scholarly journals The Ghost of Windrush Past: Intertextuality in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Amine Belaid ◽  
Wassila Hamza Reguig-Mouro

The relationships between the literary texts have recently occupied the center of debate and discovery in the literary sphere. With a so ancient a practice as intertextuality; influence, allusion and quotation seem to smolder the old assumptions about originality and creativity. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the utilization of intertextuality in the novel entitled The Lonely Londoners (1956) by the Trinidadian postcolonial writer Sam Selvon (1923-1994). To do so, a survey on the provenance of intertextuality is displayed, with reference to its pioneers who claimed that the text is a heterogeneous combination of texts, namely Kristeva and Bakhtin. Additionally, the article introduces several models of the concept that are relevant to the analysis of the aforementioned novel along with a brief overview on the cultural and social parameters leading to its creation. This inquiry shows that The Lonely Londoners textually intertwines with a few works of the literary canon, biblical characters and eminent legal cases via some names of its characters, in addition to other direct quotations. As this paper submits, the audience should reach a rational stance on the use of intertextuality in the postcolonial novel to relate to universally shared images about racial prejudice and alienation.

Author(s):  
Noelia Galán Rodríguez

Jane Eyre is considered to be one of the most significant Victorian novels within the English literary canon as well as a governess novel. However, apart from her experience as governess, it must not be forgotten that, first of all, Jane was a student. Education has shaped the protagonist’s life and the plot of the novel making it one of the main topics of Jane Eyre and other Charlotte Brontë’s literary works such as The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853). The main aim of this essay is to study how education has shaped Jane Eyre both as a student and a teacher and how it has affected the outcome of the novel. In order to do so, a close reading of the novel is carried out along with a sociocultural background of Victorian society.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.


Author(s):  
Iryna Dumchak ◽  
Sofiia Shemerliuk

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 254-269
Author(s):  
Nawal Abass ◽  
Rua'a Tariq Jawad ◽  
Maysoon Taher Muhi

Pauses as pragmatic markers are considered important devices that help readers to gain a better and deeper understanding of certain texts as well as speech, promoting effectively language communication. They can help both the speaker and the hearer, due to the functions they have in a text. Their occurrence in speech has a value that they make it more understandable. In this regard, the present study aims to examine the forms and functions of pauses in literary texts, more specifically, in selected extracts from two dramas, namely, Pinter's The Homecoming and Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation and to compare how the two writers use pauses in these two dramas. To do so, the sequential production approach of turn-taking by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), in combination with the contributions of some scholars who state the multifunctional use of pauses, has been used. The findings of the present study show that pauses do not exist arbitrarily in speech, but they are found to serve certain functions depending on the context in which they occur. Pauses, whether silent or filled have certain references. They are not merely meaningless. Pauses can express what is going on inside the characters without even saying a word. Regarding the selected extract from each play, it is noticed from the comparison that the two writers employ pauses frequently. Pauses are used by the two writers to be informative and that is why they should be studied with great care as they affect the interpretation of a certain text and consequently affect understanding


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirzad Tayefi ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Ramezani Fookulaee

Contrary to the French school of comparative literature, according to which it is merely possible to compare the two written texts in terms of conditions, in the American approach, the adaptation of literary texts to various arts, including cinema, is possible, which leads to a better understanding of literature. Since novels and films have many similarities, they are in many respects similar to each other, and two genres are considered analogous.These commons provide a good ground for discussing a movie from the perspective of a new literary theory and critique, and allow us to use the concepts and terminology we normally know as a tool for discussing the novel to critically explore the structure and art and the themes of the film. On the other hand, in recent years, the term "postmodernism" has been widely criticized about the novel in our country, and many new fiction writers also have a fascination with postmodern style fiction. Therefore, in this research, first, reviewing the views of some of the most important postmodern literature scholars, nineteen techniques used in postmodern novels are explored, and their qualitative method of applying them to Naser al-Dinshah film actor have been investigated.The results of the study show the relationship between literature and cinema (as a visual text) and the ability to compare the two written and visual texts; as many techniques used in the writing of postmodern novels are also with a high frequency have been used in the studied film


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5(74)) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
S.V. Ananeva

The poetry of the large genre form –the story and the novel includes «openness» as a fundamental opportunity that is endowed with the author and the reader. The poetics of works «in motion» creates a new mechanism of aesthetic perception, expanding the national picture of the writer's world. The concept as a focus of knowledge about the world expands the boundaries of the study of prose by I. Schegolikhin, T. Frolovskaya and K. Keshin. The concepts of the Motherland, memory, oblivion in the literary texts of Russian writers of Kazakhstan are extremely important. A literary work enters into complex non-textual relations with the surrounding reality, expanding the spiritual horizon of society, while preserving traditions and continuity


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Konul Khalilova ◽  
Irina Orujova

The current article involves the issues of losses, gains, or survivals contributing to literature in the process of translation. It represents a thorough study based on the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck from English and, respectively, its translation into Azerbaijani by Ulfet Kurchayli. It investigates the problematic areas or challenges emerging from the source-text discrepancies. Furthermore, this article also concentrates on the issue of cultural non-equivalence or the losses occurring in translating English literary texts into Azerbaijani. The paper identifies the translation techniques adopted by the translator of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Adopting certain techniques rather than others has led to many losses on different levels. The translator’s important role as a cultural insider is also emphasized. The wide gap, distance, or the differences between the cultures, languages, and thought patterns of the English and Azerbaijani language speakers are the main factors resulting in various losses in the process of translation. Coping with these extra-linguistic constraints is harder than the linguistic ones as the translator has no choice in the given situations, deleting these elements from the TT or replacing them with elements that do not fit the context. This article aims at determining translation losses and gains, defining ways that the translator employs for compensating losses, through the analysis of John Steinbeck’s style in The Grapes of Wrath. The article concludes that there are some situations where the translation of a certain text from the SL into the TL embraces alteration in the whole informational content of the text, in the form of expressions or words.


Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Samuel Kwesi Nkansah

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born is a novel known for its extensive portrayal of the ills and anomalies in the Ghanaian society right after independence. The majority of studies on the novel have overwhelmingly concluded that corruption is the preoccupation of the text. This view appears skewed in many respects. This paper argues that the corpus assisted approach can contribute methodologies to support objective investigation of the subject matters of the text. This study, adopting the corpus-assisted approach in a mix of numerical data and qualitative description of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, used frequencies of the occurrence of pejorative terms in the text to determine the dominant subject matters in the novel. The approach reveals that “rot” and “decay” are the most dominant motifs used, followed by “filth”, “corruption”, and “bribery”. It suggests that clusters, i.e., recurrence of words, characters’ association with the words, and context of use serve as textual cues in thematic exploration. The approach aids in revealing that the real intent of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that the total breakdown of the society rests on seemingly insignificant characters. The paper has implications for methodological approaches to thematic analysis of literary texts, particularly, the novel.


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