Pathology, Power, and Patriarchy in The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth

In both of his political novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), García Márquez employs similar themes and narrative strategies to portray very different protagonists. The Patriarch is a prototypical Latin American dictator, while Simón Bolívar is the hero of Latin American independence. The protagonists share numerous characteristics, such as illnesses that serve as metaphors for their loss of power (physical in the case of the General, mental in the case of the Patriarch), characterization through their numerous sexual encounters, their distaste for losing at games, and their control of national funds. The Patriarch’s pathology functions to underscore a psychological obsession with power, whose loss corresponds to the Patriarch’s mental deterioration and ultimate senility, while the General’s illness relies on traditional associations of consumption as representative of melancholy (as outlined by Sontag in Illness as Metaphor), thus romanticizing the figure of Bolívar. This essay examines how García Márquez employs similar tropes and novelistic elements to evolve very different portraits of his two protagonists: the Patriarch as a mythic figure who epitomizes evil and the abuse of power, and the General as a postmodern historical figure who combines his power obsession with other mitigating characteristics, such as the love of his continent and the dream of its unity. A contraposition of these two characters illustrates social psychological distinctions between the dominance and the functionalist perspectives of power, in addition to clarifying many of the ambiguities inherent in García Márquez’s portrait of Bolívar.

Political Praxis Topicality in The African Novel: A Postcolonial Reading of Henri Lopes’ The Laughing Cry and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of The Savannah

This paper deals with ‘political realm’ as a literary theme in African literature. It purports to evidence the manifestations of political power in Henri Lopes’ The Laughing Cry and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. The exploration of these novels from two post-colonial different linguistic areas reveals howthe political power is manifested throughout an absolute exercise the struggle for its preservation. This abuse and the misuse of the political power by the postcolonial ruling elites pave the way to the peasant masses’ disenchantment and the reign of social disorder that Africa is still struggling to get rid of. As a final assessment, this study posits the two analyzed works as political novels.

Reading Manipulation In Runaway Horses by Mishima Yukio

In her seminal work, Authoritarian Fictions: Ideological Novels as a Literary Genre, Susan Rubin Suleiman emphasizes the co-optational dimension of romans à thèse, which seem addressed to readers who are already converted to the ideological perspective of these works. Political novels therefore tend to divide readers into two categories: proponents on the one hand, denigrators on the other. Based on a close reading of Runaway Horses (1969), Mishima Yukio’s most overtly ideological fictional work, this article is meant to enrich Suleiman’s model by showing that the most elaborate authoritarian fictional works use specific rhetorical tactics to soften or compensate for the excess of their message and to appeal to nonsympathizers. Focusing on chapters 9 and 10 of Runaway Horses, where the novel shifts from a classical and realist tone (chapters 1 to 8) to an ideological and authoritarian one (chapters 9 to 40), the article analyzes three of these rhetorical tactics: (1) the lightning rod, which consists of attracting criticisms about one specific and clearly delineated locus of the text, fulfilling an apotropaic function and serving as a foil for the rest; (2) prolepsis, which anticipates the reader’s likely negative comments and thus becomes in tune with his perspective; and (3) the tactic of enlarging the audience by which the narrator reincorporates a sectarian ideology into a larger and more universal ensemble. The conclusion questions the place of the reader and investigates the reading strategies that he or she may adopt in order to respond to this manipulation.

Hesitant Empathy: Sun Baoxuan's Diary and Approaches to Reading Fiction in Late Qing China

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF 1903, SUN BAOXUAN—A SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL IN LATE QING DYNASTY CHINA—documented in his diary that he had acquired a copy of the periodical 新小說 (Xin xiaoshuo; “he New Novel”), founded by Liang Qichao in 1902 to propagate translated fiction and new Chinese fiction. Immediately drawn to the stories and novels it carried, Sun soon concluded that Western fiction had the unique strength of imparting knowledge and expanding rational capacity: 「觀西人政治 小說，可以悟政治原理；觀科學小說，可以通種種格物原理；觀包 探小說，可以覘西國人情土俗及其居心之險詐詭變，有非我國所 能及者」 (“Political novels teach us principles of politics; scientific novels teach us theories of things; detective novels show us Western customs and treachery, which often surpass ours”; 690). Immersed in a culture where vernacular novels had been suppressed by official censorship and prejudice among the elites, Sun ardently embraced translated fiction. By contrast, vernacular Chinese novels, with few exceptions, seemed to him routinely 「陳腐」 (“decadent”), providing no more than 「排遣」 (“diversion and entertainment”; 677, 690) The perceived rationality of Western fiction gave him a sudden license to seriously engage with a genre that the literary culture in China continued to exclude well into the twentieth century. Sun's encounter with foreign fiction marked the early stage of a somewhat bumpy adventure. In later sections of the diary, Sun documents reading sentimental strains of translated fiction and the more ambiguous responses they incited in him.

Painful of disprision a novel of major coups (Mawajaa Alshataat )

Abdul Karim Nassif’s novel discusses the Arab situation and the fragmentation that happened to the Arabic society. The writer tried to look deep into the Arab consciousness and search for links for the Arabic cultural heritage. This novel is one of the political novels that speaks about the political reality of the Arab world to search deep into the community and find what mistakes are happening.

Heroines and emancipation

The chapter builds on historical research to elucidate the social and legal status and the everyday lives of women of all classes, aspects that informed fiction about women and their representation, and influenced women who wrote (or did not write) fiction, poetry, and diaries. The chapter examines the interrelation of fictional models/behavioral types and historical and fictional actors. With changing educational opportunities, sexual norms, and social roles, women in literature respond differently to patriarchal norms of society, and the chapter compares gendered identity formation of heroes and heroines and surveys types of heroines, such as mothers, wives and mistresses, fallen women and temptresses. Political novels and novels of adultery, with their sense of freedom and punishment, show women testing boundaries, from extreme cases such as terrorists down to the quotidian yet surprisingly ambivalent role of the mother in Russian nineteenth-century literature.

Human, All Too Human: Thomas Berger's Crazy in Berlin

Thomas Berger is best known for his western, Little Big Man, made into a film starring Dustin Hoffman, yet his Reinhart tetralogy is at least as important an achievement. Crazy in Berlin (1958), the first volume and the author's first novel, is a very ambitious work that captures postwar Berlin in telling detail. Based on Berger's experiences in the American Army during the occupation, the book displays his tragicomic vision of the human condition. The opening sections of the essay provide information about Berger's German American background while growing up in Cincinnati, a discussion of how Berger studied the political novels of his time to shape his craft, and a succinct account of the harrowing situation in postwar Berlin that Berger witnessed firsthand. Having established the most relevant contexts, the latter half of the essay provides an interpretation of the novel's central themes as well as an aesthetic evaluation of its merits as a work of fiction. While Crazy in Berlin is not without significant flaws, it is in the last analysis an impressively accomplished work, distinguished both by its memorable characters and by the author's philosophical depth. It deserves to be much better known as one of the most challenging works of his distinguished career.

Globalisation of Cultural Circuits. The Case of International Awards for Fiction

In the international circuit of fictional texts from the last fifty years (perhaps even one hundred years, in some cases), several independent international organizations, academic and editorial platforms of critique and debate have been established. They have been organizing international contests, fine authorities of critical appreciation, evaluation and awarding of most prolific authors and most successful fictional texts: novels, short stories, stories or utopian and dystopian fictions. The allotment on cultural corridors, the geographical identification of both author and title dynamics which have been nominated at the most prestigious international awards for fiction demonstrates an increased emergence of several zones where wide international circulation texts were seldom, fifty years ago. In this paper, we suggest a reinterpretation and a comprehension of the political context from the contemporary fiction, by regrouping in one category, the three classical genres (historic novel, social novel, political novel) and also the universal fiction which implies characters and relations of power. Thus, we create a category which is known as „political fiction”. The increased individualization of this literary macro-genre called „political fiction” is also a creative answer to the high speed of circulation and at the general international amplitude with which contemporary socio-political novels are distributed.