scholarly journals “Uprooted:” Anton Chekhov’s Influence on Frank O’Connor

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-109
Author(s):  
Márta Pellérdi

Abstract Thus far perhaps the most acclaimed Irish practitioner of the short story, Frank O’Connor, attributes a lasting influence to Russian author Anton Chekhov when he considers the direction that the modern Irish short story was to take in the twentieth century. In The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963), O’Connor emphasized two particular themes in Chekhov’s short fiction that influenced his own stories: on the one hand, a preoccupation with loneliness; on the other, a belief that venial sin, or the adoption of a false personality, was “far more destructive” than mortal sin itself. In other writings, he expressed an interest in narrative technique and structure as he found them in Chekhov’s stories. The article explores O’Connor’s “Uprooted” from his collection Crab Apple Jelly (1944), a story about displaced intellectuals. My reading illustrates how the Irish writer was not only adopting Chekhov’s themes but was also experimenting with Chekhov’s character types and narrative techniques, particularly as found in the Russian author’s story “The Lady with the Dog.” At the same time, O’Connor developed a distinctly individual technique of his own within the Irish realist/naturalist short story tradition, making a lasting impact on the art of the modern Irish short story. Unlike his displaced Irish characters in “Uprooted,” he prefers to remain faithful to this tradition.

Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.


APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


1969 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt ◽  
Heinz Eulau

Scholars interested in theorizing about political representation in terms relevant to democratic governance in mid-twentieth century America find themselves in a quandary. We are surrounded by functioning representative institutions, or at least by institutions formally described as representative. Individuals who presumably “represent” other citizens govern some 90 thousand different political units—they sit on school and special district boards, on township and city councils, on county directorates, on state and national assemblies, and so forth. But the flourishing activity of representation has not yet been matched by a sustained effort to explain what makes the representational process tick.Despite the proliferation of representative governments over the past century,theoryabout representation has not moved much beyond the eighteenth-century formulation of Edmund Burke. Certainly most empirical research has been cast in the Burkean vocabulary. But in order to think in novel ways about representative government in the twentieth-century, we may have to admit that present conceptions guiding empirical research are obsolete. This in turn means that the spell of Burke's vocabulary over scientific work on representation must be broken.To look afresh at representation, it is necessary to be sensitive to the unresolved tension between the two main currents of contemporary thinking about representational relationships. On the one hand, representation is treated as a relationship between any one individual, the represented, and another individual, the representative—aninter-individualrelationship. On the other hand, representatives are treated as a group, brought together in the assembly, to represent the interest of the community as a whole—aninter-grouprelationship. Most theoretical formulations since Burke are cast in one or the other of these terms.


PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


Author(s):  
Oleh Tyshchenko

The article considers performative speech acts (expressives, commissives, wishes, curses, threats, warnings, etc.) and generally exclamatory phraseology in the original and translation in terms of the function of the addressee, the specifics of the communicative situation, the symbolism and pragmatics of the cultural text. Through cultural and semiotic reconstruction of these units, their semantic and grammatical structure and features of motivation in several linguistic cultures were clarified. Collectively, these verbal acts, on the one hand, mark the semiotic structure of the narrative structure of the text, and on the other hand, indicate the idiostyle of a particular author or characterize the speech of the characters and the associated range of emotions (curses, invectives, cries of indignation, dissatisfaction, etc.). Several translated versions of M. Bulgakov’s novel «The Master and Margarita» (in Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak and English) and English translations of M. Kotsyubynsky’s novel «Fata Morgana» and Dovzhenko’s short story «Enchanted Desna» constitute the material for the study. The obtained results are essential for elucidating the specifics of the national conceptual sphere of a certain culture and revealing the types of inter lingual equivalents, idiomatic analogues in the transmission of common ethno-cultural content. This approach can be useful for a new understanding of domestication and adaptation in translation, translation of culturally marked units, onyms, mythological concepts, etc. as a specific translation practices. There was further developed the theory of phatic and performative-expressive speech acts in lingual cultural comprehension.


PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Camba

Through an analysis of archival data and findings from interviews with industry leaders, I explore the genesis, rise, and fall of the various Philippine mineral regimes of the twentieth century. Specifically, I examine the background of successive and overlapping colonial and neocolonial powers in three eras: late colonial (1901-1941), national developmental (1945-1964), and state authoritarianism (1965-1985). I also briefly examine the current neoliberal mineral regime (1986-present). I argue that, to date, capitalist enterprises and neocolonial powers have pursued two contradictory paths to extract precious (gold and silver) and base (chromite, iron, copper, nickel, magnesium, and ore) metals in the Philippines. On the one hand, mining companies appropriated expansive land, underpriced labor and inexpensive food to subsidize capital expenditure and mineral operations. The appropriation of basic inputs - or what is referred to as "cheap natures" - allowed these companies to reduce their sunken investments and operational costs. But on the other hand, as the sector developed more, it became increasingly difficult to appropriate such "cheap natures." While initially profitable because of successful appropriation of "cheap natures," companies eventually experienced decreasing returns because of the problems this caused.


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