Doris Lessing

Critical Quarterly, 2021

Open access special issue on Doris Lessing, defining 'speculative life writing'. By returning to Lessing’s final, autobiographical rendition of her upbringing in Alfred and Emily (2008), I track how her abiding preoccupation with colonialism–her entanglements with the British Empire and its aftermath–registers in the form, as well as the content of her life writing. The article explores how, even when rerouting history in the memoir's first, counterfactual half, Alfred and Emily cannot bypass Lessing’s memories of settler life in the former Rhodesia. Contrary to previous interpretations of this hybrid text as a reconciliatory conclusion to Lessing's long career, I outline how speculative life writing explores and exposes life in the aftermath of empire.

2017

To become a true scholar on the subject of the Doris Lessing protagonist is to accept the roles of her protagonists, despite their likelihood to be female, without definition or resolution. To achieve a sense of Doris Lessing‘s purpose is to accept the idea that an institutionalized purpose is preposterous, despite her common themes of madness. To appreciate Doris Lessing from a literary stance is to accept her word that she writes without any feminist persuasion. As Katherine Fishburen said, ―Through the metaphor of her fiction, we learn that the meaning of the world eludes us if we try, by constitutionalizing or labeling it, to pin it down‖ (qtd in Kaplan 90). Doris Lessing believed that instead of attempting to explain the world, we should simply experience it, and her characters reinforce this idea.

IJRAR, 2019

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winner of 2007 is one of the outstanding novelists of modern English literature. In her novels, there is space for memories, retrospection, introspection, foreshadow, flashback and terrible recognitions that are hued by torment and trauma. She displays a well-crafted plot, occurrence, meditative or philosophical description that suggest the workings of the deep layers of the mind. Her writing embodies and extends open panoply of subjects explicit to late-twentieth-century consciousness: race; the conflict of the generations; psychological dimensions of male female relations; philosophical inquiries regarding life; the nature and planes of the real world; exploration of psychological illness, and modes of consciousness. Her writing portrays realism, and is packed with the technique of myth and speculation. In spite of her genius, she set her characters against the backdrop of human history to demonstrate their experience.

Center for Academic Research and Development, 2024

The current literary study aims to investigate the psychological and emotional conflicts and the traumatic experiences of the strong female characters depicted in Doris Lessing's selected fictions. Unmatched in all literary genres worldwide, author Doris Lessing depicts both the societal structure of her age and the basic issues facing women. Lessing looks for fresh ways to portray the experiences of a woman writer who is stuck. She was raised in Africa, developed into an engaged but disillusioned communist, is a politically engaged writer, and occasionally she even plays the role of a mistress or wife. This qualitative study focuses on how Lessing aims to portray, via her astute and nuanced approach, the psychological struggles that women have while balancing marriage and love, motherhood and career, the injustice of double standards, the isolation that single career women experience, and the hollowness of marriage in the eyes of society and the established order. Through her feminist works, she attempts to rouse the women's community to fight against patriarchy. Lessing portrays her female characters with various societal issues and male-female perspectives.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

The study aims at exploring the existential approach that Doris Lessing has adopted in portraying the character of Harriet Lovat in The Fifth Child. The work presents a conflict between society and the individual that the protagonist, Harriet Lovatt has to undergo and overcome in the process of personal choice. She is given the freedom to choose between what she wants and what society wants her to do. In doing so, she demonstrates full responsibility for such choices. In this novel, the choices and the decisions that the protagonist makes follow from an existential way of thinking. Thus, the approach of the author in portraying the character of the protagonist is examined from an existential standpoint. Lessing skillfully weaved the prevailing cultural and social circumstances of Harriet’s community with the question of being and survival in her quest for a meaningful existence. She refuses to be controlled by the traditional codes of sexual liberation before marriage and to have a ...

International Journal of Research Publication and Reviews, 2024

Doris Lessing, raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), offers a unique perspective on the lasting effects of colonialism in her novels. This essay explores how Lessing portrays the impact of colonialism on both individuals and societies within her work. It examines the psychological trauma inflicted on characters caught between two cultures, the disruption of traditional ways of life, and the lingering racial tensions that plague postcolonial societies. Through detailed analysis of specific novels, such as The Grass is Singing and The Memoirs of a Survivor, the essay argues that Lessing's work not only reflects the historical realities of colonialism but also exposes its enduring psychological and social consequences. Additionally, the essay will consider the limitations of the colonizer's perspective and the complexities of identity faced by those raised in a colonial context.

International Journal of English and Cultural Studies, 2018

Doris Lessing, an unrivaled novelist in the literary genres around the globe, portrays the fundamental problems of women as well as social system of her times. Lessing searches for new models to communicate the experiences of a blocked woman writer, who spends her early life in Africa, becomes an active and a disappointed communist, who is a politically committed writer, a mother, a wife, or a mistress sometimes a woman. With her very keen and subtle attitude, Lessing wants to present women’s psychological conflicts between marriage and love; motherhood and profession, unfairness of the double standard; alienation of a single career woman; hollowness of marriage in the traditional order and society. Lessing portrays her women in various social problems and with various perspectives of male against female. She tries to awaken women community to protest against the patriarchy through her feminist writings. For this purpose, this research paper would like to examine the psychological c...

Remarkings, 2017

Marianne Hirsch's gave the concept of Postmemory keeping in mind the survivors/next generation of the holocaust victims who find themselves burdened by the memory of the trauma which they did not suffer, but which was transferred to them by the stories/experiences of their close family members. Books and photographs often become the sites of postmemory, through which they try to get over the sufferings/trauma which they did not actually suffer. The present paper attempts to analyze Doris Lessing's two novels, her second novel and other her last, to see how Lessing's novels also become constant sites of postmemory and trauma that she inherited from her father who was a victim of the First World War.

Bilkent University, 1996

Raw for sharing the troublesome moments of this thesis. My thanks are also due to Dr. Gülşen Sayın for her recommendations, and to my sister Ender for providing all the necessary sources. I would also like to express my thanks to Nalan Şafak for bringing this thesis into its final version. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the tolerance of my dearest homemates. Nazlı, Elif and Müjdat. I dedicate this thesis to my parents. VI 'Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend m onths and years w ritin g thousands o f words about one book, or even one w riter, when there are hundreds o f books w aiting to be read. You d o n 't see that you are the victim o f a pernicious system. A n d if you have you rself chosen m y w ork as your subject, and if you do have to w rite a thesis-and believe me I am very g ra te fu l that w hat I 've w ritte n is being fou nd useful by you-then w hy d o n 't you read w ha t / have w ritte n and make up your m ind about w ha t you think, testing it against your ow n life, your ow n experience. Never m ind about Professors White and Black. ' (Lessing, from Preface to The Golden N o te b o o k) Vll

forumjournal.org

With a few symbols a dream can define the whole of one's life, and warn us of the future, too" (Schlueter 71). In this extract from an interview by Jonah Raskin in 1969, Doris Lessing explained the importance of dreams in her major work, The Golden Notebook; but it could just as easily be applied to a large part of her extensive novelistic corpus. Throughout her diverse literary output, Lessing uses traditional narrative methods such as tales and fables "as a creative vehicle to examine the states of