Trangressing Fiction Fictionalizing Transgression

Postmodern Openings, 2021

An artistic interpretation of historical facts is quite relevant in the literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. Prose works on historical themes are valuable and interesting in that they create an illusion for readers to be present in a certain period of historical time, and it is the artistic modeling of events that makes priceless facts of history completely disappear. The historical past is an inexhaustible material that word artists have been referring to for centuries, creating the best examples of fiction. Prose texts of historical subjects are perceived by each next generation in a new way, historical events and phenomena are interpreted from different angles, the activities of famous figures of the past are widely covered. Non-fiction literature is a kind of literature that is on the verge of artistry and documentary. The main non-fiction genres are a diary, autobiography, biography, memoirs, confession, letters, etc. On the one hand, non-fiction literatur...

Ars Artium, Vol. 7, 2019

Creative writers author many works depicting history while silhouetting it against some plot. Here it is very pertinent that historical facts should not be trivialized, also popular version with some biases should not be pressed into service during fictional account. The need to safeguard the historical sacredness of facts is very important since political leaders pander to popular history to whip up hatred. This is all the more important since vested interests are inclined to appropriate history by projecting their own version. Such subversion if accepted poisons the minds of the gullible sections of society. They feel that their forefathers had been wronged and therefore, seek to avenge the real or imagined perpetrators' progeny in the present. In the subcontinent, all the vested interests cutting across the barriers of religions have been responsible for the mayhem caused over the decades by "the so-called injustice" (my emphasis). Such prejudicial histories must be contested and the fallacious arguments be dismantled in light of looming threat to the survival of minorities in particular. Writing history over the last few centuries has become a muddled area as historians have got themselves entangled in the cobweb of promoting parochial interests. While throwing light on depiction of history and the pitfalls involved when it is foregrounded to some story, anecdotes etc., the paper descants upon locating the positioning of veiled historians in creative writing while touching upon the issue of partition in particular. A few Indian novels were taken for the study.

英文学評論, 1970

There may have been times in the past when the serious novelist's proper subject and concern were, in more ways than not, compatible with the commonculture, when his creations could further the creative processes of the society he lived in, but that unfortunately for the serious novelist at least, is not now the case. At his best the novelist today is undermining the concerted efforts of his society. He is the reader's enemy, seeking it often seems to annihilate good with bad indiscriminately. His best work is subversive, and yet it is to the best in his work, the act of sabotage, that his readers must be won. The fact that contact between the serious novelist and the reading-public has broken down so badly in this century seems to me plain evidence that the price in cultural revolution demanded

Novel, 2011

Thinking of the novel as an imaginative organ of, first, Western culture and now a world literature, I turn to relationships between and among media. We feel ourselves in 2010 amid a great change, and it makes me think of an earlier change, registered in Victor Hugo's 1832 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The novel is set centuries earlier, in 1482. Frollo, the archdeacon of the cathedral, looks from the church to the book on his desk and declares, "This will kill that": the book will kill architecture as the prime expression of human mind. The very characteristics that we now attribute to digital media against the book Hugo saw as advantaging print over stone: "In its print form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, ethereal, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and forcibly took hold [s'emparait] of a century and a place. Now it makes itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself [s'éparpille] to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once" (218). Hugo here is powerfully suggestive, yet he obviously overstates things: not only architecture, but even great architecture survived its murder by printand so the novel in our age of aftermath. Hugo annunciates what I call "the Age of the Novel," say 1830−1960. The novel emerged as a major cultural player, achieved considerable dominance, and then its role began to diminish. This three step alludes to Raymond Williams's terminology of emergent, dominant, and residual, but editorial constraints prevent my engaging his further key distinction between alternative and oppositional. The novel in the West became a going concern as the term literature began to consolidate its modern meaning around 1830, just as print culture was becoming immensely more powerful. To elucidate the double process by which a new sphere of literature emerged, and within it the institution of the novel, think of Shakespeare. By reshaping the figure of Shakespeare, critics established the theoretical basis for the modern Western idea of literature. It is like Hugo looking back from 1832 to 1482. From the viewpoint of the later full power of print, Shakespeare's first folio looms like a sphinx-but only after the folio was intellectually reprocessed into the scripture on which literature is founded. Starting in the eighteenth century and running into the nineteenth, Shakespeare was canonized, both nationalized and universalized, as part of a larger cultural struggle for authority that prolonged and widened the battle between Ancients and Moderns. The notions of authorship, genius, development, psychology, and individuality were constructed to praise Shakespeare and then became available to analyze the whole new body of novel writing produced in the nineteenth century. These resources helped to make possible the novel's dominance. Around 1830, the transformation and acceleration of the mechanical power of print gave Hugo the confidence to write his retrospective prophecy. Since then, Novel

Journal of Literary Theory, 2020

This issue of the Journal of Literary Theory is devoted to the »History of the Modern Practice of Fiction«. As this title already signals, the idea for this Special Issue stems, on the one hand, from a certain way of thinking about the phenomenon of fiction developed in literary theory and philosophy and, on the other hand, from research carried out in the historical disciplines.

Language, 1998

Arabic and Greek literature of the Diaspora, (1900-today). Introductory paragraph/general overview To what extent does history inspire literature? In what ways can writers converse with historical events and historical experiences and reproduce them in fiction, prose or even poetry? What ways of managing material (evidence, testimonies, memories and other sources, etc.) are required by writers? In other words what are the "tools" required to achieve objectivity that often becomes uncertain, when the writer fails to get rid of his own personal ideology, identity, or even personal experiences? In other words, τo what extent can history be transferred /transformed into a literary work? Wanting to recreate the fact in a novel for example, when referring to real historical events, do we run the risk of falsifying history? Literary theorists have debated these questions through the years, with various conclusions. J. Barnes maintains that through a myth, or its ordered "lies" as he describes them, truth can be represented more effectively than in a simple recounting of an event; and that, despite its 'subjectivity', myth seeks and mirrors the truth in its own ways*. While, philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin points out that history not only inspires literature, but is also shaped by it; and that without imagination history seems sterile or ' immobile'. As a matter of fact he argued that the (European) novel was the purest cultural embodiment of historical becoming, and that, consequently, the theory of the novel was an act of supreme historical self-consciousness. In the many essays and notes he dedicated to the history and theory of this genre, he insisted on both its uniqueness and its centrality to the modern age 1 .

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 2015

The 'turn to history' over the last few decades has become a central preoccupation within contemporary cultural criticism, as is witnessed, for example, in the theoretical trend of 'New Historicism.' While the 'history turn' in the humanities has assumed an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in contemporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and intriguing manifestations. Indeed, historical poetry, drama and particularly fiction, comprising texts at least partly set in past periods, have become a defining feature of the literary scene in diverse regions of the world. Surveying developments in contemporary British fiction, for example, James English stresses the importance of "the putative Renaissance and refashioning of historical fiction in Britain since the 1970s" (11), thus highlighting the many transformations that fiction's most recent engagement with history has also brought. Indeed, the distinct historical focus in fiction produced at least since the late 1970s is only comparable to that in the classic, nineteenth-century historical novel. Even though formalist modernism's experimental engagement with history and temporality has recently been highlighted, not least by Hayden White, 1 it is the long realist novel that, as White paradigmatically argues, competes with historiography itself in the way it 'emplots' facts and events to render a 'truthful' sense of historical reality. However, contemporary literature may be said not to reproduce 'reality' but rather to reflect on the relation between reality, fiction and history, often alluding to the ways in which realism and modernism have implicitly represented and thus conceived this relation. In her influential study, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon privileges a new kind of historical fiction which she terms "historiographic metafiction," distinguished by formal selfreflexiveness while, paradoxically, laying claim to historical events and personages (5). Although Hutcheon acknowledges the modernist legacy of problematising

Revista Transilvania, 2020

Orbis Litterarum, 2015

The article explores the problematic assumptions underlying the traditional view that literature deals with the realm of the possible and history with the realm of the actual. This dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how literary fiction provides interpretations of actual worlds, and how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past world as a space of possibilities. This argument is developed by analysing Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The article contributes to developing narrative hermeneutics as an approach which, first, suggests that both historiography and fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and, second, is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell's novel shows that the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally with an ethically problematic lifeworld without uncritically adopting the protagonist's perspective. One important way in which fiction can produce insights into history is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means, a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing and understanding history.

ACADEMIC WRITING AND BEYOND IN …, 2010

ii To my late grandfather, Paul L. Goulet (1935Goulet ( -1998, who first taught me to wonder at, rather than fear, the world.

Cultural Intertexts, 2015

The article highlights the influence of the novelists and philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the emerging and development of the modern novel as a free and outstanding form of literature, and what is more – as a form of art. The paper points out the impact of such names as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and Malcolm Bradbury, personalities that sought to change the status of the novel through their works. Due to these authors there appeared and flourished the tradition that we now name the "modern" novel. By the turn of the century, the novel was shifting to art; it was becoming a more interesting and more influential form of literature; it was aspiring to become a far more complex, various, open and self-conscious form, one which, in a new way, sought to be taken seriously as "art".