Hippos, billiards, and black boxes

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Cornelia Ruhe
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Black Boxes ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Individual

The article analyses the literary representation of traumatic memory in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011). It shows how different angles of interpretation that allow for a comprehensive understanding of the whole novel are already succinctly encoded in the first scene, a scene that has to be decoded like a palimpsest in order to present not only the individual and psychological trauma the protagonist suffered after becoming the accidental victim of a shootout, but also the collective and cultural trauma of Colombia’s recent history of violence. It is shown that the novel, whose narrator used to play billiards, is structured like a game of carom billiards, thus linking otherwise unrelated people and events through a series of successive collisions, directly or indirectly, via the rail cushions.

scholarly journals Between Social Utopia and Totalitarian Reality: “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-89
Author(s):  
Vadym Vasylenko
Keyword(s):  
Milky Way ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Social Utopia

The paper considers the novel “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora’s literary process. The focus is on the issues of relations between fiction and documentary writing, the individual and collective experiences. The literary Kyiv, being one of the central images in Dokiia Humenna’s novel, appears not only as a page from individual or national histories, a sample of the Kyiv text in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose, but also as a generalization based on such texts and made due to various forms of intertextuality, which absorb the history and atmosphere of the Kyiv 1920s. The problem of interrelations between the writer and government, art, politic, and ideology is one of the most essential in the novel: Dokia Humenna reveals various aspects of the writer’s life and work in conditions of the totalitarian state and culture – from suicide to madness, from resistance to adaptation and collaboration. A future person and society in “Children of Milky Way” are represented in a commune. The histories of the two characters-antipodes Taras Saragola and Seraphym Carmalita are connected to its progress and decline; in the world of totalitarian repressions and control they choose different life strategies and roles. The memory about Soviet terror and repressions, as well as the Holodomor-genocide, “killing the Ukrainian peasantry as a foundation of the nation and destructing intellectuals as a brain of the nation” is important in the novel. The history of collectivization is related to the traumatic memory of the serfdom times, which affects  the second and third generations and deepens the trauma caused by disintegration of a family, destruction of the patriarchal peasant world. This process was accompanied by desacralization of the Father’s figure as a personification of power, by infantilization of masculinity. The writer associates totalitarian reality with the metaphor of Night, which acquires different ambiguous meanings in the Ukrainian anti-totalitarian discourse.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

Se kép, se hang?

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miklós Takács
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
German Sociologist ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Title Character ◽  
Do So

Sebald’s novel Austerlitz can be considered a „trauma novel” not only for a narratological reason (that is, because it reflects upon the non-representability of trauma on the level of words), but also because it reveals the impossibility of depicting a past memory with pictures – despite of the fact that both the narrator and the title character are feel impelled to do so. The attitude of the narrator illustrates a phenomenon that the German sociologist Bernhard Giesen describes as the perpetrator’s trauma. According to this theory the individual trauma becomes a collective one in case of the perpetrators. Austerlitz, on the other hand, turns into a medium of the victimes as well. Cultural trauma can also become a part of the personal identity due to certain individuals and media, such as the photography, which is of crucial importance for remembering in the novel. One can describe the sound and picture of the trauma with the term of catachresis. This figure involves the constraint of signifying the non-representability.

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 Ανάπτυξη και εφαρμογή εργαλείων βιοπληροφορικής για τη φυλογενετική ανάλυση και πρόβλεψη της δομής και ρύθμισης της λειτουργίας των πρωτεϊνών

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Αθανασία Παυλοπούλου
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Inflammatory Diseases ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Dna Methyltransferases ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Homologous Proteins ◽  
Plant Dna ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Encoding Genes

In the present thesis, the availability of an increasing number of complete or almostcomplete genomes, including those that were completed recently, enabled the study ofthe evolutionary history of three functionally important protein families: (a) the plant DNAmethyltransferases and (b) the eukaryotic RNA methyltransferases, which are enzymesthat catalyze the transfer of a methyl group to nucleotide sequences, as well as (c) thekallikrein-related peptidases or KLKs, which are trypsin- or chymotrypsin-like serineproteases. The evolutionary relationships of the already known and the novel proteins ofthe three families that were identified here were investigated using phylogenetic trees.Moreover, the secondary and tertiary structures of the homologous proteins wereanalyzed, as well as the structure of the protein-encoding genes, and diagnostic proteinmotifs were constructed based on the sequences of the three enzyme families. Ourresults led to suggestions pertaining to the biological function of the identified novelproteins. In particular, homologous plant DNA methyltransferases and novel eukaryoticRNA methyltransferases were identified in publicly accessible sequence databases.Detailed phylogenetic analysis of plant DNA methyltransferases identified four alreadyknown families and a novel subfamily in addition (Pavlopoulou and Kossida, 2007).Moreover, five distinct eukaryotic RNA methyltransferase subfamilies were identified;apart from the three already known subfamilies (NOP2, NCL1 and YNL022C), onenovel subfamily (RCMT9) and the FMU which hitherto was considered to existexclusively in prokaryotes were also identified (Pavlopoulou and Kossida, 2009).Furthermore, protein fingerprints were constructed from the generic family of RNAmethyltransferases (and the individual subfamilies), which were deposited in thePRINTS database (http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/dbbrowser/PRINTS). We developed the computational program RCMTHMM, in order to discriminate/identify eukaryotic RNAmethyltransferases from other proteins. The RCMTHMM program has been madepublicly available in the URL: http://www.bioacademy.gr/bioinformatics/RCMTHMM.Finally, the evolutionary history of KLKs was reconstructed. Kallikreins are importantproteolytic enzymes which are involved in proteolytic cascade pathways and theirdysregulated expression has been associated with major human pathologies(cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, inflammatory diseases, skindiseases, different cancer types). The prominent feature of the kallikrein family is that itconsists of tandemly and uninterruptedly arrayed genes on a single locus at humanchromosome 19q13.3-13.4. This unique feature was used in order to identify novelKLKs and KLK-like genes/proteins. Previous studies on the evolution of kallikreins wererestricted to mammals and the emergence of the kallikrein genes was suggestedapproximately 150 million years ago. In the present study, homologous novel kallikreinprotein sequences were detected in silico in the genomes of various species. For thefirst time, novel KLK orthologues were identified in reptiles, aves and amphibia, whichallowed us to trace the evolutionary origin of kallikreins 330 million years ago. Inaddition, apart from the 15 already known KLK genes (KLK1-15), three novel memberswere identified (orphan Klks). All the defining structural features which are related to thecatalytic activity of KLKs were found to be conserved in the novel KLK proteinsequences. Of particular interest, the synteny of the KLK-encoding genes was analyzedand it was shown that these genes are co-localized in contiguous, uninterrupted clustersmaintaining the same orientation in all species under investigation. We suggest that aseries of gene duplication and mutation events gave rise to the family of KLK enzymesand KLKs have co-evolved with their specific substrates (Pavlopoulou et al., 2010).

scholarly journals Some Endangered Feeling

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 150 (01) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Nancy Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Recent Trend ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Human Motivation ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Behavior

This essay sees the recent trend in novels that feature damaged, partial, or wayward protagonists as the ascent of a tradition of formal outliers as old as the novel itself to a position of dominance. Rather than formulate a self-contained individual capable of defending itself against whatever forces of nature or society might disperse and refigure it, this other tradition gave into those forces, releasing human subjectivity from the confines of the self-regulating individual. Why now? How does this major turn in the history of the novel contribute to the current reconsideration of human motivation and behavior in light of affect theory? If Robinson Crusoe provided a bellwether for the individual to come, then what can the damaged protagonist of Tom McCarthy's 2005 novel Remainder tell us about the selves we are likely to become?

scholarly journals Teju Cole's Nigeria and the open cities of New York and Brussels

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
The City

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.

‘Always Returning from It’: Neoliberal Capitalism, Retrospect, and Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Sharae Deckard
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Totality ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Structural Adjustment Programmes

This article contemplates the question of the afterwardly through a reading of Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). I argue that in Brief History, anxieties about the inability to summon a future beyond the present – to know a world beyond neoliberal capitalism – are formally generative, providing the literary and cultural material for experimentation. Far from having exhausted the potential of the literary, the novel instead insists on the vitality of counter-hegemonic representation of the rise of the neoliberal world-system, and the capacity to resurrect the ‘not-known’ social totality of an earlier historical event even as it simultaneously struggles to imagine potentialities of collective agency in the present. James constructs a retrospective history of the aftermath of the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley, reinterpreted from the standpoint of the twenty-first century in order to narrate not only the individual traumas incurred by the event, but in order to rematerialise a collective history of the social, systemic, and inter-state violence perpetrated by the neoliberal turn of capitalist accumulation in the Caribbean. In particular, the novel offers a hemispheric view of the complex historical causality of the political destabilisation of Caribbean and Latin American states through CIA-sponsored drug and arms trafficking, the exploitation of extractivist resource regimes, and the economic imposition of structural adjustment programmes.

scholarly journals A poeticised indulgence. “The Beginning” by Andrzej Szczypiorski: A story of success

2021 ◽  
pp. 346-364
Author(s):  
Irina E. Adel'gejm
Keyword(s):  
Great Difficulty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Bright Field ◽  
National Tradition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
The Individual

The article dwells upon the reception of the novel “The Beginning” (“The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman”) by Andrzej Szcypiorski. The success of the book turned out to be an extremely clear evidence of the then state of the Polish society in terms of the attitude to the problem of participation / non-participation of Poles in the fate of Jews during the Holocaust and the development of a language adequate to this trauma. The reception of the novel once again showed that the sale of book products directly depends on its ability to indulge the requirements of a wide segment of consumers — but this does not necessarily apply to low genres. Szczypiorski’s “The Beginning” was the first artistic step in a public discussion concerning probably the most painful story in the history of Poland. The historical truth associated with it, on being silenced for decades, makes its way into the bright field of consciousness, even though with great difficulty and provoking resistance in various circles of the society. The experience of shame is hardly included into the baggage of memory, since it does not create a positive image of society and the individual as a part of it, and therefore any nation state seeks to suppress the memory of events that violate the declared commonality of the national tradition. However, the writer offers the society — which latently feels ethical discomfort, but in fact is not ready neither to revise the idea of itself as of a solely heroic victim of history, nor to reflect on the discourse of Polish patriotism, or to experience the emotion of collective shame — the illusion of moral self-purification and mourning for the exterminated Jewish population of Poland to soothe the conscience.

scholarly journals Toni Morrison's Beloved

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Memory And Trauma ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
The Individual

Since its publication in 1987, this novel by Morrison has spurred an enormous wave of critical responses and interpretations. Undoubtedly, the most challenging aspect to any critic is the fact that Beloved rigorously defies hermeneutic foreclosures. I choose to read the novel as a key text which throws light upon liminal psychic experiences by using psychoanalysis and especially Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject, as well as the narratological approach of Bakhtin. Morrison deals with the problem of human survival on two levels, thus bridging the gap between historical narrative and personal history. One of these levels is the level on which the author makes a subversive record of the history of survival-in-suffering, and relates the communal history. The second level is the level of depiction of survival in the history-of-suffering, that is, each individual's history. Through analysis of the issues of language, memory, trauma, and the unconscious I will try to show how memory and trauma are both personal and communal, and how they shape - through language - the psychohistory of the individual.

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