Music as Formal and Signifying Feature in García Márquez’s Mature Fiction

Music has played a varying role in García Márquez’s work since the passing reference to traveling troubadour “Francisco el Hombre” in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the novel’s concealed presence of Colombian vallenato song. In The Autumn of the Patriarch music becomes more prominent, with such musical traits as romantic bolero formulas, quotations from folk tunes, children’s jingles, and allusions to Caribbean pop rhythms. These musical insertions help provide markers to the relentless verbal flow of the work. In addition, the larger form of the novel is, by admission of the author, modeled after the string quartets of Bela Bartok. Classical music, moreover, contributes some black humor, as in the refined, cultured thug José Ignacio Sáenz de la Barra’s attachment to Mozart and Bruckner. A vallenato serves as the epigraph to Love in the Time of Cholera and also foreshadows crucial events. Musical references, moreover, furnish chronological and character markers in that novel, with Florentino and Juvenal employing music to captivate Fermina, the first communicating directly with his self-trained violin playing and the other hiring a professional to perform on a grand piano under her balcony. During their one encounter, the two men turn from the economic issue at hand to a discussion of music. García Márquez’s last novel fuses Florentino and Juvenal into a modernist musical voice in his narration of Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Punctuating his recollections with “high art” musical allusions, he also communicates directly by singing a medieval Spanish ballad to his sleeping beauty.

Dark Corporeality: Blood, Vampires and Erotics in the British TV Series “Dracula” 2020. Part 1.

The article analyzes the plot tropes of the British mini-series “Dracula”, produced by screenwriters S. Moffat and M. Gatiss, creators of the even more popular TV series “Sherlock”. The new “Dracula”, a mixture of black comedy and body horror, was produced by the BBC and shown on the streaming platform NETFLIX in 2020. The mini-series received the most controversial appraisals from viewers and art critics: from very enthusiastic to sharply negative. The author of this article examines the plot of the series “Dracula” and offers her own version of decoding its meanings. The article sequentially examines the artistic techniques used by famous British screenwriters to create visual and emotional effects, such as black humor, hypertext, queerbaiting, sexual seduction, the “defeated expectancy” trop etc.

COMIC CHARACTERS IN YU HUA’S NOVELS AND THE CONVERSATION WITH CHINESE TRADITIONAL CULTURE

The comic character in Yu Hua's novel is a unique artistic tool for the author to converse with the main clauses in the Chinese traditional culture. Through analysing the different types - sarcastic characters, comic characters and black humor characters - the article aims to decode the writer's reflective spirit towards people. From this study, the article contributes to affirm Yu Hua's new contributions in thought and art fields.

Humor or Black Humor? The Use of Humor and Irony in The Financial Expert

K. Narayan was one of the pioneers of Indo Anglian fiction along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. Their heydays were marked by complicated social issues such as India’s struggle for Independence and the more stressful period afterwards. Among the three, many consider R. K. Narayan as the most realistic in fiction considering Indian settings. The Financial Expert is again considered as Narayan’s masterpiece by many. It’s a well-constructed novel in five parts. The story is focused on three main aspects relating to the central character of Margayya. They are; Margayya’s determination to acquire wealth, his love for his own son Balu and his relationship with his brother and sister in law. It is at times mesmerizing to analyze Narayan’s use of humor and irony in crafting the fate of a normal middle class individual.

Script System and Black Humor in Plays by M. McDonagh

The present paper focuses on intertextuality as a means of black humor in plays by Martin McDonagh, a famous British-Irish playwright. Nine of his plays have been translated into different languages and staged in theatres around the world. However, most theories of comic effect cannot explain the phenomenon of his popularity. This prompted the authors to search for the most accurate and least conditioned way to classify intertext as a means of comic effect in general and black humor in particular. As a result, they chose the semantic theory of humor by V. Raskin and the multidisciplinary general theory of verbal humor developed by V. Raskin and S. Attardo. These theories employ the notions of "script" and "opposition" to examine the linguistic nature of the joke. Using attributed and unattributed intertext inclusions as "signs" or "scripts", the authors analyzed McDonagh’s plays through the prism of this theory. The result was a system of scripts and oppositions that form the chronotope of a long text as opposed to that of a joke. The article also introduces the black humor mechanism in McDonagh's plays: it is based on references to the intertextual thesaurus of the potential reader / theatre audience.

Odarchenko’s Poems: Interactions of Surrealism, Surrealist Code, and Sentimentalism

The article examines surrealist codes in poetry on the example of Y. Odarchenko’s poems. The signs of these codes include: peculiar sentimental tone; rationalist approach to the use of language; plotted poetic diegesis and poeticized prose; and principle of metonymic displacements. In the texts of Odarchenko, grotesque artistic optics leads to multilateral shifts: in terms of intonation — a shift from sentimentality to black humor; in term of genre —a shift from the idyll to horror; at the composition level — a shift from the detailed description of minor and largely random details to a pointe that highlights some underlying terrible pattern. It is possible to interpret sentimentality and lyrical tone of the poem as a response to what the poet himself believes to be another magical world while others fail to spot the coexistence of two worlds penetrating each other. While the penetration of the real and imaginary worlds develops into a Sternian motif of the wound, it also evokes surrealistic attention to the world and its living creatures.

Black humor in Daniil Kharms`s works

Daniil Kharms` s works have been a hot topic of research worldwide for several years. The present study discusses Kharms’s black humor writings of the 1930s, exposes aesthetic potential and humanistic content of black humor as an avant-garde phenomenon, and defines the role of black humor in the plot of works containing allusions to arrest in secret, hospitals and the life of Soviet children. As paper suggests the themes and subjects of Kharms’s black humor are designed to enhance humanistic content. In Kharms’s art world of black humor, “purity” is a kind of harmonious world order representing the earth as “a space, filled with madness and fear” on a real level while on an artistic level it functions as the purity of creative mind generating circular compositional structure and using semantic shift and narrative interruption. In other words, purity embodies the real world while belonging to it. The popularity of Kharms may be, firstly, explained by a clear feeling of absurdism and black humor, the root of which is his requirement for humanization of life and firm faith in God. Kharms believed that religion is “ambiguous and amorphous” and should be expressed in some form or object, without which the essence of religiosity would be lost, even if the most reliable authority and firm dogma are there. Thus, overtly inhuman elements which give a false impression of writer’s spiritual value, do not express the essence of his worldview, but reflect surrounding senseless reality. Out of dissatisfaction with reality, Kharms uses black humor to respond to the evil and absurdity of life.

With dark humor about a dark future

This article analyses the relationship between black humor and dystopian literature. In dystopia, humor can appear on the surface as language or situational comics, but there is also a deeper link between these two literary phenomena: they confront the reader with an unexpected notion in order to bring him to a critical reflection. There are many dystopias in the Nordic literature that use comic elements. Three of them are discussed in this article: Axel Jensens Epp (1965), Lena Anderssons Duck City (2006) and Kaspar Colling Nielsens Den danske borgerkrig 2018–24 (2013). The analysis shows that classic black humor is enriched with other tragicomic, satirical or surrealistic elements and significantly contributes to the critical tone of the text. In all cases humor is used for the same purpose, and this is a critique of superior power (the so-called superiority theory). Therefore, humor can be considered not only as a stylistic means, but also as a principle of construction of the dystopian works.

Laughing at the Early Cold War

The chapter examines two recent films, Hail Caesar! and The Death of Stalin, both set in the early 1950s, that use black humor to consider two very serious events. Set two years apart (the first in 1951 and the second in 1953), both films use laughter to explore a particularly stressful period in the histories of the respective superpowers. The chapter places the films in the context of the 2010s and shows how their darkly humorous re-envisioning of the past, particularly of Cold War tropes, fits into a period of renewed tensions between Russia and the United States.