The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík: Codes, Metaphors, and Compositional Devices

Slavic Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Bronislava Volek
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Guinea Pigs ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Light Touch ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Ludvik Vaculik ◽  
Experimental Novel ◽  
Good Soldier

In this article I propose to undertake a semiotic analysis of a novel by a contemporary Czech underground writer, Ludvík Vaculík's Morčata (The Guinea Pigs). A semiotic reading of the relation between the semantic and formal levels of the text is particularly rewarding because this novel combines features of several genres ranging from children's literature to the realistic novel and the surrealistic novel. This study is intended as a contribution to the analysis of the multileveled novel in general.The Guinea Pigs is a unique modern blend reminiscent of the Latin American current of magic realism that we find in the works of Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Marquez. It is a highly experimental novel in which the author has reached the peak of his literary efforts thus far and includes himself in the tradition of the absurd, showing traces of dadaism and elements of surrealism and continuing the introspective existentialist line of Dostoevskii and Kafka, refreshed with a light touch of humor and an unpretentiously naive point of view reminiscent of Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk.

Atlantic Continuities in Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya

2018 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Quesada
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Rudolfo Anaya ◽  
Caribbean Writers

This chapter draws from Tomás Rivera’s poetry and Rudolfo Anaya’s short story “The Man Who Could Fly” (2006) to read continuities of an Atlantic world formation within the Southwest. Specifically, this essay compares paradigms of a remembered “Congo” informed by dialectics of empire concerning both Central African exploration—in the case of Rivera—and plantational Latin American and American slavery—in the case of Anaya. While this article argues that in the case of Rivera, Henry Stanley’s exploration haunts the spatialization of Rivera’s poetry, in Anaya, by contrast, Atlantic continuities are chiefly embedded in a transnational comparison with Latin American Caribbean writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. Applying Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant’s theorization of “Relation” to these Chicano narratives, this chapter decodes the racial geographies of the Southwest to theorize how landscape and fiction work together to memorialize subaltern Atlantic memory.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study of Isabel Allende “Ines of My Soul” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez “Love in the Time of Cholera” from the View Point of Features of Magic Realism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Azizmohammad ◽  
Atieh Rafati
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Isabel Allende ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
View Point ◽  
Literary Movement

This tentative study suggests Isabel Allende “Ines of my soul” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez “Love in the Time of Cholera” from magic realism point of view. Magic Realism is a Latin American literary movement which attempts to depict the reality in human’s mind. This literary movement is originated in the Latin American’s fiction in the middle of twentieth century. Isabel Allende, who is famous because in the most of her novels the magic realism is used, depicts the life of Ines Suarez, without whom the settlement of Chile could not be achieved, in the historical novel “Ines of my soul”.The father of magic realist writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in “Love in the time of cholera”, depicts the inside and outside worlds of man in this world, with the using of magic realism, he wants to show these opposites clearly.In this study, firstly, a model of analysis will be assumed by the features of magic realism. Next, Allende’s and Marquez’s novels will be read and analyzed within the magic realism pattern, the magic realism’s features will be traced in the novel. Finally, possible implications of both the model and the findings of the research for literary criticism and teaching novels of this kind will be discussed. 

Some Interpretations of Foreign Literature during the Epoch of Socialism

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-294
Author(s):  
Roberto Adinolfi
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Mario Vargas Llosa ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Eastern European Countries ◽  
Dino Buzzati

This paper will focus on some Bulgarian translations of works by foreign writers that were published during the epoch of Socialism. Throughout this period several works by authors from territories such as Latin America, Western Europe and the USA were translated into the languages of the Eastern European countries; some of them do not seem to fit the criteria of the Socialism realism: this is the case of genres such as science fiction or fantasy. Authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, the Italian writers Italo Calvino, Dino Buzzati and many others have been translated into languages such as Bulgarian and Russian. Many of them do not deal mainly with social and political themes, and some of them (for instance Dino Buzzati) are even highly critical towards doctrines such as Marxism. However, in the forewords of some of the Bulgarian translations of their works we can find political and social interpretations. Similar interpretations can also be found in science fiction works and in non-literary works, such as books devoted to practices such as Yoga, which in some books is analyzed from a Marxist point of view.

Beastness is Our Culture / Le legs de McLuhan aux Études Animales

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Jaclin
Keyword(s):  
Guinea Pigs ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Human World ◽  
Theoretical Apparatus

Shaping a human world is generally understood from an inorganic point of view. Sand becomes microchips while stones are turned into homes, projectiles or writing surfaces. In this article, I suggest broadening these conceptions and looking at the shaping of our world from an organic point of view, with an emphasis on communities composed of humans and their other ancestrally modified companions: “domestic” animals. Using a media ecology-oriented theoretical apparatus, I discuss McLuhan’s legacies from an Animal Studies perspective. Although his work mostly applied to press, TV or radio, can we actualize it to reconsider the existences of some biotechnologically altered organisms? Can over-productive cows, landscaped dogs, estrogenized tigers, spider goats and other reformed guinea pigs be thought of as ever-evolving media?Le façonnement du monde humain est généralement associé à la mise en forme de l’inorganique et aux possibilités technologiques qui en découlent. C’est ainsi que le sable peut être transformé en microprocesseurs ou devenir verre tandis que la pierre peut éventuellement servir à la construction d’abris ou de projectiles. Dans cet article, je suggère d’élargir certaines de ces conceptions anthropogéniques, ainsi qu’une partie de la théorie médiatique, à l’organique et à la manipulation animale. Je propose ainsi de repenser la frange mutante de notre bestiaire moderne (chèvres-araignées, tigres oestrogénéisés, condors GPS,) comme autant de media en constante évolution. Depuis la perspective des Études animales, je reviens sur l’héritage de McLuhan et sur l’écologie médiatique qui s’en inspire. Car, même si son travail s’intéresse principalement aux médias, à la presse, à la télévision ou encore à la radio, en actualiser style et principes jette une lumière nouvelle sur l’existence biotechnologiquement modifiée d’une partie du vivant.

Semiotic analysis of symbolic logic using tagmemic theory: with implications for analytic philosophy

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vern S. Poythress
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Symbolic Logic ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
The World

Abstract This article uses tagmemic theory as a semiotic framework to analyze symbolic logic. It attends particularly to the issue of context for meaning and the role of personal observer/participants. It focuses on formal languages, which employ no ordinary words and from one point of view have “no meaning.” Attention to the context and the theorists who deploy these languages shows that formal languages have meanings at a higher level, colored by the purposes of the analysts. In fact, there is an indefinitely ascending hierarchy of theories of theories, each of which analyzes and evaluates the theories at a lower level. By analogy with Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theory, no level of the hierarchy can capture within formalism everything in a sufficiently complex system. The personal analysts always have to make judgments about how a formalized system is analogous to the world outside the system. Arguments in analytic philosophy can be useful in clarification, but neither clarification of terms nor clarification of the structure of arguments can eliminate the need for personal judgment.

Egīla Ventera fenomens latviešu literatūrā

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Laimdota Ločmele
Keyword(s):  
Popular Literature ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
Reading Texts

The article aims to study Egīls Venters’s latest works from the point of view of text semiotics and interpretation to make conclusions about the possibilities of interpretation of texts written by this author and his place in Latvian literature. In this article, a semiotic analysis of Venters’s fiction is applied as well as research of the book reviews on his recent prose texts. The present paper deals with the factors determining the popularity of a work of fiction; these factors may be related to the text itself or the readers’ ability and desire to read such texts. The most innovative work of Venters, “Mainīgā intervence” (2012), which received Dzintars Sodums Prize for Innovation in Literature, has been semiotically analysed in terms of its literary form. This work of fiction is a complex, multi-layered message, although outwardly it seems laconic and aphoristic. The possibilities of interpreting fiction depend on the language used by the author to express the content and the language available to the reader for decoding the text. Thus, the reader needs the experience of reading texts, a desire to gain new unprecedented experience, and the ability to evaluate the language and form of the work of fiction. Venters’s writing does not belong to the popular literature of easy reading; it has fewer readers who can accept the world created by Venters’s texts and are open to the unpredictable in literature.

The Arabs and Gabriel García Márquez

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
Heba El Attar
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
South American ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
The Third ◽  
American Author

In 2014, newspapers across the Spanish-speaking world covered how the international press paid tribute to García Márquez. Particular attention was given to the extensive eulogies in the Arab press. A special homage was paid to the author’s memory in Saudi Arabia, where the Third South American-Arab Countries Summit was being held at the time. This was not Naguib Mahfuz; this was García Márquez. How was it possible for a Latin American author to become that popular across the Arab world? How was it possible for his novels to be referenced naturally in popular Arab films such as The Embassy in the Building (2005)? Was all this simply due to the fact that in postindependence Latin America, particularly since the 1940s, there has been a growing de-orientalist discourse? Or did García Márquez craft a particular dialogue with the internal and external Arabs? With all this in mind, and by drawing on Latin American (de)orientalism in the works of Kushigian, Nagy-Zekmi, and Tyutina, among others, this article analyzes the dimensions and implications of García Márquez’s depiction of the internal Arab (immigrant in Latin America) in some of his novels as well as his dialogue with the external Arab (the Arab world) in some of his press articles.

Carlos Fuentes's Readings on Literary Traditions: From the New to the Great Latin American Novel

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 698-701
Author(s):  
Anadeli Bencomo
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Mario Vargas Llosa ◽  
Juan Rulfo ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Latin American Narrative ◽  
Nueva Novela ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Narrative Forms

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.

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