“We Are Making One Story, Yes?” - The Poetics of Interconnection in Postmodern Literature in a Global Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Miriam Wallraven
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Cloud Atlas ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Literary Devices

During the last decades, theories of interconnection and linking have been in the centre of many academic discourses: what goes back to the ancient hermetic worldview that regards everything as connected has been taken up in studies on our globalised world, for example as relationality in the form of cosmodernism. Thus, society has been regarded as linked in areas as different as social networks or globalised markets. In this paper, it is shown how such interconnections are created by storytelling. For this purpose, three metafictional novels with a multiplot structure are analysed. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated (2002), storytelling helps two very different characters to search for their identity and a traumatic family past influenced by the Holocaust. In the novel, three textual levels and several narrators make it visible that the search for identity and the past is only possible by interlinked stories and a process of co-authorship. The intricate structure of Catherynne M. Valente's fantastic novel Palimpsest (2009) thematises the connection between human beings and their stories which even spans different worlds. Metafictional structures – especially the structure of the palimpsest – illustrate how the whole world consists of stories written on other stories. David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas (2004) consists of six narratives set in different times and places which are connected by symbols, intertextual links, or intermedial adaptations. Hence, in the novel it is shown that despite wars, violence, and the struggle for power throughout history, human beings are connected across time and space – by their stories. By analysing these literary devices, a postmodern poetics of interconnection becomes visible that shows how human history is created by transglobal storytelling.

Threshold

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

scholarly journals Rousseau in a Post-Apocalyptic Context: Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains and Science Fiction

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Yutaka Okuhata
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in comparison, not only to Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality (1755), but also to the works of various science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper aims to examine Carter’s reinterpretation of Rousseau in a post-apocalyptic context. As I will argue, Heroes and Villains criticises Rousseau from a feminist point of view to not only represent the dystopian society as full of inequality and violence, but also to show that human beings, having forgotten the nuclear war as their great “sin” in the past, can no longer create a bright future. Observing the underlying motifs in the novel, the paper will reveal how Carter attempts to portray a world where human history has totally ended, or where people cannot make “history” in spite of the fact that they biologically survived the holocaust. From this perspective, I will clarify the way in which Carter reinterprets Rousseau’s notion of “fallen” civilisation in the new context as a critique of the nuclear issues in the late twentieth century.

The Holocaust and German Psychiatry

1991 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Population ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Entire Nation

The Holocaust under the Nazi regime is probably the most traumatic catastrophe of our century and even of history in the civilised world. Its deepest abyss consumed the lives of one-third of the world's Jewish population, who were selected and murdered in a cold-blooded industrialised machinery of death in this their ‘Shoa’. The Jewish people represent the victims of the Holocaust more than any other group of human beings who suffered this iniquity. The Holocaust has left in its wake few survivors, and many invalids in body and in mind, who remain compelled to live with a trauma that surpasses any other deliberately caused by fellow humans: and it has left in its wake an entire nation in shame and bewilderment, stigmatised and traumatised by the horrifying crimes that were committed in its name, faced with the task of analysing what happened, so that it may never be repeated, forbidden by the enormity of the horrors from repressing the past, and obliged to integrate deeds that cannot be undone.

scholarly journals Postmemorial Positions: Reading and Writing After the Holocaust in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marita Grimwood
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Child Survivor ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Representing History ◽  
Key Characters

Anne Michaels’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, has been criticized for its highly poeticized representation of the Holocaust. In this essay, however, Marita Grimwood argues that the novel uses structures of narrative transmission to explore precisely the difficulties of representing history and trauma in language. Grimwood proposes that the representation of three key characters is central to this undertaking. First, Jakob Beer, the child survivor and poet who narrates two thirds of the novel, is positioned as an intergenerational mediator, belonging fully neither to a pre-war nor a postwar generation. Two further characters (Ben, the child of survivors who narrates the end of the novel, and Michaela, Jakob’s second wife) symbolize the figure of the reader after the Holocaust, negotiating a link to the past through their interpretation and witnessing of Jakob’s life. The novel recognizes the problems inherent in communicating meaningful knowledge of past events to those living in the present. Yet, partly through Jakob’s vocation as a poet, it proposes also that poetry is a tool, however imperfect, for the communication of such knowledge.

scholarly journals “When Night Passes” and “When Day Breaks” – Between the Past and the Present. Borderlines of Holocaust in Filip David’s Works

2017 ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Sabina Giergiel ◽  
Katarzyna Taczyńska
Keyword(s):  
Primary Objective ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One

When Night Passes and When Day Breaks – Between the Past and the Present. Borderlines of Holocaust in Filip David’s WorksThe primary objective of the text is the analysis of Filip David's latest work. The Serbian writer is the author of the novel House of Memories and Oblivions (Kuća sećanja i zaborava, 2014), award for Best Novel of the Year by the NIN weekly (Nedeljne Informativne Novine). On the one hand, the output of this Serbian novelist is of interest to us as a continuation and representation of the contemporary discourse on the Holocaust in Serbia. On the other – we look at the literary realization of the Holocaust topic. The fortunes of the main characters in the novel (children who survived Holocaust) serve as the cases on which we present where the author draws the borderline of the ever-present Holocaust in their lives; how much and in what way the past affects their present; where the borderline of memory, forgetting and oblivion is. Kad padne noć i Kad svane dan - między przeszłością a teraźniejszością. Granice Holocaustu w twórczości Filipa DavidaPodstawowym celem tekstu jest analiza najnowszej tworczości Filipa Davida, autora nagrodzonej Nagrodą Tygodnika NIN („Nedeljne Informativne Novine") powieści Dom pamięci i zapomnienia (2014, Kuća sećanja i zabovrava). Z jednej strony twórczość serbskiego prozaika interesować nas będzie jako kontynuacja i reprezentacja współczesnego dyskursu na temat Holokaustu w Serbii. Z drugiej zaś – przyjrzymy się jego literackiej realizacji. Na przykładzie losów głównych bohaterów powieści (dzieci, które przeżyły Zagładę) pokażemy, gdzie przebiega rysowana przez autora granica istnienia Shoah w ich życiu. Na ile i w jaki sposób przeszłość wpływa na ich teraźniejszość, gdzie przebiega granica pamięci, niepamięci i zapomnienia oraz w jakim stopniu ich życie definiuje rozdzielenie rzeczywistości od fikcji.

scholarly journals Family history rewritten: How to narrate the life happening 'Tomorrow'

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 116-133
Author(s):  
Borjanka Đerić-Dragičević
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Competence ◽  
Family Secret

This paper is dedicated to exploring the narrative points and strategies in the novel Tomorrow, written by Graham Swift, a prominent English postmodern writer, with the main objective to draw attention to the nature of narration and narrators. The aim of the research is to give answers to the questions of choices made by the novelist when it comes to narrators, narration, narrative methods and techniques, and whether the narrators are (un)reliable, etc. The author of this paper tries to determine to which extent the 2nd person narration has become influential in postmodern literature - by being mysterious, ambiguous and unknown. We often do not know to whom a narrator is speaking, nor whose voice is being heard by readers. Contemporary narratological theories deny the existence of this clear, precise and uniformed narratological voice, whether it is an author, a narrator or a reader. These days, numerous avant-garde narratological strategies are being emphasized, most notably the "wandering" second person, used by the main character of the novel Tomorrow as well. The inseparable part of the research is also questioning the postmodern premises such as the final doubt considering the (re)presentation of a story, the truth and the past (both individual and collective) which influence the choices made while forming the narration in the novel. The narratological analysis has shown the nature of psychological, moral, as well as ethical competence of the narrator, Paula Hook - a successful woman of the 21st century - a professor, a mother, a wife, living an ideal life threatened by a profound family secret. She acts as a representative of the 21st century wandering narrator - she doubts, questions, rethinks - because the history, past and truth are being constantly questioned in contemporary societies and literature as well.

scholarly journals Returning to the Past: The Germans as a Historical Trauma in Contemporary Czech Prose

Porównania ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Alena Šidáková Fialová
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Saga ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World

This study describes reflections of wartime and postwar historical trauma in contemporary Czech prose, taking into account the issues surrounding Central Europe, which entirely overlap with the traditional confrontation between the Czechs and Germans. It also includes the changing reflections on Germany and the Germans, the Second World War and the subsequent expulsion found in the prose work of the new millennium, the unifying topic being deemed to be the issue of the ambiguous national identification of the protagonists, the detabooization of previously hushed-up subjects and the subject of the Holocaust, particularly in the family saga genre. It also takes into account groups of texts focusing on reflections of anti-German resistance activities, both in the genre of the novel (with detective elements) and in output on the boundaries between fiction and factographic prose.

scholarly journals Korzenie pamięci. O Mirabelce Cezarego Harasimowicza

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kwiatkowska
Keyword(s):  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Space ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The City ◽  
Plum Tree

The article attempts to interpret the novel Mirabelle in the light of hauntology, taken from Jacques Derrida’s works, existing in the Polish literary studies first and foremost thanks to the works of Jakub Momro and Andrzej Marzec. Harasimowicz’s novel recounts the history of Warsaw from the 1920s until the present-day period. The mirabelle plum tree growing on one of the backyards in Warsaw tells the story of the following generations of the city dwellers who fade away and fall into oblivion. The Holocaust, depicted in the beginning of the novel, does not, however, become the past. The recollection of the genocide is inscribed in contemporary Warsaw, in the city space and the consciousness of its inhabitants. The phantoms of the former dwellers of Nalewki, the Jewish district in Warsaw, visit their homes, little stores, and workshops, trying to end unfinished businesses and engaging with the representatives of the present-day citizens. The gesture of remembrance, which is the replanting and redeveloping a new mirabelle tree in the place of the damaged one, gives people hope for the restoration of balance and strengthens the bonds between the living and the dead.

History and Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Confino
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Methodological Approaches

This chapter describes how memory has shaped the academic discipline of history. In the past two decades or so, ‘memory’ as a category to analyze and understand the relation of human beings to their past has become a nearly ubiquitous concept. Triggered jointly by the general crisis of representationalism and by a specific historical experience—the Holocaust—‘memory’ has replaced for some scholars a rather linear and monodimensional concept of ‘society’. Whereas in the past, memory was considered to be subjective and unreliable, it has now moved to centre-stage: it is in individual and collective memory that the past remains present in the contemporary agent. Memory, captured in methodological approaches such as oral history, also foregrounds the historical experience of ordinary people and thus carries the potential to counterbalance official, state-focused, and politically legitimate historical narratives, as well as those more broadly sanctioned by the academic enterprise.

scholarly journals Vonnegut, Darwin, and the Tragical Satirical Arc of Human History in the Novel "Galapagos"

2020 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
Back Cover ◽  
The Future ◽  
Arne Næss ◽  
Arne Naess

In 1985 Kurt Vonnegut produced a satirical novel entitled Galapagos, in which the author explored a possible earth set one million years in the future. Human beings “have quietly evolved into sleek, furry creatures with flippers, and small brains.”[1] Vonnegut posits a world in which human logic, derived from the functioning of three-kilogramme brains, has resulted in the downfall of the species, prior to the evolution of the seal-like creatures. This article explores the novel from an ecocritical perspective, including references to the work of Greg Garrard, Rachel Carson and Arne Naess. Charles Darwin’s work is also considered because the novel’s title and setting allude to his work on evolution. This article will argue that Vonnegut believes human beings should change their thought and behaviour patterns if we are to have an optimistic future. [1] This quote is from the blurb on the back cover of the Flamingo edition, 1994.

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