La embajada de Rui: la visión del viaje medieval hacia Tamorlán en la novela gráfica contemporánea

RESUMEN: Este estudio se centra en el análisis de la novela gráfica de Nieves Rosendo Embajada de Rui, texto inspirado en el viaje de los embajadores castellanos a la corte del gran caudillo mongol, un suceso histórico importante de principios del XV cuyo testimonio quedó plasmado en el relato de viajes medieval Embajada a Tamorlán. El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar en qué medida y por qué esta obra contemporánea se aleja de la fuente medieval, así como analizar cuáles son los rasgos que comparte con el testimonio original y qué visión del viaje medieval pretende mostrar a sus lectores. El análisis llevado a cabo nos permitirá ver cómo el Medievo sigue siendo una época idealizada por la mirada nostálgica de los contemporáneos, quienes lo ven como un periodo lejano y fascinante que hacía posibles verdaderos viajes y descubrimientos. ABSTRACT: This study is focused on the analysis of the graphic novel Embajada de Rui by Nieves Rosendo, a text inspired by the travel of the Castilian ambassadors to the court of the great Mongolian leader, an important historical event in the early 15th century whose testimony was reflected in the medieval travelogue Embajada a Tamorlán. The goal of this work is to examine why this contemporary novel differs from the medieval source, as well as to analyze what are the features that it shares with the original testimony and what is the vision of medieval travel that intends to convey to the readers. The analysis carried out allows us to see how the Middle Ages continues to be an idealized period to the nostalgic gaze of contemporaries who see in it a distant and fascinating era that enabled true travels and discoveries.

Człowiek podziemny w prozie konfesyjnej oraz wspomnieniowej Fiodora Dostojewskiego i Marii Komornickiej. Przypadek Notatek z podziemia i Biesów

This paper considers the idea of an underground man. It attempts to answer why writers reach for such a type of heroes and their position in the face of contemporary novel solutions. Maria Komornicka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky see in fallen individuals a source of creative inspiration. The confessional prose of these writers is an attempt to talk about the nihilist heroes who have chosen to live in a place of the metaphorical underground. The underground space becomes a construct of these works, and it is also a symbolic place where individuals desire chaos and darkness. The heroes of Demons and Notes from the Underground escape from where “everyone” lives and go underground, devoting themselves to underground mysticism because only such space protects them against the total collapse of the universe. Underground imagery governs the research process and shows how it determines the structure of a work and influences the methodology and ways of reading these works

'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

Библиски алузии во современиот македонски роман

Biblical Allusions in Macedonian Contemporary Novel. This paper aims to show some models of biblical intertext in Macedonian contemporary novels. The concept “allusion” in this frames is not considered in classical sense, but it means more an inter-play, a ludicrous strategy of postmodern writing. The biblical allusions are interpreted as explicate quotes, implicit references, inclusions, re-writings, parodies, travesties, echoes etc. In the focus of interest are the novels: Novel for Noah by Danilo Kocevski, On the Road to Damascus by Elizabeta Bakovska, The Prophet of Diskantrija by Dragi Mihajlovski and Witch by Venko Andonovski.

Reception

From Oxford University Press's ‘Classical Presences’ series, Carol Dougherty's Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature places Homer's Odyssey in dialogue with five twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels which all deal in some way with the ideas of home or travel. The author focuses on novels which, on the whole, do not respond overtly to the Odyssey, but which instead share key themes – such as transience, reunion, nostalgia, or family relationships – with the Homeric poem. The conversations which she initiates between the ancient epic and the modern novels inspire us to rethink previously held assumptions about the Odyssey. For example, Dougherty's exploration of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), in which a veteran returns from the First World War with no memory of his wife, prompts her reader to consider Odysseus’ stay with Calypso as ‘a kind of nostalgic amnesia, a necessary break that enables rather than an obstacle that impedes his return’ (111). As ‘an experiment in improvisatory criticism’ (16), this book yields rich rewards for the reader who is already familiar with the Odyssey, as well as for those whose point of entry is one of the five modern novels. The framework applied – in which each chapter presents a reading of a relevant section of the Odyssey before setting out an analysis of the contemporary novel with which it is paired – is perhaps more familiar from comparative literary studies than from classical reception scholarship, yet Dougherty's approach is one which stimulates fresh thought about how we as readers (re-)interpret and ‘receive’ ancient texts based on the contexts in which we encounter them.

Modern Woolfian Fiction

Virginia Woolf radically transformed the novel of manners, a form defined by a domestic setting, limited emotional range, and the centrality of social codes. Woolf expanded this to include the whole range of human experience, partly through the use of shifting interior voices who meditate on art, marriage, grief, love, ambition, empire, gender, and the sea. With one long beautiful narrative sweep, Woolf turned the novel of manners into a novel of ideas. This expansion has had a profound effect on subsequent novelists such as Ian McEwan, Rachel Cusk, Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, Tessa Hadley, and the author of this chapter. These writers have used domestic settings and interior voices to write about the whole of life, laying claim to Woolf’s powerful and elastic new form, the novel-of-both-manners-and-ideas. This chapter examines works by these writers to show how Woolf’s luminous prose and deep empathy, her intellectual control and literary potency, continue to illuminate and vivify the contemporary novel.

The Uncomfortable Ordinary

Despite extensive dialogue among Robinson scholars about the role of the ordinary in her fiction, critical attention limits itself almost exclusively to the transformation of the everyday. This chapter focuses instead on the way that, for Robinson’s protagonists, loss settles uneasily into the everyday; the aesthetic defamiliarization of a taken-for-granted world often translates into the intimate experience of estrangement. The power of representation that critics associate with Robinson’s rendering of ordinary things emerges from an intensity of perception that marks her characters’ expulsion from the taken for granted. Scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, Robinson’s characters inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. This chapter introduces the concept of the “uncomfortable ordinary” within the frameworks of everyday life theory, Robinson criticism, contemporary novel studies, and recent dialogues on the lyrical novel to argue for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.