scholarly journals Dancing in the Dark: Immersion and Self-Reflexivity in Nancy Huston's Danse noire

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-310
Author(s):  
Diana Holmes

Nancy Huston's Danse noire (2014) is a formidably complex novel: multilingual, composed throughout of three connected but separately told stories, highly self-reflexive in its intra-diegetic presentation of the narrative as film scenario and its use of capoeira as framing device and analogy. Some critics and readers have found this intricate structure excessive and confusing. This article, on the other hand, situates the novel within Huston's distinctive project as a contemporary French novelist who is as committed to immersive story-telling as she is to self-aware celebration of narrative form. It argues that Danse noire demonstrates fiction's power to carry us in imagination through space and time and into the subjective worlds of others, even as it invites awareness of narrative form itself. Moreover, this combination of entrancing story-telling and self-reflexivity is central to what Huston convincingly maintains is the ethical function of the novel.

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Andreas Eckart

AbstractWe study to what extent the Milky Way was used as an orientation tool at the beginning of the Islamic period covering the 8th to the 15th century, with a focus on the first half of that era. We compare the texts of three authors from three different periods and give detailed comments on their astronomical and traditional content. The text of al-Marzūqī summarises the information on the Milky Way put forward by the astronomer and geographer ʾAbū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī. The text makes it clear that in some areas the Milky Way could be used as a geographical guide to determine the approximate direction toward a region on Earth or the direction of prayer. In the 15th century, the famous navigator Aḥmad b. Māǧid describes the Milky Way in his nautical instructions. He frequently demonstrates that the Milky Way serves as a guidance aid to find constellations and stars that are useful for precise navigation on land and at sea. On the other hand, Ibn Qutayba quotes in his description of the Milky Way a saying from the famous Bedouin poet Ḏū al-Rumma, which is also mentioned by al-Marzūqī. In this saying the Milky Way is used to indicate the hot summer times in which travelling the desert was particularly difficult. Hence, the Milky Way was useful for orientation in space and time and was used for agricultural and navigational purposes.


Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 235
Author(s):  
Fadlil Munawwar Manshur

This paper discusses the theory advanced by Bakhtin about dialogism and methodological concepts. This theory to formulate the concept of human existence on the other, which is based on the idea that humans judge him from the viewpoint of others. Humans understand the moments of consciousness and take it into account through the eyes of others. According to this theory, the essence of human life is a dialogue. The Method of heteroglossia talks about signs in the universe of individuals because of the word "heteros" means "other" or different, while "glossia" means the tongue or language. In this method mentioned that people are saying needs to be heard, and the author also has the same rights that words need to be heard. A word is born from dialogue to address the problems of life. On the other hand, Bakhtin sees carnival method has spawned a new literary genre, the polyphonic novel. The polyphonic novel is a novel that is characterized by a plurality of voice or consciousness, and the voices or the overall awareness dialogical. Polyphonic essentially a "new theory of authorial viewpoint". Polyphonic appear in fiction when the position of the author freely allowed to interact with the characters. The characters in the novel are freely polyphonic appear to argue with each other and even with the author.


Author(s):  
Elke Van Nieuwenhuyze

The aim of this article is to trace the referential value of juffrouw Lina (1888)as part of its narrative organisation by means of the narrativist historical theoryof Frank Ankersmit. This starting point demands a confrontation of thisnaturalist novel by Marcellus Emants with the contemporary medical biographyof the French writer and politician Chateaubriand by the Belgian physicianErnest Masoin on the one hand and with some case studies of hystericsby the famous French docter Jean-Martin Charcot on the other hand. lt willbe argued that the narrativity of the novel plays a key-role in the constructionof its referential value on various levels.


Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Bystrova ◽  

The paper examines two key novels by Sandro Veronesi, the modern Italian writer, Calm Chaos (2006) and Colibri (2020). Both novels were awarded Italy’s main literary prize, the Premio Strega, which is a unique precedent. The relevance of the article comes from the high demand for research on contemporary Italian literature on the one hand and from the novelty of the proposed interpretation for the novel Calm Chaos on the other hand. For the first time, the protagonist of Calm Chaos, Pietro Palladini, is presented not as a preacher of eternal values, returning the reader to the theme of knowing oneself and the surrounding world, but as a mad visionary with clear signs of psychopathy and schizophrenia. The analysis of Veronesi’s latest novel Colibri reveals the character’s evolution and the writer’s narrative manner. The theme of psychiatry in the life of a modern person appears to be one of the key ones in Veronesi’s work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-37
Author(s):  
Mona Beniwal ◽  
◽  
Dr. Anshu Raj Purohit

The novel presents a variety of characters, each has his own journey. Since the novel puts forth the time of partition (Indo- Bangladesh) and time after it, characters can be seen with traits which are both traditional and modern. It is due to their upbringing and values that their mind has certain inclinations. Because of her traditional values Thamma shows repulsion towards Ila and Tridib. The later ones on the other hand has their own personal set of beliefs to live their lives. Such disparity in thoughts gives a hint of clashes between them in many parts of the novel. However, even the traditional characters carry a spirit of freedom and modernity within them. Also modern characters have an urge to cling to their roots too.


1996 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-110
Author(s):  
Pamela Dalziel
Keyword(s):  

The selectivity and obliquity of Arthur Hopkins's illustrations for the 1878 Belgravia serialization of The Return of the Native result in a distorted reading of Hardy's text, especially through their avoidance of the passionate and subversive and their tendency to represent the novel as substantially more conventional than it actually is. Hopkins's Thomasin and Venn are represented as unambiguously and conventionally "good"; there is no visual acknowledgment of the more radical Thomasin or the more threatening Venn. Wildeve is essentially avoided as a pictorial subject, as is the problematic Clym of the novel's final books. Eustacia, on the other hand, figures prominently in the illustrations, initially-in keeping with her departure from hegemonic notions of viruous femininity-as a somewhat "masculine" figure. Follwoing Hardy's insistence that she be rendered more conventionally attractive. Hopkins rather incongruously transforms her into an object of desire, only to revert in the final illustration to his less than sympathetic reading: refusing to participate in the erotics of death of Hardy's text, Hopkins punishes the "fallen woman" by reducing her to a misshapen corpse. Hardy's essential toleration-and in some instances actual encouragement-of what now seem "unrepresentative" representations of his work appears to have been related to his own anxiety about the novel's success and based on the recognition that the very conventionality of the illustrations could be a valuable ally in his struggle to render publishable a text that pushed persistently against the limits of the then acceptable.


2000 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Tamura

In this experiment with a Novel Label Task, 48 children ages 5 to 6 years were given a novel word for a target item, e.g., a dog. They were also given one of two types of featural information for the target item, a feature naturally common to animals, i.e., “This has a heart inside,” or an accidental feature uncommon to animals, i.e., “This gets a splinter.” As a result, the number of children who interpreted the novel word at the superordinate level (animal) increased significantly when they were given the feature naturally common to animals. On the other hand, there was no significant increase for an accidental feature. Further, the children were given the instruction that all animal items in this task had the same featutes as the target item. As a result, although the number of children who interpreted the novel word at the superordinate level (animal) increased significantly when they were given both the feature naturally common to animals and also the accidental feature, there were more when the instruction was with the feature naturally common to animals than with the accidental feature. The findings were discussed in relation to the factors corresponding to young children's interpretation of a novel word at the superordinate level.


PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 1644-1648
Author(s):  
Albert Chesneau

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila S. Boulos ◽  
Hoda A. Abdel-Malek ◽  
Naglaa F. El-Sayed

2-Arylidenebenzosuberones react with a Wittig-Horner reagent in the presence of sodium hydride as a base to give the novel dimethyl (4-(4-methoxyphenyl)-2-oxa-2,3,4,5,6,7-hexahydrobenzo- [6,7]cyclohepta[1,2-b]pyran-3-yl)phosphonate. On the other hand, 6,7-dihydrobenzo[6,7]cyclohepta- [1,2-b]pyran-2(5H)-ones were isolated from the reaction of 2-arylidenebenzosuberones withWittig- Horner reagents using alcoholic sodium alkoxide. The reaction of 2-arylidenebenzosuberones with trialkyl phosphites affords the alkyl phosphonate derivatives. Tris(dialkylamino)phosphines react with 2-arylidenebenzosuberones to give the oxaphospholanoxide products. 2-Arylidenebenzosuberones react with Lawesson’s reagent to yield the corresponding dimers. Some of the prepared products were screened for antitumor activity


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