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Virginia Woolf: A Pattern In Reality

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The thesis attempts to explore the problem of a critical response to a fiction essentially experimental and inaccessible to conventional critical terminology. The critical premise finally reached agrees with Virginia Woolf's own perception that a book is "not form which you see but emotion which you feel". Accordingly, the thesis examines a series and pattern of imagery that can be found moving through her three major novels - Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves - so condensing and conveying,-aesthetically, a distinct emot'ional reality and consequent vision of death and so life.

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Melville's aesthetic strategies

Heather Ann. Raff

The exploration and discontinuity of Melville's early life are reflected in his writing career. Before settling into silent conventionality, he wrote remarkably diverse prose. His aesthetics were individualistic: the page was an arena in which to deploy experimental strategies. The novels from Typee to Moby-Dick can be regarded as action of mind as it explores ways of seeing and describing ... [Show full abstract] reality. But these experiments proved that vision is inevitably guided by the well-stocked mind and that Nature is an everchanging subjective construct. In Pierre, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence-Man--the fiction that immediately followed these discoveries--the action is externalized. Melville now explores the artist's use of definite forms rather than his mental positings. Paradoxically, this new aesthetic came to serve his final purpose: of disengagement that was subsequently fully manifested in the silence that followed.

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The Moral Vision of Technology in Contemporary Latin American Fiction

January 1993

Jane Robinett

The relationship between philosophy and literature has always been both interesting and frustrating. Philosophers and writers of fiction often explore the same ideas — ideas dealing with ethics, aesthetics, logic, and metaphysics, with morals and values and how we make choices, with the nature and meaning of human experience, and with the laws which underlie knowledge and reality. But they do not ... [Show full abstract] approach these questions in the same way. Philosophy deals explicitly with ideas, and abstracts and examines them in a detailed, systematic manner. Literature deals implicitly with ideas by embodying them in the feelings and actions of characters, and the situations in which they find themselves. Although structured, as any art form is, literature does not set ideas out in the rigorous, systematic lines which philosophy does. For a novelist to do so would be counterproductive. Novelists often make rather dreary philosophers, just as philosophers often make rather dreary novelists. Nevertheless, literature and philosophy present us with complementary viewpoints on ideas which concern us all deeply. To say that philosophy and literature represent theory and practice may be simplistic, but it begins to explain the relationship between the two.

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Novels from the Incubus. Dreamy imagery and symmetric structure in Berecche and the War and A Day

January 2010 · Critica Letteraria

V. Baldi

This essay focuses on the short stories written by Pirandello since 1929 and published in the two last editions of Novelle per un anno. By connecting a psychoanalytical approach - that starts from Freud and leads to Matte Blanco - to a detailed historical reconstruction of Pirandello's travels to Berlin and Paris, Baldi rejects the definition 'novelle surreali' because in these short stories the ... [Show full abstract] emerging of the subconscious does not efface reality but leads to a new and different kind of "realism of presentation".

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English translation of classical Chinese poetry

June 2018 · Orbis Litterarum

Classical Chinese poetry and English poetry show huge differences, mainly with regard to literary imagery, sense, rhythm, sound, genre, and format. Hence, English translation of classical Chinese poetry based on equivalence is not an option. This article intends to explore translation as a creative, cross‐cultural practice. We shall suggest that “mirror‐shared reality” may play a critical role in ... [Show full abstract] this practice. This notion refers to an intermediate construction made by the translators with the aim of bridging different “realities” of classical Chinese poetry and English poetry with regard to knowledge, tradition, and reference. The construction of a “mirror‐shared reality” is a type of creative practice based on both realities, not just one of them. By selecting some of their relevant shared features, the two realities will mirror each other in certain essential aspects and produce an aesthetic experience among English readers theoretically akin to the experience among their Chinese counterparts. Our discussion is based on a number of English translations of classical Chinese poems, in particular translations by Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲 [Xǔ Yuānchōng]), building on his own theory, “Threefold‐Beauty” (三美论 [sān měi lùn]).

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May 2011 · Synthesis an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies

Michael Hollington

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January 2007 · Sociological Inquiry

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Peter L. Berger's two novels, The Enclaves (1965) and Protocol of a Damnation (1975), are more than mere diversions from his discursive sociological writing. An examination of both his fiction and nonfiction reveals the homology Berger sees between sociology and literature as forms of consciousness, as complementary versions of “the precarious vision.” Berger uses his fiction to experiment with ... [Show full abstract] the cracks that reveal an “other condition” lying behind the ordered, taken-for-granted reality of everyday life. The novels also serve as suggestive treatises on how one may “cheat” fictive social reality in order to pursue an authentic existence.

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Terry Pratchett has created a fictional world, an integral part of which is a detailed and sophisticated system of place names. In his novels there are realistic names giving us an illusion of the real world and often serving as a characterization as well. Association is typical for a further kind of literary toponyms, the names refer to actual places on Earth, they activate our general cultural ... [Show full abstract] knowledge encyclopedia and play with the reader and his/her interpretive abilities. The last group of toponyms is purely artistic, they were created as a language game, probably the most important criterion was their aesthetic appeal. The names often deliberately destroy the illusion of reality and probability (we can talk about the anti-illusionist function), they demonstrate their artificiality, that they are a part of the author’s game. Whatever the motivation, meaning or possible allusion, all toponyms in the fictional world of the novels operate in the same way. They locate the story and help in spacial orientation within the Discworld, the names are an integral part of how the characters perceive and experience their space.

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Things, Distinction and Decay in Nineteenth-century French Literature

January 1993

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Crosscultural aspects in modern literary fiction: Daniel Kehlmann

January 2015

J. Kazakova

The study deals with the interpretation of some dominant features of reality in the novels by the famous Austrian writer of the XXI century Daniel Kehlmann and the famous Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. Using the aesthetical types of analysis, the reseacher explores the crosscultural aspects of the novel and the peculiarities of the writer's style. Special attention is paid to the ... [Show full abstract] virtual reality and the phenomenon of artistic reality in the novel which is to the reseacher's mind not unlike one of the style of Vladimir Nabokov. One of the main advantages of the novel pointed out by the reseacher of the article is that the reader is enabled to judge the values for himself, to interpret the text in his own way and decode the reseacher's message according to his personal competence and knowledge of the world.

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September 2014 · Itinéraires

Michèle Vallenthini

This article proposes a new threefold reading perspective on Sade’s novels. We propose firstly to read the character Léonore from Aline et Valcour as emblematic of an aesthetics of the turn of the eighteenth century; secondly, to unfold the idea of a feminine “triumvirate” (Justine, Juliette and Léonore) instead of the commonly assumed duality (Justine and Juliette) in Sade, based on the revised ... [Show full abstract] understanding of Léonore; and, thirdly, to point out the obvious recurrence of the feminine triptych in Sade’s historical novels La Marquise de Gange, Adélaïde de Brunswick and Isabelle de Bavière. There are actually three instead of two myths of the feminine in the imaginary universe of the marquis de Sade. Thus, Léonore and Adélaïde represent what could be called a “third Sadean sex/gender,” the only authentic literary utopian vision of the “woman of the future” responding to the new reality of the post-revolutionary era.

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May 1995 · Literator

M. Grobbelaar

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What is to Console Us?: the Politics of Deception in Woolf’s Short Stories

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Selma Meyerowitz

Virginia Woolf’s short stories have frequently been viewed as lyrical fiction that is experimental in form and concerned with a quest for reality.1 This approach, however, denies a political vision which shapes most of the short fiction just as it does Woolf’s feminist essays and her novels. As in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Woolf’s political analysis of social experience in the short ... [Show full abstract] stories is presented through female characters whom she considers a society of outsiders. Because they are denied social and class privilege, women reveal the destructive nature of a classbound society and its effects on individual consciousness and interpersonal relationships.