scholarly journals Rhizomatic Cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Sambit Panigrahi
Keyword(s):  
Structural Stability ◽  
Coherent Structure ◽  
Structural Modeling ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Structural Coherence ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Individual

Italo Calvino’s highly successful novel Invisible Cities thoroughly explains Deleuze and Guattari’s famous postmodern concept of rhizome. The cities in the novel do not possess a fixed and coherent structure; rather they exude a structurality that is immensely fleeting and continually evolving. Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities which ironically precedes Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus clearly demonstrates the defining characteristic features of rhizome through the unusual and seemingly incomprehensible structure of the individual cities. There have been scanty critical responses in the past regarding the rhizomatic behavior of Calvino’s cities, despite an extraordinary abundance of critical works existing on Calvino’s writing. The rhizomatic patterns of Calvino’s cities, it is believed by the author, need further critical attention. Rhizome, through its perpetually unstable structural modeling, perhaps most effectively demonstrates our utterly disarrayed postmodern condition of existence where any desired structural stability and coherence is a virtual impossibility, and of this trait, Calvino’s cities in the said novel are the principal demonstrators. Based on these precepts, this article intends to analyze how Calvino’s cities in the novel, with their perpetual and immense structural variabilities, exude before the readers a typical postmodern world that wholesomely discards the very idea of structural coherence and stability.  

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

scholarly journals Re-Reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Postcolonial Perspective

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.K.M. Aminur Rashid
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Igbo People ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive

Being a postcolonial narrative, Things Fall Apart experiences a wide critical acclaim. From the pen of Chinua Achebe, the Igbo cultural complexity has come into being a theme that opens up a historical account of the clash of two cultures. Okonkwo, a very well-known public figure in his community falls under the threat of a new culture brought by the white missionaries preaching the gospels of the Christianity. After the arrival of the Christian culture, the first collision that takes place is the division at the individual, and then at the societal levels. When a number of the Igbo people, including Okonkwo’s son, change their religion, it creates chaos and confusions throughout the community. Although the Igbo people have a well-established way of life, the Europeans do not understand. That is why they show no respect to the cultural practices of the Igbo people. What Achebe delivers in the novel is that Africans are not savages and their societies are not mindless. The things fall apart because Okonkwo fails at the end to take his people back to the culture they all shared once. The sentiments the whites show to the blacks regarding the Christianity clearly recap the slave treatment the blacks were used to receive from the whites in the past. Achebe shows that the picture of the Africans portrayed in literature and histories are not real, but the picture was seen through the eyes of the Europeans. Consequently, Okonkwo hangs himself when he finds his established rules and orders are completely exiled by his own people and when he sees Igbo looses its honor by falling apart.

scholarly journals "Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story" // "Deja que el buen tiempo me traiga a casa: una historia de Malta"

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri
Keyword(s):  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Fair Weather ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Descriptive Element

Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story (Excerpt from unpublished novel)Life in itself largely depends on one’s personal relationship with nature. Humankind develops as it discovers new modes of relating more efficiently with whatever surrounds it. Thus both the individual and the social aspects of such a condition greatly  depend on each other. Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home is a Maltese novel which strives to portray such a bond in terms of what it entails to live in a traditional village far removed from the center of the country where nature had to succumb to a great extent to the dictates of culture, and mainly to technology. The descriptive element of the novel, as evinced in this excerpt, is meant not only to construct a context within which the villagers live, but also to suggest a sharp contrast with the modern city, impersonal, overcrowded, noisy and inevitably distant from spaces which are considered to be still undeveloped, namely still left in their primeval state. The depiction of such a way of life in such a village, inspired by an environment typical of Southern Europe, may seem to be simply an evocation of the past, as it originally is, but it also recognizes the fact that such a relationship with nature still survives in various parts of various countries. The essential message of the excerpt is that modern ecological considerations are necessarily the expression of  humanity’s need to rediscover nature and to return to where it once belonged.                   

CONTEMPORARY LEBANESE FICTION: MODERNIZATION WITHOUT MODERNITY

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-580
Author(s):  
Samira Aghacy
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The Impact

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

scholarly journals Toni Morrison's Beloved

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Memory And Trauma ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
The Individual

Since its publication in 1987, this novel by Morrison has spurred an enormous wave of critical responses and interpretations. Undoubtedly, the most challenging aspect to any critic is the fact that Beloved rigorously defies hermeneutic foreclosures. I choose to read the novel as a key text which throws light upon liminal psychic experiences by using psychoanalysis and especially Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject, as well as the narratological approach of Bakhtin. Morrison deals with the problem of human survival on two levels, thus bridging the gap between historical narrative and personal history. One of these levels is the level on which the author makes a subversive record of the history of survival-in-suffering, and relates the communal history. The second level is the level of depiction of survival in the history-of-suffering, that is, each individual's history. Through analysis of the issues of language, memory, trauma, and the unconscious I will try to show how memory and trauma are both personal and communal, and how they shape - through language - the psychohistory of the individual.

scholarly journals “Unfathomable Calmness”: Betrayal Trauma, Silence and Dissociation in The Secret Agent

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Imen Chemengui
Keyword(s):  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Betrayal Trauma ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
Psychological Response ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Secret Agent

With the rise of trauma theory in late 19th century, researchers have focused on foregrounding the significance of some catastrophic events that pertain mainly to the collective, leaving other forms of trauma and their psychological aftermath on the individual underrepresented. In this paper, I focus on social traumas in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which seems to be overlooked by some critics whose insights highlight primarily its political aspect. The events of the novel revolve around the peculiar and traumatic experience of Winnie Verloc whose life is rife with betrayal and violence. Her recurrent exposure to successive shocking events culminates in her dissociation and, consequently, her suicide. To pin down what lies beneath Winnie’s ambiguity, aloofness and silence in the novel, I mainly rely on trauma theory, drawing from studies on PTSD, betrayal and dissociation by several trauma scholars, such as, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Jennifer Freyd, and others. Furthermore, this paper examines the inextricability of the past from the present in trauma through the breadth scrutiny of Winnie’s psychological response to her excruciating experience. Hence the way the appalling past returns unbidden to shake Winnie’s present.

scholarly journals Postmodernistiese tendense in Magersfontein, o Mogersfonfein! deur Etienne Leroux

Literator ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
M. J. Prins
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Epistemological Uncertainty ◽  
The Relationship

Post-modernist trends in Magersfontein, o Magersfontein! by Etienne Leroux The aim of this article is to prove that there are trends towards the radicalisation of certain tenets of modernism in Magersfontein, a Magersfontein! (1976) by Etienne Leroux. In the first instance, there are signs of what Brian McHale considers to be typical of postmodernism, namely epistemological uncertainty. Readers of this novel are confronted by a modernist shift from the idea of an objective rendering of an empirical reality towards a focus on the ways in which the individual consciousness p lays an active and projecting part in the formation of images of self and world. This shift is juxtaposed with an investigation into humanity's search of knowledge of the past The shift entails a modernist questioning of the objectivity of historical knowledge, an indication of the partisan way in which history can be dealt with, an emphasis on the relationship between different renderings of history and the legitimising of political power, as a result of which the novel tends towards postmodernism, at least as far as Wesseling's (1991) definition of this trend is concerned. At the same time the novel can be read as a satire on the way in which institutions like the state and the film industry are instrumental in the creation of "realities The images which are projected onto reality are often "prescribed" to the individual consciousness, a motif which is well-known in postmodernist fiction.

scholarly journals Connection and Disconnection in Tom’s Midnight Garden

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Mouhiba Jamoussi
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Individual

This paper entitled ‘Connection and Disconnection in Tom’s Midnight Garden’ aims to challenge a particular reading of Philippa Pearce’s novel Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) as nostalgic and concerned with aging and death. Tom’s Midnight Garden is regarded by some literary critics as a nostalgic work concerned with the past rather than the present. Its protagonist Tom is sometimes considered as disconnected from the real world and living in the fantastic. This paper will argue that, quite the contrary, Tom’s Midnight Garden stands against disconnection, between the child and the adult, the fantastic and the real, and the past and the present. Tom’s Midnight Garden celebrates connection through the interrelation between the self and the other, through a fantastic world constantly interwoven with the real, and a past tightly tied to the present. This paper relies on a thorough reading of the novel, on findings on the child-adult relationship, and on the effects of connection and disconnection on the individual.

scholarly journals Genre Features of the Novel Epic in Ossetian Literature: Correlation between Ideological and National-Ethnic

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10) ◽  
pp. 280-296
Author(s):  
I. V. Mamieva
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Character System ◽  
The People ◽  
The Family ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ideological Identity ◽  
First Time

The specific features of epic narration in the Ossetian novel prose (1940-1960) in the context of the all-Russian literary process are considered. The problem solved in the article is actualized in the light of the conceptual differences that emerged in the post-Soviet era in the interpretation of the essence of the concept of “epic novel”, in the attribution of its genre status. The purpose of the article is to specify the typology of the epic chronotope and character system, to identify the issues of the structural completeness of works. A typological method is used with the use of an axiological approach, which allows us to focus both on the spiritual and content aspect of artistic searches and on the pseudo-scale tendencies in the novel-epic practice of the aforementioned decades. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time, using the example of Ossetian prose, the process of the emergence of a new genre variety in national literatures is investigated. Special attention is paid to the aspects of deactualization of the national-ethnic in the behavioral sphere of characters in favor of sharpening their ideological identity. At the same time, it is shown that in the system of images, in the very poetics of narration, through the ideological sharpening inevitable for time, an orientation toward the foundations of national consciousness, toward the spiritual and historical experience of the people appears. It is concluded that works of an epic type, despite the tangible costs of an ideological and partly aesthetic order, were a new stage in the interpretation of epoch-making events of the past by Ossetian literature in their conjunction with the life of the people, the microcosm of the family and the individual.

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