Singing Finnegans Wake: A Key to Samuel Barber’s “Nuvoletta”

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-325
Author(s):  
Howard Pollack
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Finnegan's Wake

Samuel’s Barber’s 1947 “Nuvoletta,” the only freestand-ing song of the composer’s maturity, derives its text from the most famously arcane novel in the literary canon, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Musicologist Pollack dissects the text in a literary analysis, but also showing how its vivid imagery and lyric resonance is treated in Barber’s musical setting, thus offering performers crucial preparation for its performance.

Finnegans Wake

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Creasy
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
New Science ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
The World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Finnegan's Wake

An experimental masterpiece by James Joyce, published in 1939. Joyce began writing it during 1923 and parts of it appeared under the title Work-in-Progress within literary periodicals, such as transition, and in pamphlet form. It has a reputation as the most difficult text of literary modernism. Joyce set out to write "a history of the world" and much of the structure of the book derives from Italian philosopher and historian Giambatista Vico’s New Science (1725), which breaks down history into a series of cyclic phases. The final title, however, alludes to a Dublin street ballad about a builder who falls from a ladder: Tim Finnegan is aroused from unconsciousness when a drop of whisky touches his mouth during the wake organized by his family, who think him dead. Joyce used this to allude to Viconian myths of fall and redemption or resurrection. It was written during the early years of Irish independence and the Wake’s mythic re-cycling of history and literature also bears upon contemporary developments. The absence of apostrophe in the title is deliberate: although derived from "Finnegan’s Wake," it also urges the Irish (Finnegans) to rise from their historical stupor.

World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Hui Bon Hoa
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Private Property ◽  
World Market ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Communist Manifesto ◽  
The World ◽  
Anglo American

In recent decades, world has emerged as one of the most fiercely contested concepts in literary studies. The more narrowly defined stakes of the debates over world literature concern the disciplinary mandate of comparative literature. One way of grasping the world as a problematic is in terms of a dispute over the correct unit of literary analysis. Should comparative literature scholars seek to illuminate broad historical patterns in the global circulation of influence as reflected, for example, in the morphology of literary genres or the adoption of tropes across different literary cultures? Or should they seek instead to come to grips with the singularity of the world—the unique systems of thought and meaning—presented in individual texts, using the methodology of close reading that offers a model for the ethical relation to otherness? The issue of scale is equally at play in the multiculturalist imperative to expand the literary canon beyond its traditional emphasis on European and Anglo-American traditions. While the general consensus is that undoing comparative literature’s Eurocentrism is crucial to the discipline’s continued relevance, the practical question of how to go about it has been contentious. If scholars are required to draw from a diversified literary canon, how can they attain the linguistic competence required to treat the enlarged field of inquiry with adequate hermeneutic care? The danger, according to some critics, is that world literature will normalize the study of literary texts in English translation. Another critique of such globalizing initiatives regards the value of diversity itself. Some have argued that conceiving of literary works as representatives of specific cultures or regions is itself a legacy of Orientalist Eurocentrism and that, therefore, a multiculturalist approach inadvertently entrenches the very problem it seeks to rectify. A range of political and ethical concerns are thus at stake in the endeavor to globalize comparative literature. Indeed, the concept of world literature has historically been bound up with an assessment of globalization’s liberatory potential and, increasingly, its oppressive effects. The emergence of world literature as a project or goal is often, though not always, traced back to Goethe at the beginning of the 19th century. Reflecting the Enlightenment value of universalism, Goethe’s evocation of Weltliteratur projects a world united through free literary exchange across borders and intercultural understanding. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels situate Goethe’s cosmopolitan vision in a materialist framework, presenting it as derivative of the economic transformations entailed in the world market. They also radicalize Goethe’s model of cosmopolitanism. Instead of an autonomous sphere of communication among the national literary traditions of the world, for them Weltliteratur stands metonymically for a future in which both the nation and private property—as manifested in the idea of national patrimony—are superseded by an internationalist commonwealth. Fleshing out the tension between Goethe’s and Marx’s visions of the globalized world, recent debates on world literature have generated productive confrontations between liberal humanistic, Marxist, deconstructive, and postcolonial perspectives on the gap between the world one inhabits and the world one wants.

scholarly journals Kuwaiti Women Writers and Anglophone Choices: Charting New Territories

2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Anglophone Literature

While there has been a plethora of work on Arab women writers, little attention has been paid to Kuwaiti women writers, especially those who write Anglophone literature. This research paper argues that the choice to write in English rather than Arabic leaves these writers in a problematic position. As a result of embracing the English language, rather than their mother tongue, they are left outside of the dominant literary circle and often marginalized. Through a literary analysis, this paper presents some of the texts written by contemporary Kuwaiti writers who have chosen to write in English, and have produced nuanced narratives of Kuwaiti women who find agency and self-expression through their fictional journeys. These journeys explore themes of agency, voice, and trauma. A significant contribution of the present paper lies in a thematic analysis of lesser-known Kuwaiti texts in order to excavate these marginalized voices. The findings suggest that by choosing to write in English, these writers face the dangers of being dismissed from the literary canon, just like their protagonists must contend with society’s discrimination and expectations.

Solving the Problem of Babel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Basic English

By situating James Joyce within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel, this chapter show how hieroglyphs were used to make arguments for the origin of linguistic differences. The journal transition—in which Joyce’s work was serialized—served as a clearinghouse for ideas about how a new linguistic unity might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake-ese or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s universal language of Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce in Ulysses andFinnegans Wake turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphs, advertisements, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of ‘Aryan’ language and imagine a more inclusive origin for the world’s cultures. The commonality of writing and new media become in Joyce a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races and languages in a mythic past against Nazi claims for racial purity.

The Healing Magic of Joy: Understanding Magic as a Metaphor for Positive Emotion in The Secret Garden

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
Margrete Lamond
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Affective Content ◽  
The Secret Garden ◽  
Biological Nature

Literary analysis tends to be conceptual and top-down driven. Data-driven analysis, although it belongs more to the domain of scientific method, can nevertheless sometimes reveal elements of narrative that conceptual readings may fall short of identifying. In critiques of Burnett's The Secret Garden, the children's return to health is generally understood to be the result of their interactions with nature. Some readings add the power of storytelling as a healing force in the novel. Burnett's concept of magic has tended to be treated with uneasy abstractions, and the influence of affect on health remains open for further investigation. This article bases its argument on data-driven analysis that charts how affective content in the novel occurs in conjunction with references to magic. It identifies the narrative significance of negative allusions to nature and how concepts of magic occur alongside representations of positive affect, and suggests that the magic of healing in The Secret Garden is not the transforming power of biological nature, nor the transforming power of storytelling, but the transforming power of surprise, wonder and happiness in conjunction with all these factors. Positive affect represents the essence of what Burnett means by magic.

A Christmas Carol: Disability Conceptualised through Empathy and the Philosophy of ‘Technologically Useful Bodies’

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Ester Vidović
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Linguistic Approach

The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.

Joyce's Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegans Wake

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Mak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Beast Fable

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.

A Complete Replica of Contemporary Indian Society in the Fictional Works of Chetan Bhagat: A Detailed Literary Analysis of his Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center and The Three Mistake of My

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Vikram Patel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Call Center ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
Fiction Writers

hetan Bhagat is one of the most influential fiction writers of contemporary Indian English literature. Postmodern subjects like youth aspirations, love, sex, marriage, urban middle class sensibilities, and issues related to corruption, politics, education and their impact on the contemporary Indian society are recurrently reflected thematic concerns in his fictions. In all his fictions, he has mostly depicted the contemporary urban social milieu of Indian society. Though the fictions of Chetan Bhagat are romantic in nature, contemporary Indian society and its major issues are the chief of the concerns of all his fictions. He has focused on the contemporary issues of middle class family in his fictional works. All of the chief protagonists of his works are sensitive youth and they do not compromise with the prevalent situations of society. Most of the characters are like caricatures that represent one or the other vice or virtue of the contemporary Indian society. The author has a mastery to convince the reader about the prevalent condition of society so that one can easily reproduce in mind, a clear cut image of contemporary Indian society. The present article is a sincere endeavor to present the detailed literary analysis of the select fictions of Chetan Bhagat keeping in mind how the contemporary Indian society has been replicated in the fictions.

The place of the plant world in the worldview system of transoxiana sufism in 16th century

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (Extra-A) ◽  
pp. 157-161
Author(s):  
Lutfullo Eshonovich Ismoilov ◽  
Ramil Tagirovich Yuzmukhametov ◽  
Markhabo Tukhtasunovna Rajabova
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Main Method ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
The World ◽  
Lives Of The Saints

The article considers the topic of the Plant World in the Sufi writings of the 16th century Transoxiana, based on the material of manakibs, i. e. the so-called Lives of the Saints. The significance and relevance of the topic is due to the need to study the issues of semantic interpretation of the concept of plant and plant world in Sufi writings. Hence, the purpose of this article is to disclose the diverse meanings of the concept of the “World of Plants” contained in the 16th-century Transoxiana manakibs of such authors as Abdurakhman Jami, Abu-l Baka b. Khodzha Bakha-ud-din, Khusein Serakhsi. The main method in the study of this issue is the historical and comparative method, and the method of literary analysis, which allows you to create a holistic understanding of the symbolism of the Plant World in Sufi writings of Transoxiana of the 16th century.      

Philosophical and literary analysis of Imadaddin Nasimi’s works

2019 ◽  
Vol 261-262 (261-262) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Zumrud Guluzade
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document