scholarly journals "Blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the Twentieth Century”: Counterculture Resistance and the Wilderness Condition in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America // Resistencia contracultural en Trout Fishing in America

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Jill E Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Specific Setting ◽  
Richard Brautigan ◽  
Pastoral Mode ◽  
Drop Outs

Abstract Many critics consider Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America a coming-of-age account of a wayward, outsider narrator discovering that the pastoral mode is no longer viable in mid-century America.  However, these readings often ignore Brautigan’s explicit political affinity and his conscious engagement with a specific setting—southern California in the mid- to late-60s.  This paper explores Brautigan’s Counterculture ethic, which critiques the mindless prevalence of mainstream, middle-class America’s habit of consumption, production, and destruction of the natural world.  Linking the lack of individual free will with the postwar technology boom, Brautigan engages with the natural landscape and in communities of one’s own making.  As a result, the novel is peopled with alienated drop-outs, the victims of America’s technocracy.  The “trout fishing in America” refrain, with its many incarnations, is one of the modes through which these characters’ operate within Counterculture principles, namely through their self-imposed poverty and criticism of the way America uses and abuses its citizens and the natural world.   Resumen Muchos críticos consideran la novela de Richard Brautigan Trout Fishing in America (1967) un relato iniciático de un narrador forastero y obstinado  que descubre que el modo pastoril ya no es viable en los Estados Unidos de mediados de siglo. Sin embargo, estas lecturas a menudo ignoran la afinidad política explícita de Brautigan y su compromiso consciente con un escenario específico - la California sureña de los últimos años de los años 60. Este ensayo explora la ética contracultural de Brautigan, que critica la preponderancia ciega de la clase media de los Estados Unidos y su hábito de consumo, producción y la destrucción del mundo natural. Conectando la falta de voluntad propia con el "boom" tecnológico posterior a la segunda guerra mundial, Brautigan se implica con el paisaje natural y en las comunidades de creación propia. Como resultado, la novela está llena de  bohemios alienados, las víctimas de la tecnocracia estadounidense. El refrán "trout fishing in America," con sus muchas encarnaciones, es una de las formas en las que estos personajes actúan dentro de los principios contraculturales, concretamente  a través de su pobreza auto-impuesta y del criticismo de la manera en que los Estados Unidos usan y abusan de sus ciudadanos y del mundo natural.  

scholarly journals Seeking Wild Eyre: Landscape and the Environment in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre // En busca de la salvaje Eyre: paisaje y medioambiente en Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brönte

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-165
Author(s):  
Jennifer D Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Natural Landscape

Applying techniques from the growing field of ecocriticism, this article uses Jane Eyre to explore a growing environmental awareness among middle-class Victorians and demonstrate how their need to preserve a “wild” or “natural” landscape coincides with ideas of liberty and freedom prevalent in the novel. By looking at Jane’s changing interactions with and interpretations of the natural world, we can gain a better understanding of the value and interpretation of landscape to the Victorians. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s journeys continually lead her to finding a way to balance her human wants and needs with the “wildness” of the natural world.   Resumen   Aplicando técnicas del creciente campo de la ecocrítica, este artículo utiliza Jane Eyre para explorar una conciencia ambiental cada vez mayor entre los victorianos de clase media y demostrar cómo su necesidad de preservar un paisaje "salvaje" o "natural" coincide con las ideas de libertad en la novela. Al observar las interacciones cambiantes de Jane con el mundo natural y sus interacciones con éste, podemos comprender mejor el valor del paisaje y cómo se interpretaba en la época victoriana. En Jane Eyre, los viajes de Jane continuamente la llevan a encontrar una manera de equilibrar sus deseos y necesidades humanos con el "salvajismo" del mundo natural.

The Right to Dream: Gender, Modernity, and the Problem of Class in Kate O'Brien's Bourgeois Bildungsromane

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aristocratic Culture ◽  
Modern Form

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.

scholarly journals “Same Old Ed, . . . Uncommitted”: BMW Socialism and Post-Roguery in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Early Fiction

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 118-136
Author(s):  
Jordan Bolay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Counter Narrative

In this paper I assess how Guy Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction criticizes the class-based and civil movements of post-1960s Saskatchewan through the recurring character of Ed. The protagonist of “Man Descending” and “Sam, Soren, and Ed” from Man Descending, the uncollected “He Scores! He Shoots!” and the novel My Present Age, Ed both condemns and epitomizes the contaminated and seductive gestures of the movements’ influences and enterprises. Vanderhaeghe deploys layers of social criticism: the first comments on the new urban progressive generation—the BMW socialists—while another manifests a counter-criticism that comments on those who challenge social progress, questioning their motives and the credibility of their critique. But what is a BMW socialist? A sociopolitical chameleon hiding behind pretense? Ed describes such a creature as a former “nay-sayer and boycotter” who “intended to dedicate his life to eternal servitude in a legal-aid clinic,” but then “affluence did him in” and now “his ass [is] cupped lovingly in the contoured leather seats of his BMW” (Man Descending 237–38). Vanderhaeghe’s early works criticize the contemporary middle class and progressivist movements of the second half of the twentieth century through this sociopolitical rogue—who in turn becomes a post-rogue. For Ed is ironically undercut by a counter-narrative that is often sub-textual, resulting in a fascinating appraisal of social ignorance, immobility, and unproductivity rather than of any specific ideology.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

The Formation of a Budding Man Alone: The God Boy (Murray Reece, 1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Value System ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Family

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.

Patterns: Rosamond Lehmann

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann

This chapter analyzes the role of fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1932 coming-of-age novel Invitation to the Waltz. Reading the novel alongside such fashion magazines as Vogue, it demonstrates Lehmann’s awareness that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of originality, emphasized the importance of following preconceived (dress) patterns in the successful construction of modern feminine types. Invitation to the Waltz, it argues, opposes the production of patterned types and celebrates difference and disobedience in its stead. At the same time, the novel’s formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes. On closer scrutiny, it is seen to reveal its resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). A tension between imitation and originality determines sartorial fashion choices. This chapter shows that female authorship in the inter-war period was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.

Materializing Ulysses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Perceived Power

This chapter compares the reception of Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses with that of Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of the novel. Although Ulysses had been legally publishable in England for decades, Strick’s film still encountered censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. The chapter argues that Joyce’s novel, for all its obscenity and provocation, mitigated its threat by foregrounding its own printedness, allying its fate to the waning power of print as a bearer of obscenity. Strick’s film, by contrast, activated the perceived power of film. The contrast of the two versions of Ulysses, which are often identical in language, thus offers a valuable window on how obscenity changed across media through the twentieth century. In making this argument, the chapter surveys print strategies of censorship, including the asterisk, and how these strategies operated in a range of works.

Agnes Grey

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Brontë ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Anne Bronte ◽  
Agnes Grey

‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ‘myself at their age’ to win her pupils’ love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ‘unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures’. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.

North and South

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Sally Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Authority ◽  
Industrial Town ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Obedience To Authority

`She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.’ North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots of discontented millworkers through to the unsought passions of a middle-class woman, and from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny, it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Through the story of Margaret Hale, the middle-class southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell skilfully explores issues of class and gender in the conflict between Margaret’s ready sympathy with the workers and her growing attraction to the charismatic mill ownder, John Thornton. This new revised and expanded edition sets the novel in the context of Victorian social and medical debate.

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