Тhe Forging of the Self – a Universal Alien

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova ◽  

The article examines the first novel of the French writer of Vietnamese origin Anna Moï, which brought her success on the French and world stage. The plot of Black Rice uses a partly autobiographical story set in Saigon during a time of fire and bloodbaths, telling the tale of two sisters, Tan and Tao, who were captured during the siege of Têt and barely managed to survive. The novel discusses issues such as the place of women in history, their positon in society and the tragedy of a nation, it has the ambition to rewrite the story seen from the eyes of a female. Talking about the horror of the fifteen-year-old girl, the systematic harassment of the jailers, the torture, the tiger cages, the reader doesn’t see a victim crushed beyond recognition, but a fighter, a warrior who knows from an early age that they are strong and designed to survive. The uncertainty of the finale and the seemingly paradoxical sadness is the realization of the fact that part of the man himself, of his will to fight, is left behind in time. And yet we have the feeling that we are leaving behind a woman who has gone through inhuman trials, but preserved herself, forged her new self, a universal person, in opposition to the soulless patriarchal world, the daughter of the dragon, ready for new battles, ready to conquer the big world that awaits her.

Author(s):  
Pam Morris

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.


Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.


2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Ciprian Onofrei

"Calamitas terrena or Poena divina: An Eliadian Approach to the Plague in the Novel Sortez vos morts by Bruno Leydet. The article proposes a dichotomous analysis of the outbreak of the Black Plague in Marseille (1720), described by French writer Bruno Leydet in the novel Sortez vos morts, which appeared in 2005. According to the grid established by Mircea Eliade, the analysis is built on two levels: the sacred and the profane. The religious as well as the modern perception of the disease and the use of a relevant lexis allow the bubonic plague to transgress the historical space, passing into the literary one. The plague epidemic in southern France is, in our view, not only a manifestation of the divine will to punish the sinful souls of the dead, but also the incarnation of greed and vicious side of the human being. Keywords: plague, Bruno Leydet, Mircea Eliade, holy, unholy "


Author(s):  
Michael CH Yam ◽  
Ke Ke ◽  
Ping Zhang ◽  
Qingyang Zhao

A novel beam-to-column connection equipped with shape memory alloy (SMA) plates has been proposed to realize resilient performance under low-to-medium seismic actions. In this conference paper, the detailed 3D numerical technique calibrated by the previous paper is adopted to examine the hysteretic behavior of the novel connection. A parametric study covering a reasonable range of parameters including the thickness of the SMA plate, friction coefficient between SMA plate and beam flange and pre-load of the bolt was carried out and the influence of the parameters was characterized. In addition, the effect of the SMA Belleville washer on the connection performance was also studied. The results of the numerical study showed that the initial connection stiffness and the energy-dissipation capacity of the novel connection can be enhanced with the increase of the thickness of the SMA plate. In addition, the initial connection stiffness and energy-dissipation behavior of the novel connection can be improved by increasing the friction coefficient or pre-load of bolts, whereas the increased friction level could compromise the self-centering behavior of the connection. The hysteretic curves of the numerical models of the connection also implied that the SMA washers may contribute to optimizing the connection behavior by increasing the connection stiffness and energy-dissipation capacity without sacrificing the self-centering behavior.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Traber

Herman Melville’s Redburn approaches the topic of corporeal coding via the outer layer of clothing. Throughout the novel, the young protagonist consciously uses clothing as a means of self-representation and expression, deploying fashion to create and position himself in different contexts; for example, taking pride in his ragged clothes amongst well-dressed ship passengers becomes a form of social protest. But Redburn is also used to comic effect because his choices are often based on incorrect assumptions of propriety, such as his notion of the way a sailor is supposed to dress not matching the onboard reality. The rules of appearance that construct and restrain an identity are paradoxically bolstered at the same time they are broken, which allows Melville the opportunity to explore rebellion alongside the performative aspect of the self as a body constituting both a visible sign and a living vehicle for the mores, beliefs and ideologies that shape a society.


Molecules ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 1772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria de los Angeles Cortes ◽  
Raquel de la Campa ◽  
Maria Luisa Valenzuela ◽  
Carlos Díaz ◽  
Gabino A. Carriedo ◽  
...  

During the last number of years a variety of crystallization-driven self-assembly (CDSA) processes based on semicrystalline block copolymers have been developed to prepare a number of different nanomorphologies in solution (micelles). We herein present a convenient synthetic methodology combining: (i) The anionic polymerization of 2-vinylpyridine initiated by organolithium functionalized phosphane initiators; (ii) the cationic polymerization of iminophosphoranes initiated by –PR2Cl2; and (iii) a macromolecular nucleophilic substitution step, to prepare the novel block copolymers poly(bistrifluoroethoxy phosphazene)-b-poly(2-vinylpyridine) (PTFEP-b-P2VP), having semicrystalline PTFEP core forming blocks. The self-assembly of these materials in mixtures of THF (tetrahydrofuran) and 2-propanol (selective solvent to P2VP), lead to a variety of cylindrical micelles of different lengths depending on the amount of 2-propanol added. We demonstrated that the crystallization of the PTFEP at the core of the micelles is the main factor controlling the self-assembly processes. The presence of pyridinyl moieties at the corona of the micelles was exploited to stabilize gold nanoparticles (AuNPs).


2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 491
Author(s):  
Ana Cláudia Munari ◽  
Taíssi Alessandra Cardoso da Silva

A partir da análise dos romances de Ricardo Lísias e da sua produção autocrítica, este trabalho busca entender algumas relações entre a literatura de autoficção e a publicização do sujeito autor imerso no universo midiático. Partindo de uma revisão bibliográfica que conceitua os objetos aqui circunscritos e de uma apreciação anterior sobre a produção literária de jovens escritores brasileiros selecionados pela revista Granta em 2012, estreitamos nossa focalização no movimento do romancista em direção à escrita de si e à autorreferência. Nesse sentido, analisamos e contextualizamos a modalidade de escritura denominada autoficção, especialmente no que tange às aproximações entre as instâncias do narrador e do autor e entre biografemas e ficção (FIGUEIREDO, 2013; KLINGER, 2012), e evocamos estudos da Sociologia e da Comunicação de modo a caracterizar a sociedade da qual emerge o corpus deste estudo (LIPOVESTKY, 2004; SANTAELLA, 2012). A partir desse contexto, investigamos as obras literárias – O céu dos suicidas (2012), Divórcio (2013) e Delegado Tobias (2014) – e as narrativas midiáticas de Ricardo Lísias e identificamos nelas estratégias da publicidade.********************************************************************The novel by Ricardo Lísias: wide open windows to the subject hypermodernAbstract: Through the analysis of the novels of Ricardo Lísias and its self-critical production, this work intends to understand some relationships between the self-fiction literature and the popularization of the subject author immersed in the media universe. Starting from a literature review that conceptualizes the objects herein bounded and an earlier assessment of the literary production of young Brazilian writers selected by Granta magazine in 2012, we strengthened  ur focus on the novelist's movement toward the writing itself  nd self-reference. Pursuing this aim, we analyzed and contextualized the form of writing named autofiction, especially with regard to the similarities between instances of the narrator and the author and between biographema and fiction (FIGUEIREDO, 2013; KLINGER, 2012). We also evoked Sociology and Media Studies to characterize the society of which emerges the corpus of this study (LIPOVESTKY, 2004; SANTAELLA, 2012). From these premises, we investigated the literary works – Céu dos suicidas (Heaven suicide, 2012), Divórcio (Divorce, 2013) and Delegado Tobias (Tobias, the police chief, 2014) – and the media narratives of Ricardo Lísias and finally we identified his advertising strategies.Keywords: Self-ficction; Contemporary literature; Hypermodernity; Ricardo Lísias


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