Movements of Languages and Territories of the Novel

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.

European and African Literary Traditions in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

This chapter examines Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's (1938–) Wizard of the Crow. Combining African and Western traditions to make something new, Ngũgĩ's incorporates Kenyan political history and Gikuyu folktales into the European and international form of the postmodern novel. By writing from a sort of exile to his own people, he also addresses a worldwide audience. The chapter discusses Ngũgĩ's incorporation of African history and traditional stories and storytelling methods into the form of the Western novel. Then it considers the political plot, focusing on the figure of the Ruler. Finally, the chapter turns to the plot of love and resistance, discussing Nyawĩra and Kamĩtĩ in turn.

Rewriting Dostoevsky: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and the perverted truths of biographical fiction

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.

Perceptions of Russian Literature in Britain in the end of the XIX — beginning of the XX century

The purpose of the article is to analyze the existing ideas about Russian literature in Britain at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. A brief overview of the advancement of works by Russian classics among British readers is given. The spread of Russian literature in Britain had been progressing slowly for a long time due to the difficulty in translation and the lack of interest in Russia and Russian culture. However, at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the situation changed in the British literary community. This period saw a plethora of publications of translations of Russian fiction that were accomplished by professional translators, Slavonic scholars, and writers. These translations appeared in periodicals and other print formats. The article provides an overview of the translation of works of F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov, who have become the most understandable and accessible to the English mentality. It happened thanks to such outstanding translators as C. Garnett, Aylmer and Louise Maude, S. S. Koteliansky (who worked in collaboration with V. Woolf, J. M. Murry), R. E. C. Long and others. Having gained access to high-quality translations of Russian classics, British writers began to study their works in greater detail. The British saw the influence of English and European writers (W. Shakespeare, Ch. Dickens, J.-J. Rousseau, J. W. Goethe, V. Hugo, etc.), e.g., in F. M. Dostoevsky’s works. However, later the Russian influence could also be felt in the Western novel, modifying it. There is an opinion that the works of A. P. Chekhov, translated by Garnett, changed the English short story, making it exactly as we know it. V. Woolf, J. Joyce, B. Shaw, J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett and others admired the depth, style, and language of Russian writers. Translation of works of great Russian authors facilitated the flow of information about Russia and expanded the Brit’s view on the country and its people. It once again confirms the existence of mutual cultural exchange between the two countries from a historical perspective. It can be argued that, despite all the complexities of the relationship, the mutual influence of the literatures of the two countries is quite significant.

Formulating Western Fiction in Garrett Touch of Texas

Western fiction as one of the popular novels has some common conventions such as the setting of life in frontier filled with natural ferocity and uncivilized people. This type of fiction also has a hero who is usually a ranger or cowboy. This study aims to find a Western fiction formula and look for new things that may appear in the novel Touch of Texas as a Western novel. Taking the original convention of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, this study also looks for the invention and convention of Touch of Texas by using Cawelti’s formula theory. The study finds that Garrett's Touch of Texas not only features a natural malignancy against civilization, a ranger as a single hero, and a love story, but also shows an element of revenge and the other side of a neglected minority life. A hero or ranger in this story comes from a minority group, a mixture of white blood and Indians. The romance story also shows a different side. The woman in the novel is not the only one to be saved, but a Ranger is too, especially from the wounds and ridicule of the population as a ranger of mixed blood. The story ends with a romantic tale between Jake and Rachel. Further research can be done to find the development of western genre with other genres such as detective and mystery.

‘A funny thing laughter, what’s it for?’: Humour and Form in Lessing’s Fiction

The notion of Lessing, as Joan Didion once wrote, as a ‘didactic’ writer implies that her writing cannot be funny. But if the radical otherness of her outlook as a former colonial subject prevents some readers from laughing, Lessing’s use of humour, as a dialogic modality, brings awareness to problems otherwise denied or unrecognized. In her early fiction, humour takes on a conventional, social-realist function, drawing on the novel’s historical connections to the genre of satire. The limits of novelistic satire become apparent in The Golden Notebook (1962), however, and, from this impasse, Lessing’s humour moves towards an alternative, therapeutic mode in order to engage with such emerging concerns as ecological catastrophe and social collapse. After explicitly reconsidering the rhetorical value of humour in The Four-Gated City (1969) and the short story ‘A Report on the Threatened City’ (1971), Lessing incorporates enigmatically humorous moments into The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). As these works take greater distance from the Western novel tradition, they embrace the subtly dialogic method of the Sufi teaching story, which informs the absurd but instructive anecdotes of colonial Rhodesia in Lessing’s 1985 lecture,‘Prisons We Choose to Live Inside.’

An Example of Chaos in the Desired Change of a Society in Literature

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.

A Nilufar by any other Name: The Implications of Reading Sadegh Hedayat in Translation

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.

Apuleius in Meiji Japan: The Golden Ass as an Educational and Reformatory Novel

This paper will consider the 1887 Japanese translation of Apuleius'Golden Assfrom the angle of classical reception. Although this was the first translation of Greco-Roman literature to appear in modern Japanese, it has, at least in print, never been examined by a classicist before. With the rising interest in the study of classical receptions, including those taking place outside the West, the time may be ripe for a serious look at this early Meiji translation by Morita Shiken—its content, source, intellectual climate surrounding its production, and its own subsequent reception in Japan.The ancient novel, as Whitmarsh observes, is a genre uniquely suited for reception studies, especially of the more usual kind that is concerned with the modern period. Although a late and ignoble genre within antiquity, despite its often considerable linguistic and literary artistry, it came to enjoy relatively wide cultural recognition and circulation in the early modern period, before being outshone by the modern Western novel and sinking back into relative obscurity again both in the public and in academia—and its literary character is still very much controversial, to the extent that it is debated whether the ancient genre may justifiably be called ‘novel’. The history of the reception of the novel therefore may show more intriguing twists and contradictions than that of such established and uncontroversially ‘great’ genres as epic or tragedy.