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Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion
20 Sep 2005-
TL;DR: Gavin Miller as discussed by the authors re-opened contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity, including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing.
Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray’s anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.
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TL;DR: The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas, and is exported to New Zealand, where it is promoted by the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists.
Abstract: The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray, is exported to New Zealand, where it is promoted by the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists. Scottish psychoanalytic ideas also remain effective in post-war Britain: the idea of communion appears in dialogue with other theories in the work of Harry Guntrip, John Macquarrie, R. D. Laing, and Aaron Esterson.
31 citations
Cites background from "Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Commu..."
...For both Shepherd and Grassic Gibbon, the pre-war rural community contained the fullest form of human relationship; it was a Gemeinschaft rather than a Gesellschaft; a place of communion and congregation, rather than of purely economic or political association (Miller, 2005, pp. 19, 50–52)....
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01 Jan 2010
Abstract: This is a critical reading of Lanark: a Life in Four Books, a novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (b. 1934), whose talent and style provide a fitting example of Scotland’s contemporary literature. The aim of this investigation is to determine the role played by Gray’s production in the literary, cultural and sociopolitical spheres of present-day Scottish life. In his blending of fiction and metafiction, of art and autobiography, the author faces the paradoxes involved in the attempt to stress the marks of a national identity. Gray’s work cannot be considered without recognizing that his literature is both local and universal. It belongs to the Scottish cosmos which is highlighted by cultural struggles as well as it is dominant, once it is carried out in English reaching readers all over the world from within the limits and format determined by the English Language. That is one of the reasons why this research aims to shed light on the current Scottish literary scene, attempting to fill an existing gap in the Brazilian academic curriculum respecting the treatment and approach of Literatures produced in English in our undergraduate and graduate courses. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first contextualizes Gray in Scotland’s literature in its relation to the formation, ratification and revaluation of the concept of a sense of national identity as observed diachronically, throughout the period between 1940s and 1970s. The second section focuses on the new looks at Scotland’s cultural scenario by a distinguished group of writers burst with style, history and post-devolution vision, the New Scottish Writers. Gray’s strategies to deal with a fictional and biographical context in Lanark and his reflection upon world’s nature and worth are of great importance for this work. By the reading of Linda Hutcheon’s understanding on historiographic metafiction, intertextuality, parody and irony in postmodernism, I attempt to frame in Chapter Three the literary maneuvers Gray makes in using such textual resources in his novel. I hope that the result of this doctoral thesis may be useful both as a reflection upon the present state of the discussion about Scotland’s postmodern literature, and as a means of making the Brazilian academic readers more familiar with the work of Alasdair Gray.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a radio play adaptation of the novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is presented, and the authors focus on the narratological category of "voice" and explore what happens when narrators and characters' voices are actualized in radio drama.
Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.
4 citations
TL;DR: Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks's Culture series and portions of Gray's "Lanark," classical utopias such as Gunn's "The Green Isle of the Great Deep," or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins's "The Missionaries," utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence.
2 citations
01 Jun 2016
TL;DR: In this article, Gray's Poor Things, a post-modern novel with literary conventions, critiques, within a neo-Victorian historical frame, oppressive institutions and ideologies, but not without subjecting its own social agenda to contestation.
Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s prize-winning novel Poor Things , postmodern in its game-playing with literary conventions, critiques, within a neo-Victorian historical frame, oppressive institutions and ideologies, but not without subjecting its own social agenda to contestation. Through this process it enacts a form of education that replaces corrupted religion with socially responsible science.
2 citations