scholarly journals Who Is Hvalbiff? Name and Identity in W. F. Hermans’s “Beyond Sleep”

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Van Dalen-Oskam

One of the functions of names in literary texts is Akzentuierung — Anonymisierung (accentuating — anonymizing) (Debus, 2002, 84). By giving a character a certain name, an author can accentuate that name and that character; conversely, by not providing a name where a name could be expected, an author can keep that person anonymous. Both approaches are deviations from ‘normality’. This paper proposes that the accentuating and anonymizing function of literary names can be closely linked to the idea of ‘foregrounding’ as developed in stylis- tic research. To illustrate this, this paper presents an analysis of the accentuating and anonymizing use of personal names in the novel Beyond Sleep (1966) by Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–1995), one of the most important 20th-century Dutch literary authors. This paper shows that the stylistic application of names that have an accentuating or anonymizing function is key to sustaining the plot of Beyond Sleep.

2017 ◽  
Vol 141 ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Beate Sommerfeld

Der Artikel behandelt den Roman Die Meisen von UUsimaa singen nicht mehr 2014 des Experimentalfilmers und Autors Franz Friedrich als Reflex auf den Umbruch vom analogen zum digitalen Zeitalter. Stark polarisierend bezieht der Roman zum Medienwandel Stellung und schlägt sich auf die Seite der Analogmedien Fotografie und Film, wobei er auf den Fotografie- und Filmdiskurs des 20. Jahrhunderts von Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin bis hin zu Roland Barthes und Georges Didi-Huberman zurückgreift. Indem der Roman ein Gewebe aus photoästhetischen Topoi, Metaphern und Diskursen spinnt, modelliert er eine Ästhetik des Abdrucks und der Berührung, die auf Roland Barthes’ Modell des “vokalischen Schreibens” rekurriert. Das Unbehagen an der Repräsentation, das aus Friedrichs Roman spricht, geht mit einer nostalgisch gefärbten Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen einher.“The material matters” — reflections on the upheaval from analogue to digital media in the novel The Tits of Uusimaa Don’t Sing Any More by Franz Friedrich The purpose of the article is to show how literary texts reflect upon the upheaval from analogue to digital media using the example of the novel The Tits of Uusimaa Don’t Sing Any More by the experimental filmmaker and author Franz Friedrich 2014. Friedrich approaches the technological shift from analogue to digital and the transforming landscape of media from a critical viewpoint by looking back at the early 20th-century scenario of intermedial exchange. Doing so, he refers to the 20th-century media discourse Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes and Georges Didi-Huberman, scrutinizing and redefining analogue media by referring to various topoi, metaphors the analogue as a mental imprint of the real. Friedrich confronts the representation paradigm of literature to the aesthetic of contact and resonances, strongly related to Roland Barthes’ concept of “vocal writing”.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Md. Amir Hossain

<em>The aim of this paper is to examine a comparative study between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the light of Magic Realism. It aims to examine Shakespeare’s and Rushdie’s treatment of Magic Realism during 16th century England and 20th century India, respectively. For this propose, it attempts to portray some important characters, like Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel in the play, The Tempest and the narrator, Saleem Sinai in the novel, Midnight Children. It aims to look at applying the theory of Magic Realism made by prominent critics and scholars. It also wants to focus on magic, supernatural, occult, imagination, reality, and mystery. Both Shakespeare’s and Rushdie’s literary texts are analyzed within the parameters of these issues. Finally, this paper presents the art of characterization, themes and situations, writing forms, similarities and differences in various phases of the two famous writers.</em>


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Mareike Schildmann

Abstract This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-661
Author(s):  
Carl Philipp Roth

Abstract Der Beitrag untersucht die Bedeutung des Schachspiels in Elias Canettis Roman Die Blendung zum einen auf der Ebene der historischen und sozialen Kontexte, in denen der Schachspieler Siegfried Fischer im Wien des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts steht. Er fokussiert zum anderen die Bedeutung des Schachspiels auf Handlungsebene. Denn Siegfried Fischer – genannt Fischerle – überträgt seine strategischen Fähigkeiten im Schach auf die ihn umgebende Welt und bringt so Peter Kien ,Zug um Zug‘ um dessen Reichtum.The article examines the significance of chess in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung in the historical and social context of early 20th century Vienna. It further focuses on the function of chess within the novel: The actor and chess player Siegfried Fischer – called Fischerle – transfers his strategic skills from chess to his surroundings, thus depriving Peter Kien of his wealth ‘move by move’.


Author(s):  
Anatoly S. Kuprin ◽  
Galina I. Danilina

The purpose of this study is the analysis of limit situation in the narrative of war. The material of the study is the novel of Daniil Granin “My Lieutenant” and related texts. In the first part of the paper, the authors explore existing approaches to the term “limit situation” and similar concepts into scientific and philosophical traditions; limits of its applicability in literary studies and its relation to the categories of “narrative instances” and “event”. Proposed a literary-theoretical definition of the limit situation, which can be used in the analysis of fiction texts. Existing approaches to the examination of the situation of war are analyzed: philosophical-existential, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary. In the second part of the paper, the authors propose their method for analyzing limit situations in texts about war, which basis on existing approaches and preserves the text-centric principle of studying the structure of the story. Two interrelated areas of research have been identified: the study of war as a continuous limit situation in the intertextual aspect (the discourse of war); the study of limit situations (death, suffering, guilt, accident) in the narrative of war as part of a specific text. In the third part of the scientific work,the analysis of war as a continuous limit situation results in the study of the concept of “limit” (border) in a fiction text. The role of “limit” (border) concept in the texts about the war is studied, the possible types of limits in the discourse of war are examined. Limit situations in the narrative of war are analyzed on the basis of the novel “My Lieutenant” by Daniil Granin. A review of journalistic and scientific works about the novel revealed both the continuity and the differences between the novel and the “lieutenant” prose of the 20th century. An analysis of the limit situations in the novel revealed their key position in the narrative. These situations are independent of the fiction time, of the fluctuation of the point of view’; the function of the abstract author is to build the narrative as a “directive” immersion of the hero and narrator in these situations.


GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Samuel Steinberg

This essay takes as its starting point the relative lack of a contender to the “novel of ′68” in Mexico. I argue that Jorge Volpi's 2003 El fin de la locura constitutes the final writing of such a novel, to appear some 35 years after the original events of that year. The double “renewal” pursued by this work is explored both as an intended restoration of the literary to a place of social privilege after a period of decline, and also as a conservative restoration of order following the revolutionary sequences of the 20th century. However, I argue, the novel cannot finally commit to artistic renewal without also confirming the “madness” of the century; the literary renewal pursued in Volpi's text thus becomes the very political renewal that the author seeks to avoid.


1981 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 536
Author(s):  
Arra S. Avakian ◽  
Alex Aronson
Keyword(s):  

Lateral ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Moriah

Kristin Moriah’s essay is rooted in extensive archival work in the US and Germany, examining the transatlantic circulation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through markets of performance and literature in and between Germany and the United States. The essay follows the performative tropes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from its originary political resonances to the present-day restaurants, train-stops, and housing projects named for the novel. Moriah reveals how the figurations of blackness arising from these texts are foundational to the construction of Germanness and American-German relations in the early 20th century and beyond.


Author(s):  
Iryna Dumchak ◽  
Sofiia Shemerliuk

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.


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