Pernicious City: Mythologization of Kaunas in the Lithuanian Literature of the Interwar Period

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4 (463)) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Viktorija Šeina

The article analyzes the mythologization of Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania, in the Lithuanian literature of the interwar period. The methodological approach of the research is based on the research methods of urban mythopoetics by Vladimir Toporov and that of topological semiotics by Algirdas Julien Greimas. Due to objective historical and social circumstances, the formation of the Lithuanian urban literature started only at the beginning of the 20th century. The intensive period in the urbanization of the Lithuanian literature was that of the interwar period when literary reflections on Kaunas started gaining certain dominant symbolic images of the city, repeating plots and characters typical of Kaunas. The literary myth of the temporary capital as a pernicious city which becomes a moral trial for an individual is revealed in the article through the analysis of Part III of the novel Altorių šešėly [In the shadows of altars] by Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, the most prominent Lithuanian novelist of the interwar period.

2012 ◽  
Vol 433-440 ◽  
pp. 3560-3563
Author(s):  
Bin Zheng ◽  
Li Xia Ji

D.H. Lawrence was an outstanding novelist of Britain in the 20th century. While he inherited the essence of the realism, he also absorbed nutrition from modernism and made some great developments, one of which was symbolism. Lawrence applied it in many of his works skillfully, which gave the novels a taste of mystery and indicated the ending of the stories. His famous novel Sons and Lovers is naturally not an exception, in which the use of symbolism is a typical character. The writer made full use of this method. There are three kinds of symbols in this story: symbolic images implying the emotion of the characters, symbolic characters standing for different kinds of love of the hero and symbolic episodes expressing the characters’ inner thoughts. The novel has attracted so much attention partly due to the perfect application of symbolism.


Author(s):  
Bakhtiar Sadjadi ◽  
Bahareh Nilfrushan

The city has fascinated the street wanderer as the contemplation of modern life. Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘flâneur,’ originally borrowed from Charles Baudelaire, could be taken as the true legacy of such fascination. There is always a sense of nostalgia being revealed through the flânerie of the city stroller passing through the metropolis, its shopping centers, and boulevards nourishing the mind of the bohemic storyteller with tales of post-aural experience and memory. Adapting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘flânerie’ in the streets of Paris to those of Tehran, the present paper attempts to explore Sina Dadkhah’s Yousef Abad, Street 33 in order to demonstrate the post-aural stories of the flaneurs in an Iranian milieu. This article focuses on the modern aspect of the Iranian contemporary society and explores the immediate consequences of modernity on the individual subjectivity of the characters represented in the novel. Considering Dadkhah’s novel as a product of the urban literature of a generation dealing with modernity of the arcades and other lures of the megapolis on the one hand and feeling of nostalgia for their past spirit on the other, the paper simultaneously reveals the close affinity between the subjectivity of the characters and Benjaminian tenets of flânerie and modern storytellers. The flaneurs represented in the novel, by rambling through and about the city of Tehran, are turning to be the storytellers who narrate their ‘post-aural’ experiences. In Yousef Abad, Street 33 the central characters are, as fully manifested in the paper, deeply engaged in the experiences of a modern sense of living while wandering to console their wistful longings despite the everyday challenges.


Author(s):  
Sabine Mainberger

In Andrej Belyjs Roman Petersburg (entstanden 1911-1913) kulminiert der Mythos dieser Stadt und wird zugleich ironisiert. Stadt und Roman sind bestimmt von Gegensätzen wie dem von Russland und Europa, Vater und Sohn, Zarismus und Revolution etc. Im Krisenjahr 1905, in dem der Roman spielt, sind diese Gegensätze allenthalben am Werk, aber sie erlauben dennoch keine Orientierung: Denn die Staatsmacht steht nicht nur rebellischen Elementen gegenüber, sondern übt selbst Terror aus, z.B. durch Doppelagenten. In einem Klima gegenseitiger Bespitzelung und Bedrohung sind alle Zuordnungen ungewiss. Welche Funktion haben hier die zahlreichen geometrischen Referenzen: Punkt, Linie, Quadrat, Kubus und die Rede von der ›vierten‹ oder ›n-ten Dimension‹? Der Essay geht diesen Fragen nach und stellt u.a. Beziehungen zur Popularisierung der n-dimensionalen Geometrie und zu avantgardistischer Kunst(-theorie) her, namentlich zu Kandinsky und Malewitsch. In Andrey Bely’s novel »Petersburg« (written between 1911 and 1913), the myth of Petersburg comes to a peak while being simultaneously ironized. The city and the novel are determined by oppositions such as those between Russia and Europe, father and son, tsarism and revolution, and so on. Set in 1905, a year of deep crisis, these oppositions are at work everywhere in the story. Nevertheless, they do not permit any understanding of what is going on: this is because the state is not only challenged by rebellious elements, but also acts as a terrorist itself; for instance, with the help of double agents. In a climate of threat and fear, everything becomes uncertain. What is the function of the numerous geometrical references – point, line, square, cube, and of the ›fourth‹ or the ›nth dimension‹ – in such a context? The essay asks these questions and links the novel to the popularisation of n-dimensional geometry, as well as to the art and art theory of the early 20th century, namely to Kandinsky and Malevic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Gonzales

This article analyses the research methods adopted while working with Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg) families in the urban space of Bamako. With no authorisation to move outside the city, the researcher cannot but be, on the one hand, a fixed point of observation of informants' movements in and out of the city. On the other hand, the progressively acquired capacity to move through Bamako's Kel Tamasheq families – sometimes depending on others, sometimes autonomously – resituates a mobile approach within a context of general immobility. As these two levels of observations collide, this article reflects on an emerging methodological approach to 'discontinuous (im)mobility'. The article suggests that strategic (im)mobility is key to comprehending the extension and organisation of different relationships. By discontinuous (im)mobility this article means a not-necessarily pre-planned organisation of the researcher's mobility while doing fieldwork. Initially this might seem to lead to great confusion in collecting and analysing qualitative ethnographic data. However, in the long run it provides a rich and varied corpus of observations and interactions that are inclusive and intra-scalar. Readiness to be (im)mobile, to navigate volatility, is the norm that is not grasped by equilibrium-driven methodological approaches based on ordered and sequential fieldwork design. This discontinuous (im) mobility allows us to comprehend the entanglement and ongoing reproduction of such variabilities, whose change is hastened by the shifting socio-political context in Mali. To support my argument, the article takes the example of tbushak, a practice of visiting relatives and friends.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1013-1029
Author(s):  
Mikail Mamedov

AbstractThis article examines the first novel about the Karabakh crisis and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in the city of Baku. Maiden Dreams (Devich’i Sny), published in 1995, was written by Evgeniy Voyskunskiy, an author born in Baku and generally known for science fiction novels. The novel explores the tragic fate of the city, and it includes stories of persecution and pogroms against the Armenian population in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s in light of the Karabakh conflict. Maiden Dreams is the story of Baku from the beginning of the 20th century to the turbulent period late in the century when violence and ethnic cleansing had transformed the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic capital into a homogeneous city with no space for “others.” This article examines the novel from both literary and historical perspectives.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Chisum

Walter Van Tilburg Clark (b. 1909–d. 1971) was born in Maine, but spent his formative years growing up in Reno, Nevada, where his father served as president of the University of Nevada. Clark’s body of work (notably The Ox-Bow Incident) established him as one of the preeminent writers of the American West during the middle of the 20th century (he was friends with Wallace Stegner, the “Dean of Western Writers”), and in 1988, he was one of the first writers inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Clark’s fiction blends elements of the genre western with a careful eye for the local landscape and a spiritual ambivalence toward nature. The Ox-Box Incident (1940), about a lynch mob that erroneously executes a trio of innocent men, is his best-known work (it was made into an Academy Award–nominated film in 1943), though it’s perhaps the least characteristic of his artistic concerns. Clark’s second novel, The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), is a Künstlerroman that details the growth and maturation of a young, budding composer named Tim Hazard. The novel is a powerfully evocative depiction of early-20th-century Reno, and the scene-setting, characterizations, and development of central themes are all expressive of Clark’s prowess as a fiction writer. His final two creative works—The Track of the Cat (1949) and The Watchful Gods and Other Stories (1950)—are arguably his best. The Track of the Cat is a tense, tightly wound novel about a marauding mountain lion which has been preying on the cattle of the isolated Bridger family, and which begins to prey upon the humans as well. The Watchful Gods, meanwhile, shows Clark’s range as a storyteller, with the title story being perhaps the purest and most focused narrative expression of his main thematic concerns (especially the spiritual connection between humans and the natural environment). Clark did not publish any fiction after The Watchful Gods. This dry spell, from one of the most promising writers of the American West, remains one of the great enigmas of Clark’s career. The secondary literature on Clark ranges from scholarly analysis to exploration of the narrative themes in his work to biographical and archival work. Generally speaking, Clark’s fiction is interpreted through the lens of western American literary criticism and history, with many scholars treating it as both an exemplar of and deviation from western generic conventions.


Author(s):  
Jacek Rozmus

Novel Łuk by Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski is a innovatory of polish modernism. The writer showed citizens of Cracow, just before the I World War, in a really epic way. Unique landscape of the city in the novel is represented by it’s modern character, which contains urban engineering, housing and city buildings from the 19th/20th century, history and culture from the ancient architecture. Also the art stored in museums. This process was run by war, railway is the metaphor of the violent passage and influence on people.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria do Céu Martins Monteiro Marques

This paper will focus on the conflicts between Orientals and Westerners living in Macao at the beginning of the 20th century. The film Amor e Dedinhos de Pé by the director Luís Filipe Rocha, based on the homonymous novel by Henrique de Senna Fernandes will be analyzed from a perspective of a memory film as it presents a historical reconstruction that portrays the society of Macao at a time when the region was under Portuguese rule. Through the adventures and misadventures of a young man from a declining bourgeois family, both the novel and the film denounce the contrast between Eastern and Western cultures that coexisted at the time. The relationship between the inhabitants will also be seen as a mirror of the social relations that show particularly intense moments of people’s life of the “Christian City” characterized by magnificent ballrooms, well dressed people and homes with servants, which contrasts with the poverty environment lived in the “Chinese Quarter” of dirty and tight alleys where people of humble appearance wander. The city described by Luís Filip Rocha is a place of encounters and disagreements, and also of (i)moral confrontations between East and West which help to characterize the main characters who, at various times, transgress the rules established by a closed and discriminatory society.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-145
Author(s):  
İsmail Güllü

Yarım aşırı aşan bir geçmişe sahip Almanya’ya göç olgusu beraberinde önemli bir edebi birikimi (Migrantenliteratur) de getirmiştir. Farklı adlandırmalar ile anılan bu edebi birikim, kendi içinde de farklı renkleri de barındıran bir özelliğe sahiptir. Edebi yazını besleyen en önemli kaynaklardan biri toplumdur. Yazarın içinde yaşadığı toplumsal yapı ve problemler üstü kapalı veya açık bir şekilde onun yazılarına yansımaktadır. Bu bağlamda araştırma, 50’li yaşlarında Almanya’ya giden ve ömrünün sonuna kadar orada yaşayan, birçok edebi ve düşünsel çalışması ile Türk edebiyatında önemli bir isim olan Fakir Baykurt’un “Koca Ren” ve Yüksek Fırınlar” adlı romanları ile birlikte Duisburg Üçlemesi’nin son kitabı olan “Yarım Ekmek” romanında ele aldığı konu ve roman kahramanları üzerinden din ve gelenek olgusu sosyolojik bir yaklaşımla ele alınmaktadır. Toplumcu-gerçekçi çizgide yer alan yazarın, uzun yıllar yaşadığı Türkiye’deki siyasi ve ideolojik geçmişi bu romanda kullandığı dil ve kurguladığı kahramanlarda kendini göstermektedir. Romanda Almanya’nın Duisburg şehrinde yaşayan Türklerin yeni kültürel ortamda yaşadıkları çatışma, kültürel şok, arada kalmışlık, iki kültürlülük temaları ön plandadır. Yazar romanda sadece Almanya’daki Türkleri ele almamakta, aynı zamanda Türkiye ile hatta başka ülkeler ile de ilişkilendirmeler yaparak bireysel ve toplumsal konuları ele almaktadır. Araştırmada, romanda yer alan dini ve geleneksel unsurlar sosyolojik olarak analiz edilmiştir. Genel anlamda bir göç romanı olma özelliği yanında Yarım Ekmek romanında dini, siyasi ve ideolojik birçok yorum ve tartışma söz konusudur. Romandaki bu veriler, inanç, ritüel, siyaset ve toplumsal boyutlarda kategorize edilerek ele alınmıştır.  ENGLISH ABSTRACTReligion and identity reflections in literature of immigrant: Religion and Tradition in Fakir Baykurt’s novel Yarım EkmekThe immigration fact which has nearly half century in Germany have brought a significant literal accumulation (Migrantenliteratur) in its wake. This literal accumulation, which is named as several denominations, has a feature including different colours in itself. One of the most important source snourishing literature is society. Societal structure and problems that the writer lives inside, directly or indirectly reflect on his/her compositions. In this context, the matter of religion and tradition by way of the issue and fictious characters in the novel of Fakir Baykurt who went to Germany in her 50’s and lived in there till his death and who is a considerable name in Turkish literature with his several literal and intellectual workings; “Yarım Ekmek” which is the third novel of Duisburg Trilogy with “Koca Ren” and “Yüksek Fırınlar” are discussed sociologically in the study. The political and ideological past of the socialist realist lined writer in Turkey where he spent his life for a long time, manifest itself on the speech and fictious characters of novel. In the novel, themes of new Turks’ conflict, cultural shock, being in the middle, bi culturalism in their new cultural nature in Duisburg which is the city they live in. The writer not only deals with Turks in Germany but also personal and social subjects via comparing them to Turkey and even other countries. In the study, religious and traditional elements analyzed sociologically. Besides the speciality of being a migration novel in general, there are a lot of religious, political and ideological interpretations and discussions in the novel. These datum in the novel are examinated in the context of belief, ritual, politics and social categorisation. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Besin Gaspar

This research deals with the development of  self concept of Hiroko as the main character in Namaku Hiroko by Nh. Dini and tries to identify how Hiroko is portrayed in the story, how she interacts with other characters and whether she is portrayed as a character dominated by ”I” element or  ”Me”  element seen  from sociological and cultural point of view. As a qualitative research in nature, the source of data in this research is the novel Namaku Hiroko (1967) and the data ara analyzed and presented deductively. The result of this analysis shows that in the novel, Hiroko as a fictional character is  portrayed as a girl whose personality  develops and changes drastically from ”Me”  to ”I”. When she was still in the village  l iving with her parents, she was portrayed as a obedient girl who was loyal to the parents, polite and acted in accordance with the social customs. In short, her personality was dominated by ”Me”  self concept. On the other hand, when she moved to the city (Kyoto), she was portrayed as a wild girl  no longer controlled by the social customs. She was  firm and determined totake decisions of  her won  for her future without considering what other people would say about her. She did not want to be treated as object. To put it in another way, her personality is more dominated by the ”I” self concept.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document