scholarly journals Персонажная система и мотивная структура повести Г. Башкуева «Убить время»

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 384-392
Author(s):  
Olga V. Khandarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Character System ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Introduction. Gennady Bashkuev’s works attempt to comprehend the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and To Kill Time proves a most significant prose work of the writer. Goals. The article seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between the system of characters in the novel and its motif structure, which helps clarify the underlying idea of the work, eclectic in structure and close in form to a short story cycle. Methods. The study rests on the theses about a relationship between semantics of motif and character, predicativity of motif, and on the concept of motif complexes and leitmotif construction of the narrative. Results. The main character of the novel is the narrator, the narrative proper divided into childhood memories and those of recent past. The characters of childhood can be clustered into three groups: family, friends, adults —motifs of happiness, celebration, romantic dreams and that of loss are associated with them. The characters of adulthood are women and childhood friends who are associated with motifs of marginal life, betrayal, guilt, and that of romance. The motifs of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ memories are intertwined, and it is the motif structure that ensures the integrity of the narrative. The key role in the novel is played by the binary image — the saleswoman Inga and the city madwoman — that combines two main themes for the narrator’s self-reflection: childhood and women. The plot structure partly fits into the universal mythological scheme: a series of trials — sketches-events from the life of the autobiographical narrator — is built into somewhat a ‘mythological journey’ to finally end with the acquisition of ‘elixir’ — catharsis and spiritual liberation. Conclusions. The image of the protagonist, the narrator, is explicated in the text and is revealed in the system of motifs associated with characters of his memories. Analysis of the character system proves instrumental in revealing key ideas of the novel and interpreting its title: those are reflections about time that become a focus of the author’s viewpoint uniting the seemingly disparate stories.

The originality of the “estate topos” in the A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”

2020 ◽  
pp. 262-272
Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Research History ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Peasant Household ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Poor Peasant ◽  
The City

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.

scholarly journals «Вечный муж» и традиция мениппеи

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (7) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Nina Segal-Rudnik
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romantic Drama ◽  
Love Triangle ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The article examines the motif structure of the main characters in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband against the background of menippea and its various genres. The parodic transformations of the images and motifs of Dostoevsky's previous texts, especially the novel The Idiot, modify the traditional love triangle of the short story. The relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist reflects the ambivalence of the archetypal scheme “king vs jester” and the way it appears in Hugo’s romantic drama Le Roi s’amuse and Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. The plot of revenge and vindication of trampled dignity dates back to the genre of medieval mock mystery (R. Jakobson) and its narrative of the Easter resurrection, posing the problem of Christianity and its values in the Russian society of the time.

scholarly journals Ivanhoe by Walter Scott in the Creative Perception of Ivan Turgenev. Article One

2020 ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Ivan O. Volkov ◽  
◽  
Emma M. Zhilyakova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Research Attention ◽  
Speech Characteristics ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Universal Nature ◽  
Obvious Similarity

In the article, on the material of Ivan Turgenev’s library and his short story “The Jew”, the issue of reading and creative perception is examined. Turgenev’s perception of Ivanhoe by Walter Scott is in the focus. The research attention is developing from the interpretation of several Turgenev’s notes left in the English version of the novel to the analysis of the creative perception of the images of Isaac and Rebecca, which became the ideological and semantic basis of “The Jew”. The reading of Ivanhoe in the original in the early 1840s became for the writer a penetration into Scott’s individual writing system. Turgenev’s few notes indicate that he became acquainted with Scott’s creative manner: the ability to voluminously weave comic elements into the pathetic-heroic atmosphere of action, the combination of historical and artistic material, the boldness of the ironic tone, and the mastery of speech characteristics. The reader’s perception of Scott’s novel was soon replaced by its creative interpretation, as a result of which “The Jew” appeared. Following the example of the English novelist, the object of Turgenev’s artistic reflection is a Jewish father and his daughter, who find themselves in a socio-historical and moral-psychological crisis — the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Foreign Campaigns of the Russian Army. There is an obvious similarity between Scott’s Rebecca and Turgenev’s Sarah: from the elements of the external description and the details of the portrait to the moral and psychological characteristics. The two young girls are especially united by the sense of pride and the awareness of their dignity, which clearly manifest themselves in the moments of danger that threatens them. Besides, the relationship between the Jewish girl and the Russian officer in Turgenev’s story vaguely resembles the situation of Rebecca and Ivanhoe. But the love line in “The Jew” does not develop in full. Considering William Shakespeare’s and Gotthold Lessing’s experience, following Walter Scott, Turgenev reflects on the universal nature of the “humiliated tribe”. The Russian writer depicts the psychology of the experiences of the Jew Girshel, accused of spying for the French. In the tradition of objectivity and epic literature, inherited from Scott, Turgenev draws a tragic line related to the position of an ordinary person. But, unlike the English novelist, Turgenev brings the torment of the character to the highest limit – the death penalty. At the same time, the Russian writer explicates sharp contradictions in the image of his character that turns out to be a carrier of suffering, on the one hand, and a source of laughter, on the other. This shows Turgenev’s orientation on the features of Shakespeare’s image of a person, in which the tragic invariably coexists with the comic. Walter Scott sensitively learned the law of ambivalence from Shakespeare, too.

Population Thinking and Narrative Networks: Dickens, Joyce, and The Wire

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-343
Author(s):  
Sam Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Population Thinking ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Character System ◽  
Irish Context ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
The Wire ◽  
Plot Structure

Abstract Recent approaches to literary character treat fictional population as a defining element of narrative form but continue to read novels at the level of individual characters. This essay uses the tools of narrative network analysis to bridge the gap between microlevel readings and the interpretation of the novel’s character-system as a population. Network analyses of three highly populous works—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and David Simon’s HBO series The Wire—yield measures of social density and character centrality that show how Joyce adapted a Dickensian network plot that emerged amid the population explosion of nineteenth-century Britain to an Irish context marked by demographic decline. This adaptation of Dickens’s plot structure prepared it for a similar use in The Wire. Both Joyce and Simon use a large fictional network to periodically decenter their protagonists and undermine the typological assumptions of much realist fiction. The essay suggests that, rather than read these developments as evidence of a formal rupture between modernism and realism, we view Bleak House, Ulysses, and The Wire as playing a role in an understudied tradition of “population thinking” in the novel.

Improvising Chicago

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamas Dobozy
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Urban America ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The City ◽  
Civic Space

Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City articulates how civic space intersects with collective agency: "One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places [. . .] The collective memory participates in the actual transformation of space in the works of the collective, a transformation that is always conditioned by whatever material realities oppose it" (130). Rossi's contention—that the development, or "transformation," of urban space is accomplished by a collective deploying memory in its struggle with material reality—is the scene of Stuart Dybek's southside Chicago in, The Coast of Chicago. Where this short story cycle deals with musical improvisation it dramatizes Rossi's contention by showing how memory not only resists "material realities"—in this case the demolition of southside neighborhoods initiated by Mayor Daley—and not only preserves ethnicity—especially the Polish and Chicano diasporas Dybek writes about—but also enables what Thomas S. Gladsky has called "a trans-ethnic urban America [. . .] a diverse cultural landscape where ethnicity transcends national origins but remains vital" (117). Dybek's ethnic self is a processual subjectivity, improvisatory rather than definitive, "based [less] on national origins [than] on a shared sense of ethnicity as a condition of Americanness" (Gladsky 115). In the story "Blight" characters inhabit a neighborhood where "the city was tearing down buildings for urban renewal and tearing up streets for a new expressway, and everywhere one looked there were signs in front of the rubble reading: sorry for the inconvenience / another improvement / for a greater Chicago / Richard J. Daley, Mayor" (44). Yet it is this demolition of monuments, this assault on what Rossi calls "the Locus" ("a relationship between a [. . .] specific location and the buildings that are in it" 103), this demonstration of the materiality of civic space that allows the characters to reawaken to the transformative potential of community: "It was the route we usually took to the viaduct, but since blight had been declared we were trying to see our surroundings from a new perspective" (45). Awakening to "new perspectives" as a result of civic "improvement" Dybek's characters cast off a determinate subjectivity and realize the action of the collective in the determination of civic reality. When the characters go to the viaduct off Douglas Park and begin improvising a "blues" by "slamming an aerial or board or chain off the girders, making the echoes collide and ring [. . .] clonk[ing] empty bottles and beer cans [. . .] shouting and screaming like [. . .] Howlin' Wolf" (48) they are joined by "a train [. . .] booming overhead like part of the song" (48)and by "a gang of black kids" at the other end of the viaduct who "stood harmonizing from bass through falsetto just like the Coasters, so sweetly that though at first [the characters] tried outshouting them, [they] finally shut up and listened, except for Pepper keeping the beat" (48). The fragments of the city are used to enable collectivity, to remember what the city is for. The attempt of civic authority to wrest memory from its inhabitants by making it impermanent, fragmentary, demolished, is precisely what restores agency by giving way to a subjectivity that is the scene of salvage. In this way communities become aware of their ability to define landscape, to alter "perspective" and take possession of space, to regard ethnicity as a common instrument, as if out of material destruction it might be possible to make of memory something more powerful than memorization, defying institutional permanence—civic or ethnic—for a community that is elastic, responsive, aware of its relationships with and within the spaces it inhabits.

scholarly journals Imagination and mobility in the city: Porosity of borders and human development in divided urban environments

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 676-696
Author(s):  
Sandra Jovchelovitch ◽  
Maria Cecilia Dedios Sanguineti ◽  
Mara Nogueira ◽  
Jacqueline Priego-Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Cultural Layers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

We focus on the notion of borders to explore how mobility and immobility in the city affect the relationship between human development and urban culture. We define borders as a relational space made of territoriality, representations and different possibilities of mobility and immobility. Drawing on research in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, we suggest a systematic approach to the analysis of borders and identify the socio-institutional, spatial and symbolic elements that make them more or less porous and thus more or less amenable to human mobility. We highlight the association between porosity in city borders and human development and illustrate the model contrasting two favela communities in Rio de Janeiro. We show that participation in the socio-cultural environment by favela grassroots organisations increases the porosity of internal city borders and contributes to the development of self, communities and the city. To focus on borders, their different elements and levels of porosity means to address simultaneously the psychosocial and cultural layers of urban spaces and the novel ways through which grassroots social actors develop themselves through participation and semiotic reconstruction of the socio-cultural environment.

scholarly journals Claves en la escritura de Lara Moreno: "Por si se va la luz" en el marco de la nueva narrativa rural

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen María López-López
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Spanish Fiction ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

El propósito de este artículo es analizar la escritura de Lara Moreno en el marco de la narrativa neorrural. Nuevas tendencias literarias como el ruralismo o el giro hacia el campo suponen una reacción contra el poder hegemónico de las ciudades que emergió en el siglo XX. La ficción española ofrece en muchos casos un camino narrativo para explorar las representaciones literarias del ruralismo en el siglo XXI. Desde esta perspectiva, se propone profundizar en Por si se va la luz, una novela escrita por Lara Moreno en la que Nadia y Martín abandonan la ciudad para ir a vivir al campo ante el ascenso de la crisis económica. Este acontecimiento supone una grieta o un corte desde una perspectiva simbólica, de acuerdo con los diferentes ejes en que la novela se estructura: la tensión entre los espacios rural y urbano, los cruces entre los instintos animales, la sexualidad y la racionalidad, así como la relación que los personajes establecen con el lenguaje y el silencio para verbalizar la distopía desde un escenario rural. The aim of this article is to analyze the writing of Lara Moreno in the frame of neorrural narrative. New literary tendencies such as ruralism or the turn to the countryside suposes a reaction against the hegemonic power of cities which rise on twenty centuries. Spanish fiction offers in many ways a narrative camine to explore literary representations of ruralism in XXI century. From this perspective, it is proposed to delve into Por si se va la luz (2013) a novel written by Lara Moreno, in which Nadia and Martín leave the city to go to live to the countryside considering the rise of economic crisis. This event suposes a crack or cut on a simbolic way, according to the different axis in which the novel is structured: the tension between rural and urban spaces, the between animal instints, sexuality and rationality, so as to the relationship which character stablish with language and silence in order to verbalize the dystopia from the rural scenery.

scholarly journals Fiction et réalité dans Pays sans chapeau de Dany Laferrière: Entre autobiographie, autofiction et au-delà

Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Mukenge ◽  
Emmanuel Kayembe
Keyword(s):  
Nous Allons ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dany Laferriere ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Sheer Number

En architecte, le narrateur monte en épingle l’histoire d’ici et d’ailleurs : après vingt années passées à Montréal, il fait un rebond chez lui, à Port-au-Prince (cfr Pays sans chapeau). À première vue, Haïti demeure le même ; c’est le statu quo que le narrateur observe : l’odeur du café est la même, la pauvreté aussi crue que violente affecte la population, les amis du narrateur sont restés fidèles à leur jeunesse. Par la même occasion, le roman relance le débat sur la pertinence de la migration, qui, du coup, semble moins centrée à une ère où l’imaginaire se situe au-delà des pays « réel » et « imaginaire » ; cette dichotomie donne une vraie valeur intrinsèque à Pays sans chapeau et démontre, de ce fait, la belle forme technique et esthétique du roman. Ainsi, nous allons chercher à démontrer comment Pays sans chapeau constitue un corpus stratégique qui se situe entre l’autobiographie, l’autofiction au delà …Fiction and reality in Pays sans chapeau (A country without a hat) by Dany Laferrière: Between autobiography autofiction and beyond. Pays sans chapeau (a country without hat) is one of the novels written by Dany Laferrière and published in 2007. This book deals with the return of the narrator, Vieux Os, to Port-au-Prince after many decades spent abroad in exile. It is also based on the painting or description of the Haitian society in which the narrator is horrified by the sheer number of the dead people or ghosts walking around together with the living in the streets of the city. He realises that the city of Port-au-Prince is overcrowded, yet he cannot distinguish the living from the dead amongst the bodies. The article aims to research the perpetual problem of the relationship between reality and fiction in autobiographical texts. An attempt will be made to determine to which category the novel Pays sans chapeau belongs. Consequently, it also analyses the dichotomy between the fictional and the real. This article will take as its theoretical point of departure Philppe Lejeune and Isabelle Grell’s definitions of autobiography and Jenny Laurent’s definition of autofiction.

scholarly journals TOPOGRAPHPICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE NOVEL “THE CITY AND THE CITY” BY CHINA TOM MIEVILLE TOPOGRAPHPICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE NOVEL “THE CITY AND THE CITY” BY CHINA TOM MIEVILLE

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Daria Denisova
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Response ◽  
Specific Effect ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Mind's Eye

The paper focuses on the topography of “The City and the City” by China Tom Miéville and its relation to the novel’s generic and compositional structure. Starting with the findings of cognitive poetic studies regarding readers’ emotional response to the text and the mechanisms behind it, I demonstrate how the topography of the textual world adds to the effects of unease in Weird Fiction and in C. Miéville’s works. Using the example of the odd topography in “The City and the City”, I show its relevance as a compositional core of the novel, a tool to explore the psychology of the city dweller, and an experimental space for reviewing the notions of self-identity, personal freedom and the power of limitations. I argue that the specific effect of unease in Weird Fiction is partly due to the grotesque topography which the reader attempts (and often fails) to conjure up in his mind’s eye following the character’s exploration of the given space. The disorienting topography is new to both the reader and the character, and the tension builds as the two discover more and more unusual aspects of it. No stranger to this strategy, C. Miéville, however, takes a different approach in “The City and the City”. Structuring the novel around the strange topography of the city(-ies), Miéville forces the reader to deduce its weird laws and makeup from the life of its native. Thus, the relationship between the city and the citizen becomes the central mystery of the novel which I attempt to explore in my reading of it.

scholarly journals African Literature and Orality: A Reading of Ngugi wa Thiango’s Wizard of the Crow (2007)

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 196-204
Author(s):  
Mustapha Ruma Bala
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
The Relationship

This paper explores the relationship between orality and written literature in Africa. The paper interrogates the transformation of oral narrative into written texts and vice-versa. The paper specifically focuses on how Ngugi appropriates oral-narrative techniques commonly employed in African traditional societies in shaping the narration of events in this monumental novel. In this regard, the paper focuses on how the oral tradition in Africa influences the plot structure of Wizard of the Crow. The paper also looks at how Ngugi uses multiple narrators some of whom are observers as well as participants in unfolding the drama in the novel. These narrators, some of whom are categorically defined and the not well-defined, recount and render events happening in the novel orally in the presence of a live audience and in the process also embellish the story as they deem fit thereby rendering different versions of the same event The paper concludes with the observation that in spite of its being presented in the written medium of the novel, Wizard of the Crow indeed has generic resemblance to an extended oral narrative.

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