scholarly journals In the Footsteps of the Absent Father: The Protagonist as a Writing Subject in the Work of Ronit Matalon

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 97-122
Author(s):  
Moran Benit
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Absent Father ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist

The article addresses the literary development of the young female protagonist in Ronit Matalon’s early writing, and the character’s relationship with her absent father. Despite the prevalence of this theme, little research has been dedicated to the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work and its influence on the daughter’s decision to become a writer. The article examines this theme in Matalon’s young adult novel, A Story that Begins with a Snake’s Funeral (1989). My main argument here is that the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work is central to the construction of the daughter’s ’decision to write‘, and points to the issue of inter-generational accountability, in which the daughter is entitled to an inheritance from her father despite her critical view of him. As I will show in my reading of the novel, the fictional representation of this relationship bears an autobiographical imprint, particularly in light of Matalon’s choice to quote her father, Felix Matalon, and to lend his voice to the father figure in her writing. As part of the exploration of this theme, which consists of both fictional and autobiographical aspects, I suggest that the heroine’s efforts to place her absent father in the context of her life and to cope with his absence through her writing point to Matalon’s own efforts to deal with her father’s legacy by writing about him and giving him a place in the Israeli literary canon, while maintaining a critical attitude towards him.

‘NAE KING! NAE QUIN! NAE LAIRD! NAE MASTER!’: CHILDHOOD AGENCY IN TERRY PRATCHETT’s THE WEE FREE MEN

Mousaion ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-72
Author(s):  
Eileen Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Middle Childhood ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Childhood Home

In this article, a psychodynamic perspective informs the discussion of the ambivalence associated with individuation and growing up which manifests during middle childhood (from approximately 6 to 11 years of age). The author contends that Terry Pratchett explores this ambivalence in his young adult novel, The wee free men (2003), in which his young, female protagonist, Tiffany Aching, must resolve the fears and anxieties that stem from her ambivalence in order to claim agency and complete the process of individuation from her childhood home. The author argues that Tiffany’s ambivalence is most clearly reflected in her relationships with the two primary adult females in the novel, Granny Aching and the Fairy Queen, and suggests that the resolution of her ambivalence models resilience strategies for Pratchett’s young readers who may be navigating this same problem in their own lives. 

Nanook: He Is Coming: A dystopian young adult novel from Brazil1

Book 2 0 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliane Aparecida Galvão Ribeiro Ferreira ◽  
Guilherme Magri da Rocha
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
School Students ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Dialogical Relationship ◽  
Brazilian Students

This article discusses Nanook: ele está chegando (‘Nanook: He Is Coming’) (2016), written by Brazilian author Gustavo Bernardo, a Brazilian dystopian apocalyptic young adult (YA) novel influenced by an Inuit legend that mixes science with mysticism and human subjectivity. In this book, 15-year-old Bernardo emerges as a harbinger of events that will occur in the narrative, when he affirms that ‘Nanook is coming’. From that point onwards, climatic and supernatural events happen, which affect the whole world, with consequences for Ouro Preto, the former capital of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the story takes place. These consequences include snowfalls, increasingly intense cold and the disappearance of some animals. Nanook: He Is Coming was selected by the Brazilian National Textbook Program (PNLD – Programa Nacional do Livro Didático) for high school students. This programme is designed to evaluate didactic, pedagogical and literary works and make them available for free to Brazilian students what are studying at public schools. This article concludes with an analysis of the text, using critical tools, which include Reception Theory to examine the communicability of the novel with its implicit reader, the dialogical relationship with that reader and the novel’s language, stylistic characteristics, the constitution of its narrative operators and its ideological discourse.

Margaret Mahy: An Adlerian Reading

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
KATHRYN WALLS
Keyword(s):  
Young Female ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Alfred Adler ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Magical Power ◽  
Margaret Mahy ◽  
The Individual

According to the ‘Individual Psychology’ of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Freud's contemporary and rival, everyone seeks superiority. But only those who can adapt their aspirations to meet the needs of others find fulfilment. Children who are rejected or pampered are so desperate for superiority that they fail to develop social feeling, and endanger themselves and society. This article argues that Mahy's realistic novels invite Adlerian interpretation. It examines the character of Hero, the elective mute who is the narrator-protagonist of The Other Side of Silence (1995) , in terms of her experience of rejection. The novel as a whole, it is suggested, stresses the destructiveness of the neurotically driven quest for superiority. Turning to Mahy's supernatural romances, the article considers novels that might seem to resist the Adlerian template. Focusing, in particular, on the young female protagonists of The Haunting (1982) and The Changeover (1984), it points to the ways in which their magical power is utilised for the sake of others. It concludes with the suggestion that the triumph of Mahy's protagonists lies not so much in their generally celebrated ‘empowerment’, as in their transcendence of the goal of superiority for its own sake.

scholarly journals Adapting Wives and Daughters for Television: Reimagining Women, Travel, Natural Science, and Race

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African People ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.

scholarly journals Sentence Fragments in the Narration of the Novel "The Hunger Games"

Lexicon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhani Nurhusna
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
Dependent Clause

The use of sentence fragments is generally discouraged in good English writing because they lack one or more essential components of a sentence, namely a subject and/or a predicate, and thus are grammatically unacceptable. However in fiction writing, the use of sentence fragments is not only quite common in dialogue, but in narration as well. The present study analyses sentence fragments in the narration of the first novel of the young-adult science-fiction trilogy The Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins, to investigate the types of fragments employed in the novel and their classification based on syntactic structure in the form of dependent-clause fragments and phrase fragments. The sentence fragments were further analysed for their use based on the context of their preceding sentences. The use of sentence fragments in the novel basically serves the function of creating emphasis or stressing important points in the story.

scholarly journals Decolonizing the Anthropocene: ‘Slow Violence’ and Indigenous Resistance in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Il Tolomeo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Xausa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Species Level ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
Eruptive Event ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Indigenous Theory ◽  
Slow Violence

Through a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, a survival story set in a futuristic Canada destroyed by global warming, this article explores the conceptualization and reimagination of the Anthropocene in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous theory and fiction. Firstly, I will argue that literary representations of climate change can be complicit in producing hegemonic strands of Anthropocene discourse that consider human destructiveness and vulnerability at undifferentiated species level. Secondly, I will suggest that the novel’s apocalypse reveals the processes of colonial violence and dispossession that have culminated in the eruptive event of environmental catastrophe, rather than portraying a story of universal and disembodied human threat that conceals oppression against Indigenous people.

scholarly journals Change the Narrative

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Tynan Drake
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Real World ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Empathic Understanding ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Personal Level

In post-apocalyptic fiction, the concept of empathy often is depicted as a weakness that the characters cannot afford if they hope to survive. This depiction leads to harmful perceptions on the value of empathy and its ability to avert apocalyptic catastrophes. By examining David Clement-Davies young adult novel The Sight through theories of narrative empathy and through James Berger’s theories of post-apocalyptic representation, this essay argues that by representing empathic understanding, fiction writers have the power to influence positive changes in real world situations. By representing the need to teach empathy for all people, regardless of their differences, and the harm a lack of empathy can cause on both a personal level and on a large societal scale, this novel encourages future generations to seek peaceful and empathic solutions instead of repeating the cataclysmic mistakes of their forebearers.

scholarly journals Konkretyzacja estetyczna w Zwierzętach nocy (2016) Toma Forda

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrycja Rojek
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Communication Situations ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Insight Into

Rojek Patrycja, Konkretyzacja estetyczna w Zwierzętach nocy (2016) Toma Forda [Aesthetic Concretization in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016)]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 401–416. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.22. The subject of Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan (published in 1993) is the reader’s experience. The peculiar relationship that forms between the main female character - a reader of literary fiction – and the novel itself as well as its author, inspired in 2016 Tom Ford to capture the specifics of the same relationships using the language of moving images. This article presents the effects of studying the complex system of communication situations occurring in the novel and its film adaptation: each of them contains an additional story around which further author-reader relationships are formed. The analysis shows that a significant part of the film’s plot is not a direct insight into the novel, but its concretization projected by a female protagonist. Tom Ford’s film is therefore considered in relation to Roman Ingarden’s theory on aesthetic concretization.

scholarly journals Novel Mega Best-Seller Karya Luluk HF Mariposa dalam Kajian Resepsi Sastra

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 152
Author(s):  
Tania Intan ◽  
Muhamad Adji
Keyword(s):  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Research Data ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Data Source ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Horizon Of Expectations ◽  
The Way

This study discusses the reception of readers of the mega best-seller novel entitled Mariposa by Luluk HF. The purpose of this study is to (1) describe the reader's responses, (2) describe the horizon of readers' expectations, and (3) describe the factors that cause differences in responses and the horizon of expectations of readers of Mariposa's novel. The method applied is descriptive qualitative. This study uses a reception aesthetic approach that seeks to find consistent reception patterns as a reflection of the way the reader responds to the text. The research data consisted of texts containing the responses of twenty respondents from the data source in the form of the Goodreads reader site. The research results obtained are as follows. First, not all readers respond positively to the intrinsic elements of the novel, especially the characterization of the female protagonist who is considered to show aggressive behavior with a love motive. Second, most of the horizons of readers' expectations do not match the reality in Mariposa. Readings are generally motivated by curiosity because of the hyperbolic labeling of the novel, recommendations from friends, and the discourse of filming the novel. Third, the factors that cause the difference or suitability of the horizon of readers' expectations for the Mariposa novel are knowledge of literature, knowledge of life, and experience of reading literary works.

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