scholarly journals Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camilotti
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elsa Morante ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

The Garden as Unfinished Narrative of the Good in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Evrea Ness-Bergstein
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Growth And Change ◽  
Literary Devices ◽  
Hortus Conclusus

In Lewis’ transposition of Milton’s Paradise to a distant world where Adam and Eve do not succumb to Satan, the structure of Eden is radically different from the enclosed garden familiar to most readers. In the novel Perelandra (1944), C.S. Lewis represents the Garden of Eden as an open and ‘shifting’ place. The new Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve unfallen, is a place of indeterminate future, excitement, growth, and change, very unlike the static, safe, enclosed Garden—the hortus conclusus of traditional iconography—from which humanity is not just expelled but also, in some sense, escapes. The innovation is not in the theological underpinnings that Lewis claims to share with Milton but in the literary devices that make evil in Perelandra seem boring, dead-end, and repetitive, while goodness is the clear source of change and excitement.

scholarly journals Benjamin’s ‘flâneur’ and serial murder: An ultra-realist literary case study of Levi Bellfield

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-543
Author(s):  
Adam Lynes ◽  
Craig Kelly ◽  
Pravanjot Kapil Singh Uppal
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Criminological Theory ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Murder ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

This article seeks to develop criminological theory with the application of a literary device known as the ‘flâneur’ – an individual described as a ‘stroller’ – to serial murderer Levi Bellfield. With this application of the ‘flâneur’ to the phenomenon of serial murder, this article provides a fresh theoretical ‘lens’, and specifically sheds light on how particular serial murderers operate and evade detection in modern society. The importance of modernity to the phenomenon of serial murder is also considered utilizing Ultra-Realist theory, resulting in both a micro and macro examination into how the modern urban landscape has subsequently created an environment in which the serial killer both operates and comes to fruition. This synthesis between the application of literary devices, criminological theory and socio-cultural concepts not only raises important and previously neglected questions pertaining to serial murder, but also assists in forming the more sinister relative of the flâneur: the ‘dark flâneur’.

scholarly journals On freedom in the times of Economic Crisis – A Close Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Experiment ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Times ◽  
Far Future

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous experimental project enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire.

scholarly journals Epilepsy, Forgetting, and Convalescence in Ondaatje’s Warlight

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Do So

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

2017 ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Unknown Source ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

7.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Hoff
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Latin Elegy ◽  
The Many ◽  
Literary Devices

This chapter offers a synopsis and discussion of the events that take place in the seventh section of Mrs. Dalloway. Hoff explores the many layers within the section, paying close attention to the thematic links present throughout the novel, including birth imagery and references to the Underworld. The discussion also looks at the novel’s structure and literary devices used, whilst making reference to Greek and Latin elegy as well as renowned authors and philosophers.

Womb with a View

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Ally Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Brave New World

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.

China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-93
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.

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