scholarly journals Between Social Utopia and Totalitarian Reality: “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

Author(s):  
Vadym Vasylenko

The paper considers the novel “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora’s literary process. The focus is on the issues of relations between fiction and documentary writing, the individual and collective experiences. The literary Kyiv, being one of the central images in Dokiia Humenna’s novel, appears not only as a page from individual or national histories, a sample of the Kyiv text in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose, but also as a generalization based on such texts and made due to various forms of intertextuality, which absorb the history and atmosphere of the Kyiv 1920s. The problem of interrelations between the writer and government, art, politic, and ideology is one of the most essential in the novel: Dokia Humenna reveals various aspects of the writer’s life and work in conditions of the totalitarian state and culture – from suicide to madness, from resistance to adaptation and collaboration. A future person and society in “Children of Milky Way” are represented in a commune. The histories of the two characters-antipodes Taras Saragola and Seraphym Carmalita are connected to its progress and decline; in the world of totalitarian repressions and control they choose different life strategies and roles. The memory about Soviet terror and repressions, as well as the Holodomor-genocide, “killing the Ukrainian peasantry as a foundation of the nation and destructing intellectuals as a brain of the nation” is important in the novel. The history of collectivization is related to the traumatic memory of the serfdom times, which affects  the second and third generations and deepens the trauma caused by disintegration of a family, destruction of the patriarchal peasant world. This process was accompanied by desacralization of the Father’s figure as a personification of power, by infantilization of masculinity. The writer associates totalitarian reality with the metaphor of Night, which acquires different ambiguous meanings in the Ukrainian anti-totalitarian discourse.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Cornelia Ruhe

The article analyses the literary representation of traumatic memory in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011). It shows how different angles of interpretation that allow for a comprehensive understanding of the whole novel are already succinctly encoded in the first scene, a scene that has to be decoded like a palimpsest in order to present not only the individual and psychological trauma the protagonist suffered after becoming the accidental victim of a shootout, but also the collective and cultural trauma of Colombia’s recent history of violence. It is shown that the novel, whose narrator used to play billiards, is structured like a game of carom billiards, thus linking otherwise unrelated people and events through a series of successive collisions, directly or indirectly, via the rail cushions.


Author(s):  
Susanna Braund ◽  
Zara Martirosova Torlone

The introduction describes the broad landscape of translation of Virgil from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. It then explains the genesis of the volume and indicates how the individual chapters, each one of which is summarized, fit into the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries and across the world. The volume editors indicate points of connection between the chapters in order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Braund and Torlone emphasize that a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies; they therefore consider it important to extrapolate larger phenomena from the specifics presented here


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


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.”


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.


1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Moojan Momen

As the Bahá’í Faith emerges from obscurity, Bahá’í scholars will have an important role in three fields: the presentation of Bahá’í Faith to the world; the defense of the Bahá’í Faith from attacks; and the intellectual growth and development of the Bahá’í community. This paper discusses the question of the place of scholarship in the Bahá’í community. The value of Bahá’í studies to the Bahá’í community is analyzed. The problems that may arise for Bahá’í scholars in relation to their own spiritual life and also in relation to the Bahá’í community are discussed. Some suggestions are then made with regard to the question of what academic approaches are most likely to be fruitful in the study of the Bahá’í Faith. Finally, consideration is given to the mutual obligations of the Bahá’í scholar and the Bahá’í community (in particular, the Bahá’í administrative institutions). Every Bahá’í who surveys the vast range of doctrines and concepts enshrined in the holy writings of the Bahá’í Faith or whose imagination is captured by the intensity of its brief history must, to some extent, be inspired to make a more thorough study of some aspect that interests him or her. To some is given the good fortune to have both the opportunity and inclination to put this study on a more formal basis. Whether this be at an institute of learning or through private study and research, there are many areas of the teachings and history of the Bahá’í Faith that invite painstaking research and thoughtful analysis. Such study is of great benefit to the Bahá’í community as a whole, quite apart from the immense satisfaction that it can bring to the individual student. There are also dangers in such study, particularly for the individual concerned, and often the extent of this danger is not appreciated by someone just setting out on such a course of study.


Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Effi Booth

This paper was presented in History 3697, fall semester, 2017, a mid-level required writing course designed to link the methods of oral history with the study of issues in the contemporary history of the non-western world. The issue for all of us in this course was social change in recent times. I chose to examine the degree of acceptance of gays in Jamaica, in an era of great change in sexual mores throughout the world. I read the literature; I interviewed Julian, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, and I drew conclusions based on integrating the scholarly material with the interview revelations. The findings were important both for understanding (the lack of) change in sexual attitudes in Jamaica, and the importance of analysis of the individual and the collective together, of the interview and the scholarly data examined together. The individual, at least my interviewee, and the society, are currently resistant to change. The main conclusion: changes in sexual mores in other areas of the world are taking place at rates very different from, and, specifically in Jamaica, at rates much slower than, those in the USA.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.36) ◽  
pp. 983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia S.Volskaya ◽  
Olga A. Chupryakova ◽  
Svetlana S. Safonova ◽  
Gulnaz T. Karipzhanova

The paper is devoted to the study of semantic and functional features of expressive derivatives, both usual and occasional, in the artistic gist of the novel “Asan” by V. Makanin, as well as their role in structuring the individual-author’s linguistic picture of the world. It has been proven that the derivation of expressive lexemes is the result of improvisation according to established patterns, and that the formation of occasional substantives, adjectives and verbs involved the main methods of the Russian word derivation. It is noted that in the artistic discourse of V. Makanin, in the substantive word-formation, suffixation plays a leading role, which takes place in the sphere of abstractness and includes such lexical-semantic groups as expressive substantives with the meaning of a person, expressive substantives with the meaning of abstracted action or an abstract feature with connotation, as a rule, negative and/or reduced colloquial connotation. While in the sphere of adjectival and verbal word formation, confixation and prefixation, as the formation of expressiveness, is most productive. The paper considers the phenomenon of semantic word formation, describes the formation of semantic derivatives, including in the field of occasional vocabulary. Expressive derivatives in the artistic discourse of V. Makanin are a bright sign of his individual style, an important means of expressing the world view and outlook of the writer.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-165
Author(s):  
Tega Brain

This paper considers some of the limitations and possibilities of computational models in the context of environmental inquiry, specifically exploring the modes of knowledge production that it mobilizes. Historic computational attempts to model, simulate and make predictions about environmental assemblages, both emerge from and reinforce a systems view on the world. The word eco-system itself stands as a reminder that the history of ecology is enmeshed with systems theory and presup-poses that species entanglements are operational or functional. More surreptitiously, a systematic view of the environment connotes it as bounded, knowable and made up of components operating in chains of cause and effect. This framing strongly invokes possibilities of manipulation and control and implicitly asks: what should an ecosystem be optimized for? This question is particularly relevant at a time of rapid climate change, mass extinction and, conveniently, an unprecedented surplus of computing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Md. Abdul Momen Sarker ◽  
Md. Mominur Rahman

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is a post-modern sub-continental writer famous for her first novel The God of Small Things. This novel tells us the story of Ammu who is the mother of Rahel and Estha. Through the story of Ammu, the novel depicts the socio-political condition of Kerala from the late 1960s and early 1990s. The novel is about Indian culture and Hinduism is the main religion of India. One of the protagonists of this novel, Velutha, is from a low-caste community representing the dalit caste. Apart from those, between the late 1960s and early 1990s, a lot of movements took place in the history of Kerala. The Naxalites Movement is imperative amid them. Kerala is the place where communism was established for the first time in the history of the world through democratic election. Some vital issues of feminism have been brought into focus through the portrayal of the character, Ammu. In a word, this paper tends to show how Arundhati Roy has successfully manifested the multifarious as well as simultaneous influences of politics in the context of history and how those affected the lives of the marginalized. Overall, it would minutely show how historical incidents and political ups and downs go hand in hand during the political upheavals of a state.


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