DIALOGIC ADIGA: THE NEOLIBERAL GOSPEL AND ITS CONTEXTS IN THE WHITE TIGER

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, both accommodates and provokes a variety of voices and discourses, evoking and dealing with India’s past, present, and future, thus highlighting its author’s dialogic vision. Although postcolonial and posthumanist approaches are worth exploring at length in this very challenging text, the current starts from the novel’s initial “conversation” with a controversial non-fiction book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and the theory of the ten flatteners that reshape globalization, with Bangalore as the then (2006) neoliberal hub of the world. Using the patterns of the frame narrative of the Arabian Nights and of the European epistolary novel, the text under investigation dramatizes and transfigures the dark side of neoliberalism by means of the imaginary conversation between a murderer turned successful entrepreneur and the leader of the world’s most prominent rising economic tiger.

Representation of Cultural Ambivalence in Eliza Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of A Hindoo Rajah

Eliza Hamilton in her two-volume epistolary novel Translation of The Letters of A Hindoo Rajah (1819), by projecting two characters who undergo the oppositional experiences during their contact with English people, creates an ambivalent situation which neither represents England as totally positive nor India as completely negative. The two perspectives of Zaarmilla and Sheermaal exclude one another’s rendering. To unpack this contradictory narrative position, the concept of acculturation and cultural stress, especially formulated by John W. Berry is taken in interlocution. By rendering these two sorts of antithetical narratives juxtaposed together confirms the dynamics of ambivalence which does not regard Saidaian notion of Orientalism intact.

Drama Uncloseted in Boston

Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.

“Chizhiki tak i mrut”

My article will investigate the ways in which metaphors for birds, especially birds of song, in the correspondence between the protagonists of Dostoevsky's novel “Poor Folk” (Бедные люди, 1846) — Makar Devushkin and Varen'ka Dobroselova — refer back to Goethe's scandalously popular epistolary novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther” (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774). I propose that Dostoevsky involves a metaphoric net as an oblique subtext of references to recent popular European literature to convey the idea of Romantic death (bearing in mind the extent to which “Werther”, though written in the late eighteenth century, retained its cultural relevance for Russian readers in Dostoevsky's time). As I am investigating the larger picture of Dostoevsky's treatment of death and suicide in his shorter fiction as well as his dialogue with Goethe on this subject, I also argue that in “Poor Folk” the parody and stylization of Romantic discourse in Rataziaev's texts (and elsewhere) reveals thematic parallels between the Russian and the German narratives, and demonstrates Dostoevsky's viewpoint on death, Romanticism and Realism. For the methodological basis of my study, I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on parody and stylization from his seminal “Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics” (especially from the chapter “Dostoevsky's Discourse”.

The Novel "Poor Folk" in the Context of Dostoevsky's Letters from the time of the Kuznetsk Events

The article shows the connection between the epistolary novel "Poor Folk", the events of the biography of F. M. Dostoevsky and his epistolary legacy of the Kuznetsk period (1855-1857). The novel "Poor Folk" created in after -penal colony time is considered as a high standard for the author, as a self-reflection. The letters of F. M. Dostoevsky from the time of the Kuznetsk events, where there are several excerpts about "Poor Folk", are presented as a workbook, a creative laboratory, where the writer develops a new quality of artistic expression characteristic of his mature works. For Dostoevsky, the novel "Poor Folk" is not just a brilliant debut that opened the way to "great literature", but also a text that has prophetic and life-creating modes, and has connections with the events of his life in Kuznetsk. Repeated reference to it, the presence of several versions of the novel, speaks about the peculiarities of the author's creative thinking and the significance of this work for the writer.

L’'amour fou' tra spaesamento e straniamento in due scrittrici siciliane: Rosina Muzio Salvo e Cettina Natoli

Amour fou between displacement and estrangement in two Sicilian writers of the Nineteenth Century Rosina Muzio Salvo and Cettina Natoli This research aims at investigating the topos of love as deep and extreme passion, in opposition to social stereotypes, in two novels by two Sicilian female writers of the Nineteenth Century, Adelina (1845) by Rosina Muzio Salvo (1815-1866) and Margherita Royn (1886) by Cettina Natoli (1867-1913). In Adelina amour fou is in conflict with the patriotic needs and the moralism of the newborn middle-class society; in Margherita Royn, an overliterary, different kind of love clashes with the materialism and commercialization which dominate in late Nineteenth century. Adelina’s displacement is highlighted by the structure of the polyphonic epistolary novel, in which the protagonist’s ‘reasons of the heart’ are opposed to the opinions of all the other characters; according to a process of Verghian estrangement (Luperini, 1974), they convey a distorted picture of her passion and consider it a weird, unacceptable fact. Margherita is able to see reality only through an overly literary lens of extreme sentimentality; her isolation is manifest in the depiction of her body, consumed by an adulterous passion which contrasts with her husband’s rough physicality; overcome by jealousy, he will end up killing her.

The White Tiger: A Novel with Paradox & Irony

The White Tiger is an epistolary novel in seven parts with shocking fictional narrative. The protagonist Balram is an anti-hero, cleverly escapes from his crime; his innocence gone with the taste of fugitive life and become a criminal; boosted never to be catch by police. Balram’s journey starts from Laxmangarh to Delhi and to Bangalore. The writer presents a riveting tale of the realistic anti-hero Balram Halwai, who although born in the most humble surrounding, ambitions to rise above his predetermined fate to be born and die in “the darkness” and achieves it through his ruthless planning of the murder of his master Ashok. Balrams’ ascend represents subalterns’ progress in post colonial world; it is a protest that no bigotry any more is tolerable. He broke ‘the Rooster Coop’ and became The White Tiger. Balram’s acts are the product of age old resentment of marginalised generations; exhibit revenge therapy. This work advocates wild justice. This novel is well stuffed with paradox and irony.

Piano in the land of unsaid love – musical contexts of emotional lives of married female characters in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Sándor Márai’s Embers

In The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel by J.W. Goethe, we can find a literary portrait of a beloved woman playing a keyboard instrument. This is the motif Adam Mickiewicz referred to in his Dziady, Part 4. Both texts describe unrequited love to a woman belonging to another man. Belles-lettres reflect repertoire issues – at the turn of the 19th century girls from a proper home performed simple pieces, often dances. Subsequent decades of the 19th century came with the development of piano methodics, and composers wrote pieces which today constitute part of concert canon, whereas the piano became the perfect musical tool. The plot of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is set in the second half of the 19th century. Music plays an important role in that novel. Mann depicts the problem of clashing views in the marriage of Thomas, who was fond of “pretty melodies”, and Gerda, a magnificent violin and piano player who performed ambitious compositions and showed no mercy in criticising her husband’s musical taste. An important motif is the appearance of a young officer who visits Gerda in order to perform chamber works together. Thomas fears the mysterious bond between his wife and the lieutenant on the one hand and people’s opinions on the other. The motif of music as a platform for communication between a man and a woman can also be found in the novel Embers by Sándor Márai. Here as well it is a connection unavailable to the husband of the main heroine. At the end of his life, Henri, Christine’s husband, refers to music as the “melodious and obscure language” which allows “certain people” to communicate. Both novels include the motif of the end of an era and death of the characters for whom music was extremely significant and who performed compositions of the highest artistic value. Texts by Mann and Márai reflect a decline of a certain stage in the history of culture. It is also the end of the typical ways how burgesses and aristocrats spent their leisure time, how they treated the sphere of emotions and communed with the widely understood art. The result of these changes is the dethronement of the piano, which no longer was one of the most important pieces of furniture in a drawing room nor the most important instrument – as it used to be in the 19th century culture.

„Astra. Roman epistolar” de Dito şi Idem – un caz de istorie literară

The literary collaboration between Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz under the pseudonym “Dito und Idem” was a real accomplishment in the 19th century not only in Romania, but on the whole European continent. After a series of individual projects on translations of Romanian literature into German, Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz began their literary collaboration (1882-1889). The main aim of the literary project was to promote the Romanian literature and culture in Western and Central Europe. Therefore, the project produced two epistolary novels (Aus zwei Welten, Astra) with a real success on the book market. As a result of their attainment, only one novel was translated in Romania. The epistolary novel Astra was published in 1886 in German and translated and printed in feuilleton, in Romania, the same year. Taking everything into account, the study looks into the manner in which Carmen Sylva and Mite Kremnitz managed to use literary methods characteristic to the feuilleton-novel (pickling technique, narrative “seduction”, sensational plot etc.) which assured a consistent distribution of the novel. Furthermore, the comparison between the feuilleton-format and book format of the novel Astra offered us a new perspective on the transition of translated novels into the pages of a feuilleton. All in all, the literary collaboration between Dito and Idem represents a whole page in the literary history of the Romanian novel.