Music and the Novel: A Study in 20th Century Fiction

1981 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 536
Author(s):  
Arra S. Avakian ◽  
Alex Aronson
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Mareike Schildmann

Abstract This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-661
Author(s):  
Carl Philipp Roth

Abstract Der Beitrag untersucht die Bedeutung des Schachspiels in Elias Canettis Roman Die Blendung zum einen auf der Ebene der historischen und sozialen Kontexte, in denen der Schachspieler Siegfried Fischer im Wien des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts steht. Er fokussiert zum anderen die Bedeutung des Schachspiels auf Handlungsebene. Denn Siegfried Fischer – genannt Fischerle – überträgt seine strategischen Fähigkeiten im Schach auf die ihn umgebende Welt und bringt so Peter Kien ,Zug um Zug‘ um dessen Reichtum.The article examines the significance of chess in Elias Canetti’s novel Die Blendung in the historical and social context of early 20th century Vienna. It further focuses on the function of chess within the novel: The actor and chess player Siegfried Fischer – called Fischerle – transfers his strategic skills from chess to his surroundings, thus depriving Peter Kien of his wealth ‘move by move’.


Author(s):  
Anatoly S. Kuprin ◽  
Galina I. Danilina

The purpose of this study is the analysis of limit situation in the narrative of war. The material of the study is the novel of Daniil Granin “My Lieutenant” and related texts. In the first part of the paper, the authors explore existing approaches to the term “limit situation” and similar concepts into scientific and philosophical traditions; limits of its applicability in literary studies and its relation to the categories of “narrative instances” and “event”. Proposed a literary-theoretical definition of the limit situation, which can be used in the analysis of fiction texts. Existing approaches to the examination of the situation of war are analyzed: philosophical-existential, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary. In the second part of the paper, the authors propose their method for analyzing limit situations in texts about war, which basis on existing approaches and preserves the text-centric principle of studying the structure of the story. Two interrelated areas of research have been identified: the study of war as a continuous limit situation in the intertextual aspect (the discourse of war); the study of limit situations (death, suffering, guilt, accident) in the narrative of war as part of a specific text. In the third part of the scientific work,the analysis of war as a continuous limit situation results in the study of the concept of “limit” (border) in a fiction text. The role of “limit” (border) concept in the texts about the war is studied, the possible types of limits in the discourse of war are examined. Limit situations in the narrative of war are analyzed on the basis of the novel “My Lieutenant” by Daniil Granin. A review of journalistic and scientific works about the novel revealed both the continuity and the differences between the novel and the “lieutenant” prose of the 20th century. An analysis of the limit situations in the novel revealed their key position in the narrative. These situations are independent of the fiction time, of the fluctuation of the point of view’; the function of the abstract author is to build the narrative as a “directive” immersion of the hero and narrator in these situations.


GeoJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Gabellieri

AbstractScholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer’s representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer’s sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai’s theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Samuel Steinberg

This essay takes as its starting point the relative lack of a contender to the “novel of ′68” in Mexico. I argue that Jorge Volpi's 2003 El fin de la locura constitutes the final writing of such a novel, to appear some 35 years after the original events of that year. The double “renewal” pursued by this work is explored both as an intended restoration of the literary to a place of social privilege after a period of decline, and also as a conservative restoration of order following the revolutionary sequences of the 20th century. However, I argue, the novel cannot finally commit to artistic renewal without also confirming the “madness” of the century; the literary renewal pursued in Volpi's text thus becomes the very political renewal that the author seeks to avoid.


Lateral ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Moriah

Kristin Moriah’s essay is rooted in extensive archival work in the US and Germany, examining the transatlantic circulation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through markets of performance and literature in and between Germany and the United States. The essay follows the performative tropes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from its originary political resonances to the present-day restaurants, train-stops, and housing projects named for the novel. Moriah reveals how the figurations of blackness arising from these texts are foundational to the construction of Germanness and American-German relations in the early 20th century and beyond.


Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Vasiljeva ◽  

The study is devoted to the analysis of methods and techniques of mythologization in the novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet written by the British author of Indian origin S. Rushdie. The paper explores the narrative organization of the novel, in which images and motifs of ancient mythology are used as a special code for artistic interpretation of European culture of the second half of the 20th century. The article examines the artistic reality of the novel, which combines the modern history of rock culture and classical mythology of Ancient Greece. S. Rushdie addresses problems related to the nature of creativity using as the main plot-forming motifs such mythologemes as the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth of alldevouring Tartarus, twin myths. The study shows that a typical technique for creating expressive threedimensional multivocal images in Rushdie's novel is a combination of real facts from the world of rock culture and mythological allusions, intertwining, overlapping and collision of various motifs and plots of Greek mythology, which, taken all together, generates the original artistic reality. The article analyzes how the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice acquires a cultural dimension in the novel and what techniques are used by the author to activate the extensive cultural memory of the Orphic myth. The concentration and interpretation of iconic images and motifs of ancient mythology are used in the novel for artistic analysis of the state of culture in the second half of the 20th century and of its attempts to counter the catastrophic tendencies of destruction and death of the modern civilization.


2018 ◽  
pp. 22-24
Author(s):  
A.A. Kulinich

The article deals with the Gloucerster candlestick's ekphrasis in the novel «The Children's Book» by Antonia Byatt, a famous English writer of the 20th century. Pictorial ekphrasises of the candlestick are analysed in the text through their functions. Ekphrasises of different artefacts have been analysed by modern scholars, the author's works included, but no detailed analysis of the phenomen under study (the Gloucerster candlestick) has been an object of literary research yet, which shows novelty and actual importance of the analysed issue.


Author(s):  
Søren R. Fauth

Per Højholt was one of the most productive and influential Danish writers of the 20th century. He made his debut in 1948 at the age of twenty, when the modernist journal Heretica published his cycle of poems De nøgne. Højholt proceeded to elaborate his own form of radical modernism rooted in the work of, for example, Stéphane Mallarmé, with his first collection of poetry, Poetens hoved (1963). Whereas in the work of Mallarmé the suggestiveness of the language reaches towards a more elevated (truer) form of reality, Højholt’s poetry is postmodern play with language. The oeuvre spans widely, ranging from collections of poems, short prose and essays, to the novel Auricula (2001) and the posthumous fragment Hans Henrik Mattesen—En monografi (2007). Højholt by no means confined himself to the writing desk and the written page. A large part of his work comprised performance and artistic expression in other media: radio readings of poetry, radio montage, radio plays, as well as a variety of public happenings. Højholt was born on 22 July 1928 and died on 15 October 2004. A trained librarian, he worked in that capacity until 1966, subsequently devoting himself to his artistic endeavor until the time of his death. He was awarded the Danish Academy’s Grand Prize in 1982.


Author(s):  
Katharine M. Cockin

Cicely Hamilton, lesbian actor, author, and women’s suffrage activist, is best known for her plays Diana of Dobson’s (1908), exposing exploitation in the retail trade, How the Vote Was Won (1909), a suffrage comedy co-authored with Christopher St. John, and A Pageant of Great Women, which raised consciousness about women’s history in productions across Britain from 1909 to 1912. Hamilton also wrote nondramatic works, including the political tract Marriage as a Trade (1909) and the novel William, An Englishman (1919), which was inspired by her experience of wartime France. Hamilton’s prolific writing career reflects her wide-ranging interests, political commitments, and sense of public duty; her plays exemplify the intersection of Feminism and theater in the early 20th century.


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