scholarly journals MEMORIES AND STORIES OF RETURNING HOME IN KHALED HOSSEINI'S NOVELS THE KITE RUNNER, AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED, A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

2020 ◽  
Vol XI (31) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Spirovska

The aim of this paper is to analyze the acts of returning home, thinking about home and the significance of home and returning home in Khaled Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and in the novel And the Mountains Echoed. As an American writer of Afghan origin, who left his home country as a child and moved to USA, Khaled Hosseini addresses the concepts of leaving home, immigration, and returning home in all of his published novels. In 2003, Khaled Hosseini published his first novel The Kite Runner. This story depicts the friendship between two Afghan boys, whose relationship is broken by the Afghan civil war and the violence before and in the aftermath of the war. In this novel, returning home is an act of redemption on behalf of Amir, for the betrayal of his best friend Hassan. Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, describes the relationship between two women and their lives under the Taliban regime. Mariam’s and Laila’s life stories are intertwined the moment Laila, forced by the circumstances in Kabul during the civil war and the loss of her parents and her home, accepts Rasheed’s marriage proposal, becoming his second wife. The strained relationship between her and Mariam develops into close friendship, which ends the day Mariam kills Rasheed to protect Laila. Laila returns to Afghanistan and visits Mariam’s home. For her, this is an act of paying respect, of visiting a place where she can sense Mariam’s soul and her presence. And the Mountains Echoed presents the life stories of a number of characters, mutually connected in different ways. One of the sibling relationships described is the relationship between Pari and Abdullah who are separated as children. Pari, who leaves her home and is adopted, always feels the strange sensation of being homesick and missing somebody or something in her life. For Pari, who plans to travel to Afghanistan in attempt to find the answers to her questions, the act of returning home is exploring her own personality and heritage.

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
Julia Jordan

This article will explore the relationship between linguistic puns and knowledge, in particular puns in Christine Brooke-Rose's work, and what they tell us about knowledge: secret knowledge; encoded knowledge; latent knowledge that remains latent; and the refusal of knowledge. My title is an allusion to Frank Kermode's 1967 essay ‘Objects, Jokes, and Art’, where he puzzles away at his own difficulty with distinguishing avant garde writing and art, especially what he calls the ‘neo-avant garde’ of the 60s, from jokes. ‘I myself believe’, he writes anxiously, ‘that there is a difference between art and a joke’, admitting that ‘it has sometimes been difficult to tell.’ Brooke-Rose, whose work Kermode admired, is a perfect example of this. Her texts revolve around the pun, the surprise juxtaposition between semantic poles, the unexpected yoking together of disparate elements. Puns, for Brooke-Rose, sit at the juncture between the accidental and the overdetermined. So what is funny about the pun? Not much, I propose, or rather, it provokes a particular sort of ambivalent laughter which becomes folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself: its deadpan silliness; its proclivity to collision and violence; its excitability and its melancholy. Brooke-Rose's humour is thus of the difficult sort, that is, humour that reveals itself at the moment of its operation to be not all that funny. The unsettling laughter, I propose, that exposes literature's own incommensurability with itself. For Jacques Rancière, the novel must illuminate somehow the ‘punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable’, in the face of which all is reduced to passivity. The pun, in particular, forces the readers’ passivity, and exposes us to limits of what can be known.


Keep the Days ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 47-69
Author(s):  
Steven M. Stowe

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00022
Author(s):  
Fauzan Hanif

<p class="Abstract">Such cultural experiences have a possibility to be embedded in a memory of one generation. But there are mostly in form of traumatic experiences. And then, we learn that these memories could be transferred onto their children, or we could say it as “post generation”. In the novel <i>Dora Bruder</i>, such things happen when the author, Patrick Modiano, plays his attribute in composing genres to arrange and transfer his message. The story mainly concerns as the narrator try to find a missing girl named Dora Bruder. She was gone in 1941, or in the moment when Nazi was occupying France. This research aims to discover the relationship between the role of genre on emerging the message, particularly the traumatic ones by using the concept of genre and postmemory. From the analysis we conclude that Modiano use genres to transfer his message traumatic. It exists in form of the impression of absence. From the sensation of absence, he continues to transmit consecutively another impression of hollow, doubt, and also hope. For transferring his message and memory, Modiano mixes real documents and his fiction. He manifest them by constructing a story of another person and narrating it from the first-person point of view. He uses this technique to identify himself, because the “shared idea” of one’s could be related with another’s.</p>


Literator ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-219
Author(s):  
B. Van der Westhuizen

From child to young adult: The development of the main character in De koperen tuin (The garden where the brass band played) by Simon Vestdijk From an intertextual study it emerges that the postulated view of reality in the psychological-philosophical text De toekomst der religie (The future of religion) (1947) is transposed in narrative form in the text-internal vision of reality in the novel De koperen tuin (The garden where the brass band played) (1950). In both these texts the religious point of departure of the meaning of existence is reflected upon. Existential aspects especially highlighted, include the following: the I, the relationship with others, being involved in the situation, freedom, responsibility, guilt, angst, death, that which is “too-late”. Furthermore the extension of the moment, the directedness at a personal passion, and the individual’s courage to be and to keep “becoming” are also highlighted. All these aspects emphasizing existentialism are portrayed in the development of the main character, Nol Rieske, from little boy to young adult.


Kinesic Humor ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Guillemette Bolens

Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece Tristram Shandy experiments with dynamics in nonverbal communication. Tonic shifts and variations in pace are systematically narrated in the interactions between characters. This chapter focuses on the moment when Walter Shandy, emotionally shocked, throws himself across his bed and lies on his stomach for a long time, Uncle Toby patiently waiting next to him. The kinesic dialogue taking place between the two men is echoed by the relationship Sterne establishes with his readers through his work. In both instances, the novel shows that making inferences about the mental states of others is practiced on the basis of unstable kinesic data. In this section of Tristram Shandy, Sterne theorizes that the meaning of movements and gestures comes from the transitions between attitudes, rather than from fixed facial or postural representations. The text prompts perceptual simulations of such dynamic transitions, leading to humorous effects involving readers.


Author(s):  
Lindita Tahiri ◽  
Muhamet Hamiti

This article focuses on stylistic choices in the novel Im atë donte Adolfin (My father loved Adolph) by the Albanian author in Kosovo Mehmet Kraja (2005) as a strategy to generate a post-communist perspective of interpreting history. By blending first-person narration as confidentiality and third-person narration as conventionality (Barthes, 1978), the possessive construction ‘my father’ in this literary text serves both as referential label and deictic, generating dual focalization (Phelan, 2005). The heterodiegetic narrator is positioned simultaneously as a neutral eye witnessing narrator and as a signal of subjectivity. Even in cases of intradiegetic role the narrator remains detached interweaving his voice with the voice of the character. The synchronized overt and distant narratorial stances in this novel correspond with the demonstration of historical discourse as both subjective and factual narration. The relationship between fiction and truth has been widely treated in the post-modern intellectual thought, and as Borg (2010) points out in his study on Beckett and Joyce, the radical narrative innovations are “examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth” (p. 179), suggesting that in modern literary texts “every event exists factually and fictionally at the same time” (p. 187). As a resonance to Borg’s analysis of modernist literature, in Kraja’s novel the knowledge about history consists of both factual and imaginative elements, bringing “the moment of truth in all its potential” (p. 191).


2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFANIE MARKOVITS

Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South was composed from the Nightingale family residence even as the war being fought in the Crimea (from 1854 to 1856) was making Florence Nightingale into a national heroine. Reading the novel in the context of the Crimean War and of Gaskell's involvement with Nightingale helps both to historicize the book more precisely and to illuminate the moment of its production. North and South occludes the foreign con�ict even as it takes advantage of aspects of that con�ict in order to tell its story of the "civil wars" at home: those between North and South, masters and men, past and present, and men and women. The reading culminates in an analysis of the relationship between Margaret Hale and Florence Nightingale. To consider the "thread of dark-red blood" that trickles down Margaret's face in the climactic riot scene of North and South as a replacement for the "thin red line" made famous as a symbol of heroism at Balaclava is to recognize the Crimean War as a part of the Condition of England.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 273-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott

One of the least studied aspects of the Long Parliament is its role in addressing the legislative needs of private or sectional interests such as trading companies and borough corporations. In the field of parliamentary studies, the dissolution of the 1628–9 Parliament represents a major watershed. The pioneering work of Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and others has allowed us to appreciate a long-overlooked facet of Parliaments before 1629 – their function as a ‘market-place of legislative business’. But the Parliaments called after the collapse of the Personal Rule tend to be scrutinised in a very different light. Understandably, perhaps, the focus is almost exclusively upon the debates and factionalism that attended the nation's slide into civil war and subsequent endeavours to restore peace. The general assumption among historians of the civil war period is diat the two Houses were so preoccupied with the great issues of the moment that they had little time to devote to any business of a more private nature. There is certainly no denying that the Long Parliament was often consumed with ‘greate & weightie affaires’, nor diat many of the MPs who remained at Westminster after the outbreak of war were under little pressure to promote the interests of their constituents or indeed of any private individuals. Even so, where the relationship between a serving Parliament-man and those who had elected him remained strong, it is unlikely diat he could have ignored entirely his obligation to act as their spokesman and lobbyist. One of the best and yet most neglected sources for examining the role of MPs as promoters of ‘particular businesses’ in the Long Parliament is the Hull letters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-229
Author(s):  
Urška Perenič ◽  

In the paper, the problem of exile is first understood in the way of national exile and persecution. The analysis will focus on the historical novel Človek proti človeku [Man against Man], 1930, by France Bevk, which thematizes the Middle Ages, but which should be read as a metaphor through which the author during the Italian occupation of Primorsko polemically and subtle confronted foreign rulers. In the novel the problem of national persecution is represented as the opposition between the representatives of ecclesiastical and secular/aristocratic authority on the one hand and the serfdom on the other, and is most thoroughly addressed through the relationship between patriarch and brave (bandit) nobles. With their bold opposition to the patriarch, secret conspiracy and efforts to remedy injustice and restore peace and order in their home country, the nobles also serve as a model for unification of the nation. Exile is also understood in terms of the individual's exile and the search for one's identity. More specifically, it is self-exile, which is at the same time self-awareness, as embodied in the central figure of Jerko, who is torn between the sword, the monk's habit and the poetry/art/spirituality. Jerko could be the alter ego of the writer France Bevk, who wrote the novel under conditions of house imprisonment and concluded it meaningfully with the symbolism of the falcon as the messenger of the spiritual world (and thus art).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wykowska ◽  
Jairo Pérez-Osorio ◽  
Stefan Kopp

This booklet is a collection of the position statements accepted for the HRI’20 conference workshop “Social Cognition for HRI: Exploring the relationship between mindreading and social attunement in human-robot interaction” (Wykowska, Perez-Osorio &amp; Kopp, 2020). Unfortunately, due to the rapid unfolding of the novel coronavirus at the beginning of the present year, the conference and consequently our workshop, were canceled. On the light of these events, we decided to put together the positions statements accepted for the workshop. The contributions collected in these pages highlight the role of attribution of mental states to artificial agents in human-robot interaction, and precisely the quality and presence of social attunement mechanisms that are known to make human interaction smooth, efficient, and robust. These papers also accentuate the importance of the multidisciplinary approach to advance the understanding of the factors and the consequences of social interactions with artificial agents.


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