John Irving

The present study applies some of the approaches used in corpus stylistics to examine repetition in John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year and its translations into Czech and Finnish. The main aim of this case study is to explore whether systematic identification of repetitive textual features in a source language may be a beneficial procedure for translators of literary texts. The underlying assumption is that, in their complexity, not all repetitive features are necessarily easily noticeable. Repetitiveness here is identified with cluster and keyword analysis that are subsequently considered in synergy. Relevant translation solutions are examined. Though repetition plays a central role in the novel, translators show a marked stylistic strategy to avoid them. The results of the study suggest that application of corpus tools may help translators to uncover the structure of the text and keep their translation consistent.

The phrase "glimpsing the balance between earth and sky" in the thesis title is taken from Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In this novel, the central character Jeanette believes she has glimpsed the possibility that human relationships can find their mirror in the relationship with God, as she understands the divine Other. This glimpse has set her wandering, trying to find such a balance.

Though critics have frequently referred to John Irving as a “contemporary Dickens”, a key point of contact between these two authors has remained unexplored—the role of theatre in their work. Few novelists have engaged with theatrical performance in as many books as Irving, and this article argues that a close consideration of that engagement vis-à-vis Dickens’s own fictional renderings of theatre can open new understandings of his novels’ democratizing thrusts. Focusing on Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and drawing on David Kurnick’s recent analyses of theatre-novel relationships, the article develops a concept of “theatrical extraneity”, gesturing to the anamorphic ways in which, in Irving and in Dickens, what is properly, conventionally, and semiotically extraneous to theatrical representation is—both comically and transformatively—brought into the spotlight.

Despite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature's specifically aesthetic character. Peter Kivy has developed this antiaesthetic tendency furthest, ultimately denying that the reading of prose literature has any deep aesthetic content. Building on Alan Goldman's and John Dewey's work on aesthetic experience, I argue that a key literary feature of novels I single out-what I term a replete moment-has the potential to trigger in readers significant aesthetic experiences. Along with revealing aesthetic aspects in reading that Kivy's position does not cover, my account shows that contemplation of the overall structure of the novel is not the sole, more substantial form aesthetic experience can take in the case of reading, as Kivy's formalistic literary aesthetics assumes. This conclusion is argued to be significant also for the general philosophical discussion on aesthetic experience. An analysis of a key passage in John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is an important part of the view of literary aesthetic experience put forth.