scholarly journals Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jay Campbell Forlong
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
General Public ◽  
First Person ◽  
Identity Performance ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
James Phelan

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts.  Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs.  This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator.  As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

scholarly journals Exhuming the Narrator in 'The Buried Giant': Genre and Intertextual Inference in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jay Campbell Forlong
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
General Public ◽  
First Person ◽  
Identity Performance ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
James Phelan

<p>This thesis takes the critical response generated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his most recent novel, as an invitation to re-examine the overall literary ‘experiment’ of his body of work. Ishiguro’s novels, regardless of their genre, message, or cultural moment, create experiences in which the reader engages with each narrator as if they were a human being. His attention to stylistic and formal detail foregrounds our awareness of his art in each text, and much scholarship focuses on overarching discussions of memory, identity, and history; however, this all relies upon the empathy that the texts generate between the character-narrator and the reader. The commitment to mimesis over the synthetic or thematic dimensions of the text, to draw on the theoretical model of character presented by James Phelan, often remains covert throughout each novel, but character mimesis nevertheless acts as both an accessible entry point to the novels, and a consistent touchstone throughout and across the texts.  Upon the publication of The Buried Giant, Ishiguro was met with criticism and dissatisfaction from numerous reviewers and scholars, despite general public appreciation of the novel. At the heart of this dissatisfaction lies a sense that Ishiguro’s foray into fantasy lacks the affective power of his iconic artlessness. Specifically, The Buried Giant appears to lack a central, consistent, human voice to hold together the synthetic and thematic work that the text performs.  This thesis presents an argument that finds within The Buried Giant the presence of a first-person voice that, rather than diverging from each of Ishiguro’s previous narrators, takes his experimentation with the first-person voice to a new extreme. This reading allows me to locate The Buried Giant more squarely back in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, by identifying a covert but vital thread that exists beneath the shifts in genre, thematic and synthetic choices, and context of the novel. I explore the establishment of character mimesis across Ishiguro’s body of work, how this feeds into both the dissatisfaction with The Buried Giant and my reconciliation of the novel to his earlier works, and finally how The Buried Giant and its shift to both a covert narrative voice and the genre of fantasy provides an opportunity to re-examine Ishiguro’s use of non-mimetic structures and generic conventions in his first six novels around the central, mimetic narrator.  As suggested, this approach draws significantly on the theory of character presented by James Phelan, which allows for comprehensive consideration of diverse textual functions that occur both throughout a given text and across several texts of widely varying genres and perspectives. I touch on notions of unreliability, memory and subjective history, trauma, and identity performance, each of which are central to many pieces of scholarship on Ishiguro’s novels; however, the aim of this project is to swiftly push beyond readings that prioritise synthetic and thematic dimensions of the novels to reach the heart of how the voices who capture their own stories completely entrance Ishiguro’s readership.</p>

scholarly journals THE ONEIRIC SPACE OF KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NOVEL ‘THE BURIED GIANT’

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 100-106
Author(s):  
Alina A. Mikheikina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Vertical Organization ◽  
Memory Characteristic ◽  
Topological Characteristics ◽  
Fictional Space

The article provides a detailed study of the fictional space of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant. There are identified the features that give this aspect of the chronotope of the novel an oneiric character. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of certain loci of the novel’s fictional space, their toponymic and semiotic characteristics. Among the artistic means that actualize the oneiric space in the text, there are distinguished the peculiarities of the narrative level (first-person narration, representation of the events through the consciousness of the characters) and the features of the artistic expression and visualization of the novel’s fictional world: incorporation of mythological elements, metaphorization and generalization of the fictional space, emphasis on its horizontal and vertical organization. Some of the mythological characters are considered in the paper in terms of the additional meanings they contribute to the novel. Some motifs actualized by incorporation of mythological elements are also examined. A comprehensive analysis allowed us to reveal that the oneiric nature determines the topological characteristics of the novel. In addition, the oneiric space in The Buried Giant performs the function of representing the work of mnemonic mechanisms, which determines the connection of the considered aspect of poetics with the author’s intention, as well as with the theme of memory, characteristic not only of the analyzed novel but of the writer’s works as a whole. The study has also revealed an analogy in the representation of the chronotope with previous works by Kazuo Ishiguro, which allows us, among other things, to conclude that the actualization of the oneiric space is an important feature of the author’s artistic method.

ISU FEMINISME DALAM NOVEL PUTRI KARYA PUTU WIJAYA

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Arriyanti Arriyanti
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Women Rights

This paper discusses about issues of feminism in a novel titled Putri written by Putu Wijaya. The discussing about women issues will be analyzed by applying feminism ways of thinking. Issues of feminism will be seen by looking at the main character of the novel. Feminism issues in the novel appear because of the behavior and attitude of the heroine in struggling her will. The rejection toward different gender stereotypes which tends to cut women rights as human being and member of society is the reflection of the heroine‘s attitude.AbstrakTulisan ini mengkaji isu feminisme yang terkandung di dalam novel Putri karya Putu Wijaya. Pembahasan wacana perempuan ini dikupas dengan memanfaatkan kajian feminis. Isu feminisme ini diamati dari tokoh utama cerita, yaitu Putri. Isu feminisme dalam novel Putri muncul karena adanya sikap dan perilaku tokoh utama perempuan dalam mewujudkan dan memperjuangkan keinginannya. Penolakan terhadap perbedaan stereotip gender yang cenderung mengebiri hak-hak perempuan sebagai manusia dan anggota masyarakat merupakan wujud perilaku tersebut.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

scholarly journals Echoes of the Heart: Henry James’s Evocation of Edgar Allan Poe in “The Aspern Papers”

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Leonardo Buonomo
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Person ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Human Being ◽  
And Behavior

This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). It highlights the similarities, both in mindset and behavior, between the two stories’ devious and deranged first-person narrators, whose actions result in the death of a fellow human being. It further discusses the narrators’ fear and refusal of their own mortality, which finds expression in their hostility, and barely contained revulsion against a man (in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) and a woman (in “The Aspern Papers”), whose principal defining traits are old age and physical decay.

scholarly journals Comparison of Psychological Stress Levels and Associated Factors Among Healthcare Workers, Frontline Workers, and the General Public During the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rongrong Luan ◽  
Weidan Pu ◽  
Lilei Dai ◽  
Rui Yang ◽  
Peng Wang
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Stress ◽  
General Public ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Impact Of Event Scale ◽  
Event Scale ◽  
Frontline Workers ◽  
Occupation Group ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Objective: We aimed to conduct a comparative analysis of the psychological stress experienced by healthcare workers, frontline workers, and the general public and to assess the factors associated with psychological stress in each of these groups.Methods: We conducted an online survey targeting healthcare workers, frontline workers, and the general public. Psychological stress was assessed with the revised impact of event scale (IES-R). Univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted.Results: We surveyed 1,336 participants (64.6% female; mean age, 36.6). The occupation group distribution of respondents was 50.7% healthcare workers, 27.2% frontline workers, and 22.1% general public. The healthcare (23.6 ± 15.8) and frontline (23.6 ± 17.8) workers had higher IES-R scores than the general public (15.3 ± 10.6; p &lt; 0.01). Poor health perception and perception of infection avoidance were associated with psychological stress in the healthcare and frontline workers, but not in the general public.Conclusion: Both healthcare and frontline workers are suffering elevated psychological stress, compared to the general public, and this elevated stress may be related especially to their perceptions of their own health and infection risk. Interventions addressing these factors should be developed to alleviate psychological stress in these populations, and thus reduce their risk of mental illness pathogenesis.

The use of second person pronouns in a literary work

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop ◽  
Lotte Hogeweg
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Pronoun

AbstractFor this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself.

Calamitas terrena ou Poena divina : Une approche éliadienne de la peste dans le roman Sortez vos morts de Bruno Leydet

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Ciprian Onofrei
Keyword(s):  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bubonic Plague ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Black Plague

"Calamitas terrena or Poena divina: An Eliadian Approach to the Plague in the Novel Sortez vos morts by Bruno Leydet. The article proposes a dichotomous analysis of the outbreak of the Black Plague in Marseille (1720), described by French writer Bruno Leydet in the novel Sortez vos morts, which appeared in 2005. According to the grid established by Mircea Eliade, the analysis is built on two levels: the sacred and the profane. The religious as well as the modern perception of the disease and the use of a relevant lexis allow the bubonic plague to transgress the historical space, passing into the literary one. The plague epidemic in southern France is, in our view, not only a manifestation of the divine will to punish the sinful souls of the dead, but also the incarnation of greed and vicious side of the human being. Keywords: plague, Bruno Leydet, Mircea Eliade, holy, unholy "

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-344
Author(s):  
Jonathan Brent
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Geoffrey Of Monmouth ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.

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