scholarly journals “There is Nothing There.” Dmitrii Danilov’s Travel Writing and the Lure of the Russian Provinces

ENTHYMEMA ◽  
2022 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Otto Boele

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s seminal study The Practice of Everyday Life, the author argues that Dmitrii Danilov’s travel writing (Twenty Cities, 2007-2009) reimagines Russia’s symbolic geography by destabilizing the traditional opposition centre – periphery. Rather than depicting the provincial world as either an absurd and horrid world, or as a repository of “true Russianness”, Danilov provides a “decentred” perspective on the provinces that asserts the uniqueness of each city he visits. The novel Description of a City (2012), however, resurrects the more traditional view of the provinces as a world of boredom and cultural lack. To analyse this development the article looks at the central figure of the sluggish traveller-narrator, the employment of “camera-eye narration” and other, mainly linguistic, devices that reaffirm the notion of the provincial city’s “namelessness” as one of its most defining characteristics. 

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-495
Author(s):  
Henry B. Wonham

Henry B. Wonham, “Realism and the Stock Market: The Rise of Silas Lapham” (pp. 473–495) William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells’s disdain for—in Walter Benn Michaels’s words—“the excesses of capitalism,” especially as embodied in the novel’s rendering of “the greedy and heartless stock market.” Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells’s complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel’s treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas’s investment career and the novel’s surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas’s failed investment career, Howells “attempts to disarticulate…an emergent market ethos,” but as I read the novel this same “market ethos” is inseparable from Howells’s conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist.


Author(s):  
Iana E. ANDREEVA

This article examines the linguistic means of representing the category of everyday life in the novel by G. Sh. Yakhina “Zuleikha opens her eyes” and in its translation into Chinese. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the anthropology of everyday life, a broad line of research into everyday life. Comparative study of linguistic units, which reveal the essence of everyday human existence, makes it possible to identify lacunar units that are difficult to translate fiction in the context of the Russian-Chinese language pair. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the involvement in the analysis of linguistic methods of conveying the category of everyday life in the aspect of translating a Russian literary text into Chinese. The work used the methods of comparative, component, contextual analysis, the method of linguoculturological commenting. As a result of the study, the lexical-semantic, lexical-stylistic and grammatical lacunar units were identified, which demonstrate linguocultural barriers in the process of translating a text into Chinese. A comparative analysis of the texts was carried out in order to comprehend the lexical and grammatical transformations performed in the process of translation. As a result, the main ways of compensating for the lacunae of everyday life in Russian-Chinese translation were identified: transcription, tracing, descriptive translation, lexical-semantic replacement. In addition, it was found that the study of various options for depicting everyday life in a literary text not only makes it possible to identify lacunar units of everyday life, but also reveals the artistic and philosophical intention of the work.


2017 ◽  

As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualisation, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Akmal Jaya

This research aims to show the influences of the power of discourse: genre, gender, and colonialism in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Lucy Bird. Some travel writing’s paradigms were used as theoretical background in this research, such Sara Mills and Carl Thompson. As an object of the research, the novel became the source of primary data. Another historical and cultural literary and also literary review of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan as secondary data. The result of the research examined that contestation of discourses implied the way of the author to preserve his stories.


Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.


The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multifaceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism. Written in a relatively abstract language, it tells the story of Josef K., who is accused of a crime he has no recollection of having committed (and whose nature is never revealed to him). The novel has often been interpreted theologically, expressing a form of radical nihilism in a modern world abandoned by God. However, it has just as often been read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the anonymous system he is facing) progressively leads to greater and greater confusion, ending with his execution. In this volume, the contributors deal with a range of issues arising in this work. Theology is central, and related to that are questions of justice, law, ethics, resistance, and subjectivity. All the contributors view the novel as responding to a context of rapid modernization, and questions of metaphysics intersect with the most mundane challenges of everyday life. There is here a fundamental uncertainty, a context of skepticism, that the contributors approach from a variety of angles.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-116
Author(s):  
Wangtaolue Guo

In a world marked by increasing linguistic and cultural mobility, translation has gone way beyond the idea of mechanical/cultural transmission of meaning and saturated our everyday life. Translation zone, as one of the many spatial metaphors for translation, is proposed by Emily Apter and meant to debunk the myth of monolingual complacency as a norm and to highlight translation as a significant medium of subject re-formation. Although her transcoding model is path-breaking, Apter seems to insist on the intersubjective limits that resist translation, arguing about the issue of border trouble arising from occasions “where the lines dividing discrete languages are muddy and disputatious” (129). In this paper, I argue that the translation zone shall be reconceptualized as a rhizomatic zone, where both translation and mis-/non-translation constitute an adventitious mode of transformation that highlights processuality. In order to add this Deleuzian layer to the translation zone, I examine how translational literature, which “straddle[s] two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation” (Hassan 754), reflects a perpetual state of in-translation and encompasses the process of flight and movement. Specific examples are drawn from Xiaolu Guo’s novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which features a narrative characterized by malapropism, mis-hearings, mis-interpretations, and interlanguage. Incorporating translation as a constitutive element into her story, Guo highlights the interplay between linguistic creativity and (un-)translatability, complicates the process of cultural transfer, and underlines the centrality of migration and porosity which Apter fails to attribute to her framework. The novel, therefore, mimics a rhizomatic translation zone, where migration, transformation, and linguistic heterogeneity are enmeshed.


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