The American Western Novel.

1967 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Alexander Cowie ◽  
James K. Folsom
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Herbillon

In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-303
Author(s):  
Delbert E. Wylder
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Mahmut Abdullah Arslan ◽  
Mehmet Özbaş

The Tanzimat Reform Movement aimed to give a new energy to a society which lost its confidence in life due to chaos. The expectation of the Ottoman society was to recover from this chaos. Influenced by Galip of Nicosia, Namik Kemal initially wrote classical poems of which form and content were old. After his acquaintance with Sinasi, he produced Western style works which were old in form but new in content. In his later works, both of these components were new. The subject matter of Intibah is simple and comes from social life. Intibah is regarded as the first literary novel of the Turkish literature written in Western novel technique including realistic depictions, places and psychological analyses. This chapter discusses the way the destruction of love, slavery, the women problem and imperfect aspects of family life in Ottoman society were handled by Namik Kemal. Both Namik Kemal and other modernists mentioned the problems but they could not offer deep solutions.


What gives one a predisposition towards writing is not being able to speak several languages but having a particular predisposition to one langage, which may exist in more than one language. Gauvin and Glissant discuss a film in which Israelis express their attitude to Hebrew as opposed to their mother tongues, such as German; Hebrew is an absolute language replacing other absolute languages, but we have to accept that today there are no absolute languages. True creolization is not merely the interpenetration of words but the entry of the systems of poetic images from one language into another. The novel comes about when communities need political narratives to define them; the Western novel relies on the belief that you can recount history and the world because you control it.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-239
Author(s):  
Anastassiya Andrianova

This article demonstrates that Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), arguably the most important work of modern Iranian literature but also seen as ‘a Western novel’, makes it conspicuous how our understanding of ‘global’ texts is conditioned by translation, critical reception, and the material aspects of publication. More precisely, the article examines how Western and non-Western critical approaches to this novel combine to produce illuminating, but also problematic, polysemies. It shows how specific lexical choices in Roger Lescot's French and D. P. Costello's English translations transform the work's meaning, and considers, more broadly, the critical, definitional, and theoretical questions about the politics of hermeneutics and translation which these choices imply. Its wider subject is the reading, translating, and teaching of non-Western literature.


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