Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

The Alleged ‘Letter Allegedly from Us’: The Parallel Function of ὡς δι’ ἡμῶν in 2 Thessalonians 2.2

The nearly unanimous consensus of modern scholarship is that 2 Thess. 2.2 refers to a letter either written or alleged to have been written by Paul, as captured in the most common rendering of the text, ‘a letter allegedly from/by us’. The thesis of this article is that the relevant phrase, ὡς δι’ ἡμῶν, does not serve to qualify ‘letter’ or the other two substantives that precede (‘a spirit’, ‘a word’), but that it identifies Paul (the implied author) as a medium of information alternative to the other three media, thus posing a contrast between teaching conveyed through Paul and teaching conveyed through not-Paul, in a manner analogous to Gal. 1.8. In addition to the greater probability of this interpretation grammatically, this interpretation is offered as resolving further difficulties concerning 1 Thess. 2.2, as well as its relationship to 2.15. Evidence is also offered that the consensus view does not find unanimous support among ancient interpreters.

METAFICTIONAL FEATURES IN MUṢṬAFĀ AL-RĀFI‘Ī’S “RASĀ’IL AL-’AḤZĀN (LETTERS OF SORROWS)” ملامح ميتاقصّيّة في "رسائل الأحزان" لمصطفى الرافعي

This study traces the signs of metawriting or metafiction as a phenomenon in a literary sample written by al-Rāfi‘ī in 1924. More specifically, the study investigates the features of this phenomenon in al-Rāfi‘ī’s book “Rasā’il ’al-’Aḥzān (Letters of Sorrows)”. The study attempts to answer the following questions: How did al-Rāfi‘ī work with metafiction before it appeared as a literary phenomenon at the end of the twentieth century? And how was metafiction reflected in his literary writings? We do indeed find that al-Rāfi‘ī talked about the author, the narrator and the implied author. He also talked about metalanguage and about writing as a craft, discussing its processes, purposes, methodologies and expressive techniques as well as exploring the relationship between the author and the implied reader. All of these are considered metafictional features, thus proving our hypothesis that metafiction as a phenomenon had existed before the end of the twentieth century, and that al-Rāfi‘ī used various metafictional features in his writings. نتتبع في هذه الدراسة إرهاصات لظاهرة الميتاكتابة أو الميتاقص، في نموذج أدبي للرافعي من عام 1924. حيث تستقصي الدراسة ملامح الظاهرة في كتابه "رسالة الأحزان". تحاول الدراسة الإجابة عن السؤال: كيف اشتغل الرافعي بالميتاكتابة قبل أن تكون ظاهرة أدبية كما ظهر في نهاية القرن العشرين؟ وكيف انعكست الميتا كتابة في كتاباته الأدبية؟ نجد أن الرافعي قد تحدّث عن المؤلف والراوي والمؤلف الضمنيّ، وعن الميتالغة وعن الكتابة كصنعة، سيرورتها والغاية منها، منهجيتها وأدواتها التعبيرية، كما تحدث عن علاقة المؤلف بالقارئ الافتراضي المروي له. يعتبر كل ذلك ملامح ميتاقصية، مما يثبت فرضيتنا أن الظاهرة الميتاقصية وجدت قبل نهاية القرن العشرين، وأن الرافعي استخدم بعضا منها. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0880/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

The Beginning and the Narration of Ivan Slamnig’s Novel Bolja polovica hrabrosti

The study discusses Ivan Slamnig’s novel entitled Bolja polovica hrabrosti with focusing on the narrative features of the beginning of the novel. Using the results of the Croatian literary studies, the paper places the novel in the context of Croatian prose as the first postmodern Croatian novel and an outstanding example of Beat literature in Croatia and Yugoslavia, which Aleksandar Flaker called jeans prose.The paper compares the narrative features and metapoetic meanings of the beginning of the novel with the narration of the whole novel and its closure. It establishes that the beginning of the novel gives a dominant role to eventuality, coincidence, and meaninglessness instead of causally motivated storytelling. The beginning of the novel does not make sense at the level of the story told in the whole novel, however, it is important at the metalevel of narration and in its possible readings.The main character of the novel called Flaks lands without a known aim aft er escaping from somewhere. At the end of the novel, he escapes again from the story prescribed for him. The “story within a story” structure has an important role in the novel. The novel thus has two narrators and two narrated stories. According to Genette’s classification, the narrator of the whole novel (Flaks) is an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator of his own story. The other narrator (Aunt Matilda) is a character in Flaks’s story and fictive author of the embedded story with its own heterodiegetic narrator. Flaks is an implied reader of Matilda’s short story. The two narratives are in a metadialogue wiTheach other. Flaks has no organized life and no organized story. Matilda’s life is well organized, and her written short story is well organized, too. Matilda tries to make sense to the random happenings of Flaks’s life in her own story. With the story she tells, she tries to bring both her own and Flaks’s life story to a meaningful end.The beginning of the novel is associated with the characteristics of the Yugoslavian version of Beat literature, the jeans prose: generational confrontation and the denial of conformism to the post-war Yugoslavian establishment. The protagonist’s drift ing without any plan, which is typical for the genre, is taken by Slamnig as a basis so that he can direct our attention to the activity of the implied author and to the fact that the events portrayed in the novel and also the implied author are constructed. This is reinforced by the “story within a story” structure. The novel shows that the beginning and the ending of the events in the narration is arbitrary, and the meaning of the story depends on the selection of the starting point and the end point.

Cold-Blooded Killer in Novel Child 44 By Tom Rob Smith (2008)

Tujuan analisa ini adalah untuk mengungkapkan isu pembunuh berdrah dingin pada novel Child 44 karya Tom Rob Smith. Permasalah pada analisa ini adalah untuk mengetahui sejauh mana novel tersebut mengungkapkan kejahatan-kejahatan pemerintah Rusia dalam menjalankan pemeritahan. Analisa ini menggunakan implied author untuk mengeluarkan bukti-bukti yang besangkutan dengan isu pembunuh berdarah dingin. Analisa ini menggunakan konsep dekolonisasi oleh Frantz Fanon. Analisa ini dilakukan berdasarkan interpretasi teks dan interpretasi berbasis konteks. Hasil dari analisa ini adalah kejahatan-kejahatan yang dilakukan oleh pemerintah Rusia untuk mempertahankan kekuasaannya. kejahatan-kejahatan ini diperbuat dalam dua cara: pengaturan situasi dan pemberlakukan kekuasaan.

James Phelan’s Three Judgments in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

George Eliot, well-known as one of greatest realists in the 19th century, weaves multiple narratives in her representative work Middlemarch, presenting vividly the realistic picture of society between 1829 and 1832. The narrative clue of love affair between Dorothea, Casaubon and Will Ladislaw permeates the whole story, which attracts the attention of numerous scholars with fruitful, inspirational studies. However, few numbers of scholars delve into the controversial issue of Casaubon’s “will” in the story to analyze the moral values and thoughts expressed by the implied author. Thus, the paper attempts to analyze the issue of “will” by borrowing the concept of three judgments proposed by James Phelan to figure out how the implied author expresses her interpretative, ethical and aesthetical judgements by means of her distinct narrative.

Qohelet’s Implied Author and Implied Readers

Qohelet is not only an anthology of journalings or an exposition of an individual’s agonizings; it is also (perhaps more) a book of teaching and a piece of rhetoric. It aims to disturb the assumptions and thinking of people in the Second Temple period who think that they understand reality, think that work is all-important, don’t take death seriously, feel relaxed about their financial position, undervalue everyday things, think that the country’s structures are working satisfactorily, and take their relationship with God for granted. The postscript, however, whether by the same author or by someone else, does then reaffirm the truth of the Torah and the Prophets.