scholarly journals NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN L. ULITSKAYA ’S NOVEL THE KUKOTSKY ENIGMA

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
I.S. Bukal ◽  

Problem statement and goal. Lyudmila Ulitskaya is one of the most widely read contemporary Russian authors. L. Ulitskaya’s works are popular not only in Russia, but also in other countries. They arouse genuine research interest both among literary critics and linguists. Currently, there are more than two dozen dissertations, many review chapters in monographs, as well as scientific articles devoted to the analysis of such works of the author as novellas Sonechka, The Funeral Party, Women’s Lies; collections of short stories Poor Relatives, Girls, Gift not made with hands; novels Sincerely your Shurik, Medea and Her Children, Daniel Stein, Interpreter, The Big Green Tent. L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma remains the least studied text of the author. In this article, the content of this novel is analyzed for narratology. The researcher reflects on one of the topical literary problems: the influence of narrative strategies on the reception of the author’s text. The research was based on the works by V. Tyupa, Yu. Lotman, N. Leiderman, and M. Lipovetsky. The research methodology is based on historical-cultural and structural-typological approaches. The subject of the research is the specifics of the implementation of narrative strategies in L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma. Research result. Based on the analysis of L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma, it is shown how the narrative strategy of the work affects its potential reception. Based on the concept by V. Tyupa, who defined the narrative strategy as a set of three equivalent bases (the narrative picture of the world, the narrative modality, and the narrative intrigue), the researcher identifies the changes that the narrative strategy undergoes in the course of the plot development, notes how these changes affect the poetics of the novel and its axiological content. Conclusion. The narrative strategy by which the narrative of the novel in question is organized can be defined as “the strategy of breaking the horizon of readers’ expectations”. Multiple changes in the narrative instance fill the work with a variety of points of view, creates a sense of ghostly, ephemeral events, and encourages the reader to independently search for the truth. The content of the novel is not directly dependent on the chronology of events. Fragments of the story are arranged inversely, segmentally, so that their juxtaposition contributes to the fullest understanding of the content. The narratives presented in the novel actualize the “ontological intrigue”, based on the representation of individual mythopoetic models and revealing the plot of comprehension of truth and purpose.

Of particular relevance to modern literary studies is the study of the media of communicative poetics, which largely offset the traditional modernist paradigms of literary work. A related issue is the study of supertext unity, composed of author's projects with a complex narrative hierarchy and genre-stylistic hybridity. The typology of literary and medial projects embodying the phenomenon of new historicism in modern Russian literature (the works of V. Sharov, V. Sorokin, E. Vodolazkin, M. Shishkin, etc.) is highlighted. An undoubtedly significant place in this context belongs to the meta-historical project of Boris Akunin. The purpose of this article is to study the literary project of Boris Akunin as a medial system that coordinates the historiosophical motivations of the author with metatextual representations of genre-narrative models characteristic of modern literature. As a methodological key, an analysis of the productive interaction of scientistic and fictitious meanings of the concepts of “history” and “event”, as well as the corresponding cognitive traditions and practices of their understanding, is used. The study showed how “large” historical narratives are demonologized, undergoing the corrective influence of fictional ontological and anthropological models. This makes it relevant to appeal to the genres of jokes and short stories, detective and adventurous versions of a historical novel. The subject-narrative system activates polyphonic means – the interference of speech and the points of view of narrators and actors. Artistic time and space create many variations of the intersection of chronotopes, plot correlations, and motivational roll calls. Thus, the authority of the author is decentralized - he acts as a moderator of a multidiscursive set of telling versions – ‘stories’ and ‘events’. A system of authority masks is created, each of which embodies a new version of the Other's figure as a carrier of a different creative consciousness, an alternative ideology and a language for describing the world.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase Pielak

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example inDaniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. H Badii ◽  
A. R. Pazhakh ◽  
José Luis Abreu Quintero ◽  
R Foroughbakhch

Palabras claves: Ciencia, ECOEE, investigación, métodosResumen. El objetivo de esta obra no radica en realizar una búsqueda exhaustiva de la literatura en el tema, sino, sentar las bases del método científico, notando los aspectos filosóficos e éticos de la ciencia. Se presentan los conceptos y definiciones fundamentales relacionados con la metodología de la investigación científica. Se maneja el concepto de la toma de los datos válidos como un requisito básico en cualquier trabajo científico. Se pone a disposición del lector un modelo denominado el ECOEE que es una herramienta poderosa para establecer puntos de comparación e discusión entre los resultados de diferentes trabajos científicos. Finalmente, ofrece unas sugerencias de que hacer o no hacer en cuanto a realizar un trabajo de investigación.Key words: ECOEE, methods, research, Science Abstract.The aim of this paper is not to conduct a thorough literature search on the subject material, but to stress the fundamentals of the scientific methodology along with the philosophical and ethical issues thereof. The basic concepts and definitions in relation to research methodology are presented. The concept of data collection as a basic requisite in any scientific work is discussed. The ECOEE model as a strong tool in establishing different points of view and comparison among the results of different scientific works are laid out. Finally, some tips and suggestions are given as what to do or to avoid in conducting scientific research.


Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.


Tekstualia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (48) ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Magdalena Horodecka

The article offers an analysis of the strategies of writing culture (James Clifford) in Papusza, a reportage written by Angelika Kuźniak. The reconstruction of the cultural memory about the protagonist, a Gypsy poet living in Poland, is one of the key objectives of Kuźniak’s text. Additionally, the article examines the ways in which Kuźniak mediates between the subject and the narration concerning the culture of the Other. One of Kuźnaik’s key narrative strategies is a relativist poetics, which gives voice to the „users of culture”. The notion of „ethnographic mimesis” is referred to in order to describe the narrator’s attempt to present the world from a Gypsy’s perspective.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Paulina Olechowska ◽  
Marta Zambrzycka

The subject of the article is the analysis of post-Chernobyl themes in the novel by Oleksandr Irwaniec Ochamimriya and in Pawel Arje’s play At the beginning and end of time. The Chernobyl disaster played a key role in the development of contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture. Chernobyl very quickly became a universal metaphor that have gone far beyond ecology and into a cultural and political context. In both works, the atomic explosion (taken literally by Arje, as the explosion of the No. IV reactor in Chernobyl and by Irvacek more vaguely as an explosion) is a key element of the plot, aff ecting both the fate of the characters and the shape of the surrounding reality. Although these works belong to two diff erent literary genres and showcase two diff erent conventions of presenting reality, they are connected by a post-apocalyptic vision of the world and the concept of a looping time. The heroes of both texts live in a time after the catastrophe, deprived of civilized goods and isolated from the rest of the world. In the novel by Irwaniec, this time after the catastrophe is a sort of “new medieval” with a decidedly pessimistic expression while in Arje’s drama the return to the pre-industrial worldview contains hope for fi nding traditional values. Both texts also address issues relevant to the modern post-Soviet society, but they do so in very different ways. Irwaneć uses grotesque, to deprive his characters of complexity, while Arje makes his characters deeply tragic and psychologically probable.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 241-251
Author(s):  
Olga A. Valikova ◽  
◽  
Nina V. Shchennikova ◽  
Sheker A. Kulieva

The purpose of this article is to analyze the transcultural literary text as a space for the “meeting” of languages and cultures. The modern world exists in the conditions of global transculturalism (F. Ortiz), when sign systems interact, giving rise to new images of the world. The language, which translates into a wide communicative space the elements of the original culture for the author, experiences its influence on itself. The literary text acquires multidimensionality and “convexity” due to the inclusion in it of alternative genre forms, narrative strategies and tactics, archetypes. On the basis of the novel series “Dreams of the Damned”, written by the Kazakh writer A. Zhaksylykov, we demonstrate in this work the mechanisms of “internal intercultural interaction” between Kazakh and Russian cultures, using the methods of hermeneutic commentary, mythopoetic and narrative analysis. We come to the conclusion that cultural content requires the creation of adequate forms of artistic representation. The result is the creation of new novel forms of depiction, the complication of the artistic images of the world and the strengthening of the empathic effect that a literary text can provide.


KronoScope ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Olga Peters Hasty

AbstractInvitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.” Although it reads like an attack on dictatorial rule, Nabokov denied it political relevance, aiming at totalitarianism of a higher order: the constraints of mortality that he seeks, as the epigraph indicates, to refute: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” The novel rebels against the certainty that life is movement toward death operating in conjunction with the uncertainty of when death will come. Its hero is condemned to execution, but denied “compensation for a death sentence”—the “knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.” His nearing end is manifested metaphorically, but it is in the construction of the world of Invitation that Nabokov—whom one reviewer called “almost as much a theorizer of fiction as a practitioner”—develops narrative strategies that engage the reader in his challenge to mortality. This article considers his strategies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 164-177
Author(s):  
A. M. Podoksenov ◽  
V. A. Telkova

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the subject of the article is the question of the influence of L. D. Trotsky [Bronstein], who was one of the key leaders of Bolshevism, who headed the October Revolution, on the worldview and creativity of M. M. Prishvin, which has not yet been considered in the European studies. It is shown that in Russian art it is difficult to find an artist of the word, whose work would be to the same extent conditioned by the influence of the ideological and political context. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt was made to show how, through individual characters in his works, Prishvin in an artistic and figurative form reflected the characteristic features of behavior, everyday habits, the style of thinking and speech of Trotsky. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of previously unpublished due to censorship restrictions of the writer’s works: the story “The World Cup”, journalism of the revolutionary years and the 18-volume Diary, which became available to the reader only in the post-Soviet period. It is shown that, depicting Trotsky as a “pharmacist” who, according to his recipes, is trying to create the future of a huge country, Prishvin seeks not only to artistically reflect his moral appearance and personality traits, but also to convey the features of the ideological and political struggle in Soviet society.


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