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Cultural Memory in Contemporary Fiction: F. R. Leavis’s and Matthew Arnold’s Intellectual Presence in A. S. Byatt’s Work
Alexandra Cheira
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 97-107
Received: 12 March 2024
Accepted: 22 April 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.11
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Abstract: The concept of “cultural memory” serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt’s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to literature, culture, and criticism. As a result, this article begins with a discussion of the conflictual continuity and/or sustained ambivalence in Byatt’s critique of Leavisite criticism. It does this by first looking into Leavis’s position within the larger literary criticism context and then focusing on how Leavisite criticism fits into Byatt’s critical thought. Thus, Byatt’s assertion that Leavis made English literature the focal point of university education is examined by first looking into Leavis’s Cambridge. Lastly, Byatt’s criticism of Leavis’s idea of English studies is looked into in the context of critical evaluations of English literature’s place in higher education, at the same time that Byatt’s work is used as a prism to analyse the Arnoldian matrix of the Leavisite concept of “moral seriousness”. Afterward, Byatt’s critical work is critically examined in the framework of culture, society, and literature, continuing Arnold’s legacy.
Abstract: The concept of “cultural memory” serves as the foundation for this article, which explains the complex relationships between two prominent figures in the history of English letters, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, as well as how A. S. Byatt’s own work was influenced by their combined, though occasionally diametrically opposed, approaches to litera...
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“The Shifting Light of History”: Addressing Philosophy of Memory in Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch
Elena Bollinger
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 108-117
Received: 12 March 2024
Accepted: 15 April 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.12
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Abstract: This article discusses the narrative construction of various philosophical reflections on cultural memory in Julian Barnes’s novel Elisabeth Finch. It addresses the dichotomy between recollection and oblivion, presenting a memory process as a the “problem of forgotten evidence”, thoroughly discussed in today’s Cultural and Memory Studies. While contemporary scholars and philosophers aim at reflecting on the role of memory in metaphysics and epistemology, mainly relating the process of recollection either to personal identity, or the experience of time, space and epistemic rationale, the dimension of collective memory, and its foregrounding role in everyone’s self-perceptiveness, receives a considerably reduced critical attention. The literary analysis of Elizabeth Finch seeks to problematize this divisive understanding of functions of memory, proposing instead to consider the semantic complementarity of various processes of recollection/forgetting, connecting the narrative representation of events that one has personally experienced and the officially stated collective renderings of factual memory. It resists considering personal remembering and collective forgetting as ostensibly competing rationales, proposing to delve deeper into a tightly crafted relationship between the perception of one’s identity in time and epistemological framework of collective experience mostly focused on the officially stated dimension of memory. Revisiting discourses on religion associated with the narrative construction of borderlands in Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch, this article contributes to reconsider collective memory and counter-memory not as mutually exclusive, but as synthetized and put into productive motion narrative dimensions. The intertextual articulation of discourses on religion fosters new theoretical perspectives for rethinking counter-memory not only as a mode of recovering silenced and contested versions of the European history, but also as a means of providing multidimensional and transcultural interpretation of the collective past. Perceived as a form of discursive resistance to any kind of political and social dominance, the narrative construction of “forgotten evidence” elucidates the complex post-dialectical relationship between official collective memory and marginalized counter-memory.
Abstract: This article discusses the narrative construction of various philosophical reflections on cultural memory in Julian Barnes’s novel Elisabeth Finch. It addresses the dichotomy between recollection and oblivion, presenting a memory process as a the “problem of forgotten evidence”, thoroughly discussed in today’s Cultural and Memory Studies. While con...
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‘Lift me up!’: The New Major Discourses of Care and Ageing in Doris Lessing’s The Diaries of Jane Somers
Zuzanna Zarebska
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 118-124
Received: 12 March 2024
Accepted: 13 May 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.13
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Abstract: The genre of Reifungsroman considers different temporal aspects of individuation. It aids and assesses the capacity of an older person to re-story their life, enter meaningful relationships, make amends with the past and productively evolve as an individual. Instead of focusing solely on the present, time is seen as a continuum in Reifungsroman with a special emphasis on the past events and narratives. This article will trace the late life transformation that Jane and Maudie undergo as all life is mutable and finite, awareness of which can make us more compassionate. In The Diaries of Jane Sommers, written by Doris Lessing and published in 1984 the narrator tells the story of the relationship she constructs with an elderly friend, Maudie, whom she meets in the streets of London and who triggers her identarian metamorphoses. Maudie embodies all the stereotypes of an old woman, she has crone-like features and an unforgiving temper. From the physical maladies to emotional suffering, Jane Sommers is herself a source of discomfort and displeasure to those around her. As the narrative unravels and cleanses Jane from rampant egoism, as she bathes after each visit to Maudie’s home, she deconstructs her old narratives and transitions into an empathetic self. As Maudie shades her trauma in words and being bathed by Jane, both undergo a process of healing. Maudie dies with dignity and out of this sacrificial moment of catharses, the meeting of the now and then, new Jane is born. She erases the old wry Jane, an ambitious and vain journalist in a women’s magazine, only concerned with success and everlasting youth, who spends time and her financial gains on material goods. This article will look into the discourses on ageing and the genre of Reifungsroman in The Diaries of Jane Sommers, Lessing’s fifth novel, published under a pseudonym and separately as two separate books: The Diaries of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could against criticism from various editorial boards. I will analyse the processes of resignification of the minor discourses and their relationship towards the major discourses on growing older. I will consider Jana and Maudie as a two-faced Janus and a dyad of the old and the new, the ich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful: a crone, a witch and young woman whose polyphony of voices can re-story the narratives of women and ageing.
Abstract: The genre of Reifungsroman considers different temporal aspects of individuation. It aids and assesses the capacity of an older person to re-story their life, enter meaningful relationships, make amends with the past and productively evolve as an individual. Instead of focusing solely on the present, time is seen as a continuum in Reifungsroman wit...
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The Archaeology of Absence in Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone
Margarida Pereira Martins
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 125-131
Received: 12 March 2024
Accepted: 7 April 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.14
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Abstract: Approximately 1.4 million Indians were recruited to the First World War. Despite their role in the war and the high number of deaths, most of the literature in English on the Great War has been narrowed down to British experience. However, in recent years their stories have been emerging through fiction, in academic research and educational projects resulting in a more complete picture of the war and who was involved. A British arts education group engaged students in a project designed to teach and share the stories of forgotten soldiers from World War I. Writing about the project in The Guardian in 2018 Kamila Shamsie claimed the aim was to teach school children about the war and the involvement of non-British recruits whose narratives had up till then been unknown. In academia, respected scholars such as Santanu Das or Claire Buck have undergone thorough research on the representation of Indian recruits through an analysis of literary texts and artefacts states that war memories of the Indian sepoy whose stories were left behind and forgotten on the battle ground. According to Das, the lack of stories by Indian recruits does not mean that history cannot be rectified since it is possible to recover the experience and memory of the recruits. Recently emerging literary representation of the Indian recruit provided historical insight into their experience shedding light on new perspectives of the War. The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of Indian recruits and their experience of World War I in Kamila Shamsie’s 2014 novel A God in Every Stone. I argue that through fiction, it is possible to construct a broader and more inclusive understanding of this historical event as well as to uncover deeper complexities and anxieties on the Indian colonial experience.
Abstract: Approximately 1.4 million Indians were recruited to the First World War. Despite their role in the war and the high number of deaths, most of the literature in English on the Great War has been narrowed down to British experience. However, in recent years their stories have been emerging through fiction, in academic research and educational project...
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The (Re)imagined Shades of Alice Gray: The Counter-Memory of a Woman-as-Witch in Stacey Halls’ The Familiars (2019)
Inês Tadeu Freitas Gonçalves
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 132-137
Received: 11 April 2024
Accepted: 27 April 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.15
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Abstract: Historical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Familiars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray’s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existence. Halls achieves it by (re)imagining Alice Gray’s plight within the historical context of the Pendle Hill witch-hunt in 1612 Lancashire. Not only does Halls give Alice her historical voice back, but she sets the historical record straight by counter-memorialising Alice Gray as a woman-as-witch, i.e., a seventeenth-century woman othered and presumed to practise witchcraft, in this instance, merely for being an impoverished unmarried woman and a midwife. In this way, Halls’s narrative invites us to empathise with Alice’s plight, to understand the injustices she faced, and to appreciate her resilience. Besides, (re)creating Alice’s witchcraft story, Halls fleshes out her heart-wrenching emotional turmoil. Moving away from the cold historical recorded facts, Halls interweaves Alice’s troubled personal past as an abused young woman and a grieving and loving stepmother with the unfortunate contemporary events of the Pendle Hill witch hunt. As a result, we are offered a more than plausible (re)imagined rationale for Alice’s witch hunt predicament and acquittal, which cannot be found or is even hinted at in the historical records. Thus, Halls culturally endows Alice’s seventeenth-century marginalised historical counterpart with a contemporary gender-empowered mnemonic (re)imagined counter-memory. Moreover, Hall’s active remembering of Alice Gray politically (re)contextualises and (re)frames this woman-as-witch of the Pendle Hill witch hunt of 1612 previously wanting. Also, the (re)imagined counter-memory of Alice Gray challenges the dominant historical narrative and underscores historical fiction’s power in reshaping our understanding of the past. Ultimately, Halls endears and humanises this woman-as-witch of Pendle Hill and provides us with the many shades of Alice Gray.
Abstract: Historical fiction is a way of dealing with painful pasts and traumatic events as counter-memories. Long-forgotten events are (re)created in a safe space in historical fiction. Set in seventeenth-century Lancashire, in her modern historical fiction The Familiars (2019), Stacey Halls narrates Alice Gray’s painful past as a woman-as-witch into existe...
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Julian Barnes’ England, England: Beyond Postmodernism and Dystopia
Majid Sadeghzadegan
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Issue: Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2024
Pages: 138-149
Received: 17 April 2024
Accepted: 12 June 2024
Published: 23 September 2024
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20240904.16
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Abstract: Julian Barnes’ England, England lends itself to many types of critical readings as it garners many concepts and themes as diverse as identity, memory, history, nationality, rise and fall of a nation, and individual crises. All these are incorporated satirically, if not farcically, into the life a Martha Cochrane whose life milestones run in tandem with the three parts of the novel, which nostalgically cite how a nation’s glory ebbs away gradually. The present paper sets out to explore England, England in particular dimensions in order to come to better terms with its embedded themes, especially Englishness and English identity. With an esoteric literary aura and a resolute voice in portraying Englishness, its memory and the aesthetics thereof, the novel seeks to illuminate many hidden codes and messages in the guise of humor and satire. To unravel such encryptions, one needs to decipher them initially through an investigation of postmodernist elements and staples, such as paradoxes, simulacrum and parody, which constitute the most compelling plank of the thematic contents of the novel. Along this path, prominent names such as Linda Hutcheon and Baudrillard will emerge whose theoretical implications will be high on the critical agenda of the paper. On a different note, England, England, as a distinctly dystopian work, happens to equally send strongly nostalgic messages regarding the concepts of Englishness, past, present, and their memory through the portrayal of a dystopian wasteland. The ending portion of the paper will endeavour to shed light on how Barnes deploys such dystopian air and poetics to embellish his work further concerning Englishness. Ultimately, the papers will infer that the fall of grand narratives such as Englishness, identity, and memory is what it takes for a nation to rebuild and re-invent its identity.
Abstract: Julian Barnes’ England, England lends itself to many types of critical readings as it garners many concepts and themes as diverse as identity, memory, history, nationality, rise and fall of a nation, and individual crises. All these are incorporated satirically, if not farcically, into the life a Martha Cochrane whose life milestones run in tandem ...
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