scholarly journals The Postmodern Multi-Layered Narrative of Existential Feminist Subjectivity: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Hazmah Ali AI-Harshan
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
The Voice

Postmodern fiction demonstrates a suspicion about the narrative status of history. Arguably, its project is to reveal the illusion of truth in history because of history's reliance on texts. There is no doubt that historical events occur, but their transmutation into “fact” and their transmission to posterity are limited by their narrativization and textualization. In the Afterword to her novel, Alias Grace (1996) – a fictionalized narrative centering on a real-life person embroiled in a double murder in 1843 – Margaret Atwood reveals her interest in this problem with “history”. She tells the reader, “I have of course fictionalized historical events … as did many commentators on this case who claimed to be writing history”. The purpose of this paper is thus to consider Margaret Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace as a postmodern fiction that seeks to reveal the illusion of truth in history through her use of innovatory narrative techniques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “double-voiced” is used to examine the permitted, surface-level utterances – and the necessarily conflicting actual narratives – of the two narrators in Atwood’s novel. However, the term is also applied in the broader feminist/theoretical context of the silencing of the female subject more generally. Atwood establishes a fragmented, multiplicity narrative. This arises from the reported and somewhat self-aware observations of the eponymous Grace and a doctor named Simon Jordan. Seemingly, the author’s own authority does not exist. Atwood thus exploits the slippery nature of language that does not have some kind of “truth” imposed upon it. The historical “truth” about Grace Marks is never revealed, not because Atwood is “leaving it to the reader's imagination” but because Atwood plays with the problem of personality as a social construction. Almost invisible as “author”, Atwood nevertheless reveals just how language can be manipulated and made to conform to a certain version of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood also recuperates the voice of a supposedly murderous woman by revising the myth of woman’s silence and subjugation. Because her speaking voices are required to practice “double-voicing” to be heard, through presenting the reader with both voices, Atwood recuperates the moments of existential liberation to be heard from emergent voices.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

scholarly journals A Web-Based Rendering Application for Communicating Dental Conditions

Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 960
Author(s):  
Hudson D. Spangler ◽  
Miguel A. Simancas-Pallares ◽  
Jeannie Ginnis ◽  
Andrea G. Ferreira Zandoná ◽  
Jeff Roach ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stainless Steel ◽  
Latent Class ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Tooth Surface ◽  
Caries Experience ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Ceramic Crowns ◽  
Dental Conditions

The importance of visual aids in communicating clinical examination findings or proposed treatments in dentistry cannot be overstated. Similarly, communicating dental research results with tooth surface-level precision is impractical without visual representations. Here, we present the development, deployment, and two real-life applications of a web-based data visualization informatics pipeline that converts tooth surface-level information to colorized, three-dimensional renderings. The core of the informatics pipeline focuses on texture (UV) mapping of a pre-existing model of the human primary dentition. The 88 individually segmented tooth surfaces receive independent inputs that are represented in colors and textures according to customizable user specifications. The web implementation SculptorHD, deployed on the Google Cloud Platform, can accommodate manually entered or spreadsheet-formatted tooth surface data and allows the customization of color palettes and thresholds, as well as surface textures (e.g., condition-free, caries lesions, stainless steel, or ceramic crowns). Its current implementation enabled the visualization and interpretation of clinical early childhood caries (ECC) subtypes using latent class analysis-derived caries experience summary data. As a demonstration of its potential clinical utility, the tool was also used to simulate the restorative treatment presentation of a severe ECC case, including the use of stainless steel and ceramic crowns. We expect that this publicly available web-based tool can aid clinicians and investigators deliver precise, visual presentations of dental conditions and proposed treatments. The creation of rapidly adjustable lifelike dental models, integrated to existing electronic health records and responsive to new clinical findings or planned for future work, is likely to boost two-way communication between clinicians and their patients.

FROM TESTIMONY TO HETEROGLOSSIA: THE VOICE(S) OF LAMENT IN WE ARE THE PERSIANS!

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (46) ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Marios Chatziprokopiou ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Original Play ◽  
Documentary Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Audiovisual Archives ◽  
Displaced People ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Ancient Drama

We are the Persians! was a contemporary adaptation of Aeschy-lus’s The Persians presented in June 2015 at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival. Performed by displaced people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and directed by Yolanda Markopoulou, the piece grew out of the Station Athens group’s five-year theatre workshops. Extracts from the original play were intertwined with performative material brought to the project by the participants: from real-life testimonies to vocal improvisations, poems, and songs in different languages. High-lighting the historical thematic of the play, this adaptation was presented as a documentary theatre piece, and the participants as ‘modern-day heralds’ who provided on stage ‘shocking accounts’ concerning ‘contem-porary wars’ (programme notes, 2015). After briefly revisiting the main body of literature on the voice of lament in ancient drama and in Aeschylus’s The Persians in particular, but also after discussing the recent stage history of the play in Greece, I conduct a close reading of this adaptation. Based on semi-directed interviews and audiovisual archives from both the rehearsals and the final show,I argue that the participants’ performance cannot be limited to their auto-biographical testimonies, which identify their status as refugees and/or asylum seekers. By intertwining Aeschylus with their own voices and languages, they reappropriate and reinvent the voice(s) of lament in ancient drama. In this sense, I suggest that We are the Persians! can be read as a hybrid performance of heteroglossia, which disrupts and potentially transforms dominant ways of receiving ancient drama on the modern Greek stage.

Schubert’s “Ständchen” in the Voice of the Cinematic Amateur

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-183
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ronyak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

Scholars who have analyzed performances of Schubert’s Lieder have generally focused on the voices of masterful professionals, whether looking at performances before or during the age of sound recordings. This tendency overlooks one historically important group of performers: the amateurs who made up the broad marketplace for the genre during Schubert’s lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century. Studying this group of performers with any level of aesthetic particularity is, however, difficult: documentary evidence of particular singers in this group in the nineteenth century and even the early twentieth is scarce. Yet as the real-life practice of the amateur singing of Schubert’s Lieder in the home gradually dwindled after the nineteenth century, fictional representations of this nineteenth-century practice began to appear in period sound films across the twentieth. While not a substitute for documentary evidence of real practices, this film phenomenon meaningfully engages with nineteenth-century cultural history, literary sources, and musical practices through presentist conventions and concerns. Such films thus offer a vehicle through which to think about continuity and change in the relationship between Schubert’s song and the figure of the amateur in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today. This article analyzes three period film scenes involving nineteenth-century “amateur” performances of Schubert’s “Ständchen” (Schwanengesang, D. 957, no. 4). It does so in order to think about the combined aesthetic and social ramifications of the figure of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s Lieder. I look at scenes in the following three films: the operetta-influenced Schubert picture Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933), in which operetta star Mártha Eggerth sings as the Countess Esterházy, the classic novel adaptation Jane Eyre (1934), in which Virginia Bruce sings as the titular character, and a newly written piece of “governess fiction,” The Governess (1998), in which Minnie Driver performs the song as said governess. None of these scenes offers unmed­iated or simple access to amateurism. Instead, in each scene, a professional, twentieth-­century celebrity woman movie star both sings and otherwise portrays the nineteenth-century amateur musician and character onscreen. Keeping this tension in mind, I explore how this contradiction and other elements in each scene would have and can still provide audiences opportunities to think about the relationship between amateurism and Schubert’s most popular songs. In so doing, I explore the term “amateur” in a number of overlapping senses that embrace positive and, to a lesser extent, pejorative meanings. My analysis ultimately shows how these three diverse film stagings valorize the figure and, indeed, the voice of the amateur in relationship to Schubert’s music. These conclusions have implications regarding Schubert’s songs and successful modes of performance that might attend them.

Confirming False Memories: Social Construction of “Useful” Meanings

1998 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 536-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Fourie
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
False Memories ◽  
Recent Case ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Age Regression ◽  
Recent Case Study ◽  
Historical Truth

Data from a recent case study is presented to illustrate how false memories are socially constructed in the present and how they fulfill a function for the system in which such construction takes place. Based on the dubious assumption that hypnotic age-regression brings forth the historical “truth” about past events, hypnosis was misused as part of this construction, even while the outcome of the regression had to be distorted to provide confirmation of the particular memory.

scholarly journals Hearing Voices: A Corporeal Expression of Trauma in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-820
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Symptom ◽  
Childhood Trauma ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
The Body ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Hearing Voices ◽  
Inner World ◽  
The Voice

The study aims at giving the clinical symptom “Hearing Voices” a literary conceptualization through an analytical reading of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976). Shedding light on the synergy between the body, the voice, and trauma, the study specifically examines how the protagonist’s childhood trauma returns through the cracks of her consciousness in a form of hallucinations and hearing ghost voices in adulthood. The study also aims to explore how Atwood problematizes the notion of hearing voices to project her protagonist’s inner world. The ensuing discussion utilizes Sigmund Freud’s theorization on trauma’s embodiment through corporeality, as well as Cathy Caruth’s emphasis on the manifestation of trauma through both the voice and the body. Also relevant is Laura Di Prete’s focus on the interplay between embodied voices and speaking bodies. Keywords: Childhood memories; Corporeality of trauma; Hearing voices; Margaret Atwood,;Lady Oracle.

‘Pictures of Domestic Life in Country Villages’

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fergus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Narrative Techniques

Though less popular and esteemed in her own time than better known novelists like Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Jane Austen now occupies an exalted place in literary history, in part for inventing nineteenth-century British ‘realist’ fiction. Such fictions seem to represent ‘real life’; she found narrative techniques to give the effect of the real. One of the most important of these techniques has been called ‘free indirect speech’: loosely, a narrator’s third-person, supposedly detached voice ventriloquizes the language and thus the perspective of one of the characters. Austen’s experiments with this device, particularly in Emma, have a history; she had foremothers. Analysis of examples from Austen’s and Edgeworth’s works demonstrate that the use of free indirect speech came to Austen in part through Edgeworth’s experiments in Tales of Fashionable Life. Elaborated and extended by Austen in her novels, the device constitutes Austen’s lasting formal contribution to the realist novel.

Painting the Painter

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Fabrice Leroy
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Real ◽  
Bande Dessinee ◽  
Marc Chagall ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Life Journey

French cartoonist and filmmaker Joann Sfar has often used the comics medium to reflect on visual representation. His latest bande dessinée, Chagall en Russie ['Chagall in Russia'] (2010-2011), continues some of the meta-pictural elements previously found in his Pascin (2000-2002), which already featured Chagall in several episodes, as well as his acclaimed series, The Rabbi's Cat, where Sfar introduced the character of an anonymous Russian painter, whose biography and artistic stance seemingly referred to that of Marc Chagall. Although Chagall en Russie explicitly refers to the real-life Franco-Russian modernist painter, it is certainly not a standard biographical exercise. By offering a synthetic and often symbolic version of personal and historical events experienced by Chagall, Sfar takes certain liberties with the painter's life story as it was outlined by the artist (in My Life, his 1922 autobiography) and by many biographers and art historians. Sfar does not seek an authentic depiction of his subject's verifiable life journey, but rather views it through a metaphorical narrative, which is itself inspired by Chagall's artistic universe and raises questions about the figurative possibilities of comics.

Voicing the Subaltern in the Public Sphere

2015 ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Dalya Yafa Markovich
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Disadvantaged School

The voice of the subaltern is barely ever heard in the traditional historical-ethnological museum. Aiming to break the constraints and limitations of the traditional museum sphere, Alemu Eshetie, an Israeli based artist of Ethiopian origin, has created a museum dedicated to the Ethiopian Jewish community that functions as a traveling “public sphere”. Through these strategies the Museum wishes to establish a “dialogical methodology” that will voice the ‘Ethiopian' subaltern and thus foster his empowerment. By using ethnographic fieldwork that followed the activities held by the Museum in the 4th grade at a multiethnic and disadvantaged school in Israel, this chapter examined the ways in which students of Ethiopian origin chose to voice themselves in the public sphere created by the Museum, and the social and educational meanings attached to their voice. Hence findings suggest that the social construction of the subalterns' personal voice within the public sphere can expose racial and social inferior position and thus work against the aims it means to achieve.

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