scholarly journals Victim of Circumstance: Rastophchin's Execution of Vereshchagin in Tolstoi's Voina i mir

1999 ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
David J. Galloway
Keyword(s):  
Young Student ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Critical Attention

The Vereshchagin episode, describing the execution of a young student during the fall of Moscow in 1812, occupies Chapters 24 and 25 of Part 3, Book 3 of Lev Tolstoi's Voina i mir (War and Peace). This dramatic scene, in which Mikhail Vereshchagin is cut down by a dragoon on the order of Count Fedor Rastopchin, has received little critical attention given the breadth of work on the novel as a whole. This is understandable on the grounds that the text does not constitute a large portion of Voina i mir and its characters are far from principal players. Yet investigating the episode reveals how Tolstoi deliberately added psychological, ideological, and theological subtexts to the early drafts, marking such subtexts by changes in narration, language, and direct allusions. Episodes such as this one are intricately structured to produce emotions, raise questions, and initiate a philosophical inquiry into the actions and thoughts of the characters concerned.

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

Homosexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams: Demythologising the Imaginings and Universalising the Reality

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Black African ◽  
Sex Preference ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sex Orientation ◽  
The Right

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

scholarly journals 'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Temporal Qualities

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

Born, Again

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-233
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sexuality And Religion ◽  
Born Again ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter reads Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand as part of a vibrant debate within the Harlem Renaissance over the aesthetics of realism and the politics of representation. Critical attention to the novel’s secular critique of essentialisms has overlooked its insistence on the intersection of queerness and ecstatically embodied religion, a convergence that forces us to reexamine the potential that Quicksand invests in both spiritual and sexual forms of conversion. For the novel repeatedly links queer sexuality not to birth (as in contemporary “born this way” discourse) but instead, ambivalently, to rebirth. Even as it attends carefully to more repressive forms of sexual and spiritual administration, Quicksand traces a “queer sort of satisfaction,” a fugitive collectivity emerging from moments of ecstatic abandon. In turn, the novel treats ecstasy (and particularly Pentecostalism’s kinetically embodied forms of spiritual practice) as a suggestively queer nexus of sexual and religious modes of performance. Offering a timely reconsideration of Quicksand’s ostensible secularism, this chapter argues that to read its ecstatic episodes is to discover a more complex account of the ways in which the demands of race, class, sexuality, and religion might be borne or borne out by being performatively born again.

‘[C]allee me Oscar’: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, and Opium

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-87
Author(s):  
Ya-feng Wu
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End ◽  
House Beautiful ◽  
To Receive

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), one of the flagship novels of Aestheticism, contains an intricate opium narrative that has yet to receive adequate critical attention. The novel consists of two nested units: the House Beautiful that subsumes a Gothic nursery where Dorian's portrait is placed, and London the Metropolis that harbours Blue Gate Fields in the East End. The former might be read as a miniature of the latter. This double mechanism hinges on a Chinese box in which opium is stored. The structure, which evolves from the classic opium narrative established by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), enables Wilde to stage a critique on the connection between Aestheticism and the imperial trade of opium. Besides, Wilde's aesthete trio in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, and Adrian Singleton, are cast as opium smokers in order to disrupt the imperialist mindset showcased in the cartoons appearing on trade cards and in magazines that satirise Wilde's promotion of Aestheticism. This essay contends that Wilde's opium narrative exposes the hypocrisy of Empire by demonstrating that the coloniser and the colonised are anamorphic reflections of each other.

Racial Duties: Toward a Pragmatist Ethic of Race in W. D. Howells's An Imperative Duty

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Paul R. Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Social Morality ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ethical Critique

Abstract William Dean Howells's 1891 novel of interracial marriage, An Imperative Duty, has recently received increasing critical attention because of its saturation with the language of contemporary scientific racism and its complex and apparently inconsistent approach to questions of race and identity. The novel's other major conceptual concern with questions of moral duty, clearly announced in its title, has generally been neglected in this discussion. This essay examines the crucial interplay between questions of race and ethics, arguing that Howells's novel undertakes an ethical critique of late-nineteenth-century scientific racism from a specifically Pragmatist philosophical perspective. Reasoning according to Pragmatist principles, and pursuing an inherently Pragmatist narrative form, the novel implicitly asks its readers to understand the ““facts”” of race in terms of their intersections with personal and social morality rather than in strict accord with the essentialist claims of ascendant nineteenth-century race theory. In its refusal of ontological absolutism and its embrace of an ethically pluralist and instrumentalist approach to questions of race, Howells's novel offers a Pragmatist challenge to the interlocking absolutisms of traditional ethics and contemporary scientific racism.

The Theme and Structure of Faulkner's The Hamlet

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 775-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Y. Greet
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
Major Phase ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Major Exception ◽  
New Material ◽  
Narrative Method ◽  
The Hamlet

William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet has received less critical attention and, perhaps, less critical intelligence than any other of his major works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in 1940, Faulkner's only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from the novels of the “major phase,” 1929–1936. It comes at a point in the development of the Yoknapatawpha Cycle when the early conflict between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compson had been largely resolved, and it is concerned with themes that had earlier been of peripheral interest. It presents as protagonists a class of Yoknapatawphans who are relative newcomers to the cycle. These things together—the lessening of tension and the utilization of new material—are reflected in the unique tone of The Hamlet, which led Malcolm Cowley to entitle his review of the novel “Faulkner By Daylight.” Further, since the novel is leisurely in its narrative method and relatively lucid in its style, it does not at first glance seem to demand or merit the sort of exhaustive readings which have been given, say, to The Sound and the Fury. Finally, with the major exception of Robert Penn Warren, almost none of the critics has been willing to recognize the book as a novel at all. Cowley speaks of its structure as that of “beads on a string.” John Arthos calls the book Faulkner's “most remarkable writing” but adds that it “falls into at least four separate stories… there is no real unity.” O'Connor, Howe, Campbell and Foster have all dealt with and appreciated various aspects of the novel but it remains the chief enigma of the cycle.

Enlightenment Infinitesimals and Tolstoy’s War and Peace

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-451
Author(s):  
Russell Winslow ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Mathematical Problem ◽  
Human Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Extreme Form ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The One

During the Enlightenment period the concept of the infinitesimal was developed as a means to solve the mathematical problem of the incommensurability between human reason and the movements of physical beings. In this essay, the author analyzes the metaphysical prejudices subtending Enlightenment Humanism through the lens of the infinitesimal calculus. One of the consequences of this analysis is the perception of a two-fold possibility occasioned by the infinitesimal. On the one hand, it occasions an extreme form of humanism, “transhumanism,” which exhibits limitless confidence in the possibility of human science. On the other hand, the concept of the infinitesimal also contains within itself a source for a critical “posthumanism,” that is to say, a source which initiates the dissolution of the presuppositions of humanism while simultaneously announcing a different ontological organization. In , Tostoy’s novel takes up the problem of the relation between reason and motion and makes the two-fold possibility visible by presenting a contrast between its theoretical presentations and the lived experiences of the characters in the novel. Thus, is the setting in which the author has chosen to conduct this analysis.

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