scholarly journals THE ABSURDITY OF HUMAN AND REALITY IN THE NOVEL “CATCH-22” OF JOSEPH HELLER

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-31
Author(s):  
Anh Thu Thai

“Catch-22” is considered one of the American writer Joseph Heller’s greatest novels. It was published in 1961. Joseph Heller combined the irrational sensations, the mocking and satirical tones to describe a collapsed and degenerate world in the postmodern condition. Through the living background of an American military unit of World War II, the author reflected some absurd problems such as: the distortion of justice, the influence of greed, and the issue of personal integrity. This article focuses on analyzing the absurdity of character imagery and reality that is automatically accepted and followed in postmodern condition. As a result, readers can gain a deeper insight into the novel and seek empathy in the perception about the absurd, which is becoming normal in recently.

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
SABAH SALIM JABBAR

The paper attempts to address Joseph Heller in his novel, Catch-22 (1961). An examination of the content of the novel in relation to antimilitaristic concepts is a major focus of the paper. The paper depicts various characters in the novel and tries to show how they reflect antimilitarism. The effects of particular behaviors and the major events that take place in the Air Force are discussed in the paper. The story mainly revolves around some airmen who were combatants in World War II. The events discussed in the paper clearly highlight the sentiments held by antimilitarists on war issues. The plot of the novel is sequential and the description of events is comic. The characters represent various characteristics that can be used to develop a plot on antimilitarism. The paper bases its literature of the aspects of the military that necessitate and justify the rise and development of antimilitarism. Socialism is a notable aspect of antimilitarism while militarism seems to conform to capitalism. From an antimilitaristic perspective, capitalism is characterized by a type of bureaucracy that demoralizes soldiers and promotes individuality within the military. Catch-22 deals with all the militaristic and antimilitaristic factors and events that lead to the same aspects.


Author(s):  
Robert F. Jefferson

The history of the African American military experience in World War II tends to revolve around two central questions: How did World War II and American racism shape the black experience in the American military? And how did black GIs reshape the parameters of their wartime experiences? From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression years of the 1930s, military planners evaluated the performance of black soldiers in World War I while trying to ascertain their presence in future wars. However, quite often their discussions about African American servicemen in the military establishment were deeply moored in the traditions, customs, and practices of American racism, racist stereotypes, and innuendo. Simultaneously, African American leaders and their allies waged a relentless battle to secure the future presence of the uniformed men and women who would serve in the nation’s military. Through their exercise of voting rights, threats of protest demonstration, litigation, and White House lobbying from 1939 through 1942, civil rights advocates and their affiliates managed to obtain some minor concessions from the military establishment. But the military’s stubborn adherence to a policy barring black and white soldiers from serving in the same units continued through the rest of the war. Between 1943 and 1945, black GIs faced white officer hostility, civilian antagonism, and military police brutality while undergoing military training throughout the country. Similarly, African American servicewomen faced systemic racism and sexism in the military during the period. Throughout various stages of the American war effort, black civil rights groups, the press, and their allies mounted the opening salvoes in the battle to protect and defend the wellbeing of black soldiers in uniform. While serving on the battlefields of World War II, fighting African American GIs became foot soldiers in the wider struggles against tyranny abroad. After returning home in 1945, black World War II-era activists such as Daisy Lampkin and Ruby Hurley, and ex-servicemen and women, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Spissu

In the novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), the German writer W. G. Sebald recounts his solitary journey to the town of Suffolk (UK) at the end of his years, while he also reflects on some of the dramatic events that shaped World War II and his personal memories. In this work, he takes on a particular narrative tactic defined by the interaction between the text and images that creates a special type of montage in which he seems to draw from cinematic language. I argue that, drawing on Sebald’s work, we can imagine a form of ethnographic observation that involves the creation of a cinematic map through which to explore the memories and imagination of individuals in relation to places where they live. I explore the day-to-day lived experiences of unemployed people of Sulcis Iglesiente, through their everyday engagement with, and situated perceptions of, their territory. I describe the process that led me to build Moving Lightly over the Earth, a cinematic map of Sulcis Iglesiente through which I explored how women and men in the area who lost their jobs as a result of the process of its deindustrialization give specific meaning to the territory, relating it to memories of their past and hopes and desires for the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 553-564
Author(s):  
Sabina Giergiel

Body, corpse and death in David Albahari’s Gotz and MeyerThe article investigates the broadly understood record of Jewish death that emerges from the text of the Serbian prose writer David Albahari. Emphasizing the dominance of economy in the Nazi system, the author indicates those procedures described in Albahari’s book which justify such an assessment e.g. human reification, the body as debris, technical syntax used by German officials. Additionally, these considerations on death representation are supplemented with an endeavor to establish the Belgrade dwellers’ attitude towards the fortunes of the Jews. According to the author, the novel explicitly marks the spatial opposition enclosure vs. opening, the camp vs. the city center that is reinforced by the river, which during World War II divided the capital into Zemun belonging to the Independent State of Croatia, also the place where the camp was situated and Belgrade’s Serbian center. This demarcation intensifies the victims’ feelings of separation and loneliness, at the same time enabling the capital’s dwellers to occupy a comfortable position of bystanders.  Telo, mrtvac, smrt u romanu Gec i Majer Davida AlbaharijaRad se bavi vidovima smrti u romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija. Pokazuje mehanizme koje potvrđuju opštepoznatu činjenicu da je u nacističkom sistemu dominirala ekonomija. U te mehanizme se ubrajaju, između ostalih: reifikacija čoveka, tretiranje tela kao otpada i tehnička leksika koju upotrebljavaju nemački funkcioneri. Analiza uključuje i pokušaj odgovora na pitanje kakav je bio odnos stanovnika Beograda prema sudbini Jevreja. Istraživanje pokazuje prostornu opoziciju zatvoren i otvoren prostor, logor i centar grada. Nju naglašava reka koja je za vreme Drugog svetskog rata delila srpsku prestonicu na Zemun, gde je bio smešten logor, a koji je pripadao NDH, i srpski centar Beograda. Ova granica je vezana za osećaj separacije i usamljenost žrtava, s jedne starne, i udobnost i bajstander-efekat stanovnika prestonice, s druge strane


Author(s):  
Norma Rudinsky

This paper resulted from an attempt to explore factors determining or underlying the "Marxificalion" of Slovak literature after 1945-- an attempt motivated by a hunch that certain Marxisl-Leninisl principles had provided a different insight into Slovak literature from that provided by the liberal, democratic "aesthetic appreciation" school of criticism in prewar Czechoslovakia. The idea that Slovak literary criticism has thrived, relatively, since World War II is by no means new and was advanced, for example, by emigre crilics.


Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly-individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of World War II. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.


2003 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Joseph G. Gall

With the death of Harold Garnet (‘Mick’) Callan on 3 November 1993, the community of cell biologists lost one of the twentieth century's most profound and colourful students of chromosomes. During his 50-year scientific career the study of chromosomes and genes went from purely descriptive and morphological to deeply analytical and molecular. Steeped by training in the earlier tradition, Callan nevertheless contributed enormously to this revolution with his meticulous studies on the giant chromosomes of amphibians, all the while maintaining that he was a ‘mere cytologist’ on whom much of the molecular analysis was lost. Mick Callan and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends whose careers intersected at many points. We visited and worked in each other's laboratories, we published together, we generated a voluminous correspondence (much of it in the days when letters were handwritten), and our families enjoyed many good times together in Scotland and the USA. My most difficult task in writing this biography has been to extract from the vast amount of public and personal information in my possession those parts of Mick Callan's life and work that will be of chief interest to a broader audience. I have been helped in this by a 30 000-word autobiography written by him near the end of his life, covering the period from his birth in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945. This account provides considerable insight into the factors that shaped his later professional career and is an engrossing account of the life of a boy in prewar England and a young man at Oxford and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the worst days of the war. Callan's autobiography has been deposited in the University library, St Andrews, Scotland.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
David Fitzgerald

The celebrations that took place in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 stood out as the largest seen in the United States since the end of World War II, as hundreds of thousands of troops marched in triumphant parades in almost every major American city and in hundreds of small towns. But the pageantry did not simply celebrate American military and technological prowess. Spectators at these parades also engaged in a novel form of patriotism that emphasized unquestioning support for the troops. Representing a crucial moment in the American public's deepening veneration for U.S. soldiers and veterans, the Gulf War celebrations marked a turning point when the Vietnam-era image of the soldier as a broken or rebellious draftee was finally and purposefully eclipsed by the notion of the volunteer service member as hero.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-234
Author(s):  
Sabine Hirschauer

Drawing on the author’s archival research in Germany and the US, empirical data about US-allied troop sexual violence during post-World War II occupied Germany suggests a complex interplay between gender, security, silence production, and state identity. Through a feminist security studies lens, this article theorizes about an unexplored, obscured form of de-securitization: the unmaking of a security issue or referent object as active silence. De-securitization as silence provides a unique insight into silence production, gender’s normativity, and security. To move beyond de-securitization’s presumed politicization, the argument identifies specific hypervisibilities and new state-self, dominant memory regimes as acts, discursive representations, processes, or incidents of de-securitization – producing and reproducing active silence and facilitating the making of a newly imagined, ‘good’ German state-self.


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