Precarity and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Ty
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
First Person ◽  
Family Instability ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Physical Consequences ◽  
Social Uncertainty ◽  
Geographical Space

This chapter examines three works by Japanese North American writers: Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being,Mariko Tamaki's novella Cover Me, and her graphic novel Skim, illustrated by Jillian Tamaki. Though different in narrative style and technique, these three texts feature Japanese North American teens, who struggle with identity issues, family instability, self-esteem, and depression. The protagonists are unable to follow the kind of hard-working immigrant ethos of their parents; instead, they pursue what looks like a path to unhappiness, and suffer mental and physical consequences. Ozeki plays with the connectedness of geographical space, and uses postmodern devices to show global economic and social uncertainty; Mariko Tamaki uses the detached and ironic first-person point of view of a twenty-year old to critique our obsession with ownership and money. In Skim, verbal and visual techniques convey Skim's outsider status, her broken family, difficulties with her peers, and what Sara Ahmed calls the "happiness commandment."

Can the Academic Self-Concept be Positive and Realistic?

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reimer Kornmann
Keyword(s):  
Academic Performance ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
High Ability ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Other Hand

Summary: My comment is basically restricted to the situation in which less-able students find themselves and refers only to literature in German. From this point of view I am basically able to confirm Marsh's results. It must, however, be said that with less-able pupils the opposite effect can be found: Levels of self-esteem in these pupils are raised, at least temporarily, by separate instruction, academic performance however drops; combined instruction, on the other hand, leads to improved academic performance, while levels of self-esteem drop. Apparently, the positive self-image of less-able pupils who receive separate instruction does not bring about the potential enhancement of academic performance one might expect from high-ability pupils receiving separate instruction. To resolve the dilemma, it is proposed that individual progress in learning be accentuated, and that comparisons with others be dispensed with. This fosters a self-image that can in equal measure be realistic and optimistic.

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

Hypertextuality and the Economic Novel in Zimbabwe

Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-415
Author(s):  
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Great Ease ◽  
New Type ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
Source Of Information

Abstract Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down boundaries of dependence on television, newspapers, and novels, the traditional forms of communication. It is now possible to upload a novel onto an iPad and read it as one moves from place to place. The burden of carrying hard copies is relieved but not eradicated; in most African countries, including Zimbabwe (the centre of focus in the present article), the creative work of art or hard copy of a novel is still relied upon as source of information. There are creative, experimental innovations in the novel form in Zimbabwe which to some extent can justify one’s speaking of a hypertextual novel. This new type of novel incorporates multiple narratives, and sometimes deliberately uses genres such as the email form as a constitutive narrative style that confirms as well as destabilizes previous assumptions of single coherent stories told from one point of view. Using the concepts of hypertextuality, intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s notions of carnivalesque and heteroglossia in speech and written utterances, this article reconsiders the implications of the presence of ideologies of hypertextuality in one novel from Zimbabwe, Nyaradzo Mtizira’s The Chimurenga Protocol (2008). The article argues that the multiplicity of narratives constitutes the hypertextual dimension of the novelistic form.

scholarly journals From representation to enactment: temporal perspectives on literary objects in East and Central European structuralism and Ingarden’s phenomenology

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (s1) ◽  
pp. s146-s171
Author(s):  
Michał Mrugalski
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
General Context ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
First Person ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
Central European ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
Person Perspective

AbstractConsidering that enacitivsm emerged in rebellion against the representativism of first-generation cognitive science, an enactivist approach to narrative, which after all does relate events, situations, people, necessitates a directly realistic (i. e. anti-representationalist) concept of perspective on literary objects. Ingarden’s description of the spatio-temporal properties of the cognizing of the literary work, in the process of which the reader transgresses the realm of signs (representation) toward embodied and culturally embedded cognition of objects and events in a presented world, may serve as a prototype for an enactive approach narrative, provided the theory in question is situated in its original context, for example that of Ingarden’s ongoing discussion with structuralism regarded at this juncture as a representationist stance. In the first step, I am referring to the philosophical tradition of direct realism, which was apparently invigorated by the theories of embodied and enactive cognition, to propose a way of conceiving first-person perspective on literary objects and events, first-person and temporal perspective on objects being the royal road to all sorts of enaction. In the second step, I am tackling the issue of point of view in East and Central European structuralism by recalling its most general context of the dialectical relationship between synchrony and diachrony. The interpretation of linguistic signs by the receiver is a space in which structuralism and Ingarden’s phenomenology concur as they share a similar model of receptive temporality, rooted in Husserl’s description of the inner consciousness of time and aiming to reduce the ambiguity of linguistic units and increase the predictability of meaning. In Ingarden, however, there is a threshold between the linguistic and the extralinguistic elements of the literary work, which are conceived in a directly realistic manner. I specifically recall the notion of “objectification,” which was suppressed by that of “concretization,” as a borderland between indirect (semiotic) and indirect (objectual and enactive) representation. In the conclusion, I point to the major differences between present-day cognitivist aesthetics and Ingarden’s approach, which was immersed in the culture of his time, and ask whether these differences impede us to achieve as interesting results as Ingarden’s.

scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF NARRATION IN NOTES FROM A DEAD HOUSE BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-238
Author(s):  
Tamara Batalova
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Essential Idea ◽  
The Dead

Within the framework of Pavel Medvedev’s sociological poetics, the article identifies and studies the features of the narrative in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House, and examines the role of these features in expressing the key idea of this novel, namely the desire of convicts for freedom, for “resurrection from the dead”. From this point of view, the author examines the significance of the narrator’s duality (Goryanchikov and Goryanchikov-Dostoevsky) and the juxtaposition of the characters in the narrative (positive and negative). He also analyzes the compositional function of the XI chapter of the first part of Notes from a Dead House, “Presentation”, in the plot. The Christian faith plays the vital role in the expression of the essential idea of the work. An open-minded attitude to people, a friendly, Christian approach towards them is a distinctive feature of Goryanchikov-Dostoevsky and all the positive characters in the book. Inspired by the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, the convicts staged a theatrical performance, which alters the moral state of both the actors and the audience, fortifies their sense of self-esteem required to resist the prison orders that “deaden” people, and strengthens the prisoners’ desire for freedom, for “resurrection from the dead”. The article concludes that Notes from a Dead House is the beginning of aesthetic and artistic changes that manifested themselves in Dostoevsky’s post-prison works.

scholarly journals Vuoret ja kaupunki vastakohtaisina tiloina Alisa Ganijevan teoksissa

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Anni Lappela
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Real ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Space

Mountains and City as Contrary Spaces in the Prose of Alisa Ganieva I analyze Alisa Ganieva’s novel Prazdnichnaia gora (2012) and her novella Salam tebe, Dalgat! (2010) from a geocritical (Westphal, Tally) point of view. Ganieva was born in 1985 in Moscow, but she grew up in Dagestan, in North Caucasia. Since 2002, she has lived in Moscow. All Ganieva’s novels are set in present-day Dagestan, not only in the capital Makhachkala but also in the countryside.  I study the ways the two main spaces and main milieus, the mountains and the city, oppose each other in Prazdnichnaia gora. I also analyze how this opposition constructs the utopian and dystopian discourses of the novel. In this high/low opposition, the mountains appear as the utopian place of a better future, and the city in the lowlands is depicted as a dystopian place of the present-day life. The texts’ multilayered time is also part of my analysis, which follows Westphal’s idea of the stratigraphy of time. Furthermore, the mountains are associated with the traditional way of life and the Soviet past. In this way, the mountains have two kinds of roles in the texts. Nevertheless, the city is a central element of the postcolonial dystopian discourse of Prazdnichnaia gora. In my opinion, Ganieva’s texts problematize referentiality, one of the key concepts of geocriticism. Whilst the city tends to be very referential, the mountains escape the referential relationship to the “real” geographical space.

scholarly journals Analyses of Self – Administration Reality of Central Sport Federation Presidents from Administrative Bureau Point of View in Iraq

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Atheer Ailan Abdul Hussein ◽  
Abdul Rezaq Khadem
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Administration ◽  
Sport Administration ◽  
Strategy Planning ◽  
Future Vision

The importance of the research lies in self – administration being a modern topic in sport administration in general and in Iraqi central sport federation’s administration in particular.  Self - administration positively affect high self–esteem in members of the administrative board in Iraqi central sport federations. It also contributes to future vision and strategy planning for each federation to achieve winning in competitions.

Colorectal Cancer Screening: a North American Point of View

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 241-250
Author(s):  
Induruwa N. Pathirana ◽  
Dustin M. Albert ◽  
Patrick E. Young ◽  
Craig M. Womeldorph
Keyword(s):  
Colorectal Cancer ◽  
Cancer Screening ◽  
Colorectal Cancer Screening ◽  
North American ◽  
Point Of View
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