scholarly journals Family history rewritten: How to narrate the life happening 'Tomorrow'

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 116-133
Author(s):  
Borjanka Đerić-Dragičević
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Competence ◽  
Family Secret

This paper is dedicated to exploring the narrative points and strategies in the novel Tomorrow, written by Graham Swift, a prominent English postmodern writer, with the main objective to draw attention to the nature of narration and narrators. The aim of the research is to give answers to the questions of choices made by the novelist when it comes to narrators, narration, narrative methods and techniques, and whether the narrators are (un)reliable, etc. The author of this paper tries to determine to which extent the 2nd person narration has become influential in postmodern literature - by being mysterious, ambiguous and unknown. We often do not know to whom a narrator is speaking, nor whose voice is being heard by readers. Contemporary narratological theories deny the existence of this clear, precise and uniformed narratological voice, whether it is an author, a narrator or a reader. These days, numerous avant-garde narratological strategies are being emphasized, most notably the "wandering" second person, used by the main character of the novel Tomorrow as well. The inseparable part of the research is also questioning the postmodern premises such as the final doubt considering the (re)presentation of a story, the truth and the past (both individual and collective) which influence the choices made while forming the narration in the novel. The narratological analysis has shown the nature of psychological, moral, as well as ethical competence of the narrator, Paula Hook - a successful woman of the 21st century - a professor, a mother, a wife, living an ideal life threatened by a profound family secret. She acts as a representative of the 21st century wandering narrator - she doubts, questions, rethinks - because the history, past and truth are being constantly questioned in contemporary societies and literature as well.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Richard H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The Past

The introduction to this study explores the notion of audiovisuality as it pertains to John Cage’s interaction with avant-garde filmmakers. Moving from the corporeal notion of Cage’s “everyday awareness,” audiovisuality is akin to the lived phenomenal experience. Artworks expressing such an awareness point to our understanding of the self and the lived experience. Such a framework allows for the exploration of a number of issues concerning “Cage Studies,” the flood of academic literature from the past two decades that has attempted to situate Cage’s complex aesthetic stances within 20th- and 21st-century theories of history.

History on the Move: Reimagining Historical Change and the (Im)possibility of Utopia in the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhan Hellerma
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Current Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Main Ideas

Abstract In his meticulously researched and conceptually innovative book, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon aims to capture the historical sensibility emergent during the postwar period broadly conceived, spanning from the 1940s to our present moment. Attending particularly to the debates concerning ecological and technological outlooks, Simon theorizes that our historical horizon is increasingly shaped by the expectations of an unprecedented event that challenges the sustainability of the human subject as known today. Arguing that the concept of unprecedented change can best be explained against the backdrop of a modern processual temporal configuration originating in the eighteenth century, Simon likewise probes the same concept to illuminate a distinct relationship with the past. Elaborating on the main ideas of the book, the paper will interrogate critically Simon’s assertion whereby the novel postwar temporality is inherently dystopian, and will negotiate Simon’s engagement with presentism, which he questions as an inaccurate representation of our current regime of historicity.

scholarly journals A JOURNEY TO (OWN) MEMORY: LVIV BETWEEN AND DURING WORLD WAR II IN CONTEMPORARY TEXT (BASED ON NOVELS "THE MUSEUM OF ABANDONED SECRETS" BY OKSANA ZABUZHKO AND "TANGO OF DEATH" BY YURII VYNNYCHUK)

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 278-355
Author(s):  
Khrystyna RUTAR
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Access Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ukrainian Text

In the article basing on theoretical framework of memory studies, two historical novels written by modern Ukrainian authors have been analyzed. The main references to the interwar Lviv and Lviv during the war in works are singled out and the importance of inclusion and comprehension of places of those two periods in modern Ukrainian text is indicated. The main strategies of returning to memory of interwar Lviv and its inhabitants are analyzed. The traumatized memory and ways of talking about the 20th century cultural traumas were analyzed in the 21st century novel, those traumas, which for more than a half of century were surrounded by curtain of fear, censorship and inability to speak openly about it. Attention is drawn to the names of streets are obtaining features of memory prosthesis and becomes an access memory tool. The author concludes that the novel, which had the opportunity to take a fresh look at the traumatic pages of the past, remains in the shadow of stereotypes and silence. The abilities of literature in memory studies is analyzed and are noted that literature can be both as a tool of memory and as an object of memory studies. Keywords memory, Lviv, Oksana Zabuzhko, Yurii Vynnychuk, Museum of abandoned secrets, Tango of Death, trauma, war, interwar period.

Rethinking the Narrative in Fe en Disfraz: Latin American Female Slave Stories from Violence to (Self)-Emancipation

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Joseph McClanahan
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Slave

Abstract As with her previous novels, Mayra Santos-Febres explore the often-complex (inter)connections between men and women in Fe en disfraz (2009). In this novel, she takes her readers on a historical exploration into Latin America’s Colonial slave past, intertwining this history with the 21st century. The novel revolves around two Caribbean historians, who are living and working in Chicago, María Fernanda Verdejo, known as Fe, and Martín Tirado and serve as guides on this journey linking the present-day to the past. Through an entanglement of stories, relationships, and historical reflections, Santos-Febres creates a distinctive narrative which helps the reader on this literary expedition. As such, this article addresses how the author’s narrative style combined with reverberations of a bleak period in Latin American history come together to re-contextualize the violent female slave narratives in order to focus on their emancipation, and ultimately, to reveal how the central character vocalizes her own desire to be emancipated from these echoes of the past.

Postcolonial Trauma in the 21st-Century English Female Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Lilia F. Khabibullina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Psychological Problem ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Chronicle ◽  
White Teeth

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

“We Are Making One Story, Yes?” - The Poetics of Interconnection in Postmodern Literature in a Global Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Miriam Wallraven
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Cloud Atlas ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Literary Devices

During the last decades, theories of interconnection and linking have been in the centre of many academic discourses: what goes back to the ancient hermetic worldview that regards everything as connected has been taken up in studies on our globalised world, for example as relationality in the form of cosmodernism. Thus, society has been regarded as linked in areas as different as social networks or globalised markets. In this paper, it is shown how such interconnections are created by storytelling. For this purpose, three metafictional novels with a multiplot structure are analysed. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated (2002), storytelling helps two very different characters to search for their identity and a traumatic family past influenced by the Holocaust. In the novel, three textual levels and several narrators make it visible that the search for identity and the past is only possible by interlinked stories and a process of co-authorship. The intricate structure of Catherynne M. Valente's fantastic novel Palimpsest (2009) thematises the connection between human beings and their stories which even spans different worlds. Metafictional structures – especially the structure of the palimpsest – illustrate how the whole world consists of stories written on other stories. David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas (2004) consists of six narratives set in different times and places which are connected by symbols, intertextual links, or intermedial adaptations. Hence, in the novel it is shown that despite wars, violence, and the struggle for power throughout history, human beings are connected across time and space – by their stories. By analysing these literary devices, a postmodern poetics of interconnection becomes visible that shows how human history is created by transglobal storytelling.

scholarly journals Michel Houellebecq’s Submission – a novel of decadence

Literatūra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 94-100
Author(s):  
Vytautas Bikulčius
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
21St Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Madonna ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission has been analysed as a novel of decadence in this paper. Referring to the works of Michel Winock, François Livi and Michel Onfray, it has been found that a decadent novel can be associated not only with the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Loűys, Jean Lorrain and others produced at the end of the 19th century but also at subsequent periods. Such characteristics of decadent writing as the threat of catastrophe, fundamental changes in society, nostalgia can be found in the analysed novel.François, the main character of the novel, an expert on Huysmans and a professor at Sorbonne University, supports Huysmans’ ideas to some extent trying to find the link between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century by comparing processes in society. Huysmans sought an ideal in the Middle Ages, while François travels to Rocamadour, famous for the statue of the Black Madonna, with a hope to find a spiritual revelation but becomes aware that the world of the past has gone forever. Changes in society made Huysmans leave the monastery, similarly, François gets frustrated as he loses his job when the Muslim Fraternity comes into power.Using the dystopian genre, Houellebecq depicts unbelievable changes in society – the new government proclaims Islam an official religion of France. Society is governed by new rules, the authority is concerned about two things – demography and education. Those, who refuse to convert to Islam, lose their jobs. Changes in society are even linked with geopolitical changes. Meanwhile Houellebecq reveals significant differences between the decadence of the end of the 19th and of the 21st century. Huysmans’ decadence results in neuroses, a desire to seal himself off from the world in alcohol, drugs, etc., to surround himself with works of art, while François in Submission enjoys erotic pleasures, gradually becomes an alcoholic, he does not suffer like Huysmans’ protagonist Des Esseintes. It can be stated that Submission is a decadent novel only at thematic level since aesthetic values, characteristic of the decadence of the 19th century, are left in the background. The only justification of François is that he speaks about his conversion to Islam hypothetically, it shows that he has not made up his mind to take this step.

Hydraulic Laboratory at University of Liège

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Willi H. Hager
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Picture

The Hydraulic Laboratory of Liège University, Belgium, is historically considered from its foundation in 1937 to the mid-1960s. The technical facilities of the various Buildings are highlighted, along with canals and instrumentation available. It is noted that in its initial era, comparatively few basic research has been conducted, mainly due to the professional background of the professors leading the establishment. This state was improved in the past 50 years, however, particularly since the Laboratory was dislocated to its current position in the novel University Campus. Biographies of the leading persons associated with the Liège Hydraulic Laboratory are also presented, so that a comprehensive picture is given of one of the currently leading hydraulic Laboratories of Europe.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

The Pornographer and McGahern's Allusive Practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Present Value ◽  
The Past

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.

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