scholarly journals Duplicity in Novel by M. Spark “Aiding and Abetting”

2021 ◽  
pp. 267-279
Author(s):  
E. V. Ushakova

The article reveals the specifics of the functioning of the phenomenon of duplicity  in  the novel by the English writer M. Spark “Aiding and Abetting” (2000). The scientific novelty lies in the fact that this work is viewed from this angle for the first time. An overview of a number of existing approaches to the phenomenon of duality in modern literary criticism is presented. The author analyzes pairs of the main characters of the novel, who are doubles, revealed in similar situations related to the themes of fraud and crime. It is shown that in the novel “Aiding and Abetting” the characters play the roles of both antagonists and carnival counterparts. Particular attention is paid to the  combination  inherent in M. Spark’s work in the works of satirical orientation and postmodern play, which is reflected in the change of the narrative perspective, ambiguity and uncertainty of the finale. The meaning of the title of the work is revealed in the context of the realization of the motive of duality, the main moral problems posed in the novel are revealed. The author comes to the conclusion that through the use of doubles, Spark describes the vices of society and the moral degradation of a person.

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
В.С. ПУКИШ ◽  
И.С. ХУГАЕВ

В статье рассматривается роман основоположника «революционно-пролетарской словацкой литературы», «словацкого Горького» Петера Йилемницкого (1901–1949) «Компас в нас» (1937). Актуальность данного рассмотрения определяется уже тем, что в романе значительное место уделено советской (русской, киргизской) и кавказ­ской (осетинской, в хронотопе, заступающем советские рамки) теме, – и при этом произведение Йилемницкого до сих пор не было переведено на русский язык и осталось, в общем, вне поля зрения отечественного литературоведения и литературной кри­тики. Отдельные, связанные с осетинской темой, главы романа в переводе на осетин­ский язык, выполненном в свое время Хасаном Малиевым и Сафаром Хаблиевым, пу­бликовались в советское время в североосетинской периодической печати, и, поскольку одним из героев Йилемницкого выступает друг Петера Йилемницкого известный осе­тинский писатель Чермен Беджызаты (1898–1937) и действие первого плана происхо­дит именно в Южной Осетии, которую, в рамках сюжета, посещает повествователь, роман «Компас в нас» несколько раз упоминался в осетинском литературоведении. Одним из авторов данной статьи (В.С. Пукишем) роман Йилемницкого в «осетин­ской» части в последнее время переведен на русский язык с языка оригинала (редакто­ром перевода, необходимого в виду этнокультурной фактуры, выступил И.С. Хугаев); соответственно, здесь, помимо необходимой биографической и библиографической справки, вводятся в литературно-критический оборот обстоятельства творческой истории романа «Компас в нас», его основные идеи и образы, а также его оценки в словацком литературном процессе; впервые на основе оригинального текста тракту­ется архитектоника, образная система, идеология, общие изобразительные приемы и идейно-эмоциональная тенденция текста Петера Йилемницкого. The article examines the novel Kompas v nás (Compass Inside Us) by Peter Jilemnický (1901–1949), the founder of “revolutionary proletarian Slovak literature,” and “the Slovak Gorki.” The topicality of this review can be proved by the fact that the novel devotes much attention to the Soviet (Russian, Kyrgyz) and the Caucasian (Ossetian – in the space-time going beyond the Soviet period) themes – however, by now it has not been translated into Russian and thus it has remained mostly out of the eye of contemporary Russian literary criticism. At the same time, the Ossetia-related chapters of the novel translated into Ossetian by Khasan Maliev and Safar Khabliev, were published in the North Ossetian press, and due to the fact that one of the central characters of the novel is Chermen Bedzhyzaty (1898–1937), a known Ossetian writer and a friend of Peter Jilemnický, and that the foreground of the story takes place in South Ossetia visited by the narrator, Compass Inside Us has more than once been mentioned by Ossetian literary critics. One of the authors of this article (V. Pukish) recently translated the ‘Ossetian’ part of the novel from Slovak into Russian (I. Khugaev edited the translated text as required by the ehtnocultural texture); this is why, the circumstances of creative history of the novel, its main ideas and images, and the assessments given to it by Slovak literary critics are hereby introduced into the scientific discourse in addition to the required biographical and bibliographical references. Based on the original text of the novel, the authors of this article are for the first time discussing the architectonics, imagery, ideology, general representational devices, and ideological and emotional trends of the text by Peter Jilemnický.


2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-477
Author(s):  
Franziska Quabeck

AbstractInSwing Time, her newest novel to date, Zadie Smith makes use of a first-person narrator for the first time in her career as a writer, and this change in narrative perspective is crucial to our understanding of the novel. Her narrator is slightly odd and we come to question the veracity of her account. Thus, she is ‘unreliable’ in traditional terms, but this article argues that we can equally call her inauthentic because she obviously represses feelings that are vital to the story. She does not fully expose herself, for she tries to hide the fact that she does not know who she is. Trapped between the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, oppressed by an overbearing mother and a racist society, the narrator has confined herself to an existence as a shadow. By way of Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition and Frantz Fanon’s image in the third person, this article tries to show thatSwing Time’s narrator exists only as a shadow because she finds no external affirmation of herself as a black woman.


Author(s):  
O.M. Buranok ◽  
◽  
N.E. Erofeeva ◽  
I.B. Kazakova ◽  
O.V. Sizova ◽  
...  

The article examines the works of E. Haywood, as the author of novels, the publisher of three women's magazines that laid the groundwork for the culture of women's creativity in English literature of the XVIII century. Her name is called among the first authors of a women's novel, which is still interpreted from a gender perspective in modern science as a sociocultural phenomenon that represents the world through the eyes of women. Nevertheless, the authors of the article note the serious influence of men's literature on the work of the writer who was passionate about politics and social reforms. Special attention is paid to such genre modification of the novel as "secret histories", the predecessor of "the novel with the key". It is noted that what is new in "secret histories" is the shift in the angle of perception of the text itself, filled with facts about certain historical events and people, which were taken from various kinds of insinuations, as a rule, it had nothing to do with the real history, but attracted the reader with their variations in the relationships of the characters. Slander becomes the subject of the depiction, and its possessors represent heroes (antiheroes) through the prism of the certain moral values, including the state ones. For the first time in Russian literary criticism, the authors acquaint the reader to the "secret histories" of E. Haywood, novels “The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania”(1726), “Memories of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia” (1725 – 26), “The Advantures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijavea; a preAdamitical History” (1736) in the context of women's prose in England in the XVIII century. The analysis of the novel “The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania” as the most vivid example of the "secret histories" by E. Haywood is offered. The material of the article will be of interest to the specialists, as well as to those who are interested in the development of the female genre of the novel in the literature of England during the Enlightenment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-154
Author(s):  
Valeria G. Andreeva ◽  
◽  

For the first time in literary criticism, the author of the article turns her attention to the image of the estate in Tolstoy’s later artistic work, showing the dynamics of the writer’s views on estate life, the image of an ideal estate, which for Tolstoy was always associated with the motives of work, family life, proper attitude towards the people, etc. It is noted that in 1880–1910, the estate theme in Tolstoy’s creative imagination was directly related to the problems of land ownership, proper management and correct and gradual path of the individual and their spiritual growth. The picture of estate life In Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is realized in two contrasting versions: luxurious existence of the upper class and the aristocracy, not supported by any content, and transforming into a new image of the working life of the intelligentsia and landowners on the land. The author demonstrates the facts of impoverishment of estate life at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which are introduced in the artistic world of the novel. It is proved that the idea in the work of inseparable connection of a person with the people around him and with humanity at large, which is the key conception of the novel, is directly related to Tolstoy’s understanding of the change of the forms of estate life, important and dear for the writer himself. Of great importance in the novel is the awareness of the characters of natural life, which is presented in contrast to civilization, which deviates from the basic laws of love and goodness. On the basis of an analytical comparison of the drafts of the novel and the final text, the author substantiates the importance of the estate theme for understanding the feelings of the protagonist and his inner life, for organizing the epic artistic world of the novel. The article illustrates the stages of the dialectical movement of Dmitry Nekhlyudov and the connection between the estate and family themes. The author rethinks some episodes of the novel that have received controversial interpretations in science and reveals the artistic links that connect different chapters of the work.


PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Best

How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again. (Emerson 476)Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact … readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we, the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognized, become fully cognizant of, our knowledge. (Byatt 512)Literary criticism thrives on the distinction between first and second reading, on what is often parsed as absorptive reading versus critical reading, belletristic versus analytic reading. It sets itself against the idea that a irst reading of a text might be the one in which we have “seen [it] well”-on the assumption that critical insight is belated (Emerson 476). “As scholars, we read lengthy texts [such as novels] sequentially; then, in order to write, we inevitably reread recursively,” which has the efect, as the critic Michaela Bronstein goes on to observe, of producing conlicted conceptions of the novel as either “a static object (a form) or an experience in time” (77). One goal of literary criticism would appear to be to keep readers from lingering in that temporal and immersive irst reading in order to arrive at an assessment of the total work. First reading and critique are viewed as largely anathema; second thoughts inspire us to relinquish irst impressions, in a process of questioning and revision infused with a spirit of skepticism and doubt. here is an air of supersession- something vanguardist-about critique, but as Bronstein also points out, “the purpose of rereading need not be to revise the irst reading from an analytic distance. . . . Close reading [can use] the recursive process of analysis to approach, rather than to erase, sequential reading” (78). I take Bronstein's projection of a literary criticism that accounts for rather than dismisses the absorptive aspects of irst reading as an accurate description of Rita Felski's project in The Limits of Critique, a manifesto that calls on literature scholars to recommit to “care or concern for [aesthetic] phenomena” (107). Felski makes the case for a pragmatist phenomenology and calls her method for its achievement “postcritique,” a mode of reading that declines to unmask, demystify, interrogate, subvert, or expose the literary text (the habit of generations of recent critics). Postcritique means to expand the uses of literature beyond that of marking an absence or an insufficiency, returning readers to the values that drew them to the literary work of art in the first place (“aesthetic pleasure, increased selfunderstanding, moral relection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self- loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation” [188]).


Author(s):  
Pam Morris

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Wilson

Initially, Oliver Twist (1839) might seem representative of the archetypal male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a place by discovering the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. But Agnes Fleming haunts this narrative, undoing its neat, linear transmission. This reconsideration of maternal inheritance and plot in the novel occurs against the backdrop of legal and social change. I extend the critical consideration of the novel's relationship to the New Poor Law by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother enters. Under the bastardy clauses, the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time, legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all obligation. Oliver Twist manages to critique the bastardy clauses for their release of the father, while simultaneously embracing the placement of the mother at the head of the family line. Both Oliver and the novel thus suggest that it is the mother's story that matters, her name through which we find our own. And by containing both plots – that of the father and the mother – Oliver Twist reveals the violence implicit in traditional modes of inheritance in the novel and under the law.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satish Kodali ◽  
Liangshan Chen ◽  
Yuting Wei ◽  
Tanya Schaeffer ◽  
Chong Khiam Oh

Abstract Optical beam induced resistance change (OBIRCH) is a very well-adapted technique for static fault isolation in the semiconductor industry. Novel low current OBIRCH amplifier is used to facilitate safe test condition requirements for advanced nodes. This paper shows the differences between the earlier and novel generation OBIRCH amplifiers. Ring oscillator high standby leakage samples are analyzed using the novel generation amplifier. High signal to noise ratio at applied low bias and current levels on device under test are shown on various samples. Further, a metric to demonstrate the SNR to device performance is also discussed. OBIRCH analysis is performed on all the three samples for nanoprobing of, and physical characterization on, the leakage. The resulting spots were calibrated and classified. It is noted that the calibration metric can be successfully used for the first time to estimate the relative threshold voltage of individual transistors in advanced process nodes.


Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson

The chapter looks at the division between poetry and prose in ancient and other literatures, and shows the importance of rhythmic patterning in ancient prose. The development of rhythmic prose in Greek and Latin is sketched, the system explained and illustrated (from Latin). It is firmly established, for the first time, which of the main Greek non-Christian authors 31 BC–AD 300 write rhythmically. The method takes a substantial sample of random sentence-endings (usually 400) from each of a large number of Imperial authors; it compares that sample with one sample of the same size (400) drawn randomly from a range of authors earlier than the invention of this rhythmic system. A particular sort of X2-test is applied. Many Imperial authors, it emerges, write rhythmically; many do not. The genres most likely to offer rhythmic writing are, unexpectedly, narrative: historiography and the novel.


Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Ian Duncan

Your bed shall be the moorcock’s, and your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.’ Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson’s prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson’s last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson’s ‘Note to Kidnapped’, reprinted for the first time since 1922.


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