Eksperyment i awangarda. O „Różach w betonie” Mariana Promińskiego

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-248
Author(s):  
Anna Strycka
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Total Effect ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Stereotyping ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Experimental Narrative

Summary This article begins with an examination of the experimental handling of the characters’ speech and Promiński’s narrative voice in the title story of the collection Roses in Concrete. The analysis draws on some elements of constructivism - as it can be found in the early poems by Tadeusz Peiper and in the constructivist prose written by Jan Brzękowski - with the 3M catchphrase (“City - Mass - Machine”) from Peiper’s famous manifesto lurking in the background. In his short story Promiński creates a situation which enables him to lampoon the projects and visions formulated by Peiper and the Cracow Avant-garde; the total effect of “Roses in Concrete” is that of demolishing Peiper’s utopia of a new civilization. The analysis of “A specialist, Almost”, another story from the collection, focuses an its autothematic structure, as well as Promiński’s use of new, experimental narrative techniques (eg. simultaneous description, stream of consciousness). The discussion of the stream of consciousness technique reaches out to “Cracks”, a story where it marks the main character’s speech. The last of the stories taken up for discussion is “Timbert, the Traveller”, a story concerned with a case of mental illness. Here the article draws on the work of R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault and Thomas S. Sasz to argue that Timbert’s problem is not really medical, but the product of socio-cultural stereotyping and stigmatization.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

scholarly journals Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Centralized Control ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Evolving Networks ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

scholarly journals The strange case of Francis Dolarhyde and the Dragon: Alternating narrative points of view and the source of knowledge in Thomas Harris’ 'Red Dragon'

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Justyna Stiepanow
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Thomas Harris ◽  
Points Of View

This paper investigates the narrative voice employed by Thomas Harris in Red Dragon as a source of knowledge about the fictional universe, more particularly about the main villain, Francis Dolarhyde. Confronting important epistemological notions (knowledge, justification and their sources) with literary theoretical concepts (narrative voice and points of view), I analyse alternating modes of representation. Harris’ narrator shifts between three modes: the quasi-perceptual one – sense-based, rich in descriptive elements; the quasi-introspective narration carried out from a close subjective angle, using free indirect speech or stream of consciousness; and the testimonial mode – telling (rather than showing) the story through exposition resting on the principle of cause and effect. Employing a vast array of inter-textual pragmatics, the narrative remains ambiguous. In consequence, any proposition about Dolarhyde can be empirically and rationally challenged and all propositional knowledge regarding the character is merely fragmentary.

Symons at the Seaside

2018 ◽  
pp. 242-255
Author(s):  
Nick Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
Story Writer

The poet, critic and short story writer Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was an inveterate traveller who wrote frequently about the Channel and the North Cornish coasts in poetry and prose. During the 1890s and 1900s, he was at the forefront of the pre-modernist avant-garde, and was an important conduit for the dissemination of decadent and impressionist art in England. As a landscape writer, he blended the quasi-Impressionist methods of painters such as Whistler with the decadent’s concern with the privileged subjectivity of the artist. This chapter examines the implications of such practices for his treatment of Cornwall, Sussex and Dieppe – including in neglected later writings such as ‘Sea Magic’ (1920).

A First Homage

2018 ◽  
pp. 362-369
Author(s):  
Christophe Bident
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tel Quel

Looks at a special issue of the journal Critique, produced in homage to Blanchot in 1966. The chapter goes on to detail the relations between Blanchot and various theoreticians and avant-garde thinkers of the late 1960s, for instance Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the Tel Quel group.

Language and the Subject

Joseph Conrad ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Yael Levin
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Experimental Narrative

The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.

Symons, Arthur William (1865–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Boyiopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
French Symbolism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Story Writer

Arthur Symons was a British poet, art and literary critic, memoirist, playwright, short story writer, and editor. He was born in Milford Haven, Wales, on 28 February 1865, the son of Cornish parents: Reverend Mark Symons (1824–1898), a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Lydia Pascoe (1828–1896). Symons was the foremost exponent of Decadence and the leading promoter of French Symbolism in Britain. An enthused socialite, he manoeuvred successfully through London artistic circles and the Paris avant-garde. In 1901 he married Rhoda Bowser (1874–-1936) and in his later years he retreated to Island Cottage, Wittersham, Kent. In 1908–1910 he suffered a mental collapse in Italy, moving in and out of asylums; he chronicles this experience in Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). He recovered and resumed his literary career until his seventies, mainly regurgitating themes of his fin-de-siècle period. He died on 22 January 1945.

Stream of Consciousness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hu
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
William James ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Narrative Mode

The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was first coined by psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology in 1893, when he describes it thusly: "consciousness as an uninterrupted ‘flow’: ‘a ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life" (243). The term quickly came to mean a narrative mode that seeks to give the written equivalent of a character’s thought processes, and is sometimes described in terms of an ‘interior monologue’. As such, it differs from the ‘dramatic monologue’ or ‘soliloquy’ where the speaker addresses the audience or an implied receiver. Stream of consciousness style is often identified by fictional techniques such as lack of punctuation, long and sometimes agrammatical sentences, and a series of unrelated impressions. Stream of consciousness technique tries to represent a character’s general mental state before it is condensed, organized, or edited down into narrative coherence or sense. While stream of consciousness is often read as an avant-garde technique, its aims were to get closer to the ‘reality’ of human thought processes. As a narrative technique, stream of consciousness maintains affiliations with other modernist art forms, such as the visual art of German expressionism, Cubism, and modernist film.

Retrieving the Past—The Historical Theme in Penelope Lively’s Fictions

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 2014
Author(s):  
Xiaotang Lv
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Book Award ◽  
National Book ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Present Life

Penelope Lively (1933- ), the contemporary British writer, was first known mainly as a children’s writer prior to her winning the 1987 Booker Prize with her widely praised novel Moon Tiger (1987). The Road to Lichfield, published in 1977, is her first adult novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Treasures of Time (1979), her second adult novel, was the winner of Great Britain’s first National Book Award for fiction in 1980 and the Arts Council National Book Award. In her literary fictions, Lively interweaves the present and the past -- history, the public, collective past, and memory, the private and personal past -- together with the application of various narrative techniques, such as flashback, stream of consciousness, psychological time, etc. A predominant theme running through her literary world is her consistent focus on history. This essay intend to study Penelope Lively’s understanding and interpretation of history, and draw this conclusion: Although a complete understanding of history is impossible, yet as we realize our subjectivity and misunderstanding of history we can try to understand it in a new way and integrate it into the present life.

scholarly journals Breaking the Rules: Innovation and Narrative Strategies in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
Carmen Haydée Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Sandra Cisneros ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Story Line ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Stage Direction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Length

Conventional approaches to literary genres conspicuously imply definition and classification. From the very beginning of our incursions into the literary world we learn to identify and differentiate a poem from a play, a short story from a novel. As readers we classify each written work into one of these neatly defined literary genres by following basic guidelines. Either we classify according to the structure of the work (stanza; stage direction/dialogue; narrative) or the length (short story; novelette; novel). What happens though when a reader encounters a work of considerable length made up of individual short pieces or vignettes that include rhythm and rhyme and is framed by an underlying, unifying story line linking the vignettes together? Is it a novel or a collection of short stories? Why does it sound and, at times, look like a poem? To further complicate classifications, what happens when a reader comes across an epistolary format with instructions on which letters to read first: letters made up of one-word lines, poetic stanzas, or italicized stream of consciousness; letters that narrate the history of two women's friendship? Is this a novel or a mere collection of letters?

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