scholarly journals Reconstructing the Past as a Means of Rationalizing the Present: A Study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of The Day (1989)

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Mohamed Fathi Helaly Khalaf
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Past Life ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
To Come ◽  
Different Levels

The postwar world period was riddled with rapid changes at the different levels. Many people felt they were not able to come to terms with such ongoing changes and had to find a way to coexist with the status-quo. Postmodernism looks upon man as a social being that should learn how to adapt himself to whatever situation by whatever means available. Ishiguro’s novels are written in an expanded humanistic tradition. They are stories dealing with human relationship. They are narratives centering on the working of consciousness and the unconsciousness of the human mind. Ishiguro is concerned with reworking of the past from a late twentieth century perspective. The purpose of this study is to trace the postmodern aspects in The Remains of The Day through the life and character of Stevens and his relationships with the people that he has lived with. Stevens struggles to come to term with his present through telling stories and anecdotes of his past life. The novel depicts the role that memories can play in reconstructing the past events so that the present can be meaningful in some way from a postmodern standpoint. As a postwar British individual, the protagonist of the novel tries to practice suppression over his emotions at the personal level as well as the professional level to construct a new identity. Stevens appears torn between memories of the past and the representation of the present. He is suffering from an identity crisis and striving to create a meaningful present for himself. As a postmodern man, Stevens has to struggle at different levels. He is leading a life riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. He can’t feel at home with the surrounding world as he is always busy trying to achieve some perfection that is not attainable in a world riddled with conflicts and struggle.

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

Australia and People Seeking Asylum who Arrive by Boat

2018 ◽  
pp. 518-536
Author(s):  
Caroline Fleay
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Repeated Use ◽  
United Nations Convention ◽  
The United Nations

Throughout the past forty years various leaders from both major political parties in Australia have categorized the arrival by boat of people seeking asylum as a “crisis” and the people themselves as “illegal.” This is despite Australia being a signatory to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and receiving relatively few people who seek asylum compared with many other countries. Punitive government policies and processes have further reinforced these representations, such that “crisis” and “illegal” can now be understood as both categories of analysis and practice. The repeated use of such categories may be helping to produce and reproduce prejudice and racism and obscure the needs and experiences of people seeking asylum.

scholarly journals Gæst hos virkeligheden. Sprogets landflygtighed i "Løgneren" af Martin A. Hansen og "Det svundne er en drøm" af Aksel Sandemose

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-131
Author(s):  
Jørgen Veisland
Keyword(s):  
Migratory Birds ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Central motifs and episodes form interesting and significant links between Aksel Sandemose’s novel Det svundne er en drøm, published in 1946, and Martin A. Hansen’s novel from 1950, Løgneren. The motifs of truth versus lie, and the intermingling of the two, and of the split subject, manifest themselves in the protagonists who share a common first name, Johannes. The texts are an attempt to write diaries that transcend the borderline between past and present, fiction and reality, truth and lying. The diary form, composed in the first person as an alternative to the novel form proper, is viewed by both protagonists as an experiment that questions the ability of language to portray reality accurately and truthfully. Furthermore, the diaries break with chronology in order to come to terms with a darkness within, an essentially unknown, demonic territory that prevents knowledge and truth from emerging. Central episodes in the two diaries are practically identical, e.g. the drowning accident that takes place in both texts, the absence of the ‘I’ of the diary from home, and the sense of alienation from home. Additionally, significant symbols recur in both texts, e.g. a necklace and migratory birds. The protagonists’ relationships to women are all but identical and involve an examination of the past and of guilt that becomes a potential key to resolving what constitutes guilt, conscience, home and exile. The two texts form an intertext and there is compelling evidence pointing to Sandemose’s diary having profoundly influenced Hansen’s narrative.

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

PMLA ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 982-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Native American History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Accounts

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

The Tempest

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-726 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmer Edgar Stoll
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come

There is always a particular interest attaching to the last work of a great author; and in an especial degree this has been the case with Shakespeare. If The Tempest was not really his last play, it would seem that it ought to have been. The action now and then lags a bit, and gives the people on the stage or in the audience a chance to ponder; which the chief character once does to such effect that his speech, of purest and highest poetry, seems to be the “conclusion of the whole matter,” der Weisheit letzter Schluss. And there are meetings and leave-takings, and glances into the past and at what is to come.

scholarly journals Pet Lamb and Clothed Hyena: Law as an Oppressive Force in Jane Eyre

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-17
Author(s):  
Alexander Maine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Difficulties ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Social Difficulty

Writing in 1864, the literary critic Justin M’Carthy stated that ‘the greatest social difficulty in England today is the relationship between men and women.’ This came at a time of unprecedented social and legal change of the status of women in the 19th Century. A prominent novel of the time concerning such social difficulty is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography which attempts to reflect these social difficulties as often resulting from law. As such, the novel may be used as a reflection of the condition of nineteenth century English law as an oppressive force against women. This force is one that enacts morality through legality, and has particular resonance in literature concerning social issues. Jane Eyre will be discussed as a novel that provides insights into women’s experiences in the mid-nineteenth century. Law is represented within the novel as an oppressive force that directly subjugates women, and as such the novel may be regarded as an early liberal feminist work that challenges the condition of law. This article will explore the link between good moral behaviour, and moral madness, the latter being perceived as a threat to the domestic and the law’s response to this threat. It will pick upon certain themes presented by Brontë, such as injustice towards women, wrongful confinement, insanity and adulterous immoral behaviour, to come to the conclusion that the novelist presented law as a method of constructing immorality and injustice, representing inequality and repression.

Afrasian Aesthetics in M.G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida

Matatu ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-187
Author(s):  
J.K.S. Makokha
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Early Adolescence ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
The Novel ◽  
East African ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
To Come

Abstract The Magic of Saida by M.G. Vassanji (2012) centres on the central figure of the novel’s story, Kamal. He is the son of an African mother and an Asian (read Indian) father, who grows up in Tanzania and then relocates to Canada where he becomes an established doctor. The novel tackles themes of African-Asian (read Afrasian) racial identity, belonging, and the effects of the past on the present. Kamal identifies mainly as an African when residing with his mother in Kilwa during his childhood; he is then urged to embrace an Indian identity when he is sent to live with his uncle in Dar es Salaam in his early adolescence. Decades after moving to Edmonton, Canada, Kamal decides to come back to Kilwa. This paper explores the tension and ambiguity in Kamal’s identity by analyzing the way he defines himself—or is defined—in Kilwa and Dar es Salaam, and then investigating, through an eclectic psychochriticism lens, how that in turn affects him as he ages and drives him to return in seach of what it means to be both an Asian and an African in the context of East African cultural landscapes.

God in the Book of the Twelve

2021 ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
James D. Nogalski
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Persian Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Book Of The Twelve ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Character Of God ◽  
Do So

This essay considers the nature and character of God in the Twelve. To do so requires one to extrapolate assumptions about God on multiple levels: individual units, thematic developments, and modes of speech. When these elements are evaluated within the individual books and across the Book of the Twelve as a curated collection, a portrait of YHWH’s actions and motives develops that highlights YHWH’s covenantal expectations across time (from the eighth century to the Persian period) and for the future (a Day of YHWH still to come). The resulting portrait has a didactic purpose designed both to warn Jerusalem’s cultic elite of their responsibility and to admonish the people of YHWH to avoid the mistakes of the past.

scholarly journals History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945-2001

2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Schwartz ◽  
Howard Schuman
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
People First ◽  
American Memory ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Ever since Maurice Halbwachs's pioneering work, most scholars have been content to explore collective memory through texts and commemorative symbolism. Assuming that a study of collective memory has fuller meaning when it takes into account what ordinary people think about the past, we compare historians' and commemorative agents' representations of Abraham Lincoln to what four national samples of Americans believe about him. Five primary images-Savior of the Union, Great Emancipator, Man of the People, First (Frontier) American, and Self-Made Man-are prominent in the cumulative body of Lincoln representations, but recent surveys show that only one of these images, the Great Emancipator, is dominant within the public. Lincoln's one-dimensional Emancipator image, which differs from the multi—dimensional one evident in a 1945 sample, reflects new perceptions of the Civil War shaped by late twentieth-century minority rights movements. Thus, “bringing men [and women] back in” involves survey evidence being added to historiographic and commemoration analysis to clarify one of sociology's most ambiguous concepts, collective memory, and to explore its social and generational roots.

scholarly journals Marxist Analysis of Mohammed Hanif's Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-120
Author(s):  
Nazakat ◽  
Muhammad Imran ◽  
Adil Khan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The People ◽  
Marxist Analysis ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Gender

In the novel "Our Lady of Alice Bhatti", the novelist depicts the worse and pitiable plight of the lower classes living on the edges of marginality. The story is narrated through the perspective of a young Christian nurse and her 'choorah' family. Her oppression may well be interpreted as an instance of a class struggle between the capitalist and the proletariat. The study contends that religious and gender discrimination is, in some ways, the by-product of an uneven economic system and hegemonic capitalistic power structures. Basic tenets of Marxist theory are employed as a theoretical framework to conduct the research in a systematic way. The study reveals that the ideologies of creed, caste and colour are very often used as capitalistic tools to divide human beings, especially the lower classes. It suggests that there is a dire need for educating the people on how to come together simply for what they actually are.

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