scholarly journals Merging Fact, Fiction and Myth: Reading TD Ramakrishnan’s Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki as a Historiographic Metafiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Subin Varghese
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Political History ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Fictional Space ◽  
Female Perspective

TD Ramakrishnan’s novel Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki is a mixture of the mythological, metaphysical and historical into a fictional space which transcends the boundaries of nation. The novel is a quest for retelling the historical trauma of Sreelanka. In the search for Sugandhi a Tamil liberation activist, the narrator stumbles upon the mythical Sugandhi from the   folklore, creating tension between faction and reality. In the search for the mythical Sugandhi Ramakrishnan uses ‘SusinaSupina’ and arrives at Devanayaki belonging to 7th century AD Pallava Dynasty.   As fact, fiction and myth blur into the contemporary social space, the myth of Devanayaki merges with Rajani Thirinagame creating the notion of the alternate history from a female perspective. In the novel History blurs into myth, reality into fiction, contemporary into past, individual into society and body into spirit.TD Ramakrishnan deconstructs the millennium old Tamil- Sinhalese political history using the alternate history from mythology and folklore.   This paper is an attempt to read the novel Sugandhi Enna AandaalDevanayaki as a Historiographic metafiction.

scholarly journals “The Handmaid’s Tale”: a legal-literary essay

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Clarice Beatriz da Costa Söhngen ◽  
Danielle Massulo Bordignon
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Legal Provisions ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fictional Space ◽  
Second Wave

This paper proposes an analysis of the legal aspects present in the narrative of “The Handmaid´s Tale”, a novel by Margaret Atwood. First published in 1985, and heavily influenced by second-wave feminism, “The Handmaid´s Tale” addresses, mainly, the matter of gender inequality, once it creates a reality in which fertile women are compelled to reproduce through a servitude system. Through a rupture with the Cartesian dichotomy whose dualist notion separates objectivity from subjectivity, reason from emotion, this paper exposes that this oppression is not a literary creation by Atwood, but a reproduction of the power relations put forward in the history of humankind. In this regard, it is explored how Literature can aid the Law in facing the questions that come up in the resolution of legal and social problems. Besides gender inequality, it is possible to spot in the novel several violations concerning the principle of human dignity. Therefore, this research analyzes the legal provisions taken in the fictional space of Gilead, as well as in the country that preceded it, the United States of America, as well as in Brazil. In addition, it studies the symbolic violence to which women are submitted in Gilead and how it relates to the experiences lived by contemporary Brazilian women.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Ghost Meat

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Catherine Belling
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linear Topology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
The Devil

Abstract The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

Between the Alternate and the Apocryphal

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
Derek J. Thiess
Keyword(s):  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National History ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Material History

This chapter explores connections between two treatments of history in science fictional literature—the apocryphal history and the alternate history—as they deal with material place. Theorists (Jameson, Hughes-Warrington) have explored the role of materialist history in our need to create counterfactuals by examining the cityscapes and structures in literary representations of the past. This essay connects the disparate strands of materialism, place, and religious revisionism via Juan Miguel Aguilera’s La locura de Dios. It reads the novel as both an apocryphal adventure to a “lost world” civilization and an alternate narrative of Spanish national history. La locura comments surprisingly self-consciously on the crystalline fragility of the logic holding material history together, threatened as it is by a revisionist, escapist orthodoxy.

scholarly journals (Im) posibilidad de escribir el trauma. El silencio en El profundo Sur de Andrés Rivera

Anclajes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Cristian Ignacio Vidal Barría ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
A Current

The questions around literary writing and its possibilities for representing violence and historical trauma is a current discussion in both philosophical and literary studies. This article addresses these complexities and examines, through a reading of the novel El profundo Sur (1999) by Argentine writer Andrés Rivera, the possibilities of the literary text as a device that tries to represent or depict violence and trauma through a fictional narrative. The novel takes as its setting and historical reference the massacre of workers in Buenos Aires in 1919, also known as the “Semana Trágica”. Rivera, whose aesthetics is marked by the use of the ellipsis, elaborates a reflection on language, fiction, and the reconstruction of a historical event through literature.

scholarly journals Everybody’s Holocaust? Tova Reich’s Satirical Approach to Shoah Business and the Cult of Victimhood

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Stanislav Kolář
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Millennium

This paper sets out to demonstrate the changes that post-Holocaust fiction has been undergoing since around the turn of the new millennium. It analyzes the highly innovative and often provocative approaches to the Holocaust and its memory found in Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust—a scathing satire on the personal and institutional exploitation of Holocaust commemoration, manifested in the commodification of the historical trauma in what has been termed “Shoah business”. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the Holocaust by popular culture. This paper focuses on Reich’s critical response to the cult of victimhood and the unhealthy competition for Holocaust primacy, corresponding with the growth of a “victim culture”. It also explores other thematic aspects of the author’s satire—the abuse of the term “Holocaust” for personal, political and ideological purposes; attempts to capitalize on the suffering of millions of victims; the trivialization of this tragedy; conflicts between particularists and universalists in their attitude to the Shoah; and criticism of Holocaust-centered Judaism. The purpose of this paper is to show how Tova Reich has enriched post-Holocaust fiction by presenting a comic treatment of false victimary discourse, embodied by a fraudulent survivor and a whole gallery of inauthentic characters. This paper highlights the novel’s originality, which enables it to step outside the frame of traditional Holocaust fiction.

scholarly journals THE LITTERSCAPE AND THE NUDE: HISTORY ESCAPES IN MANSUR BUSHNAF'SAL-ʿILKA(CHEWING GUM).

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Charis Olszok
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Chewing Gum ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real

AbstractMansur Bushnaf'sal-ʿIlka(Chewing Gum; 2008) is the author's sole novel, born of his twelve-year imprisonment in a Libyan jail, and his reflection on the nation's subjection to international marginalization and dictatorial rule under Gaddafi. The novel is centered on a 19th-century nude which confounds all who encounter it, and which lies neglected in a corner of Tripoli's Red Palace Museum. Through this statue, and the novel's broader poetics of stasis and “chewing,” I explore howturāthin Bushnaf's work, and wider Libyan fiction, is depicted through its abject vulnerability and exposure to historical vicissitudes, reflecting the parallel exclusion of human lives from rights and agency. Inal-ʿIlka, I examine how this is formulated into a defamiliarizing perspective on the postmodern, and on historical trauma and erasure, in which the possibility of narrative is a driving concern, rooted in existential reflection, as well as the real precarity of those who tell stories in Libya.

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