Becoming Parents Based on Levinas’s Ethics of the Other : Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32
Author(s):  
Shinhyun Park
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. p49
Author(s):  
Despoina PANOU

This paper aims to investigate the norms governing the translation of fiction from English into Greek by critically examining two Greek translations of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. One is by Pavlina Pampoudi (Patakis, 2016) and the other, is by Thanasis Zavalos (Minoas, 2017). Particular attention is paid to dialect translation and special emphasis is placed on the language used by one of the novel’s prominent characters, namely, Abel Magwitch. In particular, twenty instances of Abel Magwitch’s dialect are chosen in an effort to provide an in-depth analysis of the dialect-translation strategies employed as well as possible reasons governing such choices. It is argued that both translators favour standardisation in their target texts, thus eliminating any language variants present in the source text. The conclusion argues that societal factors as well as the commissioning policies of publishing houses influence to a great extent the translators’ behaviour, and consequently, the dialect-translation strategies adopted. Hence, greater emphasis on the extra-linguistic, sociological context is necessary for a thorough consideration of the complexities of English-Greek dialect translation of fiction.


Author(s):  
Göksel Kaya

The aim of this study is to critically analyse the identity issue based on postcolonial theory in one of the most important novels of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and another novel, The White Tiger with which Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008. This study attempts to implement such an exploration not only in the context of western thought, but also from different angles with the realities of the oppressed nations of the Third World, especially India in order to construct the ‘other’ based on the other individuality. Both of the prominent writers in their works lay bare many scenes that focus on the problems of the heroes creating the basis of the events in question. That is why they take into consideration the state of the individual, because the central characters’ conflicts and developments present different aspects of the novel while constructing the individuality and identity behind the societal problems in terms of class conflict. They live under different circumstances to discover themselves and in each of the novels we can bear witness to the existence of some characters who achieve a sense of personal and social identity in the Victorian society of England, a time when great social and economic changes were taking place; and then in India where people suffer from the administrations of the members of Gandhi family led by especially Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. This study thereby examines how the individuals are exposed to the social, economic and political factors of the country where they live.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Khalid LAHLOU

The present paper is an attempt at approaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations from a morphological perspective based upon Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with a brief view of the nature of formalism: its background and its process of analysis. The second part is devoted to putting into practice what has been dealt with in the first part. It will be mostly concerned with the question as to whether all the functions of dramatis personae as stated by Propp figure in the object of analysis, Great Expectations. Finally, the paper will draw the conclusion as to whether the aforementioned elements constitute an organic unity.


Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-65
Author(s):  
Veronika Schuchter

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different fictional men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.


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