An artist’s biography in the modern science discourse

The purpose of the article reveals the conceptual statements of the artistic personality in the XXI century by studying and generalizing humanitarian study theses. The research methodology: the biographic, analytical, historical, hermeneutic, systemic approaches were applied, which enabled the complex review of the aforementioned question. The scientific novelty. For the first time ever, the specifics of an artist’s chronicles under nowadays’ civilization conditions were rendered within the national art history framework. Conclusions. On the boundary of the XX – XXI centuries, an outstanding profile’s biography experienced considerable transformations referring to epoch changes and filled with new philosophic senses having reflected the trans-modern atmosphere. The contemporary chronicle is a complex dialectic phenomenon. It is culture-centered, contextual (aspiring after involving the novel character in human civilization continuum), and trying to solve current anthropological issues, as well as to regard the agent as the universal ontological codes bearer, and to declare the value of an artistic individual, etc. Meanwhile, the abovementioned genre reveals the epoch controversy being manifested via lack of moral ideals, ethics, and aesthetic canons, and personified leaders. The consequence of the situation is the fact of the chronicles being not necessarily identical to its actual prototype, but rather suggesting a possible variant of interpreting its essence. Their author provides an original vision of facts and phenomena of the artist’s being, constructs, and represents the subject’s model in the available form reflecting the following: the master’s image; the concrete epoch’s portrait; the researcher’s autobiography. From this information source, the recipient builds his own history of the novel character. The methodology of rendering an artistic personality’s biography is based on the integration of humanitarian study advances, as well as an interdisciplinary approach, the interaction of various science discourses, contexts, senses, etc. Keywords: biography; master; art history; culture; humanitarian study.

Historical Literacy and Alternating Questions in the Novel (The Blood of Al-Hussein)

Ibrahim Issa's novel (The Blood of Hussein) employs the historical incident in the service of the narrative theme of the narrative text itself, and despite the dominance of the historical text on most of the pages of the novel, it remains within the narrative rather than the historical framework. For the clarity of the creator's goal of evoking this historical incident without others. This study, marked by (historical education and different questions in the novel (The Blood of Hussein)) aims to explain the interpretive reading and the questions that are silent in the places of historical narration and how to use them in building the plot of the novel, so the research was carried out on several axes that dealt with the history of the novel, and the mechanisms of producing the narrative meaning from the historical document As well as the psychological-ideological conflicts and the imagined pattern in which the main theme of the novel was manifested in spite of its small written space. The study found results, the most important of which are: the prevalence of psychological and ideological conflict over the main characters of the novel, the determination of the narrative type to naturalize this novel, as well as the narrator’s attempt not to surrender to the historical incident as it is, but on the contrary, he proceeds to discuss and refute it at many times.

When the Exception Is the Rule

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly accorded a foundational role in the history of the novel. Yet this inaugural gesture casts a paradoxical shadow on subsequent novels, inasmuch as it rebukes as aberrant the pleasure of indulging in novel-reading. Don Quixote brands later novels as quixotic in their generic hybridity, which can be traced to Don Quixote itself. It both is and is not a novel, setting the precedent for the novel as a genre endlessly in quest of exceptions to itself as genre—or, in the commercial context in which it has thrived, as generic. This chapter consolidates a torrent of pronouncements and observations on Don Quixote by scholars and writers which, taken collectively, reveal a kind of choral unanimity in the bewitchment to which they attest.

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.

Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s Journey to the “Other World”: The History of a Cold War Ḥajjnāma

Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s Dar on dunyo (“In the other world”), first published in Tajik in 1965 and later translated to Russian, Uzbek, and many other languages, is the only known fictionalized account of the ḥajj produced in the Soviet Union. Based on a trip made by the author in 1963, the novel provided the Soviet reader a rare glimpse into this sacred rite. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary responses, and the text itself, this article traces the origins and publication history of the novel, situates it within Soviet domestic and foreign policy goals, and analyzes the text to see how the author tried to reconcile competing ideological priorities.

Narrar e ser: a pessoalidade do narrador de Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios / Narrating and Being: The Us Narrator’s Personality Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios

Resumo: A história do romance viu, diante de si, formas diversas de narrar, conforme aponta os escritos de Theodor W. Adorno, por exemplo. Desde narradores impessoais, mantendo a distância segura que lhe confere a narrativa em terceira pessoa até os casos em que o que se narra é algo diretamente relacionado ao próprio narrador. Esse parece ser o caso do romance de Marçal Aquino, Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios, que conta o envolvimento amoroso de Cauby e Lavínia a partir do olhar do próprio Cauby. Esse narra de um modo cuja relação de si mesmo com a narrativa fica explícita, tamanha é sua passionalidade em relação às suas vivências e ao ato de narrar. Isso se manifesta tanto na linguagem, em termos de escolhas narrativas, quanto nas ações do narrador-personagem-protagonista que narra e vive aquilo que narra. Suas características mais notáveis são a passionalidade, a capacidade de registrar fotograficamente detalhes da narrativa e o rompimento com técnicas narrativas tradicionais.Palavras-chave: narrador; primeira pessoa; romance brasileiro contemporâneo; Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios.Abstract: The history of the novel saw, before it, different ways of narrating, as pointed out by the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, for example. From impersonal narrators, maintaining the safe distance that the third person narrative gives him until the cases in which what is narrated is something directly related to the narrator himself. This seems to be the case with Marçal Aquino’s novel I would receive the worst news from his beautiful lips, which tells of Cauby and Lavínia’s loving involvement from the point of view of Cauby himself. He narrates in a way whose relationship with himself and the narrative is explicit, such is his passion for his experiences and the act of narrating. This manifests itself both in language, in terms of narrative choices, and in the actions of the narrator-character-protagonist who narrates and experiences what he narrates. Its most notable characteristics are passionality, the ability to photographically record details of the narrative and break with traditional narrative techniques.Keywords: narrator; first person; contemporary Brazilian romance; Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios.