Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1993"
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TL;DR: In this paper, Beloved demonstrates its concern with linguistic expression: the evocation of both oral and written discourses, the shifting from third person narration to omniscient narration to interior monologue, the iteration and reiteration of words and phrases and passages.
Abstract: Beloved weaves a story on a singular frame: interpretation represents an integral part of black cultural and social identity. In Toni Morrison's book, the fictional characters and communities—as objects of exploitation in both slave and free-market societies—transform an essential absence into a powerful presence. A sense of self emerges from experiences of exploitation, marginalization and denial. Analogously, Morrison's narrative, confronting a facelessness the dominant culture in America threatens to impose on black expression, forges out of cultural and social absence a voice and identity. Beloved creates an aesthetic identity by playing against and through the cultural field of postmodernism. At a very basic level, this engagement with postmodernism manifests itself in the aesthetic play of the novel. Throughout, Beloved demonstrates its concern with linguistic expression: the evocation of both oral and written discourses, the shifting from third person narration to omniscient narration to interior monologue, the iteration and reiteration of words and phrases and passages. While this linguistic and narrative variation is evocative of an oral literature that shapes and retraces various tellings of the same story, it also demonstrates a concern (characteristic of experimental twentieth-
30 citations
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TL;DR: Perversion des relations amoureuses par l'oppression and le racisme dans les romans de T. Morrison as discussed by the authors was explored in the book "Les Romans of T.
Abstract: Perversion des relations amoureuses par l'oppression et le racisme dans les romans de T. Morrison
29 citations
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26 citations
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TL;DR: Among the many issues that inhabit Toni Morrison's fiction, one of the most absorbing is the multifaceted and often problematic relationship of the present to the past as discussed by the authors, and the search for self-definition and an understanding of what the past is about.
Abstract: Among the many issues that inhabit Toni Morrison's fiction, one of the most absorbing is the multifaceted and often problematic relationship of the present to the past. Whether she explores a loveaffair or a girlhood friendship, generational rupture or the meaning of freedom—whether she uses the model of communal story-telling to shape her work, reactivates a traditional myth or explores the dynamics of memory—the impact of the past remains a central issue, wending its way through theme and form. Clearly, for Morrison, the questions: \"Who am I?\" and \"Where are we going?\" are inseparable from \"Where do we come from?\", and the two sides— the search for self-definition and an understanding of what the past is about—interact constantly throughout her work. \"The reclamation of the history of black people in this country is paramount in its importance. . . . You have to stake out [your part of the work] and Identify those who have preceded you,\" she says, but also adds that \"resummoning them, acknowledging them is just one step in that process of reclamation\" (\"Interview,\" Davis 143). Significantly, her purpose is never simply to recapture the texture of a world gone by, to document its details or recreate an idealized
23 citations
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TL;DR: I returned to America conscious of my vanity, the gay pretense with which I believed that I could take respite from my life, and it was only then that I became historical, a creature gravely ready to admit that significance did not sit upon someone else's table like a magazine to which one could or could not subscribe as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: I returned to America conscious of my vanity, the gay pretense with which I believed that I could take respite from my life. It was only then that I became historical, a creature gravely ready to admit that significance did not sit upon someone else's table like a magazine to which one could or could not subscribe .... You were born fit; you rendered yourself unfit. Now comes the time when you must make yourself historical. —Meatless Days (127)
21 citations
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TL;DR: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been widely seen as typifying both postmodernism and postcoloniality as mentioned in this paper, and it has been taken to represent a new, ''de-totalizing'' way of writing history, specifically, the history of India as a modern nation-state.
Abstract: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been widely seen as typifying both postmodernism and postcoloniality. As such, it has been taken to represent a new, \"de-totalizing\" way of writing history, specifically, the history of India as a modern nation-state. The novel figures prominently, for instance, in Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism, where it exemplifies a structure that both installs and subverts \"the teleology, closure, and causality of narrative, both historical and fictive\" (63). Rushdie's postmodern techniques of narration, in this view, express a self-reflexive and wary detachment from all totalizing modes of historical thought. For Hutcheon, the combination of a contemporary self-reflexivity plus the relativizing juxtaposition of \"Eastern\" and \"Western\" modes of thought seems to sum up Midnight's Children. Rushdie's novel \"works to foreground the totalizing impulse of western—imperialistic—modes of history-
21 citations
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20 citations
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TL;DR: A psychoanalytical approach to Beloved has been proposed by as discussed by the authors, where Paul D urges Sethe to "Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" (46).
Abstract: When Paul D urges Sethe to "Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" (46), he is inviting her to "work through" past traumas with himself as psychotherapist (Freud). The novel's intertwined narratives can be viewed as a form of "talking cure": consequently, several critics have taken a psychoanalytical approach to Beloved.2 But many theorists, especially Black and feminist, have grave reservations about psychoanalysis (Abel; Spelman). Although Freud demonstrated the specific cultural construction of the psychic processes he analyzed, both he and his successors have tended to generalize from limited data unproblematically, positing a model which is both normative and universalized. As a result, psychoanalysis isolates psychic experience from the diversities of ethnicity and class; furthermore, it focuses intensively on the interaction of infant and mother as if this existed as a freestanding relation, independent of the economic, political or social conditions which affect the circumstances of parenting. In doing so, it defines motherhood according to a very specific, restricted norm, and places a huge burden of responsibility, not to say blame, on mothers (Riley; Walkerdine and Lucey; Nice). It pathologizes nonnormative families, privileging the healthy development of individual autonomy, highly valued by white Western capitalism.
18 citations
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TL;DR: The two novels that form the subject of my essay are Sashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988), and Nina Sibal's Yatra (The Journey) (1987), both originally published by British feminist presses as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The two novels that form the subject of my essay are Sashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988), and Nina Sibal's Yatra (The Journey) (1987), both originally published by British feminist presses. These writers' inscription of space as a gendered concept within the polarized categories of "home" and "world," provides my point of entry into the exploration of their novels as representative of a specific post-independence historical moment. A certain "feminism" and a certain "nationalism," corresponding to the gendered spaces of "home" and "world," produce the distinctive postcolonial features of their work. Some sort of division of private and public spheres seems to have always and universally accompanied the construction of genders, whether, as in classical Tamil poetry, as a division between the spaces of "aham" (inner) and "puram" (outer), corresponding to the polarity love/war; or between leisure and work, as in European eighteenth-century bourgeois society; or between domestic (unpaid) labor and wage labor, or reproduction (child-bearing) and production, as under capitalist social systems. Different kinds of actual (social) values have been attached to each domain, though conceptually the
17 citations
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TL;DR: Toni Morrison has always been a jazz musician, not only because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of great African works, but also and primarily because she signify, assimilate, and advance the themes of her own canon.
Abstract: Toni Morrison has always been a jazz musician, not only because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of great African works, but also and primarily because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of her own canon.1 Because Morrison is concerned with and committed to African people, she uses each of her novels as a framework for investigating various solutions to the African's class exploitation and race and gender oppression. This thematic investigation is always enhanced by narrative structure. Theme and structure work together as theory and practice in an effort to highlight, and pose solutions to, the problems African people confront.2 Jazz continues this tradition of signifying, assimilating, and advancing the mutuality of theme and structure. In her latest novel, structure does not just enhance theme, it is theme. Just as in jazz, the story and the telling of the story are one, so in Jazz, theme and structure blend together to suggest the unity that must exist among African people. The reader Is first made aware of this unifying process in the inscription:
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TL;DR: It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birchrods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils.
Abstract: It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birchrods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils. . . . Moreover, he had written a Latin Accidence, which was used in schools more than half a century after his death; so that the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair
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TL;DR: In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting and the trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am.
Abstract: In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back. (135-36)
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TL;DR: The connection between the conventions of narrative fiction and the history of European imperialism has become something of a commonplace, if still controversial topic in recent years as discussed by the authors, and the question of what would an anti-imperialist novel be like? And more specifically, could a novel about empire, written from what Edward Said calls "the Metropolis" (the West), ever be an antiimperialistic novel? Such a novel would, it seems to me, have to meet at least two criteria.
Abstract: The connection between the conventions of narrative fiction and the history of European imperialism has become something of a commonplace, if still controversial topic in recent years. As Reinhardt Kuesgen observes, there is "a fundamental problem of the concept, the function and the adequacy of the novel as a major Western genre in Africa and other non-European countries" (27). Much of this discussion surrounds the degree to which both "popular" and "canonical" novels (among English novels, Kipling's Kim and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe are favorite examples) construct and consolidate an imperialist ideology (see also Said, "Jane Austen and Empire"; Achebe, "Viewpoint" and "An Image of Africa"). Behind this issue is an important question: what would an anti-imperialist novel be like? And more specifically, could a novel about empire, written from what Edward Said calls "the Metropolis" (the West), ever be an anti-imperialist novel? Such a novel would, it seems to me, have to meet at least two criteria. First it would have to develop a sustained and relatively coherent critique of the historical fact of empire.1 Second, and this seems rather more difficult in light of the first objective, it would have to subvert two sets of novelistic conventions: the discursive conventions that make any attempt by an authorial
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TL;DR: Palomar's mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds, he no longer thinks of the lawn: he think of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Mr. Palomar's mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds. He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He Is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders, which discloses other universes within itself. The universe, collection of celestial bodies, nebulas, fine dust, force fields, Intersections of fields, collections of collections. (\"The Infinite Lawn,\" Mr. Palomar 33)
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TL;DR: A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will, except in a dream we all agreed to dream as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream. —Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (129-130)
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TL;DR: De la double conscience, a la double vision de la culture noire dans Tar Baby de T. Morrison as discussed by the authors, is a double vision of the culture no-goodness.
Abstract: De la «double conscience» a la «double vision» de la culture noire dans Tar Baby de T. Morrison
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TL;DR: The episode in which a traveling, young, poor white character named Amy Denver helps Sethe in her escape from slavery is introduced as a familiar and important story for Sethe's daughter Denver as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: I want I„I? try I„I? understand an episode in Toni Morrison's Beloved that bears a curious resemblance to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is the episode in which a traveling, young, poor white character named Amy Denver helps Sethe in her escape from slavery. The episode is introduced as a familiar and important story for Sethe's daughter Denver, who has been named after this character who helped Sethe deliver Denver during Sethe's escape— deliver her from slavery and from Sethe's womb. Denver remembers and reimagines this story during the course of Morrison's novel in something like the way the novel may suggest her readers reimagine not only Sethe's story but its relation to Twain's, and much of the raciallzed United States literature and culture that Twain's novel is often taken to represent. Morrison has described that culture in her nonaction in terms of the "solitude" and "separate confinement" of canonical American literature, especially as it has tended to be read by a critical tradition that emphasizes its romance, its flight, its individualism, its exceptionalism, and its supposedly ahistorical, apolitical nature ("Unspeakable" 1, 12). But she suggests it is also a literature and culture that
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TL;DR: In this paper, the author suggests that a poet cannot write poetry because he cannot sublimate his psychological conflicts and turn them into art, and that the key to understanding the reasons for this inability can be found in the tension between the types of language in which Stephen thinks and speaks, and his underlying psychological motivations.
Abstract: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends with a hopeful Stephen Dedalus preparing to embark on a career as a poet, excited by life and ready to "forge in the smithy of [his] soul the un-created conscience of [his] race" (Joyce 253). As the source for his art, he turns to a paternal muse: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead" (Joyce 253). But In Ulysses, we find a very different Stephen—a brooding, mourning young man whose paternal muse seems to have let him down—a poet who cannot write poetry. In his portrayal of Stephen's problem, Joyce demonstrates his insight that personal relations, language, culture, mind, and finally artistic creativity are deeply Interrelated. In order to understand Stephen's predicament better, one might look to the way psychoanalysis has formulated what Joyce seems to have understood intuitively.1 Within this interpretive framework, I suggest that Stephen falls as a poet because he cannot sublimate his psychological conflicts and turn them into art, and that the key to understanding the reasons for this inability can be found in the tension between the types of language in which Stephen thinks and speaks, and his underlying psychological motivations. One way of understanding what a poet does for himself and for his readers when he writes a poem is through the concept of
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TL;DR: The authors discuss common features of each writer's work, in particular key aspects of each novelist's technique and created world, the narrative strategies referred to in the title and recurrent topics and concerns.
Abstract: discuss common features of each writer's work, in particular key aspects of each novelist's technique and created world, the narrative strategies referred to in the title and recurrent topics and concerns. All essays are marked by clear argument and a very accessible style (there is a refreshing absence of jargon). Each is full of useful quotations and insights, and there are revelations, both general and particular. Robert Owen Evans's essay on Bedford will certainly persuade one that here is a writer one has to read, while Jenny Newman's piece on Fay Weldon reveals that the author is responsible for the British 1960s' advertising slogan \"Go to Work on an Egg\" (now, there's immortality for you!). Each essay is also furnished with a very useful bibliography and biographical note. In a collection of excellent essays, some stand out. Hosmer's own discussion of motifs of exile in Brookner's work opens up and indicates an easily missed dimension to her seemingly hermetic novels. Walter Kendrick is particularly good on Carter's style, her use of fairy tale, the motifs of sex and violence which run throughout her fiction, and on the complexities of her essay on Spark is a model of conciseness, moving feminism. Joseph Hynes's essay on Spark is a model of conciseness, moving effortlessly through narrational technique and titles to created world and metaphysics. The same can be said of Newman on Weldon. She dissects in a few pages the author's narrational techniques, typography, and developments and complexities of her depiction of women's fates and struggles. Evans's discussion of Bedford's fiction shows how this neglected author's work must be looked at by anyone interested in European and particularly Anglo-German literary relations.
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that Afro-American artistic presence has been "discovered" actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us.
Abstract: Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been "discovered" actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves. We are not lsak Dinesen's "aspects of nature," nor Conrad's unspeaking. We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, "other." We are choices. And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to
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TL;DR: Indigenous Indian Novel-writing in English dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century as discussed by the authors, and its origin owes as much to the educational reforms called for by both the 1813 Charter Act and the ensuing 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck as to the circulation, representation, and purchase of English literature and culture among members of the Indian upper classes in nineteenthcentury India.
Abstract: Indigenous Indian Novel-writing in English dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century. Its \"origin\" owes as much to the educational reforms called for by both the 1813 Charter Act and the ensuing 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck as to the circulation, representation, and purchase of English literature and culture among members of the Indian upper classes in nineteenthcentury India. While we are not at liberty to assume that novel production in Britain and colonial India underwent simply parallel routes, we may still argue for the possibility, in the case of Englishwriting in India, of a nascent space in which British and Indian social codes and value systems began to intersect and mutually determine one another. More specifically, the translation of certain progressive British social codes and cultural values of the Enlightenment into Indian terms entailed something like a new episteme, within whose rigor Indian writers started to produce novels assuming a critical stance towards what were now viewed as \"backward\" Indian social and cultural practices. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 1864 novel, Rajmohun's Wife, for instance, utilizes a social reformer's zeal in its depiction of a middle-class Hindu woman's abuse by her husband.1 However, by the early twentieth century, many writers began' to insist on the Indian \"content\" of their material, an increasingly prevalent tendency no doubt informed by the corresponding rise of nationalism and all the organized movements of civil disobedience.
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TL;DR: The notion of mother and woman has been put under erasure by feminists who argue that the perceived symbolic equivalence between the two confines women to traditional social spheres and allows the patristic economy to regulate female autonomy and sexuality as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: nisms, the elision between mother and woman in patristic cultures has been put under erasure by feminists who argue powerfully that the perceived symbolic equivalence between the two confines women to traditional social spheres and allows the patristic economy to regulate female autonomy and sexuality. In western male psychoanalytic theory, this elision has become naturalized so that the term \"woman\" is subsumed by the mother in discussions of sexual difference. The maternal body, inscribed by the male gaze, glides imperceptibly in the male imaginary to represent male projections of maternal/female desire as potentially threatening to the male.1 The symbolic equivalence between the maternal and the female curiously engenders a splitting which renders it possible to represent maternity, and not femininity. This equivalence simultaneously becomes the condition by which femininity is written, whether by male or female authors, and In which maternity is silenced. While femininity is spoken, maternity is spoken of. The elision now appears to be a radical, if untenable, bifurcation. The central question in this particular trajectory of representation becomes, \"Can the mother speak as both mother and woman?\" What happens if the elision between the two—feminine desire and maternal desire—is examined, instead of taken for granted in a \"commonsensical\" way?
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TL;DR: Narayan's The Dark Room as discussed by the authors is a novel with a tone that is halfway between shock and chagrin, and it does not give us the same kind of lighthearted and gentle sketch of Malgudi that we find in his fiction generally.
Abstract: A first read through R.K. Narayan's The Dark Room is apt to produce a response halfway between shock and chagrin. Since it is hardly the Narayan novel that people usually choose as an introduction to his work—the others are so much more popular and therefore available—we come to it expecting the same kind of lighthearted and gentle sketch of Malgudi that we find in his fiction generally. We expect a tone of amused tolerance. We expect what is fundamentally a conservative approach to the world of south India, an approach that views change as, to use Meenakshi Mukherjee's words, "a play of shadows, an illusion, an unreality like a bubble, which will burst sooner or later, and the normal order of the cosmos will prevail again" (155). But The Dark Room does not give us this security. Instead, it offers its readers a mixture of anger, despair, confusion, and belligerence. William Walsh is clearly disappointed with the novel when he writes,