scholarly journals Feline Affinities Between E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr and Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Val Scullion ◽  
Marion Treby
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Natsume Soseki

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was an eclectic writer and voracious reader during a historical period when western literary influence flourished in Japan. This article hypothesizes that the German novel, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819-1821), by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), is as strong a formative influence in terms of structure and satirical perspective on Sōseki’s novel, I Am a Cat (1905-1907), as other satiric contenders. It pursues this argument by examining correlations between these two polyphonic novels which mix many registers and discourses in a similar way. Biographical, historical and literary analysis underpins this comparison.

Popularization and/or Trivialization of Philosophy in Voltaire's Narrative Candide or Optimism

CLEaR ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Ivana Majksner ◽  
Tina Varga Oswald
Keyword(s):  
Structure Characterization ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
General Readership ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Philosophical Writings

Abstract Voltaire produced his works within the literary-historical period of Classicism and Enlightenment, in which the prevalent role of literature was educational. The period also dictated what genre, theme, style and structure authors should follow. However, more and more changes of literary genres appear, and the process of stratification of literature into high and trivial takes place. The aim of this paper is to describe the polarization of two mutually different processes involved in the literary shaping of Voltaire's philosophical narrative Candide or Optimism. In Voltaire's narrative, the popularization of philosophy, in order to simplify and illuminate the philosophical writings of G. W. Leibniz, results in the changes of style and content that become understandable to the general readership since they work within the scheme of an adventure novel. In this process, trivialization does not affect only the genre, but is also present in other parts of literary analysis and interpretation such as the theme, motifs, structure, characterization, narrative techniques, stylistic features, and so on.

scholarly journals Alcohol use and generational masculinity

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Emiliussen ◽  
Alastair David Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Alcohol Problems ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Qualitative Phenomenological

Introduction: Alcohol ranks as a major risk factor for health-related harm and mortality. Older males who encounter alcohol problems late in life are an under-studied part of the affected population. This article seeks to broaden our understanding of this group by combining empirical data with humanistic cultural analysis. Specifically, it seeks to show how the desire to cope alone can be linked to generationally specific constructions of hegemonic masculinity. Method: Clinical empirical methods are fused here with those of literary analysis. The subjects which the clinical researcher chooses for scrutiny are different from those most natural to literary study, yet the interpretive approaches of qualitative phenomenological investigation and literary close reading are in fact quite similar, and we argue that new knowledge can be generated by evaluating cultural texts alongside the testimony of phenomenological research subjects. Findings and discussion: Our findings illustrate a thematic connection between subject testimony and literary texts from the relevant historical period. In the sources we compared – a qualitative study conducted in Denmark and a British novel, Kingsley Amis’s 1954 Lucky Jim – we found a strong link between the values of masculinity and the values of independence. Older men’s resistance of institutional treatment for alcohol problems has motivations which go beyond the desire not to rely on outside aid, a desire which may apply to any illness. As Lucky Jim helps us show, alcohol use functions for men of a certain generation as a symbol of rebellion against institutions, and having institutions play a dominant role in their alcohol cessation may create resistance in these men.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
John Middleton Murry

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

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.

Kokoro Confidential

2016 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-115
Author(s):  
Brian Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
Natsume Soseki ◽  
Dissertation Advisor ◽  
Austrian Economist ◽  
Modern Japan ◽  
The University ◽  
Friedrich Hayek

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Edwin McClellan (1925–2009) translated into English the most famous novel of modern Japan, Kokoro (1914), by Natsume Sōseki. This essay tells the story of how the translation emerged from and appealed to a nascent neoliberal movement that was led by Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), the Austrian economist who had been McClellan’s dissertation advisor.

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.      

Industrial Labour Force of Russia in 20-30s of XX Century in Russian Historiography

2020 ◽  
pp. 431-449
Author(s):  
Oleg V. Shekatunov ◽  
Konstantin G. Malykhin
Keyword(s):  
Labour Force ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Russian Industry ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Potential Formation ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Force Potential ◽  
Modern Russian

The article is devoted to the specifics of studying the industrial labour force of Russia in the 1920s - 1930s in Russian historiography. The various stages of study from the 1920s through the 1930s and up to the last years are concerned. The relevance of the study is due to several factors. These include contradictions in the assessments of Bolshevik modernization of the 1920s and 1930s; projected labour force shortages in modern Russia; as well as the existing labour force shortage in industry at the moment. This determines the relevance of studying the historical period, which was characterized by the most acute personnel problems in the country. The novelty of the study is due to the fact that in modern Russian historiography there is no holistic, integrated view of the problems of the labour force potential formation of Russian industry in the 1920s and 1930s. It is noted that there is no research aimed at analyzing the historiography of these problems. The main stages of the study of industrial labour force are highlighted. The analysis of scientific works correlated with each stage of the study of the topic is performed. The problems and methodology of each stage are considered. A review of a wide range of scientific papers both articles and thesis is presented.

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