‘Our own little grain of truth’

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Angela Smith
Keyword(s):  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Directions ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
The Stranger

‘Our own little grain of truth’ focuses on the interaction of tragedy and comedy, including the gothic grotesque, in Katherine Mansfield’s work in the last three years of her life; it does not offer biographical interpretations of the texts covered. It considers the effect of her reading, suggesting that it provided a trigger for new directions in her writing. Her response to the novel by R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, which she reviewed for the Athenaeum and discussed in letters to John Middleton Murry, shows her imagining the dark places of psychology, when traumatic experiences lead characters to confront the unthinkable. Abjection is a motif in all the texts considered: Prowse’s A Gift of the Dusk, Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Vera. In each a character confronts what Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror as ‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed at a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’, yet each of these fictions contrives to combine comedy with the dark, tragic dimension.

Total Synthesis of Axially-Chiral Cannabinols: A New Platform for Cannabinoid-Based Drug Discovery

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Primali Navaratne ◽  
Jenny Wilkerson ◽  
Kavindri Ranasinghe ◽  
Evgeniya Semenova ◽  
Lance McMahon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Total Synthesis ◽  
Ground State ◽  
Chemical Space ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pharmaceutical Development ◽  
Bioactive Component ◽  
Axially Chiral ◽  
New Directions

<div> <div> <div> <p>Phytocannabinoids, molecules isolated from cannabis, are gaining attention as promising leads in modern medicine, including pain management. Considering the urgent need for combating the opioid crisis, new directions for the design of cannabinoid-inspired analgesics are of immediate interest. In this regard, we have hypothesized that axially-chiral-cannabinols (ax-CBNs), unnatural (and unknown) isomers of cannabinol (CBN) may be valuable scaffolds for cannabinoid-inspired drug discovery. There are multiple reasons for thinking this: (a) ax-CBNs would have ground-state three-dimensionality akin to THC, a key bioactive component of cannabis, (b) ax-CBNs at their core structure are biaryl molecules, generally attractive platforms for pharmaceutical development due to their ease of functionalization and stability, and (c) atropisomerism with respect to phytocannabinoids is unexplored “chemical space.” Herein we report a scalable total synthesis of ax-CBNs, examine physical properties experimentally and computationally, and provide preliminary behavioral and analgesic analysis of the novel scaffolds. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Boundaries of the Stranger

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-354
Author(s):  
Søren Blak Hjortshøj
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Zygmunt Bauman ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
The Stranger

AbstractIn recent cosmopolitan work, scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, and Ulrich Beck have represented the stranger as a universal ideal for our global age and Georg Simmel’s stranger in the Exkurs über den Fremden has been emphasized as a model for this ideal. While these uses can be justified by generalized passages in Simmel’s essay, they still omit the problem of European Jewish historical exemplarity. Thus, in the decades before Simmel’s essay, this stranger type was already a well-developed figure related to the so-called Jewish question. Georg Brandes and Henrik Pontoppidan used the Jewish stranger to evaluate the societal changes of the fin-de-siècle period and questions of progress vs. decay. Yet, their work limited the stranger to a specific type of Jewishness not including other marginal existences. Hence, reading Simmel with Brandes and Pontoppidan outlines the boundaries of this stranger type as it raises questions regarding recent cosmopolitan uses of Simmel’s stranger.

scholarly journals Deterritorialization and Traumatic Experiences of the Protoganist in Oleander Girl

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6S3) ◽  
pp. 1663-1665
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel

The paper aims to analyse the novel Oleander Girl and explore the plight of the protagonist Korobi, a young girl who goes to America in search of her identity which she believes to have lost in India due to her parent’s cohabitation. Since her mother’s live in relationship with an Afro-American could not be solemnized in India due to the intervention of her grandparents, she has to bear the brunt as a child born out of wedlock. The mystery of her birth is known to her only when she goes in search of her father to America. The main reason of her visit to America is to find out her identity as to whom she was born. During her endeavour to trace her father, she comes across situation which question her identity and her whereabouts which in turn bring forth inexplicable woes to her. The author, Chitra Banerjee attempts to expose that America though a land of freedom has not assured any safety to Korobi until she metamorphoses herself to be one like an American uprooting her true identity as an Indian. Now her transformations both physically and mentally instils confidence and she succeeds in locating her father. Korobi so long believed that knowing about her father would help her in quenching her thirst to establish her identity but in vain. Her father does not manifest any paternal instincts towards her. Though disappointing, Korobi learns to pursue her life as a transformed new woman bearing a new identity by re rooting in an alien land.

scholarly journals Tim O’Brien’s representation of the subjugated other’s voice against war in The Things They Carried

Ars Aeterna ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Ammar A. Aqeeli
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War Zone ◽  
The People

AbstractTim O’Brien’s Vietnam-based The Things They Carried has been criticized for exclusively depicting the painful and traumatic experiences of the American soldiers in the war zone. Despite the limited number of Vietnamese characters in the novel, and despite their relegation to the role of powerless and voiceless onlookers, their presence shows the degree of the power imbalance between Vietnam and America. This article demonstrates how O’Brien infused sentiments in his stories to emphasize his opposition to the war and his concern for the dignity of the Vietnamese people. O’Brien asserts that the main purpose of the United States’s invasion was to make Vietnam a learnable and controllable place. Through his critique of the United States’s imperial ambitions in Vietnam, O’Brien provides a representative voice for the people of Vietnam to share their sufferings from an unjust war.

The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

2017 ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Unknown Source ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

“Circles and Circles of Sorrow”: In the Wake of Morrison's Sula

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Novak
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recursive Structure ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Toni Morrison's Sula develops out of and centers on images of violence and violation, proffering itself as a catalog of traumatic experiences, of literal and figurative deaths. Such traumas almost invariably register as watched, the novel thus functioning, by means of its characters, as an act of bearing witness. Inasmuch as the story Sula tells is framed by passages mourning the loss of the world the novel imagines, the narrative structurally articulates an absence. Together these elements—Sula's thematic preoccupation with witnessed dying and its insistence that the narrative mark loss—locate the novel's center of interest in grieving. Folding the history of loss it narrates within a recursive structure, Sula pitches itself against the conventional notion that mourning must be worked through: indeed, the novel implicitly argues for—and persistently works to effect—a sustaining of grief. To move beyond mourning in the context of continuing cultural fragility, the novel suggests, may well constitute a surrender to the processes of cultural absorption and dispersal Sula describes toward its conclusion.

scholarly journals Postcolonial dilemmas in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

IJOHMN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Abraham Panavelil Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Material Loss ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Diasporic Literature ◽  
To Come

The paper will try to analyze Kiran Desai’s Booker winning novel The Inheritance of Loss as story dealing primarily about the problems of migration faced by her characters, their tensions and dilemmas. One of the major concerns of diasporic literature is the problem of exile, displacement and the resulting consequences. Uprooting from one’s own home land is an agonizing process that brings numerous material and emotional traumas in the process of re-rooting in an alien land. The characters are often victims of circumstances and by the time they realize the problems, they are exhausted, miserable and frustrated.  Even when they come back after their traumatic experiences, like the Judge in the novel, they often develop a sense of distrust and anger. They are in a state of confusion from which they find it difficult to come out. The paper will focus on the experiences of some of the characters in the novel – Jemubhai Patel, the Judge, and Biju, the son of Judge’s cook who is the central character of the novel. The book seems to suggest that true happiness does not lie in material wealth or comforts, but in one’s own dignity, identity and sense of belonging. In the novel, the characters especially Biju has to undergo number of traumatic experiences that brought a lot of material loss, but he has a spiritual gain- the realization of what brings true joy in life.   Keywords: Alienation, Assimilation, Diaspora, Hybridization, , Identity, Immigrant, , Postcolonial

scholarly journals Revealing Humanity: the Flexible Language of Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
K. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Russian Universities

The article features the linguistic peculiarities of four novels the author uses in her course on Contemporary English Fiction: Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate, Jim Crace’s Quarantine, Graham Swift’s Last Orders, and Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. The novels probe deeply into some of the stranger aspects of human experience. Hilary Mantel writes of people who try to behave as balanced, rational beings, but to whom irrational and terrible things happen that have to be dealt with. The metaphorical language illuminates this philosophical exploration, which would otherwise be dull or unconvincing. The novel might seem strange for English readers, but the language carries the conviction of the true storyteller. J. Crace has a wonderful sense of exact words for an exact rhythm. Graham Swift’s novel is written as though it were the thoughts and memories of seven different characters. The language here is the colloquial vernacular, the language of elderly and middle-aged men and women with little education from south-eastLondon. The most extraordinary book of these four is Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton. It consists of twelve chapters, which are a chronological set separate ‘stories’ that happened between 1650 and 1988. Each chapter uses a different literary genre for the story-telling: for example, a simple first-person narrative, a sermon, a journal, letters to a lover, lecture notes, an internal monologue, and – ending the novel – a television script. Thorpe has therefore set himself a colossal task: to render into lively readable English, the concerns and passions of individuals, often illiterate individuals, while retaining a sense of the language appropriate to a particular era and a particular genre.Literature is an act of communication between writer and reader which does justice to humanity through expressive, imaginative language. Nobody would be so arrogant as to say that reading literature is the only way of ‘being human’ but more than most activities it forces us to think about people other than ourselves.Readers who would like to read more have available many other fine examples of contemporary English literature, provided by the Oxford Russia Fund for those taking part in the project on Contemporary English Literature in Russian Universities.

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