The Knights of Science: Medicine and Mythology

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie examines how parasitologists invoked myths of British nationhood in their professional self-fashioning to frame themselves as knights of science fighting on behalf of Imperial Britain. Analysing scientific lectures, political speeches, letter correspondence, obituaries, medical biographies, and journalistic essays, she draws attention to the prominence of Arthurian legend and Greco-Roman mythology in conceptualisations of parasitology, arguing that such literary-linguistic practices sought to reimagine the relationship between medicine and empire by adapting historical and poetic models of chivalry. In this way, individual researchers were lionised as national heroes and their research framed as labour that could command the longevity of legendary stories like those recounted in Homeric poems and medieval romance. In acclimatisation debates, the tropics were frequently conceptualised in relation to the Greek Underworld, a suite of references that together with dragon slaying and the quest narrative helped to position parasitology as a type of ‘crusading fiction’ in the context of the Victorian medieval revival.

Refusing to be silenced: Claiming chaos narrative

In the Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank proposed three types of narrative told by people attempting to reclaim their voice and the body made alien by illness – restitution, quest, and chaos. Restitution narrative has dominated media; in it, the patient simply experiences the disease and is presented passively, and the medical community is presented as having agency. In quest narrative, the experiencer becomes their own hero; their suffering brings knowledge which is then shared with the audience who bears witness and is charged with learning the lesson the experience conveys. In quest narrative, while speakers have agency that they are often robbed of in the restitution narrative, they are saddled with the imperative to inspire others. This makes the narrator a hero, but we need to ask, where does the imperative come from that demands that the narrator become a hero and an example for others? If that imperative comes from the audience and market demands, we need to recognize how they are dictating the manner in which stories are told, determining which are selected by publishers and media venues to be disseminated. The third type, the chaos narrative, is rarely encountered by audiences because the chaos narrative is usually erased. This “anti-narrative” can only be lived and cannot be told. The individual living with chronic physical or mental illness or a disability, who cannot be stoic and turn their story into a quest narrative, is rendered mute. Since restitution narrative is also unavailable to these individuals, their stories are left unspoken or unwritten. Their stories have largely been controlled by external agents. Failure to meet normate expectations has meant rejection. How prescriptive norms arose that delegitimatized the authority of chaos narrative must be understood if authentic chaos narrative is to be spoken and written.

Gender, Race, and Narrative in On the Road

Johnson explores a successful method for teaching the seminal Beat novel: Kerouac On the Road. She focuses on gender, sexuality, and race, using a feminist lens to reveal how Kerouac employed consistently deft moves of thematic installation and subversion to transform the canonical quest narrative into the postmodern.

THE «QUEST NARRATIVE» RECEPTIVE MODEL IN MIKHAIL SHISHKIN’S STORY «BLIND MUSICIAN»

The article is devoted to the study of the receptive model of Mikhail Shishkin’s prose. The material of the story «Blind Musician» explores the mechanisms by which the text «routes» readers’ perception. This narrative can be considered to be «quest narrative», decoding which, a reader relies on various kinds of keys. One of the most signifi cant is the title, which is possible to interpret in terms of various contexts. Literary one leads us to an obvious comparison of the modern text with the Vladimir Korolenko’s famous story «The Blind Musician». Mythological one suggests correlation with ancient and Christian plots. Within the philosophical framework it is possible to establish a correlation of Mikhail Shishkin’s ideas with the teachings of Gnostics and Pythagoreans. Taking into account each of the listed semiotic codes allows a new decoding of the reference assignment of the sign put into the title. Thus, the «blind musician» turns out not only to be physically blind Roman, but also Evgenia, who needs to become mentally «blind» in order to continue to love, to be a «musician». The analysis revealed the peculiarities of the narrative organisation of Mikhail Shishkin’s text. The level of presentation of the narration turns out to be more important than the plot itself, there is a reconsideration of the main narrative instances, and the clear certainty of the subject of speech is lost.

Roguish Self-Fashioning and Questing in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything”

This paper examines self-fashioning in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything,” a story about a Sarajevo teenager’s journey through ex-Yugoslavia to the Slovenian town of Murska Sobota. His aim? “[T]o buy a freezer chest for my family” (39). While in transit, the first-person narrator imagines himself a rogue of sorts; the fictional journey he takes, meanwhile, is clearly within the quest tradition. The paper argues that “Everything” is an unruly text because by the end of the story the reader must jettison the conventional reading traditions the quest narrative evokes. What begins as a comic tale about a minor journey opens out, in the story’s final lines, into a story about larger historical concerns, namely, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. By introducing contemporary history, Hemon points beyond the closed world of his short story, while rejecting the quest pattern he has established.

Kafka's The Trial

The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multifaceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism. Written in a relatively abstract language, it tells the story of Josef K., who is accused of a crime he has no recollection of having committed (and whose nature is never revealed to him). The novel has often been interpreted theologically, expressing a form of radical nihilism in a modern world abandoned by God. However, it has just as often been read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the anonymous system he is facing) progressively leads to greater and greater confusion, ending with his execution. In this volume, the contributors deal with a range of issues arising in this work. Theology is central, and related to that are questions of justice, law, ethics, resistance, and subjectivity. All the contributors view the novel as responding to a context of rapid modernization, and questions of metaphysics intersect with the most mundane challenges of everyday life. There is here a fundamental uncertainty, a context of skepticism, that the contributors approach from a variety of angles.

Introduction

Franz Kafka’s The Trial stands as one of the most influential and emblematic novels of the twentieth century. Yet, as the overused adjective “Kafkaesque” suggests, rather than as a work of art in its full complexity, it has all too often been received as an expression of some vaguely felt cultural or psychological malaise—a symbol, perhaps, of all that we do not seem to comprehend, but that nevertheless is felt to haunt and influence us in inexplicable ways. Its plot, however, is both complex and completely unforgettable. A man stands accused of a crime he appears not to have any recollection of having committed and whose nature is never revealed to him. In what may ultimately be described as a tragic quest-narrative, the protagonist’s search for truth and clarity (about himself, his alleged guilt, and the system he is facing) progressively leads to increasing confusion before ending with his execution in an abandoned quarry. Josef K., its famous anti-hero, is an everyman faced with an anonymous, inscrutable yet seemingly omnipotent power. For all its fundamental strangeness, the novel seems to address defining concerns of the modern era: a sense of radical estrangement, the belittling of the individual in a bureaucratically controlled mass society, the rise perhaps of totalitarianism, as well as the fearful nihilism of a world apparently abandoned by God....