Del Ivan Janik

Bio: Del Ivan Janik is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Swift & Poetry. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 45 citations.

No end of history : evidence from the contemporary english novel

Abstract: Price, a student in Tom Crick's course on the French Revolution in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, disrupts the class and sets off Crick's rambling but fascinating discourse on the history of the East Anglian fens with a challenge that is all too familiar to teachers of history, literature, and virtually every other academic subject: "What matters . . . is the here and now. Not the past. . . . The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it's got to the point where it's probably about to end" (6-7). Price has some distinguished and more articulate company. According to such diverse critics and philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson, we are at or beyond the "end of history": there stands before or about us only a perpetual present: a world defined only spatially, no longer in terms of development through time. The grand syntheses, the "meta-narratives," the myths that once informed our consciousness of the world, have been discredited and become obsolete. One product of the "end of history" is literary postmodernism, for whose exponents, according to David Bennett, "the past as referent has been effaced, time has been textualized, leaving only representations, texts, pseudo-events, images without originals: a spatial, rather than temporal, order of simulacra" (262). In the rarefied intellectual atmosphere inhabited by post-Saussurean theorists and postmodern critics the notion of the "end of history" may appear to have some validity, but in the more pedestrian regions of the bookstore and the fiction shelves of the library, history and the concept of history are alive and well, particularly as subject and theme in recent English fiction. Indeed, a significant number of the more ambitious English novels of the 1980s and 1990s have in common an acute consciousness of history and a sharp focus on its meanings or potential for meaning. These novels are, for the most part, the products of an identifiable generation of writers who were born in the Forties or early Fifties and came of age professionally in the Eighties: the first generation of the post-World War II era. An exception to this generalization is A. S. Byatt (born in 1936), but her novel Possession (1990) could be said to exemplify this type of contemporary English novel most directly and clearly, if not most provocatively. The other novelists I have in mind include Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, pre-eminently, Graham Swift. Swift's Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever After (1992), Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), First Light (1989), and English Music (1992) are characterized by a foregrounding of the historical consciousness, most often through a dual or even multiple focus on the fictional present and one or more crucial "pasts." Their narrators or protagonists are for the most part explorers of history (in the broadest sense) by profession or avocation. Swift's narrator Prentis in Shuttlecock is a police archivist, Waterland's Tom Crick is a history teacher, Harry Beech of Out of This World is a photojournalist, and Bill Unwin of Ever After is an English lecturer engaged in editing an ancestor's memoirs; Barnes's Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired physician who is an amateur student of the life and works of Flaubert; the central characters in the contemporary plot of Byatt's Possession are literary scholars; Ackroyd's protagonists include a police detective, an archaeologist, and a failed poet who is writing a life of Thomas Chatterton. Those without a professional interest in history are driven to confront it in their attempts at self-definition, self-actualization, or self-avoidance: Ishiguro's aging, emotionally crippled butler in The Remains of the Day is an obvious example. Linda Hutcheon has described a genre which she calls "historiographic metafiction" (xiv), and Alison Lee in her book on postmodern British fiction has identified Flaubert's Parrot and Waterland as examples (36). …

Toward 'Thingness': Cezanne's Painting and Lawrence's Poetry

Abstract: Two essays that reveal D. H. Lawrence's interest in and admiration for the paintings of Paul C6zanne deserve attention as expressions of Lawrence's own artistic problem, and the manner in which he solved it in the realm of poetry. "Art and Morality," published in 1925, and the "Introduction to These Paintings" that Lawrence wrote for the 1929 edition of his own paintings both describe the special intuitive consciousness that Lawrence saw revealed in Cezanne's work, and provide an insight into what Lawence himself had been attempting to achieve in the medium of poetry.' Even more than Lawrence's Etruscan Places, which Christopher Hassall has identified as being in part an essay on poetic theory,2 these discussions of Cezanne can be read as retrospective descriptions of Lawrence's own poetic development.

History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Abstract: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians' own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction's contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and nmnenonic function today.

Crossing borders and blurring genres: Towards a typology and poetics of postmodernist historical fiction in England since the 1960s

Abstract: (1997). Crossing borders and blurring genres: Towards a typology and poetics of postmodernist historical fiction in England since the 1960s. European Journal of English Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 217-238.

No end of history : evidence from the contemporary english novel

Abstract: Price, a student in Tom Crick's course on the French Revolution in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, disrupts the class and sets off Crick's rambling but fascinating discourse on the history of the East Anglian fens with a challenge that is all too familiar to teachers of history, literature, and virtually every other academic subject: "What matters . . . is the here and now. Not the past. . . . The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it's got to the point where it's probably about to end" (6-7). Price has some distinguished and more articulate company. According to such diverse critics and philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson, we are at or beyond the "end of history": there stands before or about us only a perpetual present: a world defined only spatially, no longer in terms of development through time. The grand syntheses, the "meta-narratives," the myths that once informed our consciousness of the world, have been discredited and become obsolete. One product of the "end of history" is literary postmodernism, for whose exponents, according to David Bennett, "the past as referent has been effaced, time has been textualized, leaving only representations, texts, pseudo-events, images without originals: a spatial, rather than temporal, order of simulacra" (262). In the rarefied intellectual atmosphere inhabited by post-Saussurean theorists and postmodern critics the notion of the "end of history" may appear to have some validity, but in the more pedestrian regions of the bookstore and the fiction shelves of the library, history and the concept of history are alive and well, particularly as subject and theme in recent English fiction. Indeed, a significant number of the more ambitious English novels of the 1980s and 1990s have in common an acute consciousness of history and a sharp focus on its meanings or potential for meaning. These novels are, for the most part, the products of an identifiable generation of writers who were born in the Forties or early Fifties and came of age professionally in the Eighties: the first generation of the post-World War II era. An exception to this generalization is A. S. Byatt (born in 1936), but her novel Possession (1990) could be said to exemplify this type of contemporary English novel most directly and clearly, if not most provocatively. The other novelists I have in mind include Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, pre-eminently, Graham Swift. Swift's Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever After (1992), Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), First Light (1989), and English Music (1992) are characterized by a foregrounding of the historical consciousness, most often through a dual or even multiple focus on the fictional present and one or more crucial "pasts." Their narrators or protagonists are for the most part explorers of history (in the broadest sense) by profession or avocation. Swift's narrator Prentis in Shuttlecock is a police archivist, Waterland's Tom Crick is a history teacher, Harry Beech of Out of This World is a photojournalist, and Bill Unwin of Ever After is an English lecturer engaged in editing an ancestor's memoirs; Barnes's Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired physician who is an amateur student of the life and works of Flaubert; the central characters in the contemporary plot of Byatt's Possession are literary scholars; Ackroyd's protagonists include a police detective, an archaeologist, and a failed poet who is writing a life of Thomas Chatterton. Those without a professional interest in history are driven to confront it in their attempts at self-definition, self-actualization, or self-avoidance: Ishiguro's aging, emotionally crippled butler in The Remains of the Day is an obvious example. Linda Hutcheon has described a genre which she calls "historiographic metafiction" (xiv), and Alison Lee in her book on postmodern British fiction has identified Flaubert's Parrot and Waterland as examples (36). …

The myth of 9/11

Abstract: Conceptualisations of modern literary history are premised upon a series of dynastic successions, whereby one is able to trace, albeit simplistically, the evolution of the novel through its realist, modernist and postmodernist manifestations. Considered in this linear manner, the emergence of altered cultural movements is ordinarily attributed to a crisis within the former mood; as society ruptures and alters, existing modes of representation prove inadequate to reflect, or else engage with, the emergent structure of feeling. As an event with far-reaching implications, many critics and cultural commentators have attributed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the inception of an altered global mood. Moreover, in the days and weeks following 9/11, the publication of a number of articles penned by authors emphasised the extent to which the event had precipitated a profound crisis in representation. As an ever greater number of articles and studies emerged proclaiming the final death knell of postmodernism and the emergence of a more anxious global mood, so the myth of 9/11 quickly developed. The thesis rests upon a very simple question: to what extent has 9/11 precipitated a change in the novel? Through examining a wide range of fictions published largely within Britain in the last fifteen years, the study explores and ultimately dispels the assumptions of the myth. Rather than examining the fictional representation of 9/11, the study’s focus is on assessing the significance of the novel after the event, and moreover on interrogating the manner in which the terrorist attacks might have engendered a shift in the contemporary mood that is reflected in the subsequent novels published. Through emphasising the novelistic concerns and themes that transcend the assumed cultural rift, the thesis proposes that the ‘post-9/11 mood’ might more usefully be interpreted as an exacerbation of an already existing structure of feeling that responds to the banal superficiality of the postmodern condition.