Preparing the Novel: Spiralling Back

Paragraph ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CULLER
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Change Of Life ◽  
As If

La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, and perversely takes Haiku as a model. This new project constitutes in many respects a regression to literary and cultural ideas Barthes had previously rejected. Most seriously, it involves a turn away from reflection on language, which had been crucial to Barthes's work. But there are other ways in which the change in approach brings new insights to a thinking of the novel and of literature.

Dmenisions of Human Behavior in The Novel “The Foreigner” By Arun Joshi

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Poor People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
As If ◽  
Available Resources

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.

scholarly journals Displaced sentential complements to nouns in German

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-547
Author(s):  
Andreas Blümel
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Complement Clause ◽  
Internal Gap ◽  
As If ◽  
Lexical Factors

AbstractThis article makes the novel observation that in German, CPs functioning as complements to nouns can appear to the left of their associated DP-internal gap position. It surveys the phenomenon and, based on a number of diagnostics, argues that the noun complement clause exhibits properties as if its surface position is movement-derived. Based on parallel observations in PP-extraction from DP, I show that the same constraints on movement apply modulo construction-specific properties of DPs with a noun complement clause. The findings buttress previous approaches to extraction from DPs that highlight differentiating and controlling lexical factors. Given the delicacy of the judgments involved in this phenomenon, the article is mostly devoted to laying out its descriptive properties. Tentative suggestions as to an analysis are offered in the end.

any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc­ tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap­ pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.

2014 ◽  
pp. 327-327
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Partial Information ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Real ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Visual Detail ◽  
As If

Fiction Cares: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Ethics Of Care ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Good Will ◽  
The Cost ◽  
As If

Abstract J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”

scholarly journals WATAK TOKOH PROTAGONIS DALAM FILM KARTINI KARYA HANUNG BRAMANTYO (ANALISIS STRUKTURAL)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Supriyati Supriyati ◽  
Fitria Wulandari
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
As If

This research is aimed at describing the protagonist character in the film Kartini by  Hanung Bramantyo. This research is descriptive. The result of the research shows that: (1) the aspect of generosity found in the novel Kartini which means that she likes to give a help to other people. (2) the aspect of honesty found in the character Kartini who likes to be honest to other people. (3) the aspect of sincerity which means that she likes to be sincere towards people who give her compliments as if she is not a person with reputation while she is. (4) the aspect of smart in which she always knows how to make a decision to solve problems. (5) the aspect of independence in which she always tries to send scholarship proposal to continue her study in Netherlands without bothering others. (6) the aspect of loyalty to friends in which she (7) the aspect of defence in which she always defends and fights for woman’s and she is brave to say the truth whenever she faces problems. Based on the result of the analysis, it can be found that the most dominant aspect is sincerity and defend. Meanwhile the less dominant aspect is generosity and independence.

scholarly journals Learning finance through fiction: ‘Cecilia’ and the perils of credit

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Joyce Goggin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
As If ◽  
Affective Structure

This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century – Francis Burney’s Cecilia – as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.

scholarly journals 'As if History Could Be Circumvented'

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stef Craps
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
Real Change ◽  
As If

Graham Swift's debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity. This paper shows how the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters' failure seriously to engage with trauma. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist's daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift's search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author's later novels.

The Pamela Debate

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
To Come ◽  
As If

This chapter examines a decisive period in English literary history during the 1740s. This decade saw Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding falling into an unplanned but extraordinary artistic competition that would open two vital channels of production in the novel-writing to come: in Richardson's case toward the representation of inward experience as if mediated by no external authority, in Fielding's toward worldly experience as if mediated wholly by an authoritative storyteller. They did not compete in the usual sense, but such was their entangled proximity it nevertheless seemed a contest. The decade began with Richardson's Pamela (1740), followed by Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), and ended with Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8) and Fielding's Tom Jones (1749). This second pair of novels has long since established itself as the more powerful of the two, rightly enough, but against any other novels of the period the first would easily command superiority.

Her Body Islanded” Corporeal Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 2/2021 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Anna Kisiel
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
As If

Marian MacAlpin, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, is a “marvellously normal” (Atwood 207) young woman. However, at one point—coinciding with the acceptance of her partner’s marriage proposal—something goes utterly wrong. Her body, in an act of revolt, refuses to accept more and more food; it becomes an increasingly independent, as if exterior entity. While trying to fight off this impenetrable rebellion, Marian comes to face social norms she is supposed to comply with as a woman, finding them indeed indigestible. Written in 1965 and published in 1969, The Edible Woman touches upon issues that are still relevant for the contemporary reader. This article examines Margaret Atwood’s novel within the framework indebted to the recent shift of feminist studies towards fragility: a notion that no longer has to entail mere passivity or surrender. Aiming at an exploration of the theme of a fragile corporeal protest, this article juxtaposes the revolt of Marian’s body with such tropes and categories as fluidity and containment, abjection, agency, and becoming in order to trace the dual nature of corporeal resistance presented in the novel.

The Question of Justice in the Novel of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 148-173
Author(s):  
Michael Vander Weele
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
The Third ◽  
As If

Abstract Marilynne Robinson’s achievement in the third novel of the Iowa trilogy can be seen more clearly if measured against Erich Auerbach’s ambivalence about the novel of consciousness. Using Auerbach’s final chapter of Mimesis, on Virginia Woolf, as the horizon for Robinson’s work clarifies two points: Robinson’s work should be viewed within a novel-of-consciousness tradition that is as much European as American; and Robinson’s religious interests turn that tradition toward a more anthropological concern with the complexity of consciousness framed by the concern for justice. While Nicholas Damas’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “The New Fiction of Solitude” (April 2016), claimed that much new fiction “imagines teaching us how to be separate” and Walter Benjamin already wrote at mid-century that “the ability to exchange experiences” disappeared sometime after World War I, in Lila it is as if Marilynne Robinson set out to show both the difficulty and the possibilities of such exchange.

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