Houses and the Fate of Families : A Comparison of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Author(s):  
Eszter Enikő Mohácsi

In Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” the house where the events unfold is described as a sentient being, and its first description forebodes the occurrence of dark events. In addition, Poe utilizes the house of Usher to show how the fate of the house and its inhabitants are connected. The House of Usher stands for the building itself as well as the family, and Usher himself believes that the house is alive and can also exert its influence on the people living in it. The house of Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is equally significant and is used to symbolize Sutpen’s will to establish his dynasty. The house is furnished luxuriously to establish his reputation in society, and Sutpen finally succeeds in bringing home a wife to the completed house. However, after the war the house is in ruins and Sutpen is unable to defy his fate anymore: he cannot rebuild the house, which – several years later – is burnt down by his own daughter, the partly black Clytemnestra. This paper compares and contrasts the houses and their function in the two works.

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Maria Alice Ribeiro Gabriel

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on North American culture and literature is still a subject of debate in contemporary literary theory. However, Poe’s creative legacy regarding the writings of Miriam Allen Deford remains neglected by the literary critics. Deford’s fiction explored a set of literary genres, such as biography, science fiction, crime and detective short stories. Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article aims to identify similarities between “A Death in the Family” and some of Poe’s works. Drawing on studies by J. T. Irwin, James M. Hutchisson and others, the objective of this paper is to analyze passages from Deford’s tale in comparison with the poetry and fictional prose of Poe. The analysis suggests that Deford’s horror short story “A Death in the Family,” published in 1961, was mostly inspired by Poe’s gothic tales, detective stories, and poems.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomi Arianto

Sepasang Mata Dinaya yang Terpenjara short story expressed various problems related to the imbalance of social structure between women and men in Bali society. This is done in a structured and continuous to become a convention that is rooted down to the smallest social structure in society that is family. From the problems above, the research defined that the social problems present in those literary work included to the scope of sociological problems in literature work. The formulations of the problems in this research are as follows: 1) What is the scope of symbolic violence contained in Sepasang mata dinaya yang terpenjara? 2) How does the symbolic violence forms contained in a short story Sepasang mata dinaya yang terpenjara? To answer the research question, the researcher used literary theory related with the approach of sociology Pierre Bourdieu. The method used in this analysis is qualitative descriptive. The result of the analysis shows that the short story reveals various problems related to the inequality of social structure between women and men in Balinese society which has been formed in a structured and continuous culture that is rooted down to the smallest social structure in the family. From the dichotomy of these structures then arise forms of symbolic violence adopted from Bourdieu’s terminology. This form of symbolic violence is experienced in layers by agents who have more capital and dominate such as the parents of Dinaya, her husband, and the people who apply the patriarchal culture. This form of symbolic violence is reflected in: symbolic violence by parents (including Dinaya's mother) against her child (Dinaya). symbolic violence of an individual Man (Dinaya's husband) against his wife (Dinaya), and Symbolic Violence by Society (cultural norms) on Balinese women.


Author(s):  
Avinash Paliwal

Modern India’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan were officially instituted in 1950. But relations between the people of these countries are civilizational, and based on extensive cultural exchange. Starting with the impact of Rabindranath Tagore’s legendary short story, Kabuliwallah, on India’s imagination of Afghanistan and its people, this chapter offers a long historical view of India-Afghanistan relations. Its main focus, however, remains on British India’s approach towards Afghanistan and the 1947-1979 phase when India fought three wars with Pakistan and one with China. This historical overview allows for the teasing out the aforementioned drivers of India’s Afghanistan policy.


Author(s):  
Timothy Pawl
Keyword(s):  

One way of putting powers to work is to use them to ground (at least some) modal truths. One might hold that truths of possibility are true because of the powers of objects. For instance, that it is possible that one more person be in this room is true because of the ambulatory powers of the people in the adjoining rooms. That it is possible that Slow Steve run a fifteen-minute mile is true because of the locomotive powers that Steve has (perhaps along with other powers, such as his respiratory powers). Call the family of stronger or weaker views which hold that possibility claims are true because of powers the ‘Powers Accounts of Possibility,’ or ‘Powers Accounts’ for short. Call a proponent of a Powers Account a ‘Powers Accountant.’ In this paper I present nine objections to Powers Accounts of Possibility and show how a Powers Accountant can respond to them. I begin by providing an exceedingly strong Powers Account and offering three objections to it. The objections will prove useful for forming a more moderate Powers Account. I then subject the more moderate Powers Account to six further objections. In the end, I vindicate a Powers Account of Possibility against all nine objections.


Author(s):  
Peter Lurie

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.


Author(s):  
Baochang Gu

AbstractThis commentary is intended to take China as a case to discuss the mission of the family planning program under low fertility scenario. After a brief review of the initiation of family planning program in the 1970s, as well as the reorientation of family planning program since ICPD in 1994, it will focus on the new mission for the family planning program under low fertility scenario in the twenty-first century, in particular concerning the issue of induced abortion among the others. Given the enormous evidence of unmet needs in reproductive health as identified in the discussion, it is argued that family planning programmes are in fact even more needed than ever before under low-fertility scenario, and should not be abandoned but strengthened, which clearly has nothing to do to call back to the program for population control in the 1970s–1980s, and nor even go back to the program for “two reorientations” in the 1990s, but to aim to serving the people to fulfill their reproductive health and reproductive rights in light of ICPD and SDGs, and to become truly integral component of “Healthy China 2030” Strategy.


2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Seth Tweneboah ◽  
Edmond Akwasi Agyeman

Abstract This paper interrogates an unexamined component of the religion-migration nexus in Ghana. Using African Traditional Religion as a case in point, the paper examines the function shrines play in sustaining youth migration to Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe. The paper relies on interviews and fieldtrips to migrant sending communities in the Nkoranza area of the Bono East region of central Ghana. The paper gives an account of the daily realities of prospective migrants, returnees and their families. Among other key findings, it is shown that there is an intricate connection between youth migration, the family system and the deities in sustaining the trans-Saharan migration. This migration, we observe, has become a livelihood strategy, the perpetuation of which reassures the survival of not only the people, but their gods as well.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariwan Hamarashid ◽  
Abdul Abdalla ◽  
Hama Rashid

All political authorities to strengthen the pillars of their power rely on a set of foundations and principles in order to justify their strength and ability. Likewise, the Umayyads wanted to use various methods, especially if we knew that the Umayyad's opponents were strong in terms of their legitimacy and personality, because they were from the family of the Messenger of God. This is what made the Umayyads to search for legitimacy. One of the techniques they used is the ideas of determinism and political determinism. And the summery of the idea is, that man is a transcendent power and it is God who imposed everything on them, as well as the Umayyad's political and authority rule within that inevitable scope, so the people must accept it, and submit to it, because their authority was derived from God. To impose this idea, the Umayyads benefited from the roots of that idea that is prevalent among Muslims and had many followers who defended it.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-265
Author(s):  
Dwi Rini Sovia Firdaus ◽  
Djuara Lubis ◽  
Endriatmo Soetarto ◽  
Djoko Susanto

The people of West Sumatra, who have been adhering to the Minangkabau matrilineal cultural tradition, are currently experiencing cultural decay. Many studies speculate that the unique Minangkabau culture will not be too much disturbed by the influx of globalization because in essence the only part that will be eroded is the peripheral part, while the core will remain preserved for all time. This study photographed the people of Tanjung Raya District based on existing family typologies, then saw a shift in norms passed on to teenagers using the six Hofstede cultural dimensions. This study surveyed five types of families with calculations using a simple addition operation. The results of the questionnaire were made high and low criteria, then presented in cobweb graphical form. The assessment indicators are based on the six dimensions of Hofstede's culture. Shifting the teachings of exemplary teachings from Minangkabau culture is determined using the ANOVA test. The results of this study are to map the portrait of Minangkabau culture according to Hofstede and a portrait of each of Hofstede's dimensions in each type of family in Tanjung Raya District. From there, it can be seen how far away the approach of the values taught by the family towards Minangkabau culture is approaching.


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