The Novel

Firmly  intertwining  the  personal  with  political  history ,  this  brilliant
novel’s strength  lies  in Keki Nusserwanji Daruwalla’s trademark wit
and  underscored  humour ,  effortlessly  flowing  prose,  and  a
trenchant  grasp  of  the  historic  events  that  are  accorded  an
unconventional  treatment.  It’s  not  a  mere  family  saga,  says
KALYANEE RAJAN

“Of Affaires d'amour and Princely intrigues”, in The Sunday Pioneer Newspaper, 19th June 2016. RNI No. 53466/91, Regd. No. DL ©- 05/1219/2015-2017. Vol. 26, Issue 169. Print.

Perché il teatro occupa una posizione centrale nella civiltà letteraria inglese? Come nasce il romanzo e quali forme specifiche assume nell’isola? Come evolve la poesia inglese da quando gli elisabettiani importano il sonetto dall’Italia? Il volume fornisce una risposta a queste e altre domande, proponendosi come utile avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario inglese e offrendo una panoramica dello sviluppo dei principali generi: poesia, romanzo e teatro. Ogni capitolo è corredato di numerosi esempi distribuiti su un arco temporale che va dal Cinquecento al secondo Novecento. Insieme al tradizionale manuale di storia letteraria, questa guida presenta gli strumenti critico-metodologici indispensabili e le coordinate essenziali per lo studio della letteratura inglese.

Cette quête permanente du savoir (sur soi-même, sur autrui), en quoi consiste l’analyse, caractérise très justement La Princesse de Clèves. Mais paradoxalement, l’intérêt accordé à cet aspect du roman détourne d’une dimension essentielle de l’œuvre, moins apparente peut-être, mais d’une portée non moindre, sur laquelle je voudrais ici attirer l’attention : l’insignifiance, au bout du compte, de toute information. Ce que l’on apprend à la dérobée procure un savoir réel et néanmoins insatisfaisant. Ce qu’on dit apparaît à bien des reprises moins important que le fait même de le dire. Ainsi la fonction d’information est parfois très secondaire parmi les fonctions du langage. Le roman de Mme de Lafayette pousse cette remarque élémentaire jusqu’à ses conséquences les plus extrêmes et troublantes, en imaginant des situations qui illustrent cette double réalité : l’importance du dire, l’insignifiance du savoir.

Ben Winters’ latest mystery/thriller, Underground Airlines, is set in an America that never fought its Civil War. In the novel, a long series of political compromises between North and South allow slavery to continue to the present day. This is counterintuitive, to say the least. The novel requires that readers imagine a Confederacy that responds to the 1861 assassination of President-elect Abraham Lincoln by abandoning its rebellion and seeking a compromise that would place hard limits on the legality of slavery. Winters’ characters inhabit a world in which assassinations have the effect of cowing those politicians who would oppose slavery into softening their positions. This violence emboldens slaveowners, but never to the point that they consider negotiations to be a zero sum game. They accept that slavery will be profitable enough with mild regulatory oversight.

Among the literary works produced by Jewish Polish immigrants in France during the Second World War, the works of Robert Bober stand out in terms of style, rhetoric of understatement and their treatment of memory without fixing it too tightly to the historical event. This study, which includes unpublished statements from the writer, examines the complex play by which history and fantasy merge in a literary work. By integrating the event with a personal theme, Robert Bober brings out the horror of Nazism without polemic or pity. Bober’s aim is neither revenge nor provo- cation — even if his words are violent by association. The modus is not imperative, it is affirmative, performing only pragmatically. The narrator notes, reproduces without copying and develops memory. Therefore, the reader never feels confronted with an ideological discourse, he has no reason to think that the story is constructed with a certain purpose, as is the case in some tendency novels. Also, Bober’s novels respect the principle of intransitivity of suffering, because even if the text is a kind of object, the pain is never explained. The fragmentary nature of the narrative can be explained by resistance to putting things into a definite order, as though the description of the Holocaust deserved to stay unfinished.

As a tool for understanding, narrative is fundamental to human cognition. A wealth of theory and growing empirical evidence strongly indicate that reading a narrative activates a simulation with critical cognitive and emotional components. Importantly, these components have been linked to prosocial outcomes, such as empathy and transportation. While there is growing experimental support that reading narratives entails a simulated experience that involves transportation, the conditions under which reading leads to improvements in empathy remains understudied. This thesis applies a cognitive and narrative based approach in order to ask: What matters more? “Literary” features of a text, or the genre expectation a reader brings into a text?

To answer this question, this thesis examines whether genre expectations and text genre—in combination or independently—influence participants’ empathy, transportation and comprehension. Overall, the results of two experiments bring to light the role of genre expectation in processing fiction and nonfiction texts and suggest genre expectation is an important factor that future studies should take into account when investigating the reading experience. By considering the study results in the framework of narratology, this thesis also addresses the theoretical foundations of the division between fiction and nonfiction. Specifically, this project reflects on the implications of how and why the reader’s use of disbelief has changed since the novel’s arrival due to the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and their respective claims to truth.

To the literary historian, Thomas Hardy's Wessex evokes the struggle of traditional Britain against the ravages of modernity. While nowadays we no longer see Wessex as an idealized portrayal of rural England, but rather a place under constant change and modernization (Williams 239-240), Hardy's region remains within literary criticism a libertarian enclave embattled by a modern, bureaucratic state. This paper pushes back against such axiomatic antistatism by linking Hardy's footpaths and footpath thieves -Felice Charmond, Edred Fitzpiers, Alec Stoke-D'Urberville -with the late-Victorian footpath preservation movement. I argue that Hardy's indictments of nouveau riche landlords in The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) stakes a local statist position shared with radical preservationist groups like the National Footpath Preservation Society and the Northern Counties Preservations Society. To defend footpaths against privatization, these societies increasingly turned to what historians call the local state, especially the parish, county, and district councils created by the local government reforms of 1888 and 1894, which dispersed powers ascribable to the central state across an array of local authorities (Joyce 25). Recognizing the centrality of footpaths within Hardy's late fiction, this paper recasts him as a radical, local statist who saw, like the preservationists, not only the squirearchy as a failed regime of rural governance, but also envisioned an alternative local state wherein essential infrastructures like footpaths were open to and supportive of all rural populations. This paper first demonstrates how Hardy's late fiction drew its tragic force from the footpath movement's characterization footpath thievery. It then turns to the vision of alternative rural governance shared by preservationists and Hardy in order to outline Hardy's local state.

L'Indice dei libri del mese, Dec. 2011, XXVIII, No. 12, p. 24. "Se non sono me stesso, chi lo sarà per me? E quand'anche fossi me stesso, che cosa sono io? E se non ora, quando?". Questa nota citazione, raccolta nelle "Massime dei Padri" del Talmud e attribuita a Hillel, Maestro della Mishna ai tempi di Erode il Grande, è l'insegnamento più significativo lasciato in eredità ai propri seguaci, fra cui Yochanan ben Zakkai, il rabbino del primo secolo che compare nelle ultime pagine de La grande casa di Nicole Krauss. Per quanto la massima sia suscettibile di interpretazioni molteplici, la più ricorrente suggerisce che dall'unicità di ogni singolo individuo, coinvolto e impegnato nell'irripetibilità di ogni frammento del vissuto, derivi la duplice responsabilità che segna ogni sua decisione: delle proprie azioni nella loro attualità e delle loro ineluttabili conseguenze. È, al contempo, anche un monito alla concentrazione sul sé come atto fondativo della propria costruzione di identità, destinato tuttavia a rimanere sterile se non completato da un'apertura verso l'altro.

Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.

Drawing on Roman Jakobson's study of aphasia, I first analyze how Jakobson's description of metaphor derives from his concept of the dominant, and demonstrate how that juncture pertains to Shoshana Felman's discussion of metaphor in The Scandal of the Speaking Body. When Felman relates metaphor to the paternal, and the paternal to metaphor, she suggests that metaphor may be how the very conditions of authority and authorization are articulated. Metaphor thus turns out to coincide with a political function of language, to be observed at its most critical in modernity, in the intersections of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It is with this in mind that I proceed to analyze the Croatian novel in the 1960s and its emphatic use of metaphor, taking Antun Šoljan’s A Brief Excursion as a specimen story. I argue that metaphor colonizes Šoljan’s narration so consistently that the novel assumes for itself the position of sacrifice, demanding that metaphor be addressed in terms of a theology. It is almost as if it took a theology of metaphor for the Croatian novel to process its modern condition. // U predavanju polazim od metafore kako je opisuje Roman Jakobson; potom Jakobsonov opis stavljam u relaciju prema njegovu shvaćanju dominante, te prema metafori kako joj pristupa Shoshana Felman u studiji Skandal tijela u govoru. Prema Felman, upravo metafora najčišće upućuje na uvjete ovlaštenja, autoriteta i očinskoga u jeziku. Metafora bi zato u krajnjem izvodu bila politička funkcija jezika, a ta se funkcija osobito jasno pokazuje usporede li se diskursi književnosti, psihoanalize i filozofije. Tu konstelaciju uzimam kao polazište za analizu hrvatskoga romana u 1960-ima, koji pokazuje izrazitu sklonost prema metafori ili se prema metafori nastoji odrediti ; nije nevažno što u Marinkovićevu Kiklopu, jednome od najglasovitijih romana desetljeća, metafora ima status dominante. Šoljanov Kratki izlet još je simptomatičniji, jer se nastoji konstituirati oko čiste metafore, ili kao čista metafora, čime se roman stavlja u položaj žrtve a za pripovijedanje se zahtijevaju uvjeti žrtvovanja. Ako to upućuje na stanovitu teologizaciju metafore u hrvatskome romanu 1960-ih, pokazuje se da je teologija metafore hrvatskome romanu bila okvir da domisli uvjete vlastite modernosti.

The paper discusses how Jane Austen, in Persuasion (1817), presents a new response to the essential question of ‘how to tell the truth in narratives’. Through the composition of a narrative act that merges the voices of the 3rd person narrator’s and of the protagonist, Anne Elliot, Austen’s novel enlarges the possibilities of subjective representation and of giving voice to the otherwise silenced, opening, thus, a new path in the constitution of the homo fictus in the formation of English novel.

So beginnt der "Teil von den Verbrechen" in Roberto Bolaños Roman 2666. Hinter diesen zwei sachlich klingenden Sätzen verbirgt sich eine ambitionierte realistische Poetik. Durch den unbeirrbaren Blick auf eine Serie von horrenden Gewaltverbrechen soll die komplexe Struktur einer transnationalen, spätkapitalistischen Wirklichkeit ans Licht gebracht werden, die sich einer rein gegenständlichen Anschauung entzieht und bestenfalls in Metaphern von Kreisläufen, Transaktionen und Kapitalflüssen (136) vorstellbar ist. Die realistische Leistung des "Teils von den Verbrechen" besteht nun darin, dass eine Schicht dieser sozio-ökonomischen Wirklichkeit, die in beinahe sofortige Vergessenheit zu fallen droht (688), den Leser_innen immer wieder aufs Neue interessant gemacht wird -und zwar allein durch ihre minimal variierte Wiederholung.

This essay argues that L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) fits into the critical tradition of the Bildungsroman in one specific sense: its attention to matters of deception. First, this plot of formation and development involves a necessary apprenticeship in deception: a moral training that has links with everyday practices of concealment in linguistic construal, social etiquette, and interpersonal trust, whose presence I track in the novel. Second, the novel’s framing screens the salient context of its production, the “angry decade” of 1950s Britain. I consider Hartley’s conservative distance from other writing on childhood and youth in the period, suggesting that his representation of deception relates to his critique of social and moral erosion in the postwar period. In the loose vehicle of a Bildungsroman where development is compromised, Hartley presents a novel whose formal structure, in its use of deceptive tropes, affords both its turning away from historical difficulties and its indirect critique of failing morals.

Osij ek, 28. kolovoza 2009. na 200. obljetnicu ustoličenja i proglašenja Osij eka slobodnim i kraljevskim gradom 1 Osijek, 28. 8. 2008. Vežemo se srodnostima, ali i suprotnostima. Vežemo se uspomenama, mjestima, mirisima, pripadnostima. Vezanosti nosimo u sebi. Neke svakodnevno imenujemo u razgovorima, druge povjeravamo bliskim osobama, neke zapisujemo. Pisanje o vezanostima zahtij eva i uporabu vezničkih rij eči, povezivanje rečenica i rečeničnih dij elova. U gramatici veznici su pomoćne rij eči. Nepromjenjivi su. Kao i naši izbori, neki su veznici samo veznici i ništa drugo. Oni su pravi, a sve ostale rij eči-poveznice također su veznici, ali nepravi. 1 Dana 28. kolovoza 2009. godine svij et je internetom obišla vij est kako se 30 minuta poslij e ponoći činilo da su na nebu dva mjeseca... Drugi mjesec bio je planet Mars, vrlo sjajan, veličine pravog mjeseca... Ponovna pojava ovoga fenomena očekuje se tek 2287. godine, kada će Osij ek obilježavati 478. obljetnicu ustoličenja i proglašenja slobodnim i kraljevskim gradom. Barokni zdenac na Trgu Sv. Trojstva u Tvrđi bizarij KB finalni Ok.indd 7 bizarij KB finalni Ok.indd

This essay has three more or less discrete parts; that is, no firm linear argument is developed across them. Each part informs the next, but the arguments taken up in each could also be contemplated separately. The first responds to the thrust of this special issue, and considers the relationship of the novel to the nation; the second focuses on a wordly concern of the present, the 2007-8 financial crisis, and how it features in the contemporary novel; and the third moves towards a possible project of exploring the contemporary novel in terms of the prevailing neoliberal lifeworld.

Alur cerita dalam novel ini seakan melibatkan para pembaca masuk ke dalam. Terutama para rekan2 yang pernah melanjutkan studi di Timur Tengah, melihat bagaimana pesona wanita Mesir yang sungguh menggoda. Kisahnya sangat menyentuh. Selamat membaca!

This is a review of the MLA's volumes on teaching Bleak House and Wuthering Heights in particular, with a nod to other volumes such as that on Jane Eyre.  I spend a good deal of time discussing each approach and the overall insights of the volumes.

Tristram Shandy, de Laurence Sterne, et Jacques le Fataliste, de Denis Diderot, m'apparaissent aujourd'hui comme les deux plus grandes oeuvres romanesques du 18 e siècle, deux romans conçus comme un jeu grandiose. Ce sont deux sommets de la légèreté jamais atteints ni avant ni après. Le roman ultérieur se fit ligoter par l'impératif de la vraisemblance, par le décor réaliste, par la rigueur de la chronologie. Il abandonna les possibilités contenues dans ces deux chefsd'oeuvre, qui étaient en mesure de fonder une autre évolution du roman que celle que l'on connaît (oui, on peut imaginer aussi une autre histoire du roman européen…). 1 Cette affirmation de Milan Kundera dans L'Art du roman reste d'actualité, et elle nous pousse à affirmer que l'actualité de l'oeuvre de Diderot consiste justement dans le fait que sa littérature n'a malheureusement pas fondé une tradition. Ainsi, le retour à Diderot nous met devant des possibilités inexplorées par l'histoire littéraire, mais aussi devant certaines possibilités ouvertes par la pensée du XVIII e siècle que l'Histoire n'a pas pu réaliser. C'est-à-dire que la lecture de Diderot aujourd'hui nous rappelle les promesses de la Révolution française et de leur stupéfiante actualité. Tout commence et évolue de manière négative. D'abord, nous avons le titre qui nous présente les personnages, ensuite nous avons une petite introduction au récit, qui commence ainsi : Comment s'étaient-ils rencontrés ? Par hasard, comme tout le monde. Comment s'appelaient-ils ? Que vous importe ? D'où venaient-ils ? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils ? Est-ce que l'on sait où on va ? Que disaient-ils ? Le maître ne disait rien ; et Jacques disait que son capitaine disait que tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut. 2 Le narrateur joue avec le lecteur et présente les questions possibles qu'un lecteur se poserait devant un récit. D'abord il s'agit de savoir qui sont les personnages et comment ils se sont rencontrés. La réponse du narrateur donne le ton et présente la question qui sera celle de toute l'oeuvre. En posant les questions et en y répondant, le

Suddenly Don Quijote doubts his squire’s embassy. It would be miraculous for Sancho to have returned in just over three days because El Toboso is more than thirty leagues away, seventy-five miles or one hundred and twenty-five kilometers from where Don Quijote was in the Sierra Morena.

The Maximalist Novel sets out to define a new genre of contemporary fiction that developed in the United States from the early 1970s, and then gained popularity in Europe in the early twenty-first century.

The maximalist novel has a very strong symbolic and morphological identity. Ercolino sets out ten particular elements which define and structure it as a complex literary form: length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten characteristics are common to all of the seven works that centre his discussion: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by the Babette Factory.

Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre.

The monograph, "John Banville," offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, as well as the ‘Quirke’ crime novels he has written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. From the beginning, Banville’s work has been marked both by the presence of a complex, embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-conscious obsession with its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study argues that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly-textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels have conjured. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived. This book asserts that Banville’s fiction can be viewed both as an extended interrogation into the meaning and status of art as well as itself being a representative of the type of art that is admired in the pages of the novels. As such, it also represents an extremely sophisticated enactment of the novel form that goes beyond the “self-reflexivity” of late twentieth-century fiction to chart new developments in the literary arts. The book’s critical process involves several specific reference points. Firstly, Banville’s own theoretical statements about art in interviews, essays, reviews and journalistic writing over the past 40 years are synthesized into a coherent interpretation of the author’s artistic vision which is thereafter used as a conceptual touchstone when considering his major works of fiction. This is done in conjunction with investigating specific theoretical perspectives about the relationship between literature and art by critics such as Denis Donoghue and Susan Sontag, and by philosophers of art, Graham Gordon, Etienne Gilson, Peter Lamarque, and Susanne Langer.

At the heart of this article is a fairly straightforward assertion: that literature has a trans-verbal level at which it affects us as a work of art. Hence discussing a novel means bringing to the fore not only its overt narrative function but also its covert artistic function: a consideration of the work in light of its aesthetic intention. Following the phenomenological traditions of Roman Ingarden and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that aesthetic intention does not determine the significance of the art object, which is presumed to be dynamic within a spectrum of meanings. Rather, aesthetic intention takes into account the circumstance of the novel having been actuated into form by an " artistic gesture. " This " gesture " is not physical: it is a metaphorical motion referring to the artist's actuation of an aesthetic intention using one or another medium to give an artwork its perceivable form. In painting, this " gesture " can sometimes be traced through a work's visible brushstrokes or formal composition, but in literature such " gestures " can appear beyond the literal text and remain invisible even while they are experienced in the literary work. The conception of such a " gesture " is meant to incorporate the insights of literary and aesthetic theory, along with poststructuralism, in a critique that allows for structural analysis to also pursue a reconstituted significance. What appears below is more a program of the problem than a full treatment of its implications – a stretching of the canvas, so to speak. But I believe that the articulation of this kernel has a value in itself even if the full unraveling of the subject is yet to come.