scholarly journals Critical Dystopia: Local Narrative in the Threshold in Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-194
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
System Structure ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Critical Orientation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Knowledge Memory ◽  
Critical Dystopia

This study is an exploration of critical dystopia within a postmodern context. Literary and historical viewpoints associate dystopia with the failed utopia of twentieth-century totalitarianism manifested in regimes of extreme coercion, inequality, and slavery. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, of whose perspective this study makes use, theorize that critical dystopia provides a potential for change through rejecting the traditional dystopian ending marked by the subjugation of the individual. Problematizing critical dystopia further, the study proposes that the critical orientation of this sub-genre originates mainly from the “local narrative” of a subject whose agency generates from his position in the “threshold” between those in and under control, combined with the “counter-conducts” he uses to acquire knowledge, memory, and awakened consciousness. As a full agent, the subject resists the “utopian” “metanarrative” of an oppressive system/structure and offers possibilities of meaning in a process of “différance” which entails a potential for change. This proposition is clarified through the close reading of Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia (2011; first published in Arabic in 2008). The novel is discussed as a critical dystopian text in which Gaber, the subject in the “threshold,” opposes the totalitarian regime of Utopia in his “local narrative.”

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

scholarly journals THE PHENOMENON OF DISRUPTED COMMUNICATION IN THE NOVEL “EFFI BRIEST” BY THEODOR FONTANE AND IN THE FILM ADAPTATION BY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER: SPEECH AND GESTURE

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-72
Author(s):  
Александра Владимировна Елисеева
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theodor Fontane ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Effi Briest

The subject of this article’s comparative intermedial analysis is the phenomenon of disrupted communication in the novel by the German writer Theodor Fontane “Effi Briest” (1895) and in the film adaptation of this work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder “Fontane Effi Briest” (1974). The article consists of five parts: 1) introduction; 2) analysis of dialogues in Fontane’s novel; 3) description of the means of creating the effect of disrupted communication in Fassbinder’s film; 4) comparative analysis of some fragments of two works by the method of close reading; 5) conclusions. Methodologically, the research is based on the achievements of the theory of communication, carpalistics, comparative and intermedial approaches to the study of film adaptations. The main point of the article is that the effect of disrupted communication, which is observed in numerous dialogues of Fontane’s novel, is also created by visual means in Fassbinder’s film, among which a significant place is occupied by a gesture. The gesture of turning away deserves special attention: the characters of the film turn away from each other, turn their backs to the interlocutor and the viewer, turn to their reflection. The unconventionality and intensity of such gestures accentuate the problematic nature of communication between the characters. This structure, peripheral in Fontane’s work, becomes central in the film of Fassbinder, grasping the viewers’ attention. In this regard, the article adds to a traditional discussion about the hierarchical relationship between a literary text and its film adaptation.

scholarly journals Central Asian Social Types as an Orientalism Pattern in Leonid Solovyov’s Prose

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Eleonora F. Shafranskaya ◽  
Tatyana V. Volokhova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Cultural Methods ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

The literary work of the Russian writer Leonid Solovyov (1906-1962) was widely known in the Soviet period of the twentieth century - but only by means of the novel dilogy about Khoja Nasreddin. His other stories and essays were not included in the readers repertoire or the research focus. One of the reasons for this is that the writer was repressed by Stalinist regime due to his allegedly anti-Soviet activities. In the light of modern post-Orientalist studies, Solovyovs prose is relevant as a subcomponent of Russian Orientalism both in general sense and as its Soviet version. The Oriental stories series, which is the subject of this article, has never been the object of scientific research before. The authors of the article are engaged, in a broad sense, in identifying the features of Solovyovs Oriental poetics, and, narrowly, in revealing some patterns of the Central Asian picture of the world. In particular, the portraits of social and professional types, met by Solovyov there in 1920-1930, are presented. Some of them have sunk into oblivion, others can be found today, in the XXI century. Comparative, typological and cultural methods are used in the interdisciplinary context of the article.

scholarly journals Bernard Cohen’s Snowdome: somewhere in a postmodern time

2007 ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Andrés Romero Jódar
Keyword(s):  
Space Dimension ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The City

Occidental societies, according to certain visions of a postmodern future as reflected in literature and arts, are heading towards a dystopian decadent world order. It is inside this perspective that I place the following essay with the aim to analyse the representation of Postmodernism and Postmodernity in Bernard Cohen’s experimental work, Snowdome. This novel can be conceived as a complex portrayal of contemporary existence and life in the city. By means of three different narrations and two stories separated by the unstable boundary of time, Cohen depicts contemporary Sidney from a nightmarish present of noise that leads to the complete isolation of the subject in a near future. The novel emphasises the multiplicity of information in contemporary society and the way in which that information becomes a constant noise flooding the city. The individual is unable to grasp a bit of that “pure reality” outside the simulacrum offered by the media and by the terrifying museum. Sidney and Australia become, in Cohen’s work, a prolongation of contemporary North-American invasive culture, based on the power of the TV screen and the falsehood of simulacrum, whereas individuals are plunged into a new time-space dimension which is placed somewhere in a postmodern time.

Motyw choroby i dysfunkcji w powieści Marii Matios Słodka Darusia

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Marta Zambrzycka
Keyword(s):  
Economic Condition ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Dimension ◽  
Individual Human

The text concerns the subject of the disease in Ukrainian literature based on the novel by Maria Matios Sweet Darusia. The novel was published in 2003, has received many awards and is one of the most famous Ukrainian novels of the last decades. Many Ukrainian literary scholars have written about this novel, including Sofi a Filonenko, Jaroslaw Holoborodko, Nila Zborowska and Tamara Hundorowa. Maria Matios analyzes in Sweet Darusia an illness as a metaphor for social and cultural phenomena. In the fi rst part of my paper, I analyse the metaphor of a disease and dysfunction in Ukrainian literature. The second part of the text is about a disease as a consequence of the traumatic experience of the heroine, in which Maria Matios illustrates the problems of memory of the Ukrainian nation. Diseases, dysfunctions, and pathological states are quite popular motifs in the Ukrainian prose of the independence period. They appear, among others, in the texts of Yuri Andrukhovych, Stepan Procuik, Oksana Zabuzko, Yuri Gudz, and Yuri Izdryk. All mentioned authors combine a state of disease with the mental, political and economic condition of post-Soviet society. In Ukrainian prose, the disease is a posttraumatic symptom, manifested in both the individual plan – in the hero’s body and psyche – and also with a broader, over-individual dimension, allowing to diagnose the condition of post-totalitarian space residents. In the novel Sweet Darusia, physical suff ering and illness of the main character is an image of a historical trauma experienced by totalitarian society. The illness in this novel is the starting point for self-refl ection and the stimulus to construct new identifi cation, basing on what is individual, human, intimate but often painful and difficult to accept.

scholarly journals Foucault’un İktidar Görüşleri Işığında Erdal Öz’ün Yaralısın Romanı / Yaralisin, the Novel by Erdal Oz, in the Light of Foucault’s Power Theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 564
Author(s):  
Koray Üstün
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
New Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Power Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>In the light of the power concepts theorized by Michel Foucault, this article investigates Erdal Oz's novel Yaralisin (You’re Wounded). Foucault’s power structure that systematized in Subject and Power (1961), History of Sexuality (1984), Birth of Prison (1975), The Birth of Biopolitics (2004), has similarities with crime production that the novel reflects. Accordingly, individuals are being standardized in the prison through programs, strategies and technics that the power structure determined. In this process, there is no direct enforcement on the individual. The power structure connects the individual to itself through knowledge and body. In Oz’s novel the subject depending on space changing are being standardized and transformed into the “Nuri” character, as we read in the text. At the base of becoming standard individual through lost of identity, there is crime production. As for crime production, it takes shape in accordance with space. In the novel, space dependent suffering, inflicted on individuals, places the subject on a hierarchical plane, as Foucault has also indicated, and brings an end to existence. The power structure, cutting off the individual from his private space, taking him first into the interrogation room, and then to the prison, has made him a part of the system and has objectified him. The digestive effect of the power structure has become even more concrete with the presence of the second person narrator within the narrative plane; depersonalization has taken place within the new order.</p><p><strong>Öz</strong></p><p>Bu makalede Michel Foucault’un kuramsallaştırdığı iktidar kavramı ışığında Erdal Öz’ün <em>Yaralısın</em> romanı incelenmiştir. Foucault’nun <em>Özne ve İktidar </em>(1961),<em> Cinselliğin Tarihi </em>(1984)<em>, Hapishanenin Doğuşu </em>(1975)<em>, Biyopolitikanın Doğuşu</em> (2004) gibi kitaplarında sistemleştirdiği iktidar, romanda aktarılan suç üretimi ile paralellik taşımaktadır. Bireyler, iktidar tarafından belirlenen program, strateji ve tekniklerle hapishanelerde tek tipleştirilmektedir. Bu süreçte bireyler üzerine doğrudan bir yaptırım uygulanmaz; iktidar, bilgi ve beden yönetimi üzerinden bireyi kendine bağlar. Öz’ün romanında da uzamsal değişimlere bağlı olarak tekil özneler, tek tipleştirilerek metindeki karşılığıyla “Nuri”lere dönüşür. Bireyin kendi kimliğini yitirerek tek tipleşmesinin temelinde suç üretimi vardır. Suç üretimi ise uzama göre şekillenir. Romanda uzama göre değişen çektirilen azaplar, Foucault’un da belirttiği gibi özneyi hiyerarşik düzleme yerleştirir ve varoluşu sona erdirir. İktidar, özneyi kişisel mekânından ayırıp önce sorgu odasına ardından da hapishaneye götürerek onu düzenin bir parçası hâline getirmiş ve nesneleştirmiştir. İktidarın sindirici etkisi, anlatı düzlemindeki ikinci tekil anlatıcının varlığıyla daha da somutlaşmış; kurulan düzen içerisinde özne yitimi gerçekleşmiştir. </p>

scholarly journals Nihilisme identitaire dans Lord of the Flies de William Golding et A Slight Ache de Harold Pinter

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (32) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Maurice Gning
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
William Golding ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Lord Of The Flies ◽  
The Individual

Two works of the mid-twentieth-century British literature form the corpus of this study, namely Lord of the Flies (1954) by the English William Golding and A Slight Ache (1961) by his contemporary and compatriot Harold Pinter. Based on the issue of nihilism as defined by Nietzsche and on the poststructuralist theory of the death of the subject, it aims to analyze how the two postmodern writers, Golding and Pinter, stress the emptiness of the human identity resulting from the collapse of the Western culture. The analysis shows that, in order to reveal this identity vacuity, the two authors make use of strategies at first sight different, but that prove to be basically similar. This identity emptiness is beforehand expressed by the emptiness of the fiction space, the isolation of characters and the justified absence of traditional points of reference that could constitute the base of the societies they attempt to form. The predictable collapse of these societies discloses the strange face of the individual behind it, and unveils the kingdom of nothingness foregrounded, in both works, by the image of darkness and chaos.

scholarly journals “It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Leung
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Gestures ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Quest Narrative

Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands as one of the most influential and emblematic novels of the twentieth century. Yet, as the overused adjective “Kafkaesque” suggests, rather than as a work of art in its full complexity, it has all too often been received as an expression of some vaguely felt cultural or psychological malaise—a symbol, perhaps, of all that we do not seem to comprehend, but that nevertheless is felt to haunt and influence us in inexplicable ways. Its plot, however, is both complex and completely unforgettable. A man stands accused of a crime he appears not to have any recollection of having committed and whose nature is never revealed to him. In what may ultimately be described as a tragic quest-narrative, the protagonist’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the system he is facing) progressively leads to increasing confusion before ending with his execution in an abandoned quarry. Josef K., its famous anti-hero, is an everyman faced with an anonymous, inscrutable yet seemingly omnipotent power. For all its fundamental strangeness, the novel seems to address defining concerns of the modern era: a sense of radical estrangement, the belittling of the individual in a bureaucratically controlled mass society, the rise perhaps of totalitarianism, as well as the fearful nihilism of a world apparently abandoned by God....

The good old days?

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Tom Woodin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Older People ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Work Family ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Voice

A significant body of written work was produced by older people in the 1970s and 1980s reflecting back on the early twentieth century. Through the individual voice, wider social contexts were explored. Writers focused upon some key themes in order to achieve this, including childhood, work, family, the individual and politics to achieve this. The insistent belief in care and community in times of hardship is understood as a contradictory structure of feeling which spread widely during this time. Contrary to ideal type definitions of community, a close reading of texts reveals actual meanings and practices which have often been ignored in the historical record. Silences and tensions are also explored.

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