La Unión Europea en la serie ‘Parlement’ (2020). Entre la ficción y el realismo

The interest of this research resides in the analysis of the only fiction series dealing with the functioning of the European Union: the French- Belgian-German production Parlement (Émilie Noblet and Jérémie Sein, 2020). Through a qualitative methodology, it seeks to answer a threefold re- search objective: (1) to analyze the main characters and their characteristic elements; (2) to identify the space-time relationship and the political actions addressed in fiction in order to provide realism to its development through the scenarios and arguments presented; and (3) to detect the existence of parallelisms between the European Union in the social imagery and the one presented in the series according to the theory of social representations, the reality effect and the Eurobarometer surveys. The results reveal that Parle- ment works with stereotypes and social perceptions about the European Union through satire but manages to offer pedagogical elements in all its epi- sodes. In this way, it accomplishes becoming a popular catalyst to bring Euro- pean politics closer to citizens, by projecting a more human and lighthearted image.

The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.

On the Margin of ”Satantango”. Some Remarks on Slow Cinema

Athough Satantango by Bela Tarr is usually regarded as a perfect representative of slow cinema and certainly deserves this reputation, it is worth remembering that it shares some features with other currents of modern cinema. Its networkish structure and unreliable narration place it close to puzzle films; its close affinity with the Krasznahorkai novel, on which it is based, makes it a form of impure – that is – hybrid cinema; due to an accumulation of evil deeds, tragic and sensational events, it resembles films of action. But, first of all, it is a paramount example of slow cinema, and as such it enables one to grasp the essential features of this genre. According to certain views, often built on the foundation of Andre Bazin theory, slow cinema imitates natural human perception and therefore is inherently realistic. This is not true, though. Instead of a reality effect, slow cinema produces rather a verfremdung effect, which in turn enhances the big potential of slow cinema in inducing transcendental or religious states in a viewer’s mind. Satantango explores this potential, drawing on the religious connotations of Krasznahorkai novel.

reality effect': the figure seen from behind in Carracci's art

This article focuses on Carracci's frequent use of the figure seen from behind in their graphic and pictorial oeuvre (i.e., in the frescoes in Palazzo Fava, in the Cloister of San Michele in Bosco by Ludovico, in the series of the body in art by Annibale, and the engravings Ogni cosa vince l'oro by Agostino). It claims that the figure seen from behind plays a rhetorical function instrumental to the Carracci's search for a new form of naturalism in painting. In particular it creates a 'reality effect' that enhances the naturalistic rendering of the pictorial composition. On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

Realist Pace

Reality principle, reality effect: those two notions—psychoanalytical, narratological, epistemological—have determined our understanding of nineteenth-century literature explicitly for at least half a century. But perhaps they were both, after all, functions of narrative pace. That is what this chapter begins by arguing: that what we consider to be realism is largely a function of pace that mediates between two senses of scene. Scene, like summary, is not an altogether coherent unit. One must acknowledge that it is split between a dramatic-presentational aspect and a pictorial-representational one and that that split is decisive for how realist narrative defines its movement. The central example here is Middlemarch, with Balzac and Flaubert in the near background. But the chapter ends by looking far forward, considering the capacity of narrative fiction to pause and to speak to its reader, from Fielding and Eliot to Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.

Arnold Bennett

Virginia Woolf’s accusation that ‘Life escapes’ from the aesthetic horizons of Bennett’s fiction has long haunted his critical reception. Chapter 3 therefore turns to the function of description within realism, arguing that Bennett does not conceptually prioritize either the particulars, as Woolf argued, or the aggregated scene, as in Barthes’s ‘reality effect’, where the specificities of detail are secondary to its ideological function. The solid superficies for which Bennett has become infamous never constitute individual atoms of meaning, for he insists on both the particularity of a given scene and its transient coherence as a totality. This stereoptic effect mobilizes a searching scepticism as to reality’s appearances, which makes Bennett aim at what is at once both a more abstract and a more concrete notion of truth, one whose material manifestations carry with it the mark of its relation to a whole range of universal truths of which it is part. In this, Bennett acknowledges a debt to the ‘synthetic philosophy’ of Herbert Spencer. By examining more closely the influence of Spencer’s metaphysics on Bennett’s realist aesthetics, and focusing on Bennett’s novels together with his numerous critical writings, this chapter gives long-overdue attention to an often neglected figure in modern British literature.

Siberian Merchants as a Factor in the Formation of the Cultural Landscape of the Region in Nikolay Naumov’s Essays and Stories of the 1870s–1880s

Siberian merchants as a special social and cultural phenomenon that played a role in the formation of the cultural landscape of the region was reflected in several works of the Russian literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. An important place among them belongs to the stories and essays of the Siberian writer Nikolay Naumov created in the 1870s–1880s and included in the pantheon of populist fiction. These works can be attributed to the texts of “local consciousness”, and they were quite actively studied in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. At the same time, the image of Siberian merchants in Naumov’s works that addresses the problem of regional identity in the context of national identity remained practically unexplored. Important factors in the study of this image in the works of the writer-official Naumov are the interaction of his literary and official activities; the ideology of Siberian regionalism, whose member he was a that time; and the ideology of populism, which also had a strong influence on him. Accordingly, the aim of the article is to analyze the features of the depiction of Siberian merchants in Naumov’s works of the 1870s–1880s as an implication of the archetype, the national type of a merchant in Siberian plots. The analysis carried out in the context of the mutual influence of the various social fields occupied by the writer demonstrates the dominance of the pragmatic possibilities of Naumov’s works over the literary ones. Focused on creating a “reality effect”, all the stories are characterized by essay beginning, abundant use of facts, real events, specific details of everyday life. However, with all his efforts to focus his gaze on the material and its reliability, Naumov certainly and quite clearly communicates his ideological conception to the reader. As a rule, the presented image of the Siberian merchant class is completed and consistent, and therefore rather superficial and schematic, extremely typified. Moreover, the image of the Siberian merchant miroed (lit. “world eater”; exploiter) is part of the collective image of the miroed, which also includes kulaks and officials. The influence of the field of public service can be traced both in the subject matter of the works and in their poetics. In particular, they contain an autobiographical image of the hero-narrator (official), and they are also characterized by clearly defined temporal and spatial boundaries, which strengthens the essay element. Telling the reader about the ethnography and geography of Siberia, the writer (through the hero-narrator) draws attention to its “natural” merits, on the one hand, and persistently voices the idea, which performs a cycle-forming function, that Siberia’s natural well-being and harmony is violated by human intervention often coming to Siberia from outside, on the other. Accordingly, Naumov sees the common role of officials and writers in the development of Siberia as the protection of Siberia from predatory exploitation, which is not typical for the region, and from the destruction of lasting values.

A Case for Psychoanalytic Visual Dispositif? : Birdman after the “Cinematographic Capture”

This paper investigates how the notion of “superhero” in popular imagination, evident in the multiple live-action adaptations of Detective Comic’s and Marvel Cinematic Universe’s comic book heroes for their commercial value, has been debunked by Alejandro Inarritu’s 2014 Birdman. While the aforementioned dream factories affirm the fantasmatic “flight” inherent to these cinematic creations, especially symbolised by the aviating capacities of most of their superheroes, it is Inarritu’s Birdman, although not commercially comparable, that is theoretically significant here: the “flight” motif paradoxically gestures to the “capture” that is the very cinematic essence. Working with some key psychoanalytic theorists of the apparatus and later the suture, I shall argue that the messianic in this film, embodied by the male lead, whose waning career is resurrected from oblivion given Keaton’s subsequent work acknowledgement despite his Oscar nonsuccess, is revealed by this author to be ultimately the cinematographic apparatus that gives us Baudry’s transcendental subject, a concept arguably bound to his cinematic effect, a term with epistemological import. This paper will also redirect attention to the interpretative liberation associated with “flight", insisting that Baudry’s discussion of the cinematic dispositif is among the first to address the real, albeit with an emphasis on intelligibility, so that release from what I call the “cinematic capture”, a term that Todd McGowan defines as “uncritical subjectivity”, can be enacted. This thesis asserts that Birdman, proposed here as a case for psychoanalytic film theory, unintentionally exposes the traumatic real within the imaginary because of cinematic capture, thus leading to this discussion of the gaze, identification, narration, control and desire. In addition, it will appraise what Baudry calls the “knowledge effect” by responding to the following inquiries that encapsulate the critical stake here. How can one call this effect “knowledge” when the “subjective” of the transcendental subject becomes more pronounced with the other title of Baudry’s apparatus theory, which is suture theory? What can one say about the “reality effect” of the apparatus theory in an age of digitisation the emphasis of which is virtuality and, last but not least, can one argue that Inarritu’s Birdman is an illustrative intervention of the digitised post-cinematic?