scholarly journals The Murphy Murder Mystery: An Irish “post-mortem situation”

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Scott Eric Hamilton ◽  

This paper will propose that Beckett’s affinity for crime and mystery fiction also contributes to Murphy. The novel will be examined on the proposed hypothesis that Murphy’s death, so-called, is conspicuously left ambiguous to a certain degree, rendering it a type of mystery narrative. Approaching the mysterious death as something like a detective fiction “cold case”, the events of Murphy, and clues left by Beckett throughout the prose that follows, I will investigate whether or not Murphy does actually die toward the end of the book. Although Beckett does not present these aspects in the traditional form of “thriller” fiction, he does use them to create a modernist aesthetic which challenges traditions, identifications of being, identity, representation and space regarding both the individual and the social context of the Irish “postmortem situation” depicted in Murphy.

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 742
Author(s):  
Meirysa S ◽  
Ratu Wardarita

The purpose of this study was to describe the author's social context and socio-cultural elements in the novel About You by Tere Liye. This research was a qualitative research with sociology of literature approach. This research was to describe author's social context and socio-cultural elements in the novel About You by Tere Liye. The results of the discussion in this study were obtained story fact that related to their social values namely violence, starting a business, product marketing, malaria events (January 15 disasters), friendship, and betrayal. While the social values contained in the novel About You by Tere Liye included: patience, obedience, forgiveness, helping others, caring for others, working hard, loyalty, mutual trust between friends, help between friends, and honestly. The results of this study conclude: (1) author's social context of the novel About You by Tere Liye work consists of the theme and facts of theory, and (2) socio-cultural elements of the novel About You the moral values contained in Tere Liye's novel About You are: (a) human relationships with self that include fear, death, longing and revenge, (b) human relationships with humans.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Arnold

In the alternative fairy tale The Princess Bride, as William Goldman's character Miracle Max reanimates the apparent corpse of the hero Westley, he tells the anxious group observing the procedure: ‘There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive’ (Goldman 2007, 313). Only a select group of the dead can be characterized as being ‘slightly alive’, in the post-mortem agency sense, however, and the case studies presented here explore the many ways in which this subcategory of mostly dead individuals have engaged with and continue to impact the living in the past as well as today. Several themes emerge as especially salient: the iteration in the death-scape of the dynamic tension between the individual and the social group, which can result in transgression as well as conformity in the disposition of the body and its effects on the living; the symbolic capital represented by some dead bodies and the ways in which their potency may be affected by various forms of contextual association; and the ways in which the manipulation of the dead for political purposes is subject to constraints specific to the cultural contexts in which these interactions take place.


Barnboken ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen King

“How could she ever put those terrible pictures into words?” (Naidoo, Truth 51). This question is at the heart of Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth (2000), which narrates the trauma of Nigerian asylum seeker children Sade and Femi as they flee to Britain. Speech and silence are ambivalent within the text, fluctuating in meaning dependant on the social context in which they are enacted. Showing this text to be primarily a narrative of activism, I explore how Naidoo’s representations of trauma inform her critique of the British immigration system. This text invites a reading that draws on recent postcolonial theories of trauma. Using both textual and paratextual analysis of the novel and Naidoo’s archive, held by Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Britain, I draw on Forter’s model of psychosocial trauma to demonstrate that the trauma the protagonists face is a result of their encounter with a racist society and bureaucracy. Reflecting Kertzer’s claim that social justice should be central in trauma narratives for children, Naidoo shows healing from trauma to be the locus of political awakening for both characters and implied reader. The aim of this article is to integrate contemporary models of postcolonial trauma with an understanding of the activist nature of Naidoo’s work, showing that in this sort of children’s trauma narrative, the site of healing from trauma is simultaneously the site of social change. Since the trauma that the child protagonists face is a social phenomenon, the speech that allows the children to begin to heal is similarly socially situated, and their healing is synonymous with social justice.


10.3823/2415 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Benegelania Pinto ◽  
Kênia Lara Silva ◽  
Luciana Dantas Farias de Andrade

Goals: The aim of this study was to analyze the scientific production on the relationship between school and community in the perspective of Health Promotion. Method: Integrative review. The search was guided by question: How has the relationship between school and community occurred in Health Promotion? Results: Nine studies were selected in Portuguese, Spanish and English, published from April 2006 to April 2016. Most of the rescued studies showed that the type of relationship between school and community has based on actions that are not linked to the principles of Health Promotion, mostly focused on the individual, without considering collective issues, risk factors that cause illness, disconnected from the social context. Few studies present advances in Health Promotion with a critical-citizen perspective and experiences with the potential for the necessary establishment of the school and community relation. Conclusion: Although the relationship between school and community in the perspective of Health Promotion presents as elementary and not deepened, the successful experiences show good prospects of overcoming. It is necessary to move forward and bring the relationship between school and community in a synergetic movement in favor of Health Promotion. Descriptors: Health promotion; School; Community.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sevgi Güney

The content of thought, which emerges from the processing of information from the social context lived, is a critical factor that guides whether the behavior is psychopathological or not. In cases where worry, anxiety and fear are dominant in the content of thought, the individual may find himself in some psychopathological processes. Adversity and uncertainty are the main factors that lead to the experience of worry, anxiety and fear which is the last point of these. Uncertainty of information from the social context lived, when matched with adversity, may lead to chaotic situations at the cognitive level, e.g., thought contents such as distortions in thought, severe anxiety and fear. Obsessive compulsive disorder derives from severe worry and anxiety. Although the disorder is classified under anxiety disorders, it is actually a thought distortion disorder. The individual finds himself repeating the strange behavior patterns accompanied by strange thought contents in order to get rid of the severe anxiety and accelerated thought cycle he is exposed to. Ambiguity and uncertainty also may lead to the accelerated thought cycle, ruminations, severe thought distortions, over-generalizations. Ruminations, especially, impair the individual’s ability to think and process emotions gradually. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder will be discussed in terms of ambiguity and uncertainty with the combination of adversity. Positive Psychotherapy, which is one of the latest effective technique in recovery processes of the diseases, will be mentioned.


Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri

Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story (Excerpt from unpublished novel)Life in itself largely depends on one’s personal relationship with nature. Humankind develops as it discovers new modes of relating more efficiently with whatever surrounds it. Thus both the individual and the social aspects of such a condition greatly  depend on each other. Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home is a Maltese novel which strives to portray such a bond in terms of what it entails to live in a traditional village far removed from the center of the country where nature had to succumb to a great extent to the dictates of culture, and mainly to technology. The descriptive element of the novel, as evinced in this excerpt, is meant not only to construct a context within which the villagers live, but also to suggest a sharp contrast with the modern city, impersonal, overcrowded, noisy and inevitably distant from spaces which are considered to be still undeveloped, namely still left in their primeval state. The depiction of such a way of life in such a village, inspired by an environment typical of Southern Europe, may seem to be simply an evocation of the past, as it originally is, but it also recognizes the fact that such a relationship with nature still survives in various parts of various countries. The essential message of the excerpt is that modern ecological considerations are necessarily the expression of  humanity’s need to rediscover nature and to return to where it once belonged.                   


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAOUFIK تــوفــيــق STITI الــســتــيــتــي

تُعتبر الصيغة السردية إحدى أهم المقولات المشكلة للخطاب السردي عموما، حيث تنتظم السرود وفق نمط حكائي معين يعكس الأسلوب المتفرد والمتميز لكل كاتب على حدة. وتُشَكِّلُ المجموعة القصصية "أنين الماء" للقاصة والروائية والشاعرة المغربية الزهرة رميج، بتعدّد صيغ خطابها وتنوع أشكال اشتغال الذاكرة فيها، كونا مُكثّفا وبالغ التعقيد. حيث تُزاوج القاصّة، في تشكيلٍ إبداعي قشيب، بين المحكي والمعروض تارة، أو تُعَضِّضهُما بالخطاب المُحوّل تارة أخرى، كما تُدمِجُ في صَوْغِ سرودها الذاكرة الفردية والذاكرة الجماعية، وتمزج الذاكرة الاجتماعية بالذاكرةِ الثقافيةِ والسياسيةِ. وسنحاول في هذه الورقةِ تقديم قراءةٍ مُركّزةٍ ومُختصرةٍ، في المجموعة القصصية "أنين الماء" للقاصة والروائية الزهرة رميج، لاستجلاء بعض الخصائص الفنية والجمالية التي تُميِّزُ سرود الكاتبة، مع التركيز بشكل خاص على أنماط الحكي والصِّيَغ السردية وتعدد أشكال اشتغال الذاكرة.The narrative version is one of the most important arguments for the narrative discourse, the narratives are organized according to a specific style of reflection. The novel "Anin almaa" by the Moroccan novelist Zahra Ramej, with its varied forms of speech and the diversity of its forms of memory, is an intensive and highly complex universe. Where the mating is intertwined in a creative form, between the narrator and the viewer, or alternating with the converted discourse. It also integrates the individual memory and the collective memory into its narratives, and mixes the social memory with the cultural and political memory. In this paper, we will attempt to present a concise reading of the novel "Anin Almaa" by Zahra Ramej, to explore some of the artistic and aesthetic characteristics that characterize the writer's narratives, with particular emphasis on narrative patterns, narrative forms and multiple forms of memory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Dwi Susanto

Crime and romance were common themes in Chinese Indonesian literature during the colonial era. Although this literary genre falls into a subgenre, it aesthetically provides a covert narration of intermixing worlds: East and West. This paper examines the practices of liminality and identity construction in Tan Boen Kim’s Tjerita Nona Gan Jan Nio atawa Pertjinta’an dalem Resia (1914). The construction of identity in liminal spaces in the novel is interpreted through postcolonial lens, especially based on the concepts of hybridity and ambivalence. The material object of this study is the novel, and the formal object is the meeting of the subjects in the liminal space. The data are collected from the content of the text, the topic, the social context, and other relevant sources. The interpretation technique is performed through deconstructive reading and circular reading between the text and the social context. Based on the analysis, it is found that Tan Boen Kim preserved the moral traditions on the one hand but promoted liberalism on the other hand. It is also found that the author’s attitude in “moderation” (moderate-tradition) position is based upon his choices of cultural construction which is between moderate and tradition—thus making his strategy characterized by ambivalence.


2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 519-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Christianson

AbstractAmbiguity is a driving force of the narrative world of film noir. It is expressed through unconventional characterization as well as innovative and excessive visual and narrative techniques. Through all of the gaps and unanswered questions film noir poses, viewers are engaged in an intellectually demanding process. The book of Judges makes similar demands of its readers and shares a number of the concerns found in film noir, such as: anxiety over constructs of masculinity and normality, interest in ritualized violence, fetishization of women, existential deliberation over character, resignation to the fate of the individual (and by extension the nation), withering acknowledgment of the façade of material progress—all expressed with indeterminate narrative modes that frustrate attempts at making meaning. My argument in particular is that film noir and the Jael episode (Judg. 4; 5:24–31) share a remarkably similar rhetoric of ambiguity, and that examination of their correspondences, by an evidence-based comparison, can lead to fruitful hypothesis regarding the social context from which the Judges stories emerged.


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