scholarly journals Identity and War in Michael Ondaatje’s

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (-) ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Anamaria Enescu
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Construction Of Identity

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of identity in relation to war through a close reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. It investigates the connections between war and the construction of identity, focusing on aspects such as violence and death. In his novel Ondaatje uncovers private histories alongside the framing events of World War Two. Kip’s perception of war and his way of living through it suggest that the engagement on the world’s battlefield is riddled with inner conflicts separating people or bringing them together. In The English Patient what is at issue is the quest for a redefinition of the self: Hanna, Kirpal Singh and Almásy attempt to liberate the self through an investigation of the past. Thus, the novel problematizes the convolutions of human interaction zooming in on ideas of movement and metamorphosis as thematized in the war plot, functioning as the fundamental mechanisms that shape identity.

Causes of Death

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Anderson ◽  
Corinne Roughley
Keyword(s):  
Heart Disease ◽  
Pulmonary Tuberculosis ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Whooping Cough ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Disease Mortality

The principal reported causes of death have changed dramatically since the 1860s, though changes in categorization of causes and improved diagnosis make it difficult to be precise about timings. Diseases particularly affecting children such as measles and whooping cough largely disappeared as killers by the 1950s. Deaths particularly linked to unclean environments and poor sanitary infrastructure also declined, though some can kill babies and the elderly even today. Pulmonary tuberculosis and bronchitis were eventually largely controlled. Reported cancer, stroke, and heart disease mortality showed upward trends well into the second half of the twentieth century, though some of this was linked to diagnostic improvement. Both fell in the last decades of our period, but Scotland still had among the highest rates in Western Europe. Deaths from accidents and drowning saw significant falls since World War Two but, especially in the past 25 years, suicide, and alcohol and drug-related deaths rose.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

Symbols and the culture of memory in Republika Srpska Krajina

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 893-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vjeran Pavlaković
Keyword(s):  
Parallel Process ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Government ◽  
Republika Srpska

This article examines how rebel Serbs in Croatia reinterpreted narratives of World War Two to justify their uprising against the democratically elected Croatian government in 1990 and gain domestic and international legitimacy for the Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) parastate. While scholars have written about the strategies nationalist elites used regarding controversial symbols and the rehabilitation of World War Two collaborators in Croatia and other Yugoslav successor states, the RSK's “culture of memory” has received little attention. Based on documents captured after the RSK's defeat in 1995, this article shows that it was not only the government of Franjo Tudjman that rejected the Partisan narratives of “Brotherhood and Unity,” but a parallel process took place among the leadership in the Krajina. Ultimately the decision to base the historical foundations of the Croatian Serbs’ political goals on a chauvinist and extremist interpretation of the past resulted in a criminalized entity that ended tragically for both Serbs and Croats living on the territory of the RSK.

scholarly journals Self-Destructive Behavior Analysis of Hannah Baker in The Thirteen Reasons Why Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Jeantriani Febrita ◽  
Eka Margianti Sagimin
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Defense Mechanisms ◽  
Defense Mechanism ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Destructive Behavior ◽  
The Past ◽  
Self Defense

This study investigates Self-Destructive Behavior of Hannah Baker in Thirteen Reasons Why novel, conducted in qualitative approach analysis of self-destructive behavior of the main character and what reasons or the causes of it through the narratives in the Thirteen Reasons Why novel. The goal of the study is to analyze how self-destructive behavior impacted the main character, Hannah Baker which is described using the theory of Self-Destructive Behavior and Defense Mechanisms by Sigmund Freud (1966). The result of this study shows that Hannah Baker developed the self-destructive behavior as a defense mechanisms from herself that triggered by trauma from the past. It started with the non-suicidal self-destructive behavior but soon turns into the suicidal self-destructive behavior. This study also shows how a suicide can really be an impact of the behavior that happens in the novel resulted from a non-suicidal self-destructive behavior that is not handled well, and all the mistreatments that the main character felt which produce the desire for ending her life.Keywords: Self-Defense Mechanism, Self-Destructive Behavior, Sigmund Freud, Suicide, Thirteen Reasons Why.

scholarly journals The Restitution of the Past: Autofictional Memory in El azul de las abejas by Laura Alcoba

Anclajes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Enzo Matías Menestrina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
In Transit ◽  
Literary Experience

The construction of identity in contemporary literature of the self has become a recurring fact in recent years. The limits that blur autofictions, where hazy boundaries separate the real from the fictitious, allow for life experiences to become diluted within the literary experience. Within the context of exile, all forms of identity construction are placed “in transit”: a learning process that involves an adaptation to a new territory and a new language. The second volume in Laura Alcoba’s trilogy, El azul de las abejas (2014 [2013]), shows how the exiled subject’s identity is constructed as a result of the changes arising from linguistic configuration and learning.

scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Unique Individual

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Self ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Key Terms

This chapter both gives an account of the critical treatment of post-World War II metafiction and introduces the key terms that guide the book. The existing critical debates about postwar metafiction have tended to emphasize metafiction’s incorporation of critical and philosophical discourse, and have suggested that it either makes the novel newly responsible to political communities or disables literature from intervening into political situations. More recent criticism based on literary institutions has tended to overlook key questions of literary value. The terms the chapter develops to renew discussion about postwar metafiction are ‘self of writing’ and ‘public author as signature’. These terms are derived from a reading of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and J. L. Borges’s ‘Borges and I’. The self of writing refers to the figure of the author that a writer may imagine exists independent of discourse. The public author as signature represents the public understandings of an author that emerge from biography and the author’s corpus itself.

Beyond Realism

Renascence ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ascari ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Human Condition

A complex and controversial novel, Atonement is at the core of a lively critical debate, opposing those who focus on the impossibility of Briony’s atonement – also in relation to the author’s atheist views – to those who conversely explore the redemptive quality of her “postlapsarian” painful self-fashioning. Far from concerning simply the destiny of a literary character, this debate has to do with the impact Postmodernist relativism has on both the conception of the human subject and the discourses of the past, from memory to history and fiction. Discarding any potentially nihilistic interpretations of Atonement as disempowering, this article delves into Ian McEwan’s multi-layered text in order to comprehend its ambivalences, its subtle investigation of the human condition, and its status as a postmemory novel reconnecting us to the events of World War Two.

scholarly journals A JOURNEY TO (OWN) MEMORY: LVIV BETWEEN AND DURING WORLD WAR II IN CONTEMPORARY TEXT (BASED ON NOVELS "THE MUSEUM OF ABANDONED SECRETS" BY OKSANA ZABUZHKO AND "TANGO OF DEATH" BY YURII VYNNYCHUK)

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 278-355
Author(s):  
Khrystyna RUTAR
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Access Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ukrainian Text

In the article basing on theoretical framework of memory studies, two historical novels written by modern Ukrainian authors have been analyzed. The main references to the interwar Lviv and Lviv during the war in works are singled out and the importance of inclusion and comprehension of places of those two periods in modern Ukrainian text is indicated. The main strategies of returning to memory of interwar Lviv and its inhabitants are analyzed. The traumatized memory and ways of talking about the 20th century cultural traumas were analyzed in the 21st century novel, those traumas, which for more than a half of century were surrounded by curtain of fear, censorship and inability to speak openly about it. Attention is drawn to the names of streets are obtaining features of memory prosthesis and becomes an access memory tool. The author concludes that the novel, which had the opportunity to take a fresh look at the traumatic pages of the past, remains in the shadow of stereotypes and silence. The abilities of literature in memory studies is analyzed and are noted that literature can be both as a tool of memory and as an object of memory studies. Keywords memory, Lviv, Oksana Zabuzhko, Yurii Vynnychuk, Museum of abandoned secrets, Tango of Death, trauma, war, interwar period.

The Ivory Tower : The Cessation of Concern

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
Alan W. Bellringer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Late Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
The Way

Henry James's The Ivory Tower (1917) has suffered a similar fate to that of other incomplete last novels; most critical discussion has centred on the way it would have ended, taking into account resemblances with earlier works. This line of enquiry has not been very profitable; James's late style is too complex and rich to tempt anyone to continue The Ivory Tower in the way that ‘ Another Lady ’ has recently gone on with Sanditon. In any case one cannot legitimately say one wishes that James had lived to finish The Ivory Tower, since in fact he lived on without doing so; he had enough time to complete it if he had wanted. His general intentions were clear as we know from the ample notes he left. Why then did James give up? He stopped with the outbreak of the First World War, no doubt on the day war broke out. The really interesting critical question with regard to The Ivory Tower is: What is there in the novel, in its design as well as in its completed opening, which James found contradicted by war? James's imagination found the creative act of writing The Ivory Tower incompatible with war-time experience. He turned to other work, such as The Sense of the Past.

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