scholarly journals Becoming Indivisible in the Age of Cloning: Resistance, Individuality, and Photography in Notre vie dans les forêts

Author(s):  
Sonja Stojanovic

After broaching the topic in two short stories included in the collection Zoo (2006) – “Quand je me sens très fatiguée le soir” and “Mon mari le clone” – Marie Darrieussecq, in her most recent novel Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), returns to the question of clones. In an age when high-tech surveillance and meticulous tracking mechanisms have become the norm, in a world where clones are used as spare parts to prolong one’s life, a group of rebels decides to resist and liberate their cloned halves, only to find out that they are also clones themselves; from their hiding place in a forest, the dying female narrator writes her story in a notebook hoping she will be remembered. This article considers how clones can be said to have a distinct and unique identity by tracing the evolution of the female narrator  from clone to individual. It also proposes to read the novel as a powerful series of snapshots that allow the narrator, through her photographic writing, to become her own ghost, as opposed to someone else’s clone.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
Patricia Wulandari

A good literary work can provide information about various kinds of community life,including life related to religiosity. Literary works are closely related to religisiutas,because of that, various works appearing showing the religiosity of society, one ofwhich is the Javanese. Modern Indonesian literary works that illustrate this are thecollection of short stories from Umi Kalsum by Djamil Suherman, the lyrical prosePengakuan Pariyem by Linus Suryadi AG, and the novel Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk byAhmad Tohari. Each of these works represents the diversity of Javanese society. Thecollection of short stories from Umi Kalsum shows the religious side of the communitycalled the santri who are so obedient in carrying out their worship. The lyrical proseof Pariyem's confession provides information on how a babu is so resigned to seeinglife, but in her soul holds the wisdom of Kejawen. Meanwhile, Ronggeng Dukuh Parukdescribes the Javanese people who worship the spirits of their ancestors. Even thoughthey have different religions, they basically want harmony. Javanese people who livein santri enjoy harmony when they live with strong Islamic values. The Javanesepeople of the Gunung Kidul area live in harmony if they are always nrimo and see lifeas it is according to its Javanese nature. The Dukuh Paruk community attainsharmony that originates from the worship of the spirit of Ki Secamenggala.


Author(s):  
Maria S. Sloistova ◽  

The paper focuses on complex research and description of creative reception theory and typology. There are provided definitions of such terms as reception, creative reception, creative reception strategies, and others. The author builds the typology of creative reception on the basis of works by E. V. Abramovskikh, S. Ye. Trunin, M. V. Zagidullina, V. I. Tyupa, and M. Naumann. This typology includes two types (or levels) of creative reception, defined as classic and postmodernist. Each of the types is characterized by a number of strategies, i. e. ways of representing an artistically received text in one’s own work. The classic type strategies (formal, authentic, neutral and antithetical) focus primarily on plot transformation. As for the postmodernist level, the author singles out two strategies: congenial and play. The theory and typology of creative reception is substantiated with some examples of reminiscences and allusions to English and world poetry. The examples under analysis are taken from the following prose works by the outstanding English postmodernist writer John Robert Fowles (1926–2005): the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the collection of long short stories The Ebony Tower (1974), the philosophic book The Aristos (1964), and also the lyric collection Selected Poems, published posthumously in 2012. The collection has not been translated into Russian yet. Therefore, the poem under analysis (Islanders) has been translated into Russian by the author of the present paper. The paper also deals with indirect Biblical reception which is found in the allusion to the ivory tower. The allusion gave the title The Ebony Tower both to Fowles’ long short story and collection as a whole. The author of the paper draws a conclusion about the dominant creative reception strategies in the literary works under analysis and also about the possible use of the presented creative reception typology in analyzing works by other writers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Dorota Czerkies

The Category of Reticence and a Return to the Story in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Writing. An Introduction The article presents the function of reticence in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s writing in the context of the return to the story in francophone literature, initiated in the 80s of the 20th c. Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a contemporary Belgian writer, photographer and film-maker. He has written twelve novels and short stories, as well as authored films and installations. Belonging to the generation of minimalist writers, Toussaint sets his use of reticence in the context of the tendency to return to Genette’s category of story (récit). Since the publication of his novel La Réticence (1991) reticence has become the key category of his écriture. In his books, it shapes the form, the narration and the plot, the construction of characters, temporality, and space. Thus, its function in Toussaint’s writing enables us to observe idiosyncratic aspects of his “infinitesimalist” texts which play with the canonical, realistic model of the novel. Kategoria „powściągliwości” (réticence) i powrót do opowieści w pisarstwie Jeana-Philippe’a Toussainta. Wprowadzenie Artykuł stanowi próbę omówienia kategorii powściągliwości (fr. réticence) w prozie Jeana-Philippe’a Toussainta w kontekście powrotu do opowieści w literaturze frankofońskiej, zapoczątkowanego w latach 80. XX wieku. Jean-Philippe Toussaint to współczesny belgijski pisarz, fotograf i filmowiec. Napisał m.in. dwanaście powieści i kilka zbiorów krótkich form, jest także autorem filmów i instalacji. Jako przedstawiciel pokolenia pisarzy minimalistycznych Toussaint osadza wykorzystanie powściągliwości w kontekście zjawiska powrotu do genette’owskiej kategorii opowiadania (fr. récit). Od czasu publikacji powieści La Réticence (1991) powściągliwość stała się kluczową kategorią Toussaintowskiego pisarstwa. W jego utworach kształtuje formę, narrację i fabułę, ale także konstrukcję postaci, czasowość i przestrzeń. W ten sposób status omawianej kategorii w twórczości Toussainta umożliwia analizę poszczególnych, a zarazem charakterystycznych dla tego twórcy aspektów textes infinitésimalistes, które podejmują grę z modelem balzakowskiej powieści realistycznej.


Author(s):  
T. Hajder

Polish literature is one of the leading positions not only in the Slavic world, but also well-presented at the global level. The article is devoted to the Polish writer of the middle of the twentieth century, whose name is unknown to the Ukrainian narratee, but his works are extremely interesting. The reasons why some writers do not fall into the field of wide-ranging research are different. In the case of the Kazimierz Trukhanovsky’s works, this is an insufficient research of the Polish literary criticism, the researchers are writing about it only now. Returning the names of interesting writers and attracting attention to their works is an actual and interesting task.The creative legacy of K. Trukhanovsky is quite extensive – it’s a romance cycle, story and short stories, individual novels. Philosophy, reflection and utopia are the most extensive characteristics of the writer’s works. The imagery and aesthetic background of the novels become clearer if we attract the work of artists, whose leading motive of creativity was the hell and the wandering of human souls in the search of divine light. The writer applied to mythologization and the magic properties of time-space measurements in the novel. Mythological and literary traditions are superimposed, as a result of which the author creates a complicated model of a labyrinthine novel.


Author(s):  
Aleksei V. Makarychev

The article is devoted to the study of the “Shakespearean text” by Yuri Dombrovsky from the standpoint of Bakhtin dialogism. Clarifies the concept of “Shakespearean text” refers to and analyzes “Shakespearean text” by Dombrovsky, including artistic works – a trilogy of novels about Shakespeare (“Dark Lady” “Second-highest quality bed”, “Royal Rescript”) and two chapters of the novel “Dark Lady” (“Queen” and “Count Essex”), originally entered into its composition, but later was published separately, as well as two scientific and critical articles – “‘RetlandBaconSouthamptonShakespeare’: about the myth, anti-myth and biographical hypothesis” and “To Italians about Shakespeare”. The study author states that “Shakespearean text” by Yuri Dombrovsky dominated themes of tyranny and government that does not want to hear the people, of censorship, depriving the artist’s freedom of expression and the role of the artist in an unfree society. Special attention is paid to the problem of interaction between Shakespeare and monologue-authoritarian society in the artistic world created by the writer. The author hypothesizes that in the trilogy of short stories about Shakespeare, Dombrovsky addressed such problems of the totalitarian regime as censorship, cruelty and despotism of power from a relatively “safe” distance – the age of Shakespeare. The author notes the presence of a special situation of double dialogue in “Shakespearean text” by Yuri Dombrovsky: the dialogue is conducted through the Shakespearean era with the contemporary writer’s reality, power and culture. The article proves the similarity of Dombrovsky as a biographical author with the Shakespeare he portrayed, and notes the presence of common features in both writers (sacralization of creativity, impulsive character, addiction to alcohol, epileptic seizures, etc.). The conducted research allows us to conclude that Dombrovsky, attempting a dialogue with the monologue-authoritarian power, finds a voice through art, like “his” Shakespeare. Dombrovsky connects the ways of solving the problem of the artist and power with art as the only way to build a dialogue in the conditions of totalitarianism – not so much with the authorities, who are not able to hear it, as with themselves.


Author(s):  
Andrew Gibbons

Tragedy is a central theme in the work of Albert Camus that speaks to his 46 years of life in “interesting times.” He develops a case for the tragic arts across a series of letters, articles, lectures, short stories, and novels. In arguing for the tragic arts, he reveals an epic understanding of the tensions between individual and world manifest in the momentum of liberalism, humanism, and modernism. The educational qualities of the tragic arts are most explicitly explored in his novel The Plague, in which the proposition that the plague is a teacher engages Camus in an exploration of the grand narratives of progress and freedom, and the intimate depths of ignorance and heroism. In the novel The Outsider Camus explores the tragedy of difference in a society obsessed with the production of a normal citizen. The tragedy manifests the absurdity of the world in which a stranger in this world is compelled to support the system that rejects their subjectivity. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus produces an essay on absurdity and suicide that toys with the illusion of Progress and the grounds for a well-lived life. Across these texts, and through his collection of letters, articles, and notes, Camus invites an educational imagination. His approach to study of the human condition in and through tragedy offers a narrative to challenge the apparent absence of imagination in educational systems and agendas. Following Camus, the tragic arts offer alternative narratives during the interesting times of viral and environment tragedy.


Author(s):  
Louise Hardwick

Joseph Zobel (1915-2006) is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognized for his novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). Yet very little is known about his other novels, and most readings of La Rue Cases-Nègres consider the text in isolation. Through a series of close readings of the author’s six published novels, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel’s highly original decision to develop Négritude’s project of affirming pride in black identity through the novel and social realism. The study establishes how, influenced by the American Harlem Renaissance movement, Zobel expands the scope of Négritude by introducing new themes and stylistic innovations which herald a new kind of social realist French Caribbean literature. These discoveries in turn challenge and alter the current understanding of Francophone Caribbean literature during the Négritude period, in addition to contributing to changes in the current understanding of Caribbean and American literature more broadly understood.


Author(s):  
John Callahan

In “’That Pause for Contemplation’: A Centennial Meditation on Ralph Ellison,” John Callahan—Ellison’s literary executor and the dean of Ellison studies—looks back upon Ellison’s life and work, asking what Ellison’s accomplishment looks like 100 years after his birth, and a new century proceeds in his wake. Beginning with the “thought experiment” of a young Barack Obama jogging past Ralph Ellison in New York in the 1980s, Callahan meditates on Ellison’s investigation of the relationship between the individual search for identity and America’s pursuit of democratic equality. Drawing upon Ellison’s wealth of posthumously published material—the short stories, essays, interviews, and his unfinished second novel—Callahan emphasizes Ellison’s relentless pursuit of the novel form as his means of interrogating the fluid, improvisational, evolving form of American identity. Callahan probes the omnipresent father figures that dominate Ellison’s work after Invisible Man—Lewis Ellison, Abraham Lincoln, Alonzo Hickman, and others.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
James Acheson

D. H. Lawrence began to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche while a student at Nottingham University College. The influence of the two philosophers on his early short stories and his novels from The White Peacock (1911) through to The Rainbow (1915) has been considered at length in books and essays on Lawrence. There has been little discussion to date, though, of the presence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Women in Love (1920). The unmistakably Nietzschean term Wille zur Macht (will to power) appears in the novel and has attracted some critical comment, but there is no equally obvious reference to Schopenhauer, and discussion of Schopenhauer’s influence has been accordingly slight. Lawrence believed, however, that every novel should have a ‘background metaphysic’, and careful examination of Women in Love reveals that its metaphysic, or ‘theory of being’, derives from a combination of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophical theories.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (Special) ◽  
pp. 86-95
Author(s):  
Phuong Khanh Nguyen

f on a winter's night a traveler is considered one of the greatest novels by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Published in 1979, this literary work, which belongs to the postmodernist narrative style in the form of a frame story, tells about a reader trying to read a book with the same title from beginning to end. Much of the story’s content was written in the second-person’s narration, implying that “you” (the Reader) are the protagonist of the novel. Embedded inside are ten short stories (the loose ends of different novels) read by the main character, which causes the book to constantly switch between settings, narrators, and styles. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is truly a perfect illustration for the literary style characterized by metafiction and postmodernism. The novel is a conscious textual play with various techniques employed such as authorial role limitation, reader involvement in the plot line, open structure, non-linearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, and intertextuality. By effectively using these devices, Calvino deconstructs the traditional novel form and creates a new structure which shows a parallel between the processes of writing and reading a text. Calvino acts as the supreme game-master taking control of both the characters and the real players, who have been pushed into this game-like novel. This article focuses on analyzing the charactericstics of metafiction, the Droste effect and deconstruction in Calvino’s novel If on a winter's night a traveler, thereby helping to grasp his playful language and his narrative techniques as well as to discover his metafictional discourse.


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