scholarly journals The International Settlement: The Fantasy of International Writing in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Jerrine Tan
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Historical Moment

Abstract I identify two general approaches to the reception of Ishiguro’s novels: World Literature critics writing on cosmopolitanism exalt what I am calling Ishiguro’s “post-Japan novels” for their consideration of universal ethical dilemmas that transcend their historical moment and place; conversely, most criticism on his “Japan novels” performs problematically culture-specific exoticizing and Orientalist readings. Widely read as a detective novel about a British detective, Christopher Banks, solving the mystery of his parents’ disappearance, When We Were Orphans is in many ways Ishiguro’s most underwhelming novel. But, set in Shanghai, it is an anomaly among Ishiguro’s “post-Japan novels.” Its lackluster reception may be explained by simply acknowledging from the start that When We Were Orphans is just not a very good detective novel at all. The refusal or discomfort around doing so, this essay argues, is because the excuse of bad genre provides (like Japaneseness does for the Japan novels) precisely the convenient veil for why the novel does not work, or is not well liked. In other words, by historicizing the novel and reading it (with)in its political and historical moment, I argue that When We Were Orphans forces an exposure of the double standard and aestheticizing reading practices that critics often bring to their readings of Ishiguro’s works.

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

"Without a Cross": The Cultural Significance of the Sublime and Beautiful in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans

1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Blakemore
Keyword(s):  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Indian Tribes ◽  
Last Of The Mohicans ◽  
Historical Moment

This essay demonstrates that James Fenimore Cooper was incorporating the language and values of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) into the "world" of The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In the Enquiry Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful centers on traditional distinctions between men and women-an "eternal distinction" that Burke continually underscores. In Mohicans Cooper initially incorporates the beautiful into the sublime, in an intentionally illusive "mix" that corresponds to the illusory mixing of the white and Indian races. He then reinscribes Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful as an eternal distinction between whites and Indians-writing "out" the problem of the "Other" (gendered "femininity" and alien, "red" beauty) in a meditation of the significance of culture and race in America. In retrospect, Mohicans is a novel of ambiguous "crosses" and complicitous combinations-a novel of fatal and fruitful mixes comprising a series of covert traces telling a secret story contradicting Cooper's overt, racial ideology. Yet it is this "pristine" ideology that finally overpowers and double-crosses the novel's "other" message. Written in 1826, at a specific historical moment when the Indian tribes were being removed or destroyed, the novel reaffirms a racial ideology tortured with its own historical ambiguities.

On translating Emily Brontë’s style in Wuthering Heights into Arabic

Babel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Muhaidat
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Wuthering Heights

Abstract Translating Emily Brontë’s (1818–1848) Wuthering Heights (1847) into Arabic is a complex and multifaceted task. This paper explores the challenges involved in this task by discussing distinctive features of Brontë’s style and their counterparts in Mamdouh Haqqi’s Arabic translation of the novel. Stylistic features under focus include lexis, figurative language, and structure. As for Brontë’s lexis, it intricately knits elements like characters, setting, and themes. To take their readers to the unpredictable world of Wuthering Heights, translators try to find Arabic equivalents suggesting the associations and connotations of the Source Text (ST) style. Among the obstacles translators need to overcome are lexical gaps, as some lexicalized thoughts and experiences in English have no lexicalized equivalents in Arabic. Resorting to paraphrases may result in sacrificing the compactness of the source text (ST) and losing some shades of meaning. Further complications result from dealing with figurative language. Conveying Brontë’s imagery, personifications, and references to abstract notions in terms of material objects requires thoughtful consideration. Furthermore, the structure of Brontë’s language significantly expresses characters’ attitudes and other subtle traits. Less vivacious translations are expected when the function of expressions in the ST eludes translators’ attention. Throughout the discussion, suggestions are made to provide readers of the text in Arabic with better access to the ST. At the same time, the researcher acclaims Haqqi’s translation which reflects a considerable effort to make a landmark of English/world literature accessible to Arab readers.

A Thousand and One Nights and the Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Modern Arabic

This chapter examines the influence of Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights), the ingenious Arabic cycle of stories, on the development of the novel as a literary genre. It shows that the Nights helped shape the European novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter first explains how the French translation of the Nights and its popularity in Europe led to its incorporation in world literature, creating an enduring taste for “Orientalism” in many forms. It then considers how the Nights became integrated in modern Arabic literature and how Arabic novels inspired by it were used to criticize social conditions, dictatorial authority, and the lack of freedom of expression. It also discusses the Nights as a source of innovation for the trend of magical realism, as well as its role in the interaction between the Arab world and the West.

scholarly journals Tradition Versus and Modernity in Laila al-Juhani’s The Waste Paradise: An Intertextual Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1197-1202
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr Alhusami
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saudi Women ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Story Writer

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of intertextuality in the novel Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) by the female Saudi novelist and short story writer Laila al-Juhani. Intertextuality is a rhetoric and literary technique defined as a textual reference deliberate or subtle to some other texts with a view of drawing more significance to the core text; and hence it is employed by an author to communicate and discuss ideas in a critical style. The narrative structure of Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) showcases references of religious, literary, historical, and folkloric intertextuality. In analyzing these references, the study follows the intertextual approach. In her novel The Waste Paradise, Laila al-Juhani portrays the suffering of Saudi women who are less tormented by social marginalization than by an inner conflict between openness to Western culture and conformity to cultural heritage. Intertextuality relates to words, texts, or discourses among each other. Moreover, the intertextual relations are subject to reader’s response to the text. The relation of one text with other texts or contexts never reduces the prestige of writing. Therefore, this study, does not diminish the status of the writer or the text; rather, it is in itself a kind of literary creativity. Finally, this paper aims to introduce Saudi writers in general and the female writers in particular to the world literature.

scholarly journals Allusion As The Way Of Rendering Elements Of Ancient Greek Mythology In The Tissue Of Modern Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (01) ◽  
pp. 505-514
Author(s):  
Mirzaeva Aziza Shavkatovna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Way

World literature of XX century has experienced the great influence of postmodermism, which resulted in diversity of styles and refusal of well-known structures and forms. One of the most widely used stylistic devices, characterizing the features of postmodernism, is intertextuality. Appearing only in recent years, intertext become widespread with its own forms, such as allusion, quote and reminiscence. And the novel “Percy Jackson” b y American writer Rick Riordan seems to be an example of the use of intertext-allusion within the work. 12-year-old boy, Percy Jackson, becomes the part of adventeruos, danderous and exciting world of Ancient Greek Gods, legends, myths and heroes. This work tries to study and analyse the importance of allusion to understand the idea of the writer and interpret the used allusions in the first book of Riordan “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief”.

scholarly journals The Mystery of Lexical Coincidences in the Works of Yuri Tynianov and Osip Mandelstam

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
Valery Milydon
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
Extreme Degree ◽  
High Regard ◽  
The Times ◽  
The 19Th Century

The essay explores lexical coincidences in the works of Yuri Tynianov and Osip Mandelshtam coincidences which appeared in different time periods, independently of each other.In the second half of the 1920s, Tynianov wrote the novel Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar which, while dealing with events of the 1820s, anticipated the soon-tobe disappearance of free artistic speech.Ten years later, Tynianov's anticipation became a reality reflected in Mandelstam's poem Lamarck. Freedom of creative activity did not disappear completely but became, in many respects, a thing of the past. Even if the hope for the return of free expression still existed, no one imagined when this event would take place. Loyalty to the regime and assentation were the signs of the times. Studies of Soviet artistic life in that period reveal the extreme degree of the unnatural selection aimed at creating unwavering servants of the regime. One of such servants wrote: In today's situation, genius and villainy are two compatible things: the killing of a Mozart may assist history.Such assistance to history became a Soviet norm and, according to independent Russian migr observers, led to a situation in which Soviet literature lost the position within world literature obtained by the Russian classical literature of the 19th century and acquired unmistakably provincial traits. As Shigalev declared in Dostoyevsky's Demons, All are slaves and equal in their slavery.Analogous processes were taking place in cinema, where pro-regime servilism due to cinema's ability to influence the audience more rapidly and more powerfully than literature acquired its most dangerous form. This was fully understood by the Bolshevik regime which held cinema in high regard. Creating art? No, doing what you were told to do, this was how Soviet filmmaker Leonid Trauberg later described those times.

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