British Literature

Our time is characterized by a crisis of representational
practice, fuelled by unprecedented technological and economic changes on a global level. Narrative, therefore, takes a wide variety of forms. This course examines the aesthetics and techniques of film and literature from around the world, and analyses the masters of each art form. Through short stories and plays, we will study different ways a story can be told and the many exciting ways embedded "narratives" (or discourses) can be framed. Similarly, through films and film adaptations of great literary masterpieces, we will study how visual elements challenge the reader's imagination.


Specifically, we examine the relationship between meaning
and narrative structure. The course considers the tensions
between claims for originality and poetic license, between
producers and audiences, between fiction and reality, narrative and history, memory and representation. We will study representative theorists of narratology, such as J. Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and Hayden White. Cutting-edge scholarship on film and the new media will also be introduced, such as Seymour Chatman, Rey Chow, as well as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation. In addition to becoming familiar with major issues in film studies and East-West comparative studies, students will acquire a working knowledge of narrative theory.

This paper aims to account for what I describe as the gentrification of the humanist tradition by strengthening the bond between the epistemic merger of virtue theory and the still emergent category of political economy in eighteenth-century discourses. I use Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) to trace the shifting relation between character and currency to historical transformations in transatlantic slavery and the development of an innovative line of rhetoric capable of registering the historical novelty of ‘creditable’ yet ‘unreal’ value. I argue that the text articulates contemporary fears that the growth and diversification of character through the process of commodity production and exchange rendered virtue in a politically paradigmatic form archaic and remote. In other words, Austen's narrativized account of the advent of paper money and public credit dramatizes how these linguistic transformations resulted in a wider cultural unease about the socially determined indicators of value, character, and race, and meant that not merely the functioning, but the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reification. Yet I caution that the novel's conclusion signals that the success of this program remained anxiously unsettled at the close of the eighteenth century and that it instead acknowledges how the modern dialects of credit precariously subsumed grammars which had traditionally given shape to the material or otherwise ‘real’ foundations of civic personality and virtue.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears (2010) and Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012) are two recent plays of the British stage exploring the minds of women suffering from a psychological or neurological disorder: in Haddon’s play, Kay, an artist, is bipolar; in Payne’s play, Marianne, a scientist, has a brain tumour. Both pieces question the protagonists’ freedom of self-determination and highlight our sense of reality as a construct, using poetic structures which break with the traditional dramatic linearity of the conventional play. Indeed, instead of providing a chronological succession of scenes, they allow the drama to emerge from a random alternation of parallel scenarios to be read as probabilities. The contradictory, disordered fragments that make up the plays thus invite the reader-spectator, in a suggestive way, to imagine the dramatic possibilities of a story which is never set or decided, instead of merely registering a given narrative. As a result, in providing structural metaphors for the female characters’ pathological states, these plays not only reflect on the tentative process of their own writing, they also encourage us to question our perception of reality as a unique object – a view contradicted by the paradigm shift of quantum physics. While Marianne explains the scientific theory that "In the quantum universe, every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginable vast ensemble of parallel universes", Kay seems to experience Everett’s many-worlds interpretation from a first-person perspective, exclaiming, "We think there’s only one world. […] But there are so many worlds, aren’t there, one laid over the other. […] It’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry." This study aims to look at how these two plays, as instances of a “Theatre of Possibilities”, to use Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s expression, explore mind and brain disorders to open a dramatic space which allows for a subversive form of realism to develop, based on the quantum principle of uncertainty. They resort to tropes – quantum principles and phenomena used as thematic and structural metaphors – as a means to portray our cognitive processes and, more specifically, to conjure up the hidden reality of pathological subjective experience, paralleled by the most mind-blowing theories of modern science. I argue that in Payne’s and Haddon’s plays, the dramatic space becomes a place where quantum descriptions of reality and psychopathological distortions of reality tend to converge to form a consistent landscape/mindscape, making room for theatrical realism to be reinvented from the very matter of what should intuitively appear as the most delusional imaginings.

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Polar Bears de Mark Haddon (2010) et Constellations de Nick Payne (2012) sont deux pièces britanniques récentes qui explorent la psyché de personnages féminins souffrant soit d’un trouble psychiatrique soit d’une maladie neurologique : dans la pièce de Haddon, Kay, une artiste, est bipolaire ; dans la pièce de Payne, Marianne, une scientifique, déclare une tumeur cérébrale. En faisant dialoguer santé mentale, fonctionnement cognitif et mécanique quantique, les deux pièces interrogent la liberté et la capacité des protagonistes à s’autodéterminer malgré la maladie et, à travers la mise à mal des fonctions cognitives, mettent en lumière notre perception de la réalité comme construction subjective en utilisant des structures poétiques qui rompent avec la linéarité traditionnelle du drame conventionnel. En effet, au lieu de proposer un enchaînement chronologique de scènes déterminantes dont le déroulé crée progressivement l’univers de la fiction sur le mode indicatif, Polar Bears et Constellations se tissent toutes deux autour d’une alternance aléatoire de scénarios parallèles qui s’appréhendent sur un mode conditionnel comme autant de probabilités décrochées de la flèche du temps. Les fragments contradictoires et désordonnés qui les constituent invitent ainsi le lecteur-spectateur, par touches suggestives et non successives, à imaginer les possibilités d’une histoire sans résolution, qui n’est jamais fixée ou déterminée, au lieu d’enregistrer simplement les avancées d’un récit donné. Cet article vise à montrer que les hésitations et oscillations qui s’élaborent autour des états pathologiques des personnages féminins (et dont elles sont le résultat et le symptôme) mettent non seulement en abyme le processus même d’écriture (dimension métadramatique), elles nous encouragent également à interroger notre rapport au réel (dimension philosophique) non pas tant comme objet unique et extérieur au sujet qui l’observe, mais comme onde de probabilités ou écosystème d’états superposés dans lequel l’observateur lui-même joue un rôle déterminant. Ce changement de paradigme introduit par la physique quantique rencontre ainsi l’instabilité ou l’indécidabilité psychologique. Tandis que, dans Constellations, Marianne explique la théorie scientifique selon laquelle « dans l’univers quantique, chaque choix que l’on fait, chaque décision que l’on prend existe dans un ensemble infiniment vaste d’univers parallèles », dans Polar Bears Kay semble faire l’expérience directe, à la première personne, de la théorie des mondes multiples d’Everett (many-worlds interpretation) lorsqu’elle s’exclame, en proie à une phase maniaque : « On croit qu’il n’existe qu’un seul monde. […] Mais il existe tellement de mondes (so many worlds), n’est-ce pas, empilés les uns sur les autres. […] C’est si beau que ça me donne envie de pleurer. » Ce travail s’intéresse à la manière dont ces deux pièces illustrent ce que l’on pourrait appeler, avec Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, un « Théâtre des Possibilités » et explorent les maladies de l’esprit et du cerveau pour ouvrir un espace dramatique dans lequel se développe une forme subversive de réalisme postdramatique fondé sur le principe quantique d’incertitude (Heisenberg). Les tropes qui s’y déploient – principes et phénomènes quantiques utilisés comme métaphores thématiques et structurelles – permettent de rendre compte de nos processus cognitifs et, plus précisément, de la réalité cachée de l’expérience intime de la maladie, tout en mettant ces expériences en relation avec les théories les plus révolutionnaires de la science moderne. Chez Payne comme chez Haddon, l’espace dramatique devient le lieu où les descriptions quantiques et les distorsions psychopathologiques de la réalité tendent à converger pour former un paysage étonnamment cohérent dans sa relativité et permettre au réalisme théâtral de se refonder à partir de cela-même qui s’apparente intuitivement aux délires d’une imagination malade et à des dysfonctionnements cognitifs, pour finalement poser la question essentielle de notre libre-arbitre.

Ce travail s’intéresse à la poétique de la dissociation mise en œuvre par Helen Cooper dans sa pièce Three Women and a Piano Tuner (2004). Réunies pour mettre en commun leurs talents respectifs de compositrice, pianiste et productrice autour d’un projet de concert, les trois femmes de la pièce font émerger à la surface un trauma enfoui : en constant désaccord, Ella (figure de la mère), Liz (figure de l’amazone), et Beth (figure de la prostituée) matérialisent en réalité trois versions possibles du personnage unique mais intimement divisé d’Elisabeth, dont le fils possible est accordeur de piano. Dans cette pièce marquée par la prolifération du même – non pas idem, mais ipse – comme figure du clivage, où la métaphore musicale sert à évoquer le phénomène de dissonance cognitive, chacune incarne un mécanisme de défense spécifique en réaction à l’inceste subi à l’adolescence par la protagoniste. A la minimisation (Ella), au refoulement (Beth) et à l’exagération (Liz), s’articulent ainsi trois chemins de vie éventuels ou fantasmés mis en dialogue. Cette concurrence permet de dramatiser un conflit intérieur en quête de résolution, en mettant en scène les forces psychiques contradictoires, conscientes et inconscientes, qui animent ce personnage féminin, dont le choix ultime entre plusieurs options – garder l’enfant de l’inceste, le donner à adopter ou bien avorter – semble simultanément avoir déjà été fait et se reporter à l’infini. C’est autour de cette décision laissée hors du temps, qui se cristallise en creux sur la figure du fils reléguée en arrière-plan, dans l’espace du hors-scène, alors qu’il travaille sur l’instrument désaccordé, que s’élaborent les versions multiples du drame originel et d’un personnage féminin dissocié qui vise sa propre réconciliation. Redonnant symboliquement voix à un drame passé sous silence, le seul personnage masculin de la pièce illustre, par son travail, le patient processus de réparation du trauma, alors même que son existence à lui se révèle incertaine, terriblement « optionnelle ». Figure de hantise, l’accordeur de piano apparaît donc comme le maillon central qui à la fois œuvre à cette intime harmonie et l’empêche, invitant par ailleurs à réfléchir sur le processus d’écriture dramatique et le statut du personnage de théâtre, toujours en attente d’incarnation, jamais pleinement actualisé, suspendu entre la page et la scène. La métaphore musicale qui parcourt la pièce, depuis la présence en filigrane de l’accordeur jusqu’à la scène finale du concert, permet ainsi de travailler la figure du rhapsode conceptualisée par Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, qui traduit ici le travail de réintégration psychologique du Réel dans l’ordre Symbolique (Lacan). À la fin de la pièce, l’apparition de Harold, qui répète les gestes d’un père incestueux qu’il n’a pas connu, offre la vision d’un mimétisme impossible : cette coïncidence signifiante, ou « synchronicité » (Jung), évoque la dimension transgénérationnelle du trauma et laisse présager le retour du même. Elle renouvelle ainsi le sens du tragique sur la scène contemporaine en ouvrant l’espace du doute, des probabilités et du malaise. Dès lors, l’incertitude se donne comme la modalité ultime d’un réalisme traumatique de la scène qui, en interrogeant la vérité impossible du sujet, relocalise le drame de l’humain dans l’indéterminé, ce dont l’accordeur de piano, œuvrant dans l’ombre des dissonances, se fait l’image.

An early study of representations of Jews and Judaism in British literature a the turn of the 20th century.  The overall picture is best characterized as ambivalence - Jews were becoming more recognizably human and their symbolic function was changing.

Acknowledgements Barbara Korte: Facing the East of Europe in Its Western Isles: Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives East and West: Mirrorings Elisabeth Cheaure: Infinite Mirrorings: Russia and Eastern Europe as the West's "Other" Mike Phillips: Narratives of Desire - A Writer's Statement Christiane Bimberg: 'A glimpse behind the scenes', 'trying to capture the very soul of things Russian': Literary Representations of Intercultural East-West Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes Kapka Kassabova: From Bulgaria with Love and Hate: The Anxiety of the Distorting Mirror (A Writer's Perspective) Two Poems Kapka Kassabova: Our Names Long and Foreign Kapka Kassabova: The Travel Guide to the Country of Your Birth Journeys, Encounters, Cultural Translations Elmar Schenkel: To Russia with Love: Maurice Baring (1874-1945) Dirk Wiemann: A Russian Romance: 1930s British Writers as Wishful Participants in the Soviet Revolution Sissy ...

Niniejsza praca ma na celu przedstawienie teorii mitotwórczej J. R. R. Tolkiena, z perspektywy jej wymiaru duchowego. Od czasów antycznych teorie, tudzież filozofie, opierały się na myśleniu abstrakcyjnym i miały za zadanie wyjaśnienie ówczesnemu człowiekowi otaczającej go rzeczywistości. Nie inaczej było z Tolkienowską teorią, na potrzebę której ukuł swój termin Mitopoeia. „Duchowy wymiar Tolkienowskiej Teorii Mitotwórczej” – tłumacząc tytuł tej pracy na język Polski – przekłada się na wiele sfer życia Tolkiena. Pierwsza z tych płaszczyzn, to przypisywany mu przez niektórych krytyków program filozoficzny. Na tym wymiarze skupia się pierwszy rozdział tej pracy: „The Philosophical Disenchantment.” Jednak jak sugeruje tytuł, stanowi on zaledwie tło wszelkich dalszych poszukiwań, gdyż oferuje badaczom Tolkienowskiej myśli jedynie jej racjonalizację i demitologizację. Życiowa pasja Tolkiena, filologia komparatywna, daje wystarczające zrozumienie jego fenomenu, a przynajmniej zdaniem kilku krytyków. Niezaprzeczalnie stanowiła ona inspirację, a zarazem była narzędziem, którego Tolkien użył podług swej ogromnej wiedzy z zakresu językoznawstwa. Pomimo, iż w tej pracy „Comparative Philology” jest omawiana w drugiej kolejności, to właśnie ta dyscyplina była źródłem znajomości filozofii u Tolkiena. Podążając krokami Tolkieniany nie można jednak na tym poprzestać. Trzeci wymiar, jakże metafizyczny i filozoficzny w swych założeniach i implikacjach to odkrycie Owena Barfielda, znajomego Tolkiena. Barfield odkrył Teorię „Jedności Semantycznej,” co Tolkienowi przyszło łatwo przyjąć do wiadomości: język jako narzędzie może również być transcendentny, ze względu na swe początki. Dla Tolkiena była to jedna z tych rzeczy, która pozwoliła mu uwierzyć w smoki. „Philological Philosophy: Let There Be Dragons” – jest zatem łącznikiem między dwoma światami. Jednakże Tolkien nie był byle fantastą, oderwanym od ziemi. Teoria Barfielda, obudziła w nim nadzieję. Pomimo to, tak jak każdy rozsądny i racjonalny człowiek Tolkien musiał dowiedzieć się, „czy to prawda.” Potrzebował czegoś, aby idee odnieść do nie tyle rzeczywistego doświadczenia, ile prawdy. Prawda, bowiem wyzwala. Mimo nieustannego negowania jego wiary, to właśnie ona umożliwiła mu dalsze rozważanie tych teorii. I nie da się inaczej wytłumaczyć jego mitotwórstwa, jak przez uznanie jego wiary. Miłości do Boga, która była tak głęboka, że aż sięgała wiedzy teologicznej. Tego, między innymi, tyczy ostatni rozdział tej pracy: „Myth Becomes Truth.”
Liczba stron: 51

Adapted for the screen by Sir Richard and Charles Wood and directed by Sir Richard Eyre,  Iris tells the life story of famous British philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch. Her husband, John Bayley writes two books entitled Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris with reference to the health problems, Murdoch has towards the end of her life.  Relying on these two books, the movie Iris came out in 2001, three years after Murdoch’s death. In the movie, it is shown how Iris suffers from loss of brain power and Alzheimer as she gets older and how this situation gives pain both to her and her husband, Bayley.  Hence,  in this study, how lives of elderly and their loved ones change after illnesses and their pain will be analyzed in reference to Iris Murdoch’s real life story as it is depicted in the movie, Iris.

This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.

My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theory of world literature that relies upon epistemological limits. My contention is that this shift in his novelistic project can be understood as a career-spanning interest in the dynamic between constraint and freedom that generic conceits force upon us in any conceptualization the world. The genre conventions of The Buried Giant, and Never Let Me Go signify not unbounded fantasy, but indeed the opposite: a writer hemming his style and characters into worlds in which structures necessary for understanding have been reduced to
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.

In Adam Bede, George Eliot explores the way a society divides its members into categories and how these categories contribute to the formation of an individual’s identity. In the mid-nineteenth century authors in the naturalist tradition often discussed this dialogical relationship between individual and society, the specific roles for social gaze, the labeling and degrading. Eliot shows an acute of these labels that no one shapes identity without their influence. According to Nancy Anne Marck, Adam Bede introduces the theme of “emerging social consciousness” where the characters gain broader awareness of human interdependence through an experience of suffering (447). This is particularly evident when examining Eliot’s characters of “lesser fortune.” Once we’ve investigated how Eliot portrays these negative social forces throughout the novel, the labeling and the stigmatization, we will return to how Eliot addresses the larger question permeating her novel of education: how one judg...

In Writing against War, Charles Andrews integrates literary analysis and peace studies to create innovative new ways to view experimental British fiction in the interwar period.

The cataclysm of the First World War gave rise to the British Peace Movement, a spectrum of pacifist, internationalist, and antiwar organizations and individuals. Antiwar sentiments found expression not only in editorials, criticism, and journalism but also in novels and other works of literature. Writing against War examines the work of Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Siegfried Sassoon, Rose Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf to analyze the effects of their attempts to employ fiction in the service of peace activism. It further traces how Huxley, Woolf, and others sought to reconcile their antiwar beliefs with implacable military violence.

The British Peace Movement's failure to halt the rise of fascism and the Second World War continues to cast a shadow over contemporary pacifist movements. Writing about War will fascinate scholars of peace studies and literature and offers valuable insights for current-day peace activists and artists who seek to integrate creativity with activism.

Available here: http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/writing-against-war

Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.

Marine insurance made a significant contribution to British success in her wars of the long eighteenth century. As both a defensive and offensive weapon, it allowed British sea-borne trade to continue, and foiled French designs to destroy the English economy. Underwriters were instrumental in ensuring that merchant convoys were protected by naval escorts, and that capture-and-ransom was preferred by enemy privateers to the seizure of prizes. Parliamentary legislation used marine insurance to encourage private adventures to support the war effort, despite the relatively small size of the navy in comparison to the merchant fleet.

Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen was an acclaimed dramatist during his times. He had a great pride in his country Norway. In 1877 he was influenced by the social structure of his country. He wanted to extol the values of truth and freedom in his people with his works like The Pillars of the Society (1877) and then in 1879 A Doll's House which questioned the suppressed role of women in the society. He is best known for creating female characters in dramas like Hedda Gabler (1890) and A Doll's House. Nora the protagonist in the beginning of the play seems to be content with her life. She prances about and exhibits child like qualities. When Torvald enters the scene, Nora's childlike behavior becomes more patent. Torvald calls her pet names "little lark", "little squirrel", and "little miss extravagant". However Torvald"s true character is revealed when he accuses Nora for the forgery and tries to disown her, unaware of the fact that she had forged the signature for his sake. His attitude suddenly changes when everything is sorted out. She decides to walk out of her marriage. Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist and essayist. He was a prolific writer who drew his writings from his personal experiences. In the play Miss Julie he confesses his hatred for the opposite sex. Julie suffers an identity crises. She blatantly displays her disregard for class and gender conventions. It is mentioned at the beginning of the play that the people of the estate are celebrating St John"s eve with dance, song and revelry, and Julie mingles with the servants. Henceforth there is a discussion of Julie"s behaviour between two characters indeed known to be the people of the low class. Her behaviour is quite absurd , at one moment she is forward and at next she is coy. Jean warns her against her impetuous behaviour. Julie further makes advances but Jean warns her of injury to his reputation. She wavers between the high and the low class identity and hence she is confused of her true identity. She has inherited the primitive intense passion of her mother and the aristocratic tendencies of her father. Her antics result in her downfall, in contrast to her Jean rises above her when she reveals her background of common birth. The play, A Doll's House, emphatically stresses upon the status of women how their roles should be perceived in the context of the social norms, related with marriage and motherhood. It stresses the norms and functions of the Victorian women at that time. Further the play had been criticized on certain aspects of Nora. Strindberg was known to be a misogynist a, "hater of woman." Strindberg was more of a confessional writer and much of his writings are an output of his three disastrous marriages. __________________________________________________________________________________________

Table of contents:

Remerciements
Avant-propos
Introduction. Réfléchir (sur) la sensation (Lucie Lagardère, Anne-Laure de Meyer, Marina Poisson)
PREMIÈRE PARTIE : PHILOSOPHIE ET ART
Chapitre 1.
La couleur : de la sensation à la création. Turner et Locke. (Maxime Chapuis)
Chapitre 2.
Regards croisés entre Hume et Bramante : la sensation humienne face au Christ à la colonne. (Florence D'Aupias d'Alcochète)
DEUXIÈME PARTIE : HISTOIRE ET REPRÉSENTATION
Chapitre 3.
La sensation comme outil politique : les représentations anglaises de l'exécution de Charles Ier au XVIIe siècle (Anne-Laure de Meyer)
TROISIÈME PARTIE : LITTÉRATURE ET CRÉATION
Chapitre 4.
Feeling et construction imaginative chez S.T. Coleridge. (Lucie Lagardère)
Chapitre 5.
La sensation dans The Scarlet Letter : de l'oppression du sujet à la création libératrice. (Marina Poisson)
Chapitre 6.
Le dérèglement des sens dans Naked Lunch de William S. Burroughs. (Edouard Marsoin)

DAL SITO EINAUDI: Géricault e Courbet, Manet e Cézanne, Vuillard e Magritte, Oldenburg e Freud. Diciassette grandi pittori, perlopiú fra Romanticismo e Modernismo, e un unico dilemma: lasciare che la potenza dei loro quadri parli direttamente agli occhi, al cuore e alla mente, come vorrebbe Flaubert? O piuttosto mettere lo sguardo in parole e affidare a quelle la forza dell’immagine? Il grande scrittore Julian Barnes anela alla prima via, ma fortunatamente cede alla tentazione della seconda, e lo fa in un percorso di raffinata originalità in cui si sbilancia, si diverte, ci incanta.



Sono le parole di un grande scrittore e non di un professionista del mondo delle arti figurative o di un accademico, quelle che Julian Barnes mette in conversazione con le immagini di alcune grandi opere del canone occidentale tra il 1850 e il 1920, dal maturo Romanticismo fino al Modernismo e oltre. Il punto di partenza è il dipinto noto come La zattera della Medusa di Géricault, di cui Barnes segue le fonti storiche nel naufragio della fregata francese Meduse nel luglio del 1816, per spostarsi poi sulla storia dei bozzetti preparatori e dell’autoreclusione del pittore per otto mesi durante il lavoro sulla grande tela, fino a offrire risposta su che cosa trasformi la catastrofe in arte, dopo aver trasformato l’evento in immagine. I saggi trattano dipinti di Manet, Bonnard, Vuillard, Degas, Cézanne, ma anche di Vallotton, Braque, Picasso e Magritte, fino agli inquieti ritratti di Lucian Freud, con la loro spietata ricerca dell’anima della carne, e al gigantismo giocoso di certa Pop Art destinata, nel giudizio di Barnes, a invecchiare male e approdare a una senilità precoce e un tantino ridicola. Si tratta di testi eruditi e brillanti che garantiscono tuttavia un piacere ulteriore a chi vi si accosta, quello di suggerire in controluce alle figure descritte potenziali personaggi o scene di romanzi di Barnes. Accade con l’analisi di certi interni borghesi di Vuillard, con l’attenzione tutta narrativa riservata alla posizione dei piedi nel dipinto di Manet L’esecuzione dell’imperatore Massimiliano; accade nel racconto delle vite a confronto di Braque e Picasso. Barnes si sbilancia, si diverte, ci incanta. E, dopo aver sommessamente contraddetto per quasi trecento pagine le indicazioni del maestro Flaubert, secondo il quale i grandi dipinti non vogliono parole a illustrarli, Barnes liquida se stesso commentando cosí le opere dell’amico Howard Hodgkin: «Questi quadri parlano ai miei occhi, al mio cuore, alla mia mente. Perciò, basta con le parole».

This is the last catalogue of the Gandophiana collection and library. More then one hundred 18th and 19th Centuries novels have been added since then, all in the original language and, if not in first edition, just published few years after.
We'll publish soon other thematic catalogues, focusing also on the other shelves of our library: Italian, French and latin Literature from 16th to Early 20th Century.

The pre-publication praise Natasha Brown received for her debut novel Assembly (2021) from renowned writers like Bernardine Evaristo or Ali Smith is quite remarkable. The author had been virtually unknown to the larger public before winning one of the London Writers Awards in the literary fiction category in 2019. As a young Black British woman of Jamaican descent, Brown meets the criteria defined by Spread the Word, the organisation behind the Awards assisting underrepresented writers to develop and publish their work, with an overall aim of reflecting diversity and enabling inclusivity. Assembly highlights the discriminating intersections of race, gender and class in today’s Britain and tells a story of social ascendancy, of a Black female narrator-protagonist who has overcome her lower-class background and has managed to obtain a top position in a London-based finance company. While this partially invites an autobiographical reading – Brown, who holds a Cambridge degree in mathematics, also made her career in the finance industry – Assembly is a far cry from celebrating the glory of making it to the top and instead exposes this goal as utterly questionable.

The British artist Ralph Rumney never adhered to a fixed sense of self. Of the little documentation that exists of his life and work, most is comprised of his own disparately collected thoughts, letters, notes, interviews, images and recollections. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1934, he experienced an unsettled and repressive childhood in Wakefield, prompting him to leave home ‘by stages’. His adolescent years were spent lodging with the ‘notorious communist’ Edward Thompson, hitching to London in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, and then travelling around Cornwall meeting ‘all those Cornish artists like Pat Heron and Terry Frost and Brian Winter — and Barbara Hepworth’, until, in order to avoid arrest as a conscientious objector, he moved where the currents bore him, between London, Paris, Milan and eventually settling for a time in Venice. The writer, painter and only member of the British branch of the Situationniste International, was often the one behind the Rolleiflex camera.

本文评介了温特森(Jeanette Winterson)的自传《寻常便好，何必快乐(Why be happy when you could be normal)?》及其第一步小说《橘子不是唯一的水果(Oranges are not the only fruit)》。文章视图说明，世界是强大而险恶的，个体是渺小而脆弱的。然而，世界上总有像温特森那样的个体，他们明知自身渺小却不向强大的外力妥协，他们明知自己脆弱却依然在险恶的环境中坚持信念，他们不仅改变了自己的命运，也改变了自己生活的这个世界。事实上，正是因为有了他们和他们的自由意志，这个世界才在浑噩、堕落、投机与虚华之间，有了变得更好的可能。

This essay argues that L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) fits into the critical tradition of the Bildungsroman in one specific sense: its attention to matters of deception. First, this plot of formation and development involves a necessary apprenticeship in deception: a moral training that has links with everyday practices of concealment in linguistic construal, social etiquette, and interpersonal trust, whose presence I track in the novel. Second, the novel’s framing screens the salient context of its production, the “angry decade” of 1950s Britain. I consider Hartley’s conservative distance from other writing on childhood and youth in the period, suggesting that his representation of deception relates to his critique of social and moral erosion in the postwar period. In the loose vehicle of a Bildungsroman where development is compromised, Hartley presents a novel whose formal structure, in its use of deceptive tropes, affords both its turning away from historical difficulties and its indirect critique of failing morals.

This book review of Emma Young's important monograph calls for more inclusivity in short story theory.
Article also accessible here: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/14/1/144/5316465

Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpy028

Contrary to what it might seem like, Stella Gibbons does not create a world. While Cold Comfort Farm is definitely a place like no other, it is actually a place like many others. Entering into the universe of rural fiction so prevalent and popular during her time, Gibbons borrows and exaggerates many of the prevailing motifs made popular by writers long since forgotten. Gibbons's choice to set her novel in the oversexed and animalistic realm of rural Britain between the wars is on the surface an effort to lampoon and satirize novels that offered the reader little more than base entertainment. Her acerbic wit sets the stage for an outright lampooning. However, Gibbons provides the readers more, but certainly not less, than brilliant one-liners and hilarious descriptions of people and places in service of a satire. The heavy-handed symbolism, overt allusions, caricatured character presentations, and excessively overt foreshadowing lead up to an ending that has been described, somewhat accurately, as saccharine. What is easy to miss, however, is the sheer satisfaction the last chapters provide when the reader is open to the role of Robert Poste's child as an alternative lense through which to view the world of Cold Comfort Farm. Gibbons gleefully guides her audience from expectations of a farm filled with animalistic people guided solely by reproductive impulse to an understanding of rural people as fully and genuinely human, worthy of respect and affection.