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British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The present book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. It argues that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. The chapter contends that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. It shows that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, while they have employed a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

La tesis es una valoración crítica de dos novelas colombianas contemporáneas. El análisis literario, por un lado, conduce a determinar que el silencio de algunos de los personajes de Burgos obedece a un tipo de violencia simbólica, con sus respectivas implicaciones psicológicas; por otro lado, permite establecer que el insulto del narrador y personaje principal de Vallejo busca conjurar el mal que siempre lo ha asediado. Las conclusiones de dicho análisis resaltan la crítica de la novela de Burgos al silencio impuesto por la violencia, así como la necesidad del insulto en la novela de Vallejo, el cual es un recurso discursivo con posibilidades para enfrentar todo aquello que daña la vida. La diferencia radica en que la primera obra es consciente de que el silencio impuesto es una limitación que enfrenta el lenguaje, mientras que la segunda hace del insulto un recurso dominante, recurso que autolimita y encierra al narrador, lo cual equivale a un empobrecimiento narrativo. (Texto tomado de la fuente). The thesis is a critical appraisal of two contemporary Colombian novels. The literary analysis, on one hand, leads to determine that the silence of some of Burgos’s characters obeys a type of symbolic violence, with its respective psychological implications. On the other hand, it allows us to establish that the insult of the narrator and main character of Vallejo seeks to ward off the evil that has always besieged him. The conclusions of this analysis highlight the criticism of Burgos’s novel against the silence imposed by violence, as well as the need for insult in Vallejo’s novel, which is a discursive resource with possibilities to face everything that damages life. The difference is that the first work is aware that the silence imposed is a limitation faced by language, while the second makes the insult a dominant resource, a resource that self-limits and encloses the narrator, which is equivalent to a narrative impoverishment. Maestría Magíster en Estudios Literarios

The Liar’s Paradox is a coming-of-age story about a boy and his mother. It follows Sam, the narrator, over the course of 30 years, from major Canadian city to major Canadian city, exploring the mosaic of racism, systemic oppression, and genocide, as he forms his identity as a young man. Through relationships in each city, he comes to see that his past, present, and future are entangled with others in heartening and terrifying ways. Recognizing that his life is built on a foundation of lies, just as his country is, leaves him grappling for a sure hold. When he comes to see that the struggle itself is his truth, he is finally able to take a deep breath of relief. 2999-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the portrayal of early accountants in the unfamiliar site of Portugal by examining Portuguese-language realist literature from the second half of the nineteenth century. Design/methodology/approach Two popular literary works – Uma Família Inglesa (An English Family), written by Júlio Dinis and published in 1867, and Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura (The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman), written by Eça de Queirós and published in 1873 – were examined through a qualitative content analysis. Findings The dimensions of the accounting stereotype discerned for the two early accounting practitioners featured in these works are portrayed as: modest; on-the-job trained practitioner; uncreative, conservative and unenergetic; honest financial manager; servant of the capitalist (i.e. merchant), and warm and sentimental. The accountant stereotype depicted from 1860s to 1870s period is similar to the conventional accountant stereotype, identified as the “traditional accountant” stereotype. Variations from this stereotype, however, are identified in the local, time-specific settings of Lisbon and Oporto. Originality/value The study’s portrayal of early accounting practitioners occurs during a period of transformation marked by liberalism. It augments an understanding of the image of early accounting practitioners, reflecting their social positioning at a time of significant social, economic, political and cultural changes, thereby contributing to an appreciation of the historical legacy of the accountant stereotype in continental Europe. Importantly, a taxonomy is proposed for content analysis that can be used and developed by future researchers., Study conducted, by the second author, at Research Center in Political Science (UID/CPO/00758/2013), University of Minho and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.

Resum: El present article té per objectiu explorar la poesia dels anys seixanta de Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas en contrast amb la de Vicent Andrés Estellés des de l’òptica d’estudi de la «poètica de la resistència» proposada pels autors Cornelia Gräbner i David Wood (2010). D’una banda, analitzarem l’obra dels dos poetes en tant que autors que formen part de la resistència cultural durant els anys de la dictadura per formar part d’una literatura minoritzada. I, d’altra banda, estudiarem com aquesta situació imprenga el contingut dels textos i articula una «poètica de la resistència» en què les veus literàries mostren a través dels versos la seua dissensió ideològica amb l’entorn dictatorial, especialment pel que fa a la reflexió de la consciència social, de gènere i nacional.Paraules clau: poètica de la resistència, poesia, franquisme, política, realisme Abstract: This paper aims to explore the poetry of the 60s of Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas in contrast with the poetry of Vicent Andrés Estellés as an example of «poetics of the resistance» proposed by the authors Cornelia Gräbner and David Wood (2010). On the one hand, we will analyze the work of the two poets like authors that form part of the cultural resistance during the years of the dictatorship because they are part of minoritised literature. On the other hand, we will study how this situation permeates the content of the texts and articulates a «poetics of resistance». The poetic voices of these authors show through the verses his ideological dissent with the dictatorial frame, especially regarding the reflection of social conscience, gender conscience and national conscience.Keywords: poetics of resistance, poetry, francoism, politics, literary realism

The aim of the Diploma thesis is to examine diverse modes of fictional depiction of crime. The thesis demonstrates the basic genre differentiation of this specific theme using the suggested corpus of selected canonical literary works. This diachronic overview is accompanied by the synchronic research which focuses on the occurrence of crime in the context of Czech literary production of the 1890s. In the second part of the thesis, the particular features of crime-based literature are presented on the example of Czech novel which was published during this selected period - Kalibův zločin by Karel Václav Rais. In this section, both period and recent critical reception of Kalibův zločin is discussed and its publication frequency presented. The subsequent part of the thesis deals with comparative analysis of Kalibův zločin and Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Michajlovič Dostojevskij which is based on selected narratology reference books. Based on this narrative comparison, the thesis exposes structural and narrative diversity concerning literary portrayal of crime.

Before 1918, Slovaks were a nation without borders, and they would therefore assert their identity mainly through language and literature. The writers from the end of the 19th century (M. Kukučín, B. Slančíková Timrava, L. Nádaši-Jégé, J. Gregor Tajovský, J. Jesenský) had to defend their positions under the difficult conditions of harsh magyarisation. Their situation changed after 1918 and this article observes how they reacted to this complicated post-war situation in terms of genres and themes, for example, in co-existence with literary and avantgarde directions. The values that the realistic authors promoted before the war became surprisingly developed under the changed political conditions. Each of them was able not only to attract readers’ attention, but also to reflect on and critically depict the deformations of the new era.

RESUMEN Este artículo propone una lectura materialista del género realista, tomando como base la teoría del lenguaje de Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), y sus reelaboraciones (Žižek 1989, Eyers 2011 y Kornbluh 2017). Se discutirá su extendida clasificación como "postestructuralista", tomando como eje el carácter materialista de la noción de lo Real. Considerando la influencia predominante del postestructuralismo en la crítica literaria, este distanciamiento teórico tiene consecuencias políticas, estéticas y literarias relevantes que permitan rescatar al realismo del anticuario de los géneros literarios. Para ejemplificar, se analizará un corpus de tres obras argentinas de las últimas décadas: Este-oeste de Martín Rejtman, La villa de César Aira y Rabia de Sergio Bizzio. ABSTRACT This article proposes a materialistic approach to the genre of realism, based on Jacques Lacan's theory of language and its reworkings (Žižek 1989, Eyers 2011 and Kornbluh 2017). Its extended classification as "poststructuralist" will be discussed, taking as a central point the materialist character of the notion of the Real. Considering the predominant influence of poststructuralism in literary criticism, this theoretical distancing has relevant political, aesthetic and literary consequences that make possible a rescue of the realism from the antiquarian of literary genres. To exemplify, a corpus of three Argentine works of the last decades will be analyzed: Este-Oeste by Martín Rejtman, La villa by César Aira and Rabia by Sergio Bizzio.

Resumen Los trasplantados (1904) de Alberto Blest Gana es una novela que no ha recibido la atención debida por parte de la crítica especializada. Su estudio es relevante en la medida en que permite establecer los rasgos distintivos de una novela clave -aunque poco visible- en la producción literaria del autor de Martín Rivas. El análisis de la historia de la adinerada familia Canalejas en el entramado social de París, que considera el diálogo intertextual, el comentario de la crítica precedente y la operacionalización de conceptos teóricos que iluminan las posiciones de deseo del relato, posibilita, entre otros aspectos, amplificar la reflexión sobre la significación de las escenas de lectura, del deseo mimético, del acontecimiento de la muerte y sus vinculaciones con la emergencia o superación del mal dentro del marco de la novelística del escritor chileno. Abstract Los Trasplantados (1904) by Alberto Blest Gana is a novel that has not enjoyed proper attention by specialised critics. Its study is relevant in that it allows establishing the distinctive features of a key novel, though not visible enough, in the literary production of Martin Rivas’ autor. The analysis of the history of the wealthy Canalejas family in the social fabric of Paris, which considers the intertextual dialogue, the commentary of the preceding critic and the operationalization of the theoretical concepts that illuminate the positions of the desire of the story, makes possible, among other aspects, to amplify the refection on the meaning of the scenes of reading, of the mimetic desire, of the event of death and of the links with the emergence or the overcoming of the evil within the framework of the Chilean writer’s novel.

Se rebaten dos tipos de críticas sobre Cuentos de barro (1933), de Salarrué: se cuestionan interpretaciones que identifican a los personajes con los indígenas y los negros reales de El Salvador en las décadas de 1920 y 1930; por otra parte, se disputan las críticas académicas que, a pesar de reconocer el ingrediente inventivo en las representaciones de los personajes, califican la ficción de un acto engañoso. Con el análisis de «El negro», con atención en el discurso metafórico, el realismo de Salarrué es más complejo que el realismo concebido como una copia fiel del mundo real. The study refutes two types of criticism about Cuentos de barro (1933), by Salarrué. It questions interpretations identifying the characters with real indigenous and black people in El Salvador in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, it argues against academic criticism which, in spite of acknowledging the non-realistic traits of the characters, describes the fiction as misleading. Through the analysis of “El negro”, with attention to the metaphoric discourse, Salarrué’s realism is viewed as more complex than realism conceived of as a faithful copy of the real world.

Resumen: Lo que me propongo aquí es darle continuidad a una hipótesis ya anteriormente formulada por algunos lectores de Blest Gana. Se trata de la necesidad de un estudio capaz de relacionar toda la producción con los libros consagrados, en una integración de la obra como un todo, de manera orgánica, dentro de una visión general. En este caso, tomo las siete novelas que el autor publicó entre 1860 y 1864 para mostrar algunas de las redes que es posible establecer entre ellas. Abstract: My purpose is to give continuity to an argument previously suggested by-nc some readers of Blest Gana. The general idea is associated with the need of a study capable of establishing a link between all of the renowned books, as a way of integrating them in the work as a whole in an organic way and with a general vision. In this case, I take the seven novels which the author published between 1860 and 1864 to show some of the relationships that can be established between them.

A Fraught Inheritance: Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Forging of American Democracy is the first extensive conceptualization of two seminal, contemporaneous movements in American law and letters. The project literarily and legally cross-examines the Reconstruction Amendments, which formally cemented equal citizenship rights in the Civil War’s wake, from the Amendments’ ratification through World War II. I construe the Amendments through the lenses of literary realism and legal realism, which are framed as dissenting intellectual movements. Both realisms emerged largely in response to statutes and judicial decisions that belied the Reconstruction Amendments’ egalitarian promise by intentionally or effectively subordinating people of color and the working class. My analysis couples legal texts that critiqued these laws with kindred literary works by Charles Chesnutt, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright. Despite criticisms of literary realism and legal realism’s overall complicity with an unjust status quo, a reading of the movements against the disciplinary grain demonstrates their social justice resiliency during the modern period as well as their formidable influence on equitable literary and legal developments into today.

Situated at the intersection between comparative literature and gender studies, this dissertation theorizes what I term the postnormâle novel. It deploys readings of four contemporary European novels along with a corpus of literary and feminist theory. The novels include Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook (1962), Märta Tikkanen's Manrape (1975), Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005-2007) and Virginie Despentes's Apocalypse baby (2010). My analysis of these texts examines the way in which the postnormâle novel reclaims social discourses of sexual difference for a mass audience while subtly displacing realist conventions in order to inscribe women s or lesbians experience of sexual conflict into the text. A four step process is used to study the work. First, I anchor the novels to a realist real , and study the function of detail within the postnormâle aesthetic. Then I chart the sociogram feminism in the novels and their reception. Thirdly, I read the narrative of what I call counter-rape , and lastly the inscription of woman-desire and the figuration the constitution even of entr elles, a feminist space. The perspective of my study is postmodern, which implies a suspension but not a disbelief of the twofold question of literary status and literary evaluation, in order to focus on texts in their contexts. In this process, I aim to rethink the link between the notions of the feminine and the queer in light of contemporary feminist and lesbian perspectives. Postnormaalin romaanin teoria kehkeytyy sukupuolentutkimuksen ja yleisen kirjallisuustieteen välimaastossa, neljän kielen (ranska, englanti, ruotsi, suomi) risteyskohdassa. Se lähestyy feministisellä tutkimusotteella norminmukaisuuden, mieheyden ja eheyden kolmiyhteyttä kirjallisuusinstituutiossa ja realistisen romaanin historiassa. Tutkimus keskittyy neljään menestysromaaniin, jotka tuovat eri tavoin esiin eurooppalaisten realismien seksistisiä taustaoletuksia. Osana postnormaalia romaania ne ilmentävät feminististen ajatusten punoutumista osaksi länsimaista "tervettä järkeä" (ransk. le sens commun) viimeisten 60 vuoden aikana. Doris Lessingin The Golden Notebook (1962), Märta Tikkasen Män kan inte våldtas (1975), Stieg Larssonin Millenium- tai Men som hatar kvinnor -trilogia (2005-2007) sekä Virginie Despentes in Apocalypse bébé (2010) toistavat ja muuntavat hienovaraisesti normieheyden tarinoita, mielikuvia, henkilöhahmoja ja rakenteita voidakseen kertoa naisten kokemuksista. Tutkimuksen kunnianhimoinen tavoite on tuottaa postnormaaleja lukijoita. Normieheys kirjallisuudentutkimuksen horisonttina voidaan purkaa vain asettamalla moninaisten lukijoiden kokemukset kirjallisuuden ja kielen toiseuttavista rakenteista tutkimuksen keskiöön. Teoria kehittyy neljässä vaiheessa. Ensimmäiseksi tuodaan esille realistisen romaanin, normieheyden ja kirjallisuustieteen yhteisön yhtenevä historia. Näin voidaan erottaa ne muutokset, joita postnormaalin romaanin lukija tuo tullessaan nostaessaan kissan pöydälle eli ottaessaan normieheyden toiseuttavat rakenteet ja oman kaksoistietoisuutensa kriittisen tarkastelun kohteeksi. Kolmannessa vaiheessa toiseutettujen ja normieheyden suhteita tutkitaan pureutumalla raiskauksen ja sitä seuraavan vastaraiskauksen tarinoihin. Lopulta tuodaan esille normieheyden viitekehyksen rajat: kun postnormaali lukija astuu feministiseen tilaan jossa toiseutetut puhuvat keskenään, normieheyden on hajottava jälkitekijöihinsä. Tutkimus suuntaa näin katseen, kielen ja kuuntelevan korvan kohti lukijoitaan siinä toivossa, että he osallistuvat liikkeeseen ja avaavat paitsi kirjallisuudentutkimusta myös feminististä teoriaa yhä moninaisemmalle, yhä oudommalle lukija- ja tekijäkunnalle.

The essay quickly dismisses the question of realism as a spurious category and unverifiable in terms of language. Moreover – assuming the Wu Ming’s perspective – the point is not represented by the facts, but the mechanisms of communication and inflation of narratives that alter, from an ideological perspective, the perception of the world. Literature takes therefore the responsibility to offer an interpretation that challenges the conformism and the one-sidedness with which reality – history, in particular – is often read, to create a new space of freedom. Wu Ming put in the center of the novel the complexity of history to highlight the ideological readings of which it is the result., CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism, N. 9 (2016): Letteratura e nuovi realismi

What is it like to be imprisoned, to spend months or even years in solitary confinement? Apart from the answers that psychology, criminology of philosophy may hold, the biographical-historical study The Hour of Truth. On Imprisonment as a Literary Experience looks at what answers literature has to offer to this question. Concentrating on the period roughly between the French Revolution up to and including the Second World War, this book mainly concerns itself with three European writers who have written about their own prison experiences: Silvio Pellico, Oscar Wilde and Albrecht Haushofer. How did those extreme experiences shape and influence the descriptions of their prison life? What does one write about in the ‘the hour of truth’, when life has been reduced to four walls and a barred window, and when all that remains of one’s authorship is a scrap of paper and a pencil? Do these three writers succeed in adequately conveying this ultimate experience to the reader? In a comparative analysis of three examples of imaginative literature (by Stendhal, Charles Dickens and the Dutch poet Jan Campert) Maarten Asscher suggests that the extreme truth of prison experience is better served by literary imagination than by autobiographical testimony.

What is it like to be imprisoned, to spend months or even years in solitary confinement? Apart from the answers that psychology, criminology of philosophy may hold, the biographical-historical study The Hour of Truth. On Imprisonment as a Literary Experience looks at what answers literature has to offer to this question. Concentrating on the period roughly between the French Revolution up to and including the Second World War, this book mainly concerns itself with three European writers who have written about their own prison experiences: Silvio Pellico, Oscar Wilde and Albrecht Haushofer. How did those extreme experiences shape and influence the descriptions of their prison life? What does one write about in the ‘the hour of truth’, when life has been reduced to four walls and a barred window, and when all that remains of one’s authorship is a scrap of paper and a pencil? Do these three writers succeed in adequately conveying this ultimate experience to the reader? In a comparative analysis of three examples of imaginative literature (by Stendhal, Charles Dickens and the Dutch poet Jan Campert) Maarten Asscher suggests that the extreme truth of prison experience is better served by literary imagination than by autobiographical testimony.

This master´s thesis concern about personal and family strategies of rural population in the second part of 19. century. The following strategies are especially affiliated with choosing children´s name, select of godfathers, partners choices, labour migration and reservatum rusticum. The origin for rechearch of this theme is possible divide in two big parts. The first generate literary works of the realist art movement 19. century (novel and short stories from Jindřich Šimon Baar, Karel Klostermann, Teréza Nováková, Karel Václav Rais, Gabriela Preissová and others) and trivial literature the same period (novel and short stories from V. Čuta, Josef Jahoda, Vlasta Javořická, Vlasta Pittnerová, Marie E. Vokáčová, Bohumil Zahradník-Brodský and others). The second part is consist of origin evidential (birth, marriage and death records, census) and insurance charakter. It was choosed a territory of Besednice for a concrete comparation.

Problem Statement: Studies have shown that language is used discriminatorily to women and men. Hence, there have been movements against gender biased language−the movements which are reported so successful especially in the West.Purpose of Study: This paper however argues that discrimination stems from speakers’ minds; and hence performing gender neutral language alone does not confirm gender neutrality of the performer. The reliable way of judging gender neutrality would then be studying the speakers’ minds.Method: The study applied psychoanalytic literary criticism as a gateway to the unconscious minds of American authors–to find out how gender neutral they were at cognitive level. Through psychoanalytic literary criticism, authors’ suppressed desires would find their way out onto their works in a distorted form. Along these lines, the study assessed the equality in assigning agentive and patient semantic roles between males and females in American fictions–to find out who between males and females were frequently assigned agentive and patient roles of the reciprocal verbs: kiss, hug, marry, and divorce.Findings: The study found out that males were assigned more agentive roles in kiss and hug, and females in divorce. Moreover, both were assigned almost equal roles in marry.Conclusion: The implication of the findings is that speakers’ unconscious mind is basically gender biased along gender stereotypes.

A década de 1970 começou de facto para o autor em 1968, com os protestos e críticas antiguerra na Universidade de Columbia em Nova Iorque. Refletindo sobre o seu percurso nesse decénio, entreteceram-se três dimensões (a académica, a biográfica e a poética) na sua emigração para a Europa, e na sua passagem dos estudos literários às antropologias americana e britânica. As revelações críticas dos grandes autores realistas tiveram eco no título e no conteúdo da revista londrina Critique of Anthropology, tal como a crítica feroz de etnógrafos como Cutileiro e Bourdieu teve eco na monografia do autor sobre uma aldeia transmontana aparentemente “comunitária”, arquiteturada entre 1974 e 1982. A crítica tornou-se um modo de vida. Uma perceção tardia da sua própria identidade étnica dupla de hispânico e “branco assimilado” não descurou a possibilidade de se terem fundido subtilmente todas estas múltiplas dimensões. Podemos acumular duas, senão três, identidades? The 1970s began surprisingly for the author in 1968, amidst anti-war protests and critiques at Columbia University in New York. Pondering over his trajectory during that decade, three dimensions (academic, biographical, and poetic) interlaced as he emigrated to Europe, and as he passed from literary studies through American and later to British anthropology. The critical revelations of the great realists echoed within the title and contents of the London journal Critique of Anthropology, just as the ferocious critical tone of ethnographers such as Cutileiro and Bourdieu echoed within the author’s monograph of an apparently “communitarian” hamlet in Trás-os-Montes, composed between 1974 and 1982. Critique became a veritable life-style. Delayed consciousness of his own double ethnic identity as both a Hispanic and an “assimilated white” did not obscure the possibility of all these multiple dimensions having subtly fused together. Can we accumulate two, if not three, identities?

This is a comparative study of Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut, arguing that both writers’ engagements with the emerging historical and political dynamics of the Cold War need to be taken seriously if we are to understand how their careers began, developed, and have been read and canonized. I base my claim on detailed readings of four novels by Bellow (Dangling Man, The Victim, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet) and three novels by Vonnegut (Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five), demonstrating that formal innovation in the work of both writers remains marked by tensions in national and international life. Specifically, Bellow and Vonnegut are understood in the context of Cold War debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the most decisive and contentious of which involve the question of literary realism and its legacies. I trace the evolution of debates about realism across the work of Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, John Hersey, Tom Wolfe, Robert Scholes, and Reinhold Niebuhr, suggesting that for all their obvious differences these critics similarly interrogate and recast realism as a set of literary conventions and an ambiguously oriented political enterprise, whose realignment in American literature and national culture between 1944 and 1970 had everything to do with the global expansion of the superpower conflict. At stake across various strands of the realism debate were nothing less than the political possibilities of the American novel, and it is with these debates in mind this study offers its interpretations of Bellow and Vonnegut. In four chapters, Bellow’s engagement with the Cold War is shown to depend on his representations of private life, positioned as the fraught formal centre of his fiction as well as the key to its political resonances. The first two chapters approach Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) according to how private life intersects with the recent history of the Second World War and its aftermath. Dangling Man makes use of journal entries written by a civilian and former Communist awaiting induction into the army, while The Victim situates its representation of contemporary anti-Semitism in reference to the Holocaust. Herzog (1964) complicates Bellow’s fictional rendering of private life in its selective recourse to epistolary conventions, with the title character’s interminable letter-writing an expression of psychological crisis as well as a self-conscious rebuke against contemporary apocalypticism. Herzog’s juxtaposition of private life and public history is linked with Bellow’s emerging status as an essayist and public intellectual, using his newfound prominence as a bestselling author to voice a polemical criticism against the American 1960s that would become directly albeit reluctantly entangled in the growing controversy about the Vietnam War. Bellow’s dual roles as novelist and public intellectual appear most pronounced and contentious in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), a novel whose savage renderings of New York City at the end of the 1960s can only be read as a bitter political critique of that decade. Mr. Sammler’s Planet calls for a rethinking of Bellow’s career up to this point, a task begun in this study in relation to the novel’s fascination with the Apollo missions and imminent moon landing. In contrast, Vonnegut’s fiction lacks all semblance of psychologically and morally complex private life, without which Bellow’s novels would be unthinkable in every sense. The point is not to reclaim Vonnegut as a realist in the manner of Bellow, but instead to demonstrate how his eclectic and self-conscious combinations of satire, science fiction, and metafiction engage with realism’s most basic forms and assumptions. In three chapters, Vonnegut’s fiction is shown to delight in its methods of imaginative contrivance, presenting readers with a series of historical and political alternatives in recognizable yet unfamiliar form. Vonnegut’s engagement with the Cold War is initially considered in relation to his work as a freelance short story writer for the popular weekly magazines Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, read alongside his employment as a public relations writer for General Electric between September 1947 and December 1950. Vonnegut’s proximity to mass culture during the earliest period of his career is understood as highly significant to his sense of authorship as a form of popular entertainment, his amiable self-satire in his prefaces and the short story ‘Deer in the Works’ (1955) taking on more formally elaborate configurations in the science fiction of his first novel Player Piano (1952). Vonnegut’s self-conscious negotiation of authorship in the context of the Cold War is further understood in relation to his lifelong opposition to America’s nuclear program. His magazine short stories ‘Report on the Barnhouse Effect’ (1950), ‘Thanasphere’ (1950), and ‘The Manned Missiles’ (1958) adopt an earnest style of moral satire targeting the military industrial complex, before giving way to a more peculiar combination of playfulness and pessimism in the end of the world scenario of Cat’s Cradle (1963). Like Bellow, the political resonance of Vonnegut’s fiction is associated with changes in his authorial self-image as it took on an increasingly public role from the mid-1960s, what for Vonnegut was his status as what Edward Said calls an ‘amateur’ in the public sphere, taking on the largest social questions using comedy, playfulness, anecdotes, and personal sentiment. Vonnegut’s passionate albeit idiosyncratic sense of the writer’s political responsibility culminates in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), a novel whose formal eclecticism interrogates the ability of the realist novel to represent disaster. Slaughterhouse-Five tempts readers with a series of highly contrived and ultimately unacceptable alternatives to the catastrophic history of the twentieth-century, giving the impression of history as a fundamental yet largely incomprehensible aspect of human life and understanding. Vonnegut’s reinvention of Cold War history is completed in his satirical essay on the Apollo missions, ‘Excelsior! We’re Going to the Moon! Excelsior!’ (1969), divesting the iconography of the space age of its symbolic power in the superpower narrative.

El siguiente ensayo lleva a cabo un análisis de la novela del escritor colombiano Luis Fayad Compañeros de viaje, publicada en 1991. Utilizamos esta creación como ejemplo de una nueva línea en la narrativa colombiana, a finales de los ochenta y principios de los noventa, tendente a realizar reconstrucciones en ambientes urbanos en detrimento de aquellos rurales. Ofreceremos un estudio de ésta desde un enfoque sociocrítico, pues el objetivo del ensayo consiste en evidenciar la manera en la que Fayad ha llevado a cabo una representación de la Bogotá del inicio de La Violencia, fundamentalmente, en cuanto a sus facetas políticas, sociales y personales. This essay analyses Compañeros de viaje, a novel by the Colombian writer Luis Fayad published in 1991. By means of this piece of work, we aim to illustrate the new tendency that appeared in the Colombian novel in the late eighties and early nineties that reflects urban contexts instead of rural contexts. To do so, we apply a social-critical approach to demonstrate the way in which Luis Fayad represented the Violence and most of the political, social and human aspects in Bogotá.

El siguiente ensayo lleva a cabo un análisis de la novela del escritor colombiano Luis Fayad Compañeros de viaje, publicada en 1991. Utilizamos esta creación como ejemplo de una nueva línea en la narrativa colombiana, a finales de los ochenta y principios de los noventa, tendente a realizar reconstrucciones en ambientes urbanos en detrimento de aquellos rurales. Ofreceremos un estudio de ésta desde un enfoque sociocrítico, pues el objetivo del ensayo consiste en evidenciar la manera en la que Fayad ha llevado a cabo una representación de la Bogotá del inicio de La Violencia, fundamentalmente, en cuanto a sus facetas políticas, sociales y personales., This essay analyses Compañeros de viaje, a novel by the Colombian writer Luis Fayad published in 1991. By means of this piece of work, we aim to illustrate the new tendency that appeared in the Colombian novel in the late eighties and early nineties that reflects urban contexts instead of rural contexts. To do so, we apply a social-critical approach to demonstrate the way in which Luis Fayad represented the Violence and most of the political, social and human aspects in Bogotá.

This thesis sets out to explore French writer Michel Houellebecq’s poetics of the novel. It is advanced in the introduction that Houellebecq’s work could be read against the novelist’s 1997 suggestion that “if somebody today was able to craft a mode of expression that was at once honest and positive, they would change the world”. A poem where Houellebecq expresses a need for “unseen metaphors” (“métaphores inédites”) is also put forward as an example of the author’s aspirations within this area. In order to provide a background to Houellebecq’s quest for an honest literary discourse, the thesis first presents the writer’s world view, exploring Houellebecqian ideas about sexuality, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion and the arts – in particular in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Auguste Comte and French poetry theorist Jean Cohen. This account takes place in chapter 2 and the material here consists of Houellebecq’s whole work, i.e. his poetry and his essays as well as his novels. One important point made in this chapter is the difference, as stated by Houellebecq himself, between literary and religious discourse. The core of the thesis, however, is chapter 3 and 4, where Houellebecq’s first four novels Extension du domaine de la lutte, Les Particules élémentaires, Plateforme and La Possibilité d’une île serve as material for the analysis. Chapter 3 attempts to capture Houellebecq’s poetics in relation to literary genre by comparing his novels to the French 19th century realist novel, Menippean satire and Novalis’ unfinished novel Henry of Ofterdingen. Finally, chapter 4 presents an analysis of what is defined as the poetic “dense” structuration of Houellebecq’s novels. Each of the four novels is studied with particular focus on the metaphorical interpretation of their titles as well as on the motifs of sun and light. In this context, Riffaterre’s concept of the “poetic matrix” is loosely used to characterise Houellebecq’s novels as romans poèmes (“novel-poems”). The chapter ends with an analysis of some of the mythical elements found in Houellebecq’s novels, in particular Plato’s Myth of the Androgyne and its relation to the Houellebecqian yearning for love and purpose in life. Both chapter 3 and chapter 4 can be seen as an investigation into the manner in which Houellebecq’s pursuit of “honesty” relies on traditional elements of Western literature such as the three literary genres studied in chapter 3 and the literary imaginary of motifs and myths put forward in chapter 4.

This article aims to clarify the stakes of the recent critical revision of naturalism and to determine how durably its shift in methodological practice and thematic focus has affected literary scholarship. There has been no overall return to previous classical orthodoxies. Issues such as gender and race have gained a permanent standing in the critical landscape. Still, studies focusing on more traditional issues-determinism and the literary appropriation of science, most notably-have been published throughout the neo-Marxist/neo-historicist refashioning of the field. Likewise, scholarship has kept developing in ways unrelated to postmodernist theory. The 1981 publication of the restored text of Sister Carrie indicated how classical scholarship still had the capacity to set the terms of the critical debate. Additionally, advances in literary historical research have brought into the circle of critical discussion ever more texts deserving inclusion into the naturalist corpus. These developments further the emergence of what we might call a postclassical definition of naturalism. The latter term is relevant to discussions of naturalism that integrate the critical input of postmodernism without reducing turn-of-the-twentieth-century texts to test cases for theoretical paradigms. Postclassical scholarship, unlike some essays of the 1980s and 1990s, handles naturalism as a genre with its specific history, thematics, and discursive features., Cette contribution au Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism fait l’état des lieux des approches critiques anglo-américaines contemporaines consacrées au naturalisme littéraire. Les principaux courants abordés sont le néo-marxisme et le néo-historicisme. Ces mouvements, l’article suggère, ont produits des définitions nouvelles du discours naturaliste et de ses enjeux :l’attention ne se porte plus sur les problématiques du déterminisme scientifique mais plutôt sur la contribution du naturalisme à l’instauration de l’économie consumériste et sur sa capacité à construire des rôles genrés., SCOPUS: ch.b, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Toda empresa autobiográfica exige cierto grado de verismo (la "realidad" aludida por Kramarae) por parte de la persona literaria: el "peso de la realidad" en palabras de la poeta. Al reclamar su autoría, Helena Ospina cumple cabalmente con este cometido en Andadura de vida porque nombra y renombra los artificios estéticos que son pilares de la posmodernidad. Al hacer justicia a este juicio, se debe recordar que tanto poetas como autobiógrafas (Helena Ospina es ambas) se interpretan a través de múltiples lecturas. El discurso crítico se simplifica o se complica con la investigación y la actividad textual desplegada en la obra literaria como espacio socio-cultural del lenguaje del "yo", acompañado del socorrido retrato y el autorretrato esparcidos por el libro. La escritura ospiniana da coherencia a la fragmentación consciente o inconsciente del sujeto desenmascarado en una técnica discursiva que hace de su vida cotidiana e incluso de su profesión un acto público como lo es la autobiografía poética.

This paper considers literary realism in the novels of Thomas Pynchon as a means to examine the ways in which realism is embedded within a post-modern context. After first considering some of the problems surrounding the concept of realism – its historical lineage, conflation with philosophical realism and the changing nature of reality itself – I discuss Pynchon’s novels in terms of his technological construction of reality effects within a context of ontological doubt. I suggest that in Pynchon we arrive at what might be called a ‘baroque realism’, which draws on the Deleuzian metaphor of the fold, and is concerned with questions of illusion and reality, paradox and complexity in tune with the ontological uncertainty that characterises the age.

Este trabajo tiene dos objetivos. Por un lado, el análisis del fenómeno paradójico de la obra de Mahfuz: la tradición clásica de los cuentos de Las mil y una noches mantenida en el siglo XX, a pesar de la propia evolución del modernismo. Por otro, la complejidad de una narrativa cuyo fundamento es la reconstrucción histórica del Egipto moderno. Para conjuntar todo ello, Mahfuz ha dispuesto unos mecanismos narrativos relacionados con un tratamiento muy específico de la narratividad y de la ficcionalidad., This work has two objectives. On the one hand, the analysis of paradoxical phenomenon in Mahfuz’s literary work: the classical tradition of the shorts stories of The Thousand and One Nights during XXth Century, in spite of the own evolution of Modernism. On the other, the complexity of the narrative whose basis is the historical reconstruction of the modern Egypt. To combine all this, Mahfuz applies narrative mechanisms related with very special treatment of narrativity and fictionality.

El autor contrapone la recepción que los textos de ambos autores tuvieron en su momento de producción –fines del siglo pasado–, a las lecturas que hoy se hacen de sus novelas. Parte del reencanto de los críticos se debe a que estos textos resisten métodos de análisis narrativo de corte estructuralista, desconstructivo o posmoderno. El lector contemporáneo, a diferencia del decimonónico, tiene plena conciencia del realismo como una forma de ficción, y por tanto su lectura implica un deliberado placer estético. El artículo destaca la dimensión humana de los personajes de novelas como "La Regenta" o "Fortunata y Jacinta", los que siguen apareciendo, a ojos del lector de hoy, como verosímiles y entrañables. The author contrasts the reception that the texts of both authors had in their moment of production—the end of the last century—with the readings that are done today of his novels. Part of the new charm of the criticisms is owed to the fact that these texts resist methods of narrative analysis of a structuralist, deconstructionist, or postmodern type. The contemporary reader, in contrast to that of the 19th century, is plainly aware of realism as a form of fiction, and therefore his/her reading implies a deliberate aestethic. The article highlights the human dimension of the characters of novels such as "The Professor’s Wife" and "Fortunata and Jacinta", those which apparently continue to be, in the eyes of the reader today, truthful and likeable.