scholarly journals Den arabiske telefon - Krimiparodier og litterær åndsnærværelse hos marokkaneren Driss Chraïbi

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (72) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steen Bille Jørgensen

Steen Bille Jørgensen: “The Arab Telephone: Crime Parodies and Literary Presence of Mind in the Work of Moroccan Novelist Driss Craïbi”Telephones play a central role in the work of the Moroccan novelist Driss Chraïbi. As a francophone writer spending most of his life in France, the writer’s meta-literary crime parodies about Inspecteur Ali integrate telephones at a structural and thematic level to invite the reader to reflect on the relation between the oral Arabic culture and the western crime novel. With a point of departure in the French notion of “téléphone arabe” (Chinese whispers) the poetics of the novel is focusing on its capacity to deal indirectly with the experience of proximity and distance. This problem appears already in the partly autobiographical La Civilisation ma mère and is developed throughout the work. Though Chraïbi critically points to ideological aspects of a paternalistic culture, his development of the Inspecteur Ali figure mainly leads the occidental reader to consider the importance of bodily experience and the spoken word (a fortiori oral literature) with its imaginary-fantasmagorical and fictional implications. Thus the telephone appears to be an ambiguous device that on the one hand provokes fragmentation – mainly related to the western civilisation – but on the other hand points to the foundation of an ethos related to listening and more generally an individual presence of mind.

1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
Peter Simonsen

HAPPINESS ON EARLY RETIREMENT: THE WELFARE STATE AND AFFECTIVE MOBILITY IN JENS BLENDSTRUP’S GUD TALER UD | The article takes its point of departure in current happiness studies and probes the possibly fruitful interdisciplinary relation between research in social science that suggests close links between the Nordic welfare model and the high levels of selfreported happiness we find in the region, and literary criticism which instinctively seems to hold that unhappiness is most conducive to inspire the literary mind. To demonstrate that things are never as simple as that, the article reads Jens Blendstrup’s novel, Gud taler ud (2004), as an example of both a welfare narrative and of what it coins ”an affective mobility story”: a story about a person’s enhanced feeling of happiness in retirement. On the one hand, the novel portrays a person who finds happiness when he is granted early retirement from the welfare state. On the other hand, the novel relates this in such a manner that we are reminded that one man’s happiness may be another’s unhappiness.


2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-116
Author(s):  
W. H. Carruth

In Westermann's Monatshefte for January, 1891, and later in his ‘Life of Lessing,‘ Professor Erich Schmidt has outlined the chief features of the history and transformations of the story of the three rings in Europe. On examination it will be found that all the versions of the story belong to one or the other of two types, which are represented by the two earliest forms of the story preserved to us. The oldest version, that of the Spanish Jew Salomo ben Verga, tells of two rings or jewels only, which were in outward appearance exactly alike, and there is no question of one being genuine and the other false, but only of the relative value of the two. In the absence of the father it is found impossible to decide the question, and thus the decision between Christianity and Judaism is simply avoided. In Li Dis dou vrai aniel, a French poem of the end of the twelfth century, three rings appear, and to the original or genuine ring is attributed a marvelous healing power by which it may be recognized, and following which a decision is arrived at among the three religions, in this case in favor of Christianity, although ther were not wanting later narrators so bold as to hint that the true ring was possessed by Judaism. The version of Etienne de Bourbon, the versions of the Cento Novelle, the three versions of the Gesta Romanorum, all belong to one or the other of two types. We may refer to these two types as the Spanish type and the French type. Those of the first type, to which belongs also the version of Boccaccio, the one from which Lessing took his point of departure, avoid a decision, implying that all religions are equally authoritative, but without inherent or inner evidence of their quality. Those of the second type, to which in many of its features Lessing's final version of the story is allied, lead to a decision, making religion of divine origin indeed, but supplying a test, that of good works, whereby the true religion may be recognized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-222
Author(s):  
Mathias G. Parding

Abstract It is known that Kierkegaard’s relation to politics was problematic and marked by a somewhat reactionary stance. The nature of this problematic relation, however, will be shown to lie in the tension between his double skepticism of the order of establishment [det Bestående] on the one hand, and the political associations of his age on the other. In this tension he is immersed, trembling between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand Kierkegaard is hesitant to support the progressive political movements of the time due to his skepticism about the principle of association in the socio-psychological climate of leveling and envy. On the other hand, his dubious support of the order of the establishment, in particular the Church and Bishop Mynster, becomes increasingly problematic. The importance of 1848 is crucial in this regard since this year marks the decisive turn in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Using the letters to Kolderup-Rosenvinge in the wake of the cataclysmic events of 1848 as my point of departure, I wish to elucidate the pathway towards what Kierkegaard himself understands as his Socratic mission.


Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219
Author(s):  
Liz Shek-Noble

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.


PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.


Author(s):  
Anne Knudsen

Anne Knudsen: The Century of Zoophilia Taking as her point of departure the protests against a dying child having his last wish fulfilled because his wish was to kill a bear, the author argues that animals have achieved a higher moral status than that of humans during the 20th century. The status of animals (and of “nature”) is seen as a consequence of their muteness which on the one hånd makes it impossible for animals to lie, and which on the other hånd allows humans to imagine what animals would say, if they spoke. The development toward zoophilia is explained as a a logical consequence of the cultural naturalisation of humans, and the author draws the conclusion that we may end up entirely without animals as a category. This hypothetical situation will lead to juridical as well as philosophical complications.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kerry Alistair Nitz

<p>Iris Hanika’s commercially and critically successful novel Treffen sich zwei makes use of several techniques in the characterisation of its protagonists. Many of its reviews focus on the author’s deliberate placement of links to a wider literary context. Their interest extends from questions of genre-mixing through to the identification of direct quotes from other authors’ works. The critical preoccupation with intertexts demonstrates their importance for the readers’ response to the novel. More specifically, certain reviews highlight the important role intertexts play in the characterisation of the protagonists. This study catalogues the intertexts, metaphors and parodies in Treffen sich zwei and, by means of quantitative analysis, identifies high-level patterns in the use of these techniques. In particular, patterns are identified between, on the one hand, the different narrative functions of the intertexts and, on the other hand, the different ways in which they are interwoven in the text. The data also shows that distinct patterns are associated with each of the two protagonists and that certain patterns change in the course of the novel in parallel with the changes in the relationship between them. This quantitative evidence is supported by a more detailed, qualitative approach, which examines how specific intertexts or metaphors are used for the purposes of characterisation. In addition, variations in voice are used to distinguish the two main protagonists in a manner consistent with the intertexts and metaphors. It is thanks to the combination of these techniques that the theme of meeting encapsulated in the title, Treffen sich zwei, is woven into the textual fabric of the novel.</p>


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