scholarly journals Poetics of descriptions in the novel “A Hero of Our Time” by M.Yu. Lermontov in Literature classes

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
E.N. Kolokoltsev

The purpose of the study is to actualize the role of descriptions in the novel by M. Yu. Lermontov “A Hero of Our Time” as an important constructive element of the narrative. The most common form of description in the novel is the descriptions of nature and descriptions of the characters’ portraits. The descriptions found a lively response in literature studies, literary criticism, in art criticism, which responded to the paintings of the poet-and-artist and illustrations for the novel. Naturally, it attracted the author’s attention to the study of the works of those scholars, who viewed the features of Lermontov’s narrative manner. In the stories that made up Lermontov’s novel, descriptions play an important compositional role: they accompany the narrative, the thoughts of the characters, and they are often motivated by the author. The article highlights a number of techniques that will allow students to specify ideas about the descriptions in the novel. The students’ comprehension of landscape descriptions can be supported by drawing up a plan that will reflect the spatial and time-line structure of the story “Bela”, which represents both “travel notes” and the novelette. The use of reproductions of Lermontov’s Caucasian landscapes, similar in the object image to its verbal descriptions in the novel, serves as a visible emotional aid in the nature descriptions comprehension by schoolchildren. Turning to Pechorin’s psychological portrait caused such ways of discovery of his portrait features as drawing up a stylistic map that assists students to focus on linguistic means that the narrator uses to relate the hero image with his potential ingrain. The image and words are closely intertwined in the art print that performs the function of figure of speech and gives a spatial image to the piece of writing. The illustration serves as a means of specifying the students’ perceptions of the characters’ portraits, descriptions of nature and the related plot situations. Ways to comprehend a literary text with the wide involvement of works of art assist students to learn about the peculiarities of Lermontov’s narrative manner and facilitate their aesthetic development.

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Valentina E. Vetlovskaya

<p>The article explores the role of logical connections in an epic text. It is these connections, according to the author of the article, that connect the individual components of the narrative (motifs, complexes of motifs) and make up in the reader&rsquo;s perception for the missing elements. The reticence and failures to mention, common in fiction, appear in the narrative for various reasons. Sometimes due to the aesthetic principles of the writer who prefers ambiguity to a completed statement depriving readers of the opportunity to finish thinking over a vague idea. And sometimes, due to the author&rsquo;s conviction that there is no need to explain the idea implied by what has been earlier said. But it also happens that the omissions in the narrative are engendered by the requirements for the presentation of a chosen topic, for example in crime fiction. But these reasons may go together as it occurs in Crime and Punishment. These ideas are illustrated by the analysis of one of the themes of the novel Crime and Punishment.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Dan Paranyuk

Based on the methodological proposals of literary anthropology, in particular on the conceptual ideas of C. Levi-Strauss (structural anthropology), J. Ortega y Gasset (“dehumanization of arts”), J.-M. Schaeffer (“the end of human exceptionality”), M. Foucault (the fall of a human being from the humanistic pedestal of culture), the article under studies emphasizes the violation of the anthropological dominant in science fiction, which is very typical of the fantasy genre. Consequently, there arise new principles of constructing personosphere of a literary text. On the example of the novel “City” (1953) by an American science fiction writer Clifford Simak, the article traces the way a human being shifts from the center of personosphere to the “outskirts” of narration, whereas its image acquires fictional parameters. This all happens due to the phenomenon of “anthropocene” (the term by G. Canavan), which implies the harmful consequences of the human reigning over the nature. In addition, the author of the article introduces the notion of “phantasoid’ – a character of the fictional world of fantasy (outlined by the narrator) that functions exceptionally in the imagination of a certain fantastic character and is somehow related to his previous experience. The novel by C. Simak outlines a gradual shift of the anthropological vector: the heterogeneous image of a human turns into a counter-image, whereby particular significance is attached to the change in the attitude towards mankind. In the text, human culture is perceived as something alien, while Simak’s image of a human being ruins the so called imagological stereotype, along with the reader’s receptive expectations. The role of the attractor in the novel is assigned to “antromorphized” and “humanized” creatures (plants, animals, objects, robots, mutants), which indicates the drastic breach with the previous genre tradition, as well as higlights a peculiar polemic connection with classical literary science fiction. This all proves the metamorphic nature of science fiction and its transition into the hyperreal dimensions of fantasy, where different artificial forms of life and mentality can peacefully coexist with each other.


Author(s):  
David Kurnick

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2 (17)) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Irina Mkhitaryan

The paper attempts at presenting the author’s ironical attitude in the allegorical novel “Animal farm” written by G. Orwell. Here we posit the idea that the author’s ironical attitude can be embodied by personification, a figure of speech, which makes inanimate objects, animal characters or abstract ideas seem just like people by giving them human traits. The article also clarifies the role of context in defining the title-text correlation, which is best marked by the superiority of pigs ruling the farm instead of people. Hence, the former Manor Farm comes to be named Animal farm, postulating the abilities and strength of animals.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Débora Magalhães Cunha Rodrigues

RESUMO: Elisa Lispector escreveu inúmeros romances e contos, recebendo prêmios por alguns deles. A escritora, embora tenha explorado a construção de uma subjetividade feminina, é quase sempre lembrada pelos escritos autobiográficos, principalmente o romance No exílio de 1948. A crítica esteve mais atenta às narrativas que iluminavam episódios da vida de sua irmã caçula, Clarice Lispector, do que às especificidades de sua escrita. A obra e a trajetória de Clarice Lispector causaram sombra não só à obra de sua irmã como às de outras escritoras do mesmo período.  Neste artigo, questionamos o papel da crítica no apagamento do nome de Elisa Lispector na literatura brasileira que tomou o caso Clarice como excepcional, negando às escritoras, de um modo geral, um espaço para debater seus textos e subjetividades. Além da vinculação da obra da escritora à obra de sua irmã pela crítica literária, analisamos como a tradição literária falocêntrica contribuiu para este apagamento. Elisa Lispector contribuiu para o debate acerca do baixo número de publicações de escritoras, evocando Virginia Woolf e Simone de Beauvoir. Atuou para que as escritoras pudessem ter uma tradição em que se ancorar. Analisamos os romances O muro de pedras publicado em 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza de 1965, A última porta de 1975, Corpo a corpo de 1983 e do conto “Uma outra temporada no inferno” de seu último livro O tigre de bengala publicado em 1985, demonstrando como a escritora explorou os processos de emancipação feminina e os conflitos comuns a esta fase de transição.BEYOND A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: THE CASE ELISA LISPECTORABSTRACT: Elisa Lispector has written numerous novels and short stories, receiving awards for some of them. The writer, although she explored the construction of a female subjectivity, is almost always remembered for autobiographical writings, especially the novel No exílio of 1948. The criticism was more attentive to the narratives that illuminated episodes of the life of her younger sister, Clarice Lispector, than to the specificities of her writing. Clarice Lispector's work and trajectory cast a shadow not only on her sister's work but also on those of other writers of the same period. In this article, we question the role of criticism in the elimination of Elisa Lispector's name in Brazilian literature, which took Clarice as exceptional, denying writers, in general, a space to debate their texts and subjectivities. In addition to linking the writer's work to her sister's work by literary criticism, we analyze how the phallocentric literary tradition contributed to this elimination. Elisa Lispector contributed to the debate about the low number of writers' publications, evoking Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. It worked so that the writers could have a tradition in which to anchor themselves. We analyze the novels O muro de pedras published in 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza of 1965, A última porta of 1975, Corpo a corpo of 1983 and the short story "Uma outra temporada no inferno" from her last book O tigre de bengala published in 1985, demonstrating how the writer explored the processes of female emancipation and the conflicts common to this phase of transition.Keywords: Elisa Lispector; feminist criticism; Brazilian literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pia Brückner

Over the last decade, studies from multiple academic disciplines have started to examine the city’s role as a place of decolonization for Māori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article uses those multidisciplinary findings as a basis for literary criticism by re-examining the role of the city in Patricia Grace’s second novel Potiki (1986). Indigenous urbanites are generally deemed impossible and ‘unnatural’ within the inherited colonial ideology. And even though the novel foregrounds a Māori family’s return to their ancestral land, this article argues that the very success of this return is based on the interrelation between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ strategies of decolonization. While the colonial urban–rural binary often seems reinforced, the novel inverts the power positions between colonizer and colonized, thereby promoting decolonization. At the same time, some characters become unconsciously entrapped in a romanticized pre-migration idyll, which the harsh reality of agricultural working life cannot satisfy. In order to assess the effectiveness of the different decolonizing strategies employed by the characters, my analysis utilizes the postcolonial key concepts of binary opposition, the liminal, the interstice, ambivalence, double consciousness and cultural appropriation, and examines the degree to which inherited binary oppositions are either maintained or defied by Pākehā and Māori within the novel.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-191
Author(s):  
Dmitrii V. Larkovich ◽  

The title of the new novel by the Yugra writer Eremey Aipin In Search of the Primordial Land, first published in Russian in 2019, contains an obvious reference to the cultural tradition and suggests the possibility of a scholarly reading of a literary text from the perspective of mythopoetics. The novel organically continues the attitude characteristic of all Aipin’s previous works. This attitude clearly discerns the writer’s desire to see the essence of modern life realities through the prism of traditional values enshrined in the myths and legends of his people. In Aipin’s artistic picture of the world, myth does not just appear as one of its elements. It enters the very flesh of this world, constitutes its foundation, its pivotal ontological and axiological axis. Aipin does not limit himself to the role of a popularizer of the mythological repertoire of the Khanty people. On the basis of traditional images, plots and motives, he builds his own mythological paradigm, in which the system of national and universal values is superimposed on the personal life experience of the author and his heroes. This fundamentally determines the basic principles of Aipin’s artistic expression organization. The article aims to reveal the meaning-forming role of the myth of the eternal return in Aipin’s In Search of the Primordial Land and to characterize the means of its artistic actualization in the text. During the research, the results of the latest developments in the field of philological regional studies and mythopoetics were taken into account. The analysis of the novel in the context of the traditional culture of the indigenous peoples of Yugra shows that Aipin inextricably connects reflections on the historical fate of Russia with the fate of a person. Despite the fact that the novel is based on the dramatic events of a worldwide scale, it is full of high optimistic sound. According to Aipin’s idea, Russia, which is at the turn of the millennium, is experiencing a situation of the “second world flood”, since the human community lost its spiritual values. The protagonist of the novel is the artist Matvey Taishin. He goes through difficult life trials, but acquires the desired sense of being; he finds it in love and in the awareness of the need to continue life. Using the example of Taishin, Aipin convincingly demonstrates that the revival of Russia is impossible without recognizing its cultural and spiritual origins, without moving towards its own metal Primordial Land. It is this saving path, based on the return to the eternal, timeless values, that will give Russia the opportunity to realize its historical destiny and overcome the state of chaos and decay. The article is the first experience of a conceptual and contextual analysis of Aipin’s In Search of the Primordial Land in Russian literary criticism, which constitutes the novelty of the research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Watson ◽  

This paper investigates the role of literature and, in particular, Proust in Merleau-Ponty’s late works’ rehabilitation of the ontology of the sensible. First, I trace Proust’s role in Phenomenology of Percpetion, contrasting it with the somewhat more paradigmatic status as a model it plays in the late works. Second, I compare this with the role of the novel as partial myth in Schelling, who also played an essential role in Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the sensible. I briefly trace his examination of the historical or “sociological meaning” of literature through works of the fifties, beginning with his Collège de France candidacy proposal and continuing through his examination of the rationality of modern disenchantment (Entzauberung) or dépoétization in the Adventures of the Dialectic. Finally, discussing the late analysis of Proust against this backdrop, I conclude with considerations concerning the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s overall analysis of Proust both in his thought and contemporary literary criticism and philosophy more generally. Cet article examine le rôle de la littérature et, en particulier, celui de Proust, dans la réhabilitation ontologique du sensible qui se trame dans les derniers écrits de Merleau-Ponty. En premier lieu, je retracerai le rôle de Proust dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, en l’opposant au statut quelque peu plus paradigmatique, comme s’il s’agissait d’un modèle, qu’il joue dans le dernier Merleau-Ponty. Deuxièmement, je comparerai cela avec la fonction du roman conçu comme un mythe incomplet chez Schelling, qui a aussi joué un rôle essentiel dans la reconfiguration du sensible chez Merleau-Ponty. Je décrirai brièvement son analyse de la « signification sociologique » ou historique de la littérature à travers des oeuvres des années ’50, en me penchant, d’abord, sur sa candidature au Collège de France, et, ensuite, sur son étude de la rationalité du désenchantement moderne (Entzauberung) ou dépoétisation dans les Aventures de la dialectique. Finalement, en examinant les dernières analyses de Proust à partir de ces prémisses, je conclurai avec des considérations sur l’intérêt de l’ensemble de l’analyse que Merleau-Ponty fait de Proust à la fois pour sa pensée, pour la critique littéraire contemporaine et, plus généralement, pour la philosophie.Il presente articolo indaga il ruolo della letteratura e, in particolare, di Proust nella riabilitazione ontologica del sensibile negli ultimi scritti di Merleau-Ponty. In primo luogo, si delinea il ruolo di Proust nella Fenomenologia della percezione, contrapponendolo, in qualche modo, allo statuto paradigmatico di modello che l’autore riveste nei lavori dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty. In secondo luogo, si confronta questo con il ruolo del romanzo come mito parziale in Schelling, che pure ha giocato una parte essenziale nella rifigurazione del sensibile in Merleau-Ponty. Si articolerà brevemente il significato storico o sociologico della letteratura attraverso gli scritti degli anni Cinquanta, a partire dalla proposta di candidatura di Merleau-Ponty al Collège de France e proseguendo mediante il suo esame della razionalità del disincanto moderno (Entzauberung) o depoetizzazione ne Le avventure della dialettica. Infine, esaminando l’ultima lettura di Proust a partire da queste analisi, propongo una considerazione riguardo alla rilevanza complessiva dell’autore della Recherche nella riflessione di Merleau-Ponty e, più in generale, nella critica letteraria e nella filosofia contemporanee.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Umaira Aleem ◽  
Inayat Ullah ◽  
Aziz Ullah Khan ◽  
Afzal Khan

Euro-American exclusivity has been eclipsing the universalizing appeal of Ecocriticism, which attempts to counter the war on terra—the Latin name for earth. Ecocriticism also explores the connection between humans and their environment. It gives way to the examination of the environment and its illustration in literature and, by doing so, develops an investigative ecological consciousness regarding different environmental issues. The present study is aimed to study the non-Euro-American setting of Anis Shivani’s Karachi Raj (2015) through an eco-critical lens. It attempts to explore the eco-critical consciousness of the characters, highlighting the way the effort of creating eco-consciousness is made through the settings and plot of the literary text. The study focuses on environmental issues presented in the novel through various situations. The research uses qualitative method of textual analysis under the theoretical underpinnings of Ecocriticism.


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