scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Jeantriani Febrita ◽  
Eka Margianti Sagimin

This study investigates Self-Destructive Behavior of Hannah Baker in Thirteen Reasons Why novel, conducted in qualitative approach analysis of self-destructive behavior of the main character and what reasons or the causes of it through the narratives in the Thirteen Reasons Why novel. The goal of the study is to analyze how self-destructive behavior impacted the main character, Hannah Baker which is described using the theory of Self-Destructive Behavior and Defense Mechanisms by Sigmund Freud (1966). The result of this study shows that Hannah Baker developed the self-destructive behavior as a defense mechanisms from herself that triggered by trauma from the past. It started with the non-suicidal self-destructive behavior but soon turns into the suicidal self-destructive behavior. This study also shows how a suicide can really be an impact of the behavior that happens in the novel resulted from a non-suicidal self-destructive behavior that is not handled well, and all the mistreatments that the main character felt which produce the desire for ending her life.Keywords: Self-Defense Mechanism, Self-Destructive Behavior, Sigmund Freud, Suicide, Thirteen Reasons Why.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwi Masdi Widada

<p><em>The phrase that describes that a science should be pursued even to China. Novel Assalamualaikum Beijing provides an overview of the presence of Islam in the Bamboo Curtain country. Islamic civilization has appeared some time ago in China. The novel is intentionally prove that Islam was, and triumphed in China. Islam not only had triumphed in Europe, especially Andalusia (now Spain). Travelling around the main character of China as a columnist Asma Indonesia provided a glimmer of hope, strength, and love of the teachings of Islam. Islam never lived and interacted with the people of China. Chinese Muslim faces with hoods and eyes sipitnya show relationships and interactions among the Muslims. Islam in China is known as "pure religion of the sky" .In this novel, the reader is also treated to the values </em><em></em><em>of Islamic education, the history of Islam, and the messages of Islam. Building a mosque in China a sign of the existence of Islam. One of the mosques and Muslim villages in China. This shows the triumph of Islam in the past. The value of education and the propagation of Islam seen in self Zhongwen figures. He was fascinated with friends Mus'ab bin Umair handsome and willing to remove the sparkling world for his new love in Islam</em></p><p><strong><em> </em></strong></p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>Islamic Civilization, Islamic Education Value, China</em>


J-PAI ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwi Masdi Widada

<p><em>The phrase that describes that a science should be pursued even to China. Novel Assalamualaikum Beijing provides an overview of the presence of Islam in the Bamboo Curtain country. Islamic civilization has appeared some time ago in China. The novel is intentionally prove that Islam was, and triumphed in China. Islam not only had triumphed in Europe, especially Andalusia (now Spain). Travelling around the main character of China as a columnist Asma Indonesia provided a glimmer of hope, strength, and love of the teachings of Islam. Islam never lived and interacted with the people of China. Chinese Muslim faces with hoods and eyes sipitnya show relationships and interactions among the Muslims. Islam in China is known as "pure religion of the sky" .In this novel, the reader is also treated to the values </em><em></em><em>of Islamic education, the history of Islam, and the messages of Islam. Building a mosque in China a sign of the existence of Islam. One of the mosques and Muslim villages in China. This shows the triumph of Islam in the past. The value of education and the propagation of Islam seen in self Zhongwen figures. He was fascinated with friends Mus'ab bin Umair handsome and willing to remove the sparkling world for his new love in Islam</em></p><p><strong><em> </em></strong></p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>Islamic Civilization, Islamic Education Value, China</em>


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

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.”


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Anca Andriescu Garcia

AbstractDue to his supernatural nature, but also to his place of origin, Bram Stoker’s well-known character, Dracula, is the embodiment of Otherness. He is an image of an alterity that refuses a clear definition and a strict geographical or ontological placement and thus becomes terrifying. This refusal has determined critics from across the spectrum to place the novel in various categories from a psychoanalytical novel to a Gothic one, from a class novel to a postcolonial one, yet the discussion is far from being over. My article aims to examine this multitude of interpretations and investigate their possible convergence. It will also explore the ambivalence or even plurivalence of the character who is situated between the limit of life and death, myth and reality, historical character and demon, stereotype and fear of Otherness and attraction to the intriguing stranger, colonized and colonizer, sensationalism and palpable fin-de-siècle desperation, victim and victimizer, host and parasite, etc. In addition, it will investigate the mythical perspective that results from the confrontation between good and evil, which can be interpreted not only in the postcolonial terms mentioned above, but also in terms of the metatextual narrative technique, which converts into a meditation on how history and myth interact. Finally, it will demonstrate that, instead of being a representation of history, Bram Stoker’s novel represents a masterpiece of intergeneric hybridity that combines, among others, elements of history, myth, folktale and historical novel.1


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gulnara Dadabayeva ◽  
Dina Sharipova

This article focuses on the famous novel Koshpendiler (1976) by Ilyas Esenberlin. This literary work occupies a special place in Soviet Kazakh literature because it raises important problems such as the foundation of the state and nation, the sense of territoriality, and the struggle against Russian colonizers. The authors argue that this historical novel can be considered as an example of post-colonial discourse. The novel itself is an extrapolation of the 1970s’ Soviet reality when national Union republics, including Kazakhstan, were seeking greater independence. Kazakh cultural elites and the intelligentsia turned to the past history of nation-building to address the problems of the present day. Not having an opportunity to openly express their views, the Kazakh establishment preferred to express their national sentiments through the historical genre. In this work, the authors suggest their own vision of Soviet national literature from political science and historical perspectives.


PMLA ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 982-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Peterson

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.


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