‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’

Author(s):  
Avishek Parui

This article examines the entanglement between masculinity crisis and traumatic memory as described in Katherine Mansfield's short story ‘The Fly’. By exploring the way Mansfield depicts the figure of the ‘boss’ in the story as symbolic of the stubborn resistance against the natural organic order of time, the article investigates how such a memory project of preservation fails with all its masculinist hubris. Drawing on Pierre Janet’s notions of traumatic memory and narrative memory and on Freud’stheory of traumatic repetition and castration, the article attempts to locate the politics of memory in Mansfield’s story alongside the politics of masculinity that perversely equates male hysteria with performance and prestige.

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110262
Author(s):  
Beibei Chen

Silver Sister, a biographical novel telling the unique life stories of the so-called “comb-ups,” represents China as a troubled homeland with turmoil, war, and painful memories. Silver, the protagonist of this novel, as a Chinese comb-up, has mixed and doubled identities as an illiterate Chinese female in diaspora. On one hand, she is imprinted with characteristics of Chineseness. On the other hand, the novel contests the notion of Chineseness by demonstrating the interactive relation between Silver’s personal remembrance and collective memory of common Chinese females at that time. In this essay, it is argued that this novel is more precisely about how traumatic memory transforms Chinese women’s diasporic identity in a global context, instead of only in a journey from China to Australia. Its meaning lies not only on the way of representing trauma and memory respectively, but the way how traumatic memories together with other diasporic memories function on influencing identity politics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


Tempo ◽  
1944 ◽  
pp. 104-107
Author(s):  
W. H. Mellers

We are often told that there is to-day a promising efflorescence of musical culture in this country; that the public for ‘good’ music is growing rapidly; and that more adequate provision must be made for music in the post-war reconstructed world. Substantially I believe all this is true; but it does also seem to me that much potential cultural vitality may be wasted if these conclusions are accepted too easily, without enquiry into the premisses on which they are based. What do we mean by musical culture? What do we expect music to give us? The mere quantity of music played tells us nothing; we want to know what kind of relation the noise has to the society that produces it, we want to know what bearing it has on the way people live. If we look back a moment to consider some of the things that music has meant to people living before us, we shall soon see that our problems are peculiarly difficult, and that we may well need a virtually new technique to deal with them. A refusal to see our educational problems against the background of history will lead to confusion and incompetence in musical culture as in everything else.


LINGUISTICA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 409
Author(s):  
ULFA YOZA SALSABILA ◽  
ELIA MASA GINTING ◽  
WILLEM SARAGIH

This study aimed to analyze the mood and modality used in the short stories of Willem Iskander’s Si Bulus-Bulus Si Rumbuk-Rumbuk, elaborating and explaining the interpersonal meaning realized in each short story. The source of data was taken from a book authored by Willem Iskander, entitled “Si Bulus- Bulus Si Rumbuk-Rumbuk”. This research showed that : (1) there were 157 clauses in the short stories with three mood types and two degrees of modality. (2) interpersonal meaning is realized based on the order of the subject and the finite. (3) the reason why the interpersonal meaning is realized in the way they are is that the author wants to share his thoughts and experiences of Mandailingnese by classifying each clause and finding the dominant use of declarative mood as the most direct and soft way of conveying the author’s thought


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Christian Moe

The wars that dissolved Yugoslavia – were they religious wars? Why are conflicts increasingly coded as religious, rather than as, for example, social or ethnic? What constitutes a ‘religious’ or ‘holy’ war. This article attempts an inventory of important cat­egories and hypotheses generated in the relevant literature so far, with a few critical notes along the way. The author considers the role assigned to religion in structural, cultural, and actor-oriented explanations of the Yugoslav wars. Structural and cultural explanations downplay the role of human agency and, hence, of moral responsibility; actor-oriented approaches focus on it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Ms. Shikha Sharma

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hampson Lundh ◽  
Mats Dolatkhah

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to analyse how a particular reading activity in a post-war Swedish comprehensive school, was part of the larger social and political project of the welfare state, and tied to the notion of good citizenship. Thereby, and secondly, the paper aims to illustrate how dialogical document theory enables the study of reading, and possibly other types of document work and practices. The analysis of a speech by a teacher about what can be learnt from a short story during a Swedish lesson in a primary school in 1968 illustrates how document work such as reading activities are value-laden, and tied into ideologies and political projects. In this specific case, reading is in dialogue with the political project of realising the democratic and egalitarian “People’s home” which, somewhat paradoxically, required the disciplining of its young citizens. It is concluded that a dialogical document theory, which focuses on document work as it unfolds in localised activities and at the same time on situation-transcending documentary practices, can be useful for studies within Library and Information Science on reading in both utilitarian and pleasure oriented empirical contexts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-135
Author(s):  
Guanqiong Lin

As a Russian mountain-forest policeman and writer of the Harbin diaspora, B. M. Yulsky combined in his prose the experience of the police service and ideas about the ethnoculture of the Chinese who inhabited the territory of the Far East. This article contains a hermeneutic and comparative historical analysis of the short story The Way of the Dragon (1939) by B. M. Yulsky. The artistic morphology of the dragon is built on the comparison of its image in Chinese, Amur, Slavic and European cultures. One of the key images in the Russian heroic epic, in the Christian legend of Saint George, in Western and Northern European mythology, the dragon is actualized in modern literature. The analysis involves a philosophical treatise and a Chinese classic novel. It is shown that in the Chinese mythopoetic consciousness the temper and morphology of the dragon is different from its interpretation in European and Russian texts. The content of the short story by B. M. Yulsky speaks about his acquaintance with the understanding of the dragon, which is more characteristic in Chinese culture. The writer integrated the archaic image of the werewolf dragon into the real situation and brought a legend to the history of Honghuzi. The facts set forth in the monograph by D. V. Ershov are the real confirmation of the story described by B. M. Yulsky. The Way of the Dragon is an example of the artistic ethnography and the authorial frontier mythology that have developed in Russian literature in Harbin.


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