Challenging Narrative Hierarchies: Embedded Narrative Structure in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves

<p>Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas both feature highly complex structures of narrative embedding. This thesis examines the use of narrative levels in these two novels, considering how the purposes and effects of embedding change and how attention to the structure of this literary device transforms readings of these texts. Cloud Atlas features six distinct and seemingly stand-alone embedded narratives. The relationship between them is complicated both by competing structural models and by clashes of continuity between fact and fiction. Mitchell's novel draws attention to the role of storytelling in the creation of history and human identity. House of Leaves embeds an invented film within a novel masquerading as film criticism, with edits and commentary provided by a further narrator. The disparate parts, narratorial unreliability, and multiple acts of remediation serve to undermine the elaborate narrative hierarchy Danielewski creates. This instability foregrounds the subjectivity of the relationship between reader and text and the embedding narrator functions as a model for the active reader who both interprets and recreates. In both novels the differently styled narratives and structures of embedding facilitate an exploration of the permutations of fact and fiction and, by transgressing the norms of this literary device, they bring into focus the assumptions that exist around it.</p>

Challenging Narrative Hierarchies: Embedded Narrative Structure in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves

<p>Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas both feature highly complex structures of narrative embedding. This thesis examines the use of narrative levels in these two novels, considering how the purposes and effects of embedding change and how attention to the structure of this literary device transforms readings of these texts. Cloud Atlas features six distinct and seemingly stand-alone embedded narratives. The relationship between them is complicated both by competing structural models and by clashes of continuity between fact and fiction. Mitchell's novel draws attention to the role of storytelling in the creation of history and human identity. House of Leaves embeds an invented film within a novel masquerading as film criticism, with edits and commentary provided by a further narrator. The disparate parts, narratorial unreliability, and multiple acts of remediation serve to undermine the elaborate narrative hierarchy Danielewski creates. This instability foregrounds the subjectivity of the relationship between reader and text and the embedding narrator functions as a model for the active reader who both interprets and recreates. In both novels the differently styled narratives and structures of embedding facilitate an exploration of the permutations of fact and fiction and, by transgressing the norms of this literary device, they bring into focus the assumptions that exist around it.</p>

Translator’s notes as a form of linguistic localization of literary works (the case of D. Mitchell’s novels)

The purpose of the present article is to describe the significance of translator's notes from the point of view of localization of English works of fiction for Russian readership, as well as to identify the types of lexical units that become object of adaptation and the degree of their explication. The theoretical and methodological basis of this study is made up of the key provisions of translation studies, the study of linguistic localization and the study of literary discourse. Within the framework of the present research, a comparative analysis of the concepts of adaptation (pragmatic adaptation) and localization has been carried out to substantiate the advisability of using a new term to name culturally determined modifications of the original text. The characteristics of a literary text have been established, which make it possible to classify works of fiction as objects of localization. Content analysis of the English and Russian versions of the novels Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Slade House by the British writer D. Mitchell has been carried out. The original English-language and translated Russian-language versions of the specified literary works are analyzed, in particular, a comparative analysis of the English-language lexical units and phrases, accompanied by translator's notes in the secondary texts, has been conducted. The advantages of notes as a form of localization of literary texts are indicated. They consist in the possibility of a more detailed and quick description of foreign cultural units in comparison with intra-text transformations.

The Rules of How Reality Works Through the Prism of Post-Postmodern Prose

The reviewer analyses the monograph Problematic-Thematic Units and Philosophical­-Esthetical Parameters of the British Post-Postmodern Novel (Kyiv, 2020) written by Dmy­tro Drozdovskyi, a Ukrainian scholar from Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, member of The European Society for the Study of English (Bulgarian branch). In the monograph, the author has outli­ned the theory of the post-postmodern novel based on the analysis of the key novels of contemporary British fiction (David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Sarah waters, Mark Haddon, etc.). The review states that the Ukrainian scholar has developed the theory proposed by Fredric Jameson regarding the post-postmodern features of Cloud Atlas and also discusses the concept of meta-modernity as one of the sections in the post­-postmodern literary paradigm in the UK. Drozdovskyi argues that meta-modernism cannot be the only term that explains all the peculiarities of contemporary British fiction, which also cannot be outlined as meta-modern but as post-postmodern. The scholar provides a new theory of the novel based on the exploitation of real and unreal historical facts and imagined alternative histories and multifaceted realities. Further­more, the reviewer pays attention to the contribution this monograph has for world literary studies spotlighting the theory of literary meta-genre patterns, as Drozdo­vskyi provides a theory according to which literary periods can be divided into those in which the carnival is the dominant meta-genre pattern (like postmodernism) and those that exploit the mystery as the meta-genre pattern (post-postmodernism). The reviewer analyses the key thematic units explained by Drozdovskyi as the key ones that determine the semiosphere of the contemporary British novel (post-metaphysical and post-positivist thinking of the characters, medicalisation of the humanitarian di­scourse, and the representation of the temporal unity of different realities). The scho­lar also states that the post-postmodern British novel exploits the findings of German Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy.

Collections in Atonement, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Bring up the bodies, and Cloud Atlas: A prelude

I will read the fascination with collectors and collecting in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (2012), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) regarding at least two theoretical questions. Can collected things and objects ever assist in the imagination of more satisfying social roles and identities? Can collecting material traces lead to an accurate or truthful depiction of the past-present-future life writing? Those novels represent one of the most popular and critically acclaimed examples of the widespread interest in collecting apparent in contemporary British fiction.

The universal nature of human soul in David Mitchell’s literary legacy

Nowadays when the majority of themes in literature have been already explored, it is hard to find something topical and yet not studied. In this case David Mitchell’s works are the treasury of philosophical ideas covered by author’s fantasy. The novel under our investigation Cloud Atlas is a complicated work in terms of system of characters, plot development and mixture of themes. At the same time this difficulty attracts researchers from all over the globe and provides them with the enough material to study. As each part is a separate story united only by the reincarnation theme (a comet shaped birth mark). Thus, our objective is to study this binding element which reflects the author’s concept of a soul’s universal nature. Even though this concept is a corner stone in this novel, it was left poorly studied. Therefore, this research is an attempt to fill in the gap in literary criticism. In this article we determined how the author expressed this concept in the novel. Moreover, we analyzed how the theme of reincarnation in the novel imitates elements of Hinduism. Thus, we conclude that Cloud Atlas is a complex philosophical novel of the new era.