‘The End is No Longer Hidden’: News, Fate and the Sensation Novel

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-123
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Novelistic Form

Victorian commentators saw the sensation novel--a sub-genre known for fast-paced plots drawn from real life--as symptomatic of the newspaper’s growing influence on the reading public. In a famous 1860 review, H. L. Mansel conflated this new novelistic form—which he called ‘The Newspaper Novel’--with crime news. This chapter argues, however, that the sensation novel makes the newspaper into a source of superstition and exclusion, one that problematises similar exclusions practiced by Dickens and Trollope. By experimenting with newspaper time and form, as well as the temporal structure of narrative, these sensation novels highlight characters whose experience of time and community is not presentist, as Anderson suggests, but rather more akin to dynastic time and a sense of history beyond the nation. Throughout Wilkie Collins’s and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novels, the newspaper becomes a part of the mysterious, the uncanny, and ‘atmospheric menace’ for which the sensation novel is so famous. Rather than drawing upon newspapers for a sense of realism, as critics have argued, these novels make their newspapers integral to their providential plots.

scholarly journals Tilsynekomstens politik. Om virkelighedsmodellering i Joseph Conrads Nostromo

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (111) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Jonas Kjærgård Laursen
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Ideological Criticism ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Politics Of Literature ◽  
Material Interests ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Novelistic Form

POLITICS OF APPEARANCE. ON REALITY MODELLING IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOSTROMOArtistically Nostromo is arguably the most ambitious of Joseph Conrad’s novels. It is also without a doubt the most explicitly political in that it openly engages with the question of how capitalism, imperialism, and revolution affect the human consciousness. There is however no agreement as to how this political problem is to be understood or, more precisely, what kind of understanding of the interrelationship between politics and literature is necessary when engaging this artwork. As a necessary supplement to both a 60’s Marxist reading and readings from the 70’s and 80’s dealing with ideological criticism, this article suggests a reading focusing on how the text creates a model of society by reconfiguring certain real life elements. By developing a specific artistic idiom Nostromo attempts to show the very limited view of the whole of society caused by, in the wording of the novel, the material interests of imperial capitalism. Under the inspiration of both Jurij Lotman and Jacques Rancière the analysis presented here is able to address some key political insights that appear as a consequence of the novelistic form when understood as a relatively autonomous model of society. And that is what is meant by the expression politics of appearance: the politics of literature is to be analysed as something generated by the specific gestalt of the text, as something that comes into sight with – and only with – the text.

Paintings

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-367
Author(s):  
Finn Enke
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Gender Transition ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Birth Death

Watercolor and ink help me dwell with the porousness of all morphologies emerging through birth/death, living/nonliving, dis/ability, interbeing, visible and nonvisible embodiments, and the passages of time. In real life, numerous non-trans people have told me that gender transition gives me control over what happens to my body and what people make of it; gives me more freedom than they have to choose what my body/mind does in the world; makes me get younger instead of older. Like me, watercolor has its own opinion and illumination. Like me, it is mortal. When I use ink, as in these black ink paintings, I often close my eyes as I make the lines. The canvas witnesses my nonlinear, non-Cartesian, queer experience of time and space, grief, and love.

scholarly journals What Can the Temporal Structure of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical “Timelessness”?

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. K. Noble
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Temporal Organization ◽  
Human Information Processing ◽  
Experience Of Time

“Timelessness” is an area of intense interest for many composers and authors interested in 20th- and 21st-century music, but it is not always clear exactly what the term denotes. In particular, the distinction between theinductionof timelessness (the listener’s subjective experience of time is altered or suspended by music) and theperceptionof timelessness (the listener recognizes that the music expresses altered or suspended time) has yet to be clarified. This paper argues that, while experiences of timelessness may beinducedby a wide variety of musics and are not necessarily contingent on specific musical qualities, theperceptionof musical timelessness involves relationships between music’s temporal organization and the temporal structure of auditory perception. Of particular interest are segmentation, sequence, pulse, meter, and repetition. Music whose temporal organization optimizes human information processing and embodiment expresses “human time,” and music whose temporal organization subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness. This hypothesis is illustrated with examples from the 20th-century repertoire by Truax, Ligeti, Crumb, Reich, Tenney, Messiaen, and Grisey, music that has been associated with timelessness.

A Grounded Theory on the Relation of Time Awareness and Perceived Valence

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 316-340
Author(s):  
Sonja Ehret ◽  
Anna K. Trukenbrod ◽  
Vera Gralla ◽  
Roland Thomaschke
Keyword(s):  
Grounded Theory ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
High Time ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
Time Awareness

The subjective experience of time has many different facets. The present study focused on time awareness and its antipode timelessness as an expression of the extent one focuses on the passage of time. In an exploratory mixed-methods study, we investigated different extents of this time awareness and their relation to perceived valence of the environment, different states of consciousness, and strategies to cope with doing nothing. Thirty-three participants were tested for one hour or more with sitting and exploring as the within-subjects factor. For each condition, they stayed in one of two libraries characterized by their contemplative architecture. Then, participants answered quantitative questionnaires on their time experience and perceived valence and participated in a semi-structured interview. By means of grounded theory, we extracted four different types of time awareness from the qualitative data, of which three corresponded to the results of a cluster analysis on the dimensions of time awareness and perceived valence of the environment. In line with previous literature, we found relations between unpleasant high time awareness and boredom and pleasant low time awareness and flow. Additionally, the data revealed a pattern of high time awareness and positively perceived valence that was mainly experienced while sitting. Possible connections to states of consciousness such as relaxation, idleness, and a mindful attitude are outlined. Real-life settings, long durations, and level of activation are discussed as possible fostering factors for finding this pattern.

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert McParland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Cultural Measures ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-111
Author(s):  
Tamás Csönge
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
The Core ◽  
Fragmented Structure ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Nouveau Roman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe essay’s aim is to examine the relationship between perspective and nonlinear temporal structure in Attila Janisch’s 2004 film, Másnap, which is loosely based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955). My analysis revolves around the understanding of two important narratological distinctions, that between a nonlinear presentation of events and a paradoxical plot, and that between narrative focalizalization and textual focalization. According to David Bordwell, the most widespread definition of linearity is when the successive events of A, B and C are presented in the narrative in their chronological order. Any other form of their presentation results in a nonlinear narrative. But Másnap is a special type of narrative, which highlights the limitation of such traditional dichotomies, because a consistent order of events cannot be reconstructed. Many critics tried to grasp the core of the film’s narrative by trying to put together the original timeline of events, relying on false indicators of logic and coherence, while they failed to recognize the narrative’s real rhetorical purpose in preventing a consistent and unambiguous plot to be established. The narrative’s complexity lies in the fact that both assumptions – that it depicts a subjective experience of time and a storyworld with strange temporality – are necessary to explain the film’s unusual, fragmented structure and interpret its events. I point out how the film requires us to reinterpret the meanings attached to the familiar techniques of continuity editing and how it converts the practices of the early Nouveau Roman, which marginalizes traditional plot-structures, the notion of character, and conventional descriptions of objects, to interact with a subjective vision governed by a fictional mind.

The Poetics of Place and Space in Michael David Kyazze’s Zimbabwe-Set Novel Rustlings of the Mulberry Tree (2014)

Matatu ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Danson Sylvester Kahyana
Keyword(s):  
Life Events ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Place And Space ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Discursive Strategy ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Mulberry Tree

The essay explores the centrality of place and space in the Ugandan Michael David Kyazze’s Zimbabwe-set Rustlings of the Mulberry Tree (2014), a novel which details the fight against pederasty of some Pentecostal Church pastors. One of the issues examined is why this novel, which is a fictionalized account of real-life events that happened in Uganda, is set in Zimbabwe. I argue that if we look at Zimbabwe not just as a geographical reality—i.e. as a country located in southern Africa—but also as a socio-political reality, then Kyazze’s choice of this country as the setting for his book becomes a discursive strategy to carry across his message to his Ugandan reading public through the refraction of another place that closely resembles Uganda. In other words, through the abuse of office that happens in the fictional Zimbabwe that the author creates, the Ugandan reader is invited to compare and contrast this far-away place with home. Also explored are the ways by which the novel can be read as a battle over the control of space between the accused pastors and government forces as represented by the police.

A Textbook of the Genteel Tradition: Henry Ward Beecher'sNorwood

Prospects ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Henry Nash Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Dime Novels ◽  
Related Series ◽  
Sensation Novel

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner'sThe Wide, Wide World(1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature.

The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
German Film ◽  
Figurative Meaning ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Real Life Setting ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Art Critics

The first German film to excite art critics was simultaneously a milestone in the history of special effects. Der Student von Prag was co-created by some of Germany’s most ardent early cinephiles with the goal to demonstrate the feasibility of film art. Proceeding from techno-romantic assumptions, they construed artistic filmmaking as the articulation of ideas and feelings through the imaginative application of the medium’s technological assets, specifically location shots and trick effects. Consequently, Der Student von Prag depicts the intrusion of an uncanny doppelganger into a real-life setting, the mystical city of Prague. As a vehicle for abstract notions, the horrific double thus bore witness to cinema’s ability to convey figurative meaning and participate in the life of the mind.

Reading for success: the professional plot

2015 ◽  
pp. 169-218
Author(s):  
Helena Michie ◽  
Robyn Warhol
Keyword(s):  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Romance Plot

In the last two chapters we have read some key moments in Scharf’s life with and against two dominant cultural narratives: the romance plot and the differentiation plot. These plots are intimately but complexly related to literary genres– the marriage-plot novel and the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses not so much on a single plot as on a culturally privileged place that has generated a variety of literary plots. By telling the story of Scharf’s relationship with two great country houses only seven miles apart, we cannot help invoking the frisson-inducing spectre of the Gothic and sensation novel and the linked cultural and literary plot of inheritance. Scharf’s relationships with Knole, the home of the Sackville family, and Chevening, the seat of the earls of Stanhope (both located in Sevenoaks, Kent), brought up for us some of the central questions of Gothic and sensation novels: who belongs to the house, and who does not? Who is absorbable into the household, and who, finally, is foreign to it and must be thrust out into a different space, whether that be a prison, an asylum or another country?1

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