Women's Friendship in Literature.

The Collected Stories

Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media (review)

There is often a resistance to analysing the output of writers while they are still living, as scholars prefer to wait until an oeuvre is completed before patterns can be established and the consti

Touchstones: John McGahern’s classical style

John McGahern: Nightlines

In John McGahern’s stories, stories bring to life characters in both comic and tragic instances, and their whole existence comes under the spotlight, as the writer uses mild, ironic or sarcastic touches. In between automatisms and mobility often directed at dogmatism or mental stereotypes displayed by characters, clergymen, workers, teachers, writers or family members display their ignorance, occasional (lack of) manners, boredom or elevation, often imitating what seems to be ‘decent’ in terms of taste. This paper explores how class, gender and false pretences are ridiculed and exposed in both novels and short stories, and how laughter moves from a classical Kantian play instance to a Freudian-supported analysis of condensation and ambiguity as vehicles employed by a realist creator. The narrative often alternates between family roles and poles of power, visible and invisible laughter, as natural and changing (or hybrid) as human nature.

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‘touched’ by humour in life: characters in john mcgahern’s fiction

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Kobiecość: tożsamość, trauma i poznanie w terracotta ovens of my childhood elite olshtain

Bonded to Memory: Terracotta Ovens of My Childhood by Elite Olshtain

Evident from her first book Voica (1924), and up to her last novel Le Temoin de l’Eternite printed first in France in 1975 and translated into Romanian in 1995, Henriette Yvonne Stahl becomes from a promising writer a unique voice in the inter-war and post-war literary scene in Romania.
Starting from Rimbaud’s illuminating pensee “Love has to be reinvented” (Felman  2007: 213),  this paper aims to explore the identity of protagonists in My Brother, the Man (Fratele meu omul, first published in1965), drawing on identity and trauma theory as developed by Penny Brown (1992), Cathy Caruth (1995; 1996), Shoshana Feldman (2007) and Dori Laub (1992; 1995). In addition, the mixture of memory and narrative analyses types of ‘talk fiction’ (Kakandes 2005), the shift of focus from the subject of remembrance to the mode in which it takes place (Whitehead 2009), and how narratives impact readers (Piątek 2014).
Both male and female characters in My Brother, The Man have clear dominant traits, so that their actions and inner voices are marked by abrupt shifts, meant to stimulate a noticeable response from those they love or dislike. Are the main characters engulfed in a dense life texture able to explore their personal dilemmas, difficult choices and detach themselves from the flux of their own passions and desires? Or are they going to fall victim to their own inability to understand life’s meaning, paralleled by a lack of vision and humanity as manifested by other characters? How do they act and react to the actions and emotions they experience? The present paper examines how memories, dilemmas and changes nuance a story moving from a classically-structured narrative to crime fiction, embedding numerous interior monologues and deep psychological impasses, the result being a female novel of self-development.

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Gaps, silences and witnesses: the quest for identity in Henriette Yvonne Stahl’s "My Brother, the Man"

Abstract Current explorations of migration in fiction focus on innovative perspectives, linking memory and trauma with the concepts of exile and conflict. Personal memories ask for an understanding of what belonging and identity represent for the Irish; immigration has hybrid and fertile links to memory studies, psychology and psychoanalysis (Akhtar), making the immigrant both love and hate his new territory, while returning to the past or homeland to reflect and regain emotional balance. From the focus on ‘the sexy foreigner’ (Beltsiou), we rely on the idea of crisis discussed by León Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Frank Summers’ examination of identity, the place of the modern polis and the variations of the narrative (Phillips), the trans-generational factor (Fitzgerald and Lambkin), the departure seen as an exile (Murray and Said) and the impact of guilt (Wills). Such views support an analysis of McGahern’s writing which works as a blend of memories and imagination, the writer highlighting dilemmas, success and failure as ongoing human threads. They are as diverse as the people met by the novelist in his youth, many of them being workers, nurses, entrepreneurs, teachers and writers, both young immigrants in search of a better life and migrants returning to spend their retirement or holidays home.

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Dana Radler

Papers

‘touched’ by humour in life: characters in john mcgahern’s fiction

Kobiecość: tożsamość, trauma i poznanie w terracotta ovens of my childhood elite olshtain

Bonded to Memory: Terracotta Ovens of My Childhood by Elite Olshtain

Gaps, silences and witnesses: the quest for identity in Henriette Yvonne Stahl’s "My Brother, the Man"

Us and Them: A Vision of Heroes on the Move in John McGahern’s Fiction