Elisabeth Langgässer and Juan Donoso Cortés: A Source of the “Turm-Kapitel” in Das Unauslöschliche Siegel

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-367
Author(s):  
Anthony W. Riley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Form ◽  
Narrative Techniques

New documentary evidence throws light on the genesis of Das unauslöschliche Siegel and on Langgässer's narrative techniques. Her hitherto unpublished notes on Donoso prove that the extensive quotations from his works in the “Turm-Kapitel” derive from one source: L. Fischer's introduction to his translation of the Ensayo sobre el calolicismo. Further evidence supplied by her widower shows that she wrote the chapter before 1944, and that its mise-en-scène was prefigured in her visit to Senlis, France, in 1937. Thus, the hypothesis is untenable that—as an attempt at self-justification in the face of charges of manichaeism—she inserted the chapter only after she had completed the rest of the novel. It seems probable that Langgässer considered Donoso's life exemplary from a Christian viewpoint, and that her montage of his writings stemmed from her desire to create a “new form” for the Christian novel. Donoso's religious beliefs and his hostility to the Enlightenment not only provide appropriate material for the chapter (the “counterpointing” of religious, cultural, and political events in Europe over a period of several centuries), but also reflect Langgasser's own religious attitudes, which any critical appreciation of the novel as a whole must take into account.

Beckett's Watt and Monastic Tradition

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Kristen Marangoni
Keyword(s):  
Boarding School ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Geometric Shapes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
The Face ◽  
Choral Arrangements ◽  
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The enigmatic setting of Beckett's novel Watt has been compared to places as diverse as an insane asylum, a boarding school, a womb, and a concentration camp. Watt's experience at Knott's house does seem suggestive of all of these, and yet it may more readily conform to the setting of a monastery. The novel is filled with chants, meditations, choral arrangements, hierarchical classifications, and even silence, all highly evocative of a monastic lifestyle. Some of Watt's dialogue (such as his requests for forgiveness or reflections on the nature of mankind) further echoes various Catholic liturgies. Watt finds little solace in these activities, however. He feels that they are largely rote and purposeless as they are focused on Knott, a figure who in many ways defies linguistic description and physical know-ability. Watt's meditations and rituals become, then, empty catechisms without answers, something that is reflected in the extreme difficulty that Watt has communicating. In the face of linguistic and liturgical instability, the Watt notebooks present a counter reading that can be found in the thousand plus doodles that line its pages. The drawings reinforce as well as subvert their textual counterpart, and they function in many ways as the images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The doodles in Watt often take the form of decorative letters, elaborate marginal drawings, and depictions of a variety of people and animals, and many of its doodles offer uncanny resemblances in form or theme to those in illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells. Doodles of saints, monks, crosses, and scribes even give an occasional pictorial nod to the monastic setting in which illuminated manuscripts were usually produced (and remind us of the monastic conditions in which Beckett found himself writing much of Watt). Beckett's doodles not only channel this medium of illuminated manuscripts, they also modernize its application. Instead of neat geometric shapes extending down the page, his geometric doodle sequences are often abstracted, fragmented, and nonlinear. Beckett also occasionally modernized the content of illuminated manuscripts: instead of the traditional sacramental communion table filled with candles, bread and wine, Beckett doodles a science lab table where Bunsen burners replaces candles and wine glasses function as beakers. It is through these modernized images that Watt attempts to draw contemporary relevance from a classic art form and to restore (at least partial) meaning to rote traditions.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

Mansfield Park

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Jane Stabler
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Sexual Jealousy ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

‘Me!’ cried Fanny … ‘Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act any thing if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act.’ At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. There she accepts her lowly status, and gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund. When the dazzling and sophisticated Henry and Mary Crawford arrive, Fanny watches as her cousins become embroiled in rivalry and sexual jealousy. As the company starts to rehearse a play by way of entertainment, Fanny struggles to retain her independence in the face of the Crawfords’ dangerous attractions; and when Henry turns his attentions to her, the drama really begins… This new edition does full justice to Austen’s complex and subtle story, placing it in its Regency context and elucidating the theatrical background that pervades the novel.

Esther Waters

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Moore
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Horse Racing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Illegitimate Child ◽  
Class Woman

I daresay I shall get through my trouble somehow.’ Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes a position as a kitchen-maid at a horse-racing estate. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther's struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. Her moving story is set against the backdrop of a world of horse racing, betting, and public houses, whose vivid depiction led James Joyce to call Esther Waters ‘the best novel of modern English life’. Controversial and influential on its first appearance in 1894, the book opened up a new direction for the English realist tradition. Unflinching in its depiction of the dark and sordid side of Victorian culture, it remains one of the great novels of London life and labour in the 1890s.

scholarly journals Sex Differences in Spatial Activity and Anxiety Levels in the COVID-19 Pandemic from Evolutionary Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1110
Author(s):  
Olga Semenova ◽  
Julia Apalkova ◽  
Marina Butovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Economic Losses ◽  
General Level ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Attitudes ◽  
Spatial Activity ◽  
Sexual Specialization ◽  
The Face ◽  
Novel Virus ◽  
Virus Spreading

Despite the enforced lockdown regime in late March 2020 in Russia, the phenomenon of the continued virus spreading highlighted the importance of studies investigating the range of biosocial attributes and spectrum of individual motivations underlying the permanent presence of the substantial level of spatial activity. For this matter, we conducted a set of surveys between March and June 2020 (N = 492). We found that an individual’s health attitude is the most consistent factor explaining mobility differences. However, our data suggested that wariness largely determines adequate health attitudes; hence, a higher level of wariness indirectly reduced individual mobility. Comparative analysis revealed the critical biosocial differences between the two sexes, potentially rooted in the human evolutionary past. Females were predisposed to express more wariness in the face of new environmental risks; therefore, they minimize their mobility and outdoor contacts. In contrast to them, the general level of spatial activity reported by males was significantly higher. Wariness in the males’ sample was less associated with the novel virus threat, but to a great extent, it was predicted by the potential economic losses variable. These findings correspond to the evolutionary predictions of sexual specialization and the division of family roles.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

The Politics of Living Death in Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Peter Leman
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Common Fate ◽  
Sour Milk ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Face

Abstract This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals what truly can and cannot be substituted. The General insists on the uniqueness of his power, for example, but Farah reveals it to be a cliché, easily substituted by that of other dictators throughout history. Cliché becomes revolutionary in this way, suggesting that dictators share a common fate: they will be deposed or, eventually, die of old age. However, like a horde of the living dead, others like them will return. The article concludes with analysis of the apparent pessimism of this point and the global implications of Farah's ideas about both necropolitics and the limits of the novel form in the face of authoritarian power.

Marivaux's Place in the Development of Character Portrayal

PMLA ◽  
1912 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-187
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
New Form ◽  
Continuous Narrative

When in 1710-11 the Sir Roger de Coverley papers appeared in the Spectator, the art of the novel seemed to have been discovered. The wonder is that people did not sooner awaken to a realization that a new form of art had been created. The faithful description of life and manners was there, the interest of character and incident was also present. The essays needed but to have been thrown into the form of a continuous narrative to have given us at least the germ of the modern novel. As a matter of fact, however, the actual appearance of the novel was delayed for nearly three decades.

NEW INSPIRATION FROM CHINA'S PHILOSOPHY OF "UNITY OF MAN AND HEAVEN": CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS UNDER THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
PU JINGXIN
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Type ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
The Ancient Chinese ◽  
Self Protection ◽  
Harmonious Community

Abstract: The danger of the novel coronavirus has not yet come to an end, and new variants have begun to attack the world. What philosophy should humankind’s strategy be based on when human society as a group is fighting against Covid-19, as the pandemic ravages the world? Unfortunately, political leaders of various countries have failed to achieve the overall awareness of attacking the pandemic for a shared future for mankind so far. In the face of the pandemic, mankind as a whole urgently needs to break through the narrow nation-oriented ideology of seeking only self-protection. The International Community should establish a new type of international cooperation featuring the concept of harmony of "all things under heaven as a unity". The international relations system dominated by the power ofwestern discourse is now in a bottleneck. The main aim of this article is to study the ancient Chinese wisdom of "the Unity of Man and Heaven" philosophy and build a global harmonious community. The author argues that the “export” of the aforementioned wisdom must be a priority for Chinese scholars. Keywords: Tao; Unity of Man and Heaven; Novel Coronavirus; Anthropocentrism; Harmony.

scholarly journals A Flexible Transoral Robot Towards COVID-19 Swab Sampling

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changsheng Li ◽  
Xiaoyi Gu ◽  
Xiao Xiao ◽  
Chwee Ming Lim ◽  
Xingguang Duan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Parallel Mechanism ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Flexible Manipulator ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Visual Guidance ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Tongue Depressor ◽  
Operation Procedure ◽  
The Face ◽  
Master Device

There are high risks of infection for surgeons during the face-to-face COVID-19 swab sampling due to the novel coronavirus’s infectivity. To address this issue, we propose a flexible transoral robot with a teleoperated configuration for swab sampling. The robot comprises a flexible manipulator, an endoscope with a monitor, and a master device. A 3-prismatic-universal (3-PU) flexible parallel mechanism with 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) is used to realize the manipulator’s movements. The flexibility of the manipulator improves the safety of testees. Besides, the master device is similar to the manipulator in structure. It is easy to use for operators. Under the guidance of the vision from the endoscope, the surgeon can operate the master device to control the swab’s motion attached to the manipulator for sampling. In this paper, the robotic system, the workspace, and the operation procedure are described in detail. The tongue depressor, which is used to prevent the tongue’s interference during the sampling, is also tested. The accuracy of the manipulator under visual guidance is validated intuitively. Finally, the experiment on a human phantom is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the robot preliminarily.

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