominance of sex and violence in the text threatens to overshadow the musicality of the text, even as masculinity and misogyny are considered as the other side of the coin of jazz. In its exploration of the jazz and gender interface, this paper highlights how the phallocratic logic that informs and dominates the novel is indicative of the fact that Khumalo may have ‘pushed the envelope’ too far in his representation of masculinity and misogyny in jazz culture in his writing of this work. That Khumalo's novel fails to interrogate the relationship between jazz and black masculinity, but rather endorses and valorises it, serves to reinforce the stereotype of misogyny in jazz culture. Keywords: Fred Khumalo, Bitches’ Brew, jazz, musicality, masculinity, misogyny

scholarly journals Uncovering Cinematic Adaptations of James Joyce’s The Dead

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Pegah Marandi ◽  
Alireza Anushiravani
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
John Huston ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Culture And Language

The relationship between literature and film is the subject of plentiful analyses and reflections within the general framework of Comparative Literature. A comparison between a literary work and its adaptations shows how filmmakers adhere to the principles of intertextuality. Exploring various adaptations of James Joyce’s The Dead (1914) and comparing them against each other are the main objectives of this research. This study examines how John Huston (1987), Travis Mills and William Ivey Long (2013) adapted James Joyce’s The Dead (1914) culturally, geopolitically, and sociologically. This study demonstrated that Huston’s adaptation was faithful to Joyce’s text in terms of character, costume, culture, and language, whereas Mills and Long’s adaptation was not fully loyal to Joyce especially in terms of character and culture. However, Mills and Long have attempted to create a language similar to Joyce’s. Further, consciousness and interior thoughts as subtle issues precisely shown in the novel were not illustrated wholly in both adaptations. Huston’s creativity was maintained in the last scene, picturing Gabriel’s monologue, whereas Mills and Long’s creativity was shown in creating new postmodern characters and culture. 

scholarly journals “Everywhere Felt and Nowhere Seen”: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the “Sovereign Paradox"

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Johanna Skibsrud
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Order Language ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

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.

Dirty Love

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Single Point ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Alexander Romance ◽  
Greek Novel

Where does the Greek novel come from? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to definitively Greek founding fathers, the novel revelled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions (or at least affected to combine them: it is often hard to tell how ‘authentic’ the non-Greek material is). More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridisation, or what we would now call ‘mixed race’ relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or ‘dirtiness’, of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression, transformation and mess. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. Dirty Love focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and covers such texts as Ctesias’s Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis.

scholarly journals THE CHARACTER CONFRONTING THE AUTOR: TOWARD THE ISSUE OF AN UNDESCRIBDED METALITERARY PLOT

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-113
Author(s):  
Olga N. Turysheva
Keyword(s):  
Miguel De Unamuno ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
Mass Literature ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines a specific metaliterary motif of the confrontation between ‘the author’ and the character. In this motif, both ‘the author’ and the character are portrayed as characters of the plot of the fictional world. The article analyses the emergence of the motif in modernist literature which subverts the realist poetics of the author’s omniscience. The author of the article employs the term ruman to refer to the novel genre where the author and the character enjoy equal rights. The term was first introduced by Miguel de Unamuno whose Mist (1914) was the first example of this version of metareflexive narrative. The article traces the development of the motif in modernist, postmodernist, and recently published contemporary novels. The differences in depicting of the relationship between the author and the character are explicated by reconstruction of the aesthetic and philosophical context of the time and the polemics with the dominating concepts of the Subject. Additionally, the article examines variations of the motif both in highbrow and mass literature focusing on such rumanistic pieces as novels by K. Vaginov, J. Fowles, V. Pelevin, L. Binet.

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