Sabine Horning, Transparent Things: On Art's Opacity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Doris Lessing’s the Memoirs of a Survivor as an Experimental Dystopic Novel
International Journal of Language Academy, 2021
Since the publication of her novel The Golden Notebook in 1962, Doris Lessing's works have started to evolve with the same recurrent types of crises. The protagonist of the story experiences a massive breakdown or trauma, the environmental setting where the protagonist resides exhibits signs of decay. In addition, her main characters are always very sensitive, wise, and possess a strong political, social, emotional, and critical vision. The Memoirs of a Survivor published in 1974, is yet another piece of art by Doris Lessing. The novel has been regarded as a great illustration of dystopia as the critics of Lessing have reported. However, it is crucial to see what literary and non-literary features of the novel have made them to call this a dystopian work. This research aims to analyse Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor through a qualitative approach with thematic analysis method in the light of critical evidences implemented on the work. Moreover, this paper also analyses the preceding and following works of Doris Lessing to estimate the extent to which this piece of fiction has deviated from her previous trends of novel writing. The detailed analysis of The Memoirs of a Survivor concludes that the novel has followed conventional process of crisis as explained in the previous novels of the author such as The Golden Notebook and Briefing for a Descent into Hell and has represented the decline of a community due to weird human practices till the ultimate level of absolute demolishment. The demonstration of dark visionary novel has remained a fundamental aspect of Lessing's writing which possess clear signs of "dystopia" and "apocalypse," however, her style of writing fiction has been observed as experimental which is debatable to be classified within the fictional genres.
Respectus Philologicus
The essay collection "Doris Lessing: Border Crossings" (2009), claims the writer's persistent impulse to cross borders of all kinds-gender, maternity, class, ideology, geography, etc., and explores the impact it has on Lessing's novels and autobiography. It therefore offers a new critical and theoretical approach that revises a traditional methodological paradigm of Lessing studies. This article extends the field of exploration by examining the transgressions of borders in the author's novel of 1973 "The Summer Before the Dark". Despite the extensive scholarship on the writer over the last years this novel remains among those which are less explored. However, it is relevant to the new theoretical scheme suggested by the authors of the volume. A central protagonist, Kate Brown, breaks restrictive gender and age codes as she is moving into "the darkness" of her new life order. The controversy of this move is announced in the title of the novel but towards its end the text suggests a transformation that enables the heroine to revise her agency inside and outside the domestic space, at the same time, through a set of narrative techniques and imagery, it problematises such a change.
Female psyche in Lessing's selected fictions: A critique
Center for Academic Research and Development, 2024
The current literary study aims to investigate the psychological and emotional conflicts and the traumatic experiences of the strong female characters depicted in Doris Lessing's selected fictions. Unmatched in all literary genres worldwide, author Doris Lessing depicts both the societal structure of her age and the basic issues facing women. Lessing looks for fresh ways to portray the experiences of a woman writer who is stuck. She was raised in Africa, developed into an engaged but disillusioned communist, is a politically engaged writer, and occasionally she even plays the role of a mistress or wife. This qualitative study focuses on how Lessing aims to portray, via her astute and nuanced approach, the psychological struggles that women have while balancing marriage and love, motherhood and career, the injustice of double standards, the isolation that single career women experience, and the hollowness of marriage in the eyes of society and the established order. Through her feminist works, she attempts to rouse the women's community to fight against patriarchy. Lessing portrays her female characters with various societal issues and male-female perspectives.
Overtones Ege Journal of English Studies Vol. 1, 2022
Abtract: Speculative fiction has always provided a suitable ground for contesting social constructions such as strict gender roles and conventional views on sexuality. In the 1970s especially, with the influence of second wave feminism, speculative fiction authors began to depict the political struggle of women in fictional universes which presented alternative modes of subjectivity and social structures. Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) make use of the historically-situated nature of speculative fiction to narrate their experiences, reflect personal as well as political struggles in fictional alternate and future worlds which are indeed reflections of the here and now. Both Lessing and Russ combine autobiographical and fictional elements in their exploration of female subjectivity and experience. This preference leads to a more genuine, less generalized impression of female identity and solidarity. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, described as “an attempt at autobiography” by its author, Lessing integrates personal experiences from her own life into the text while exploring a post-apocalyptic, or more precisely, a post-“Crisis” world. Although the events take place in a fictional future, they are influenced by the author’s past in real life. Similarly, in The Female Man, Russ adds autobiographical elements into the text, especially her experiences as a lesbian feminist and her struggle to exist in male-dominated environments. FM presents four different alternate narratives, two of which take place in the future (one is a utopia and the other is a dystopia); however, all of them express a different version of women’s, and of course Joanna Russ’, struggle in life. Both FM and Memoirs therefore reflect the multiplicity and plurality of the voices of women, and by employing speculative fiction tropes, they point to diverse ways of confronting oppressive ideologies both collectively and individually.
This paper aims to explore the breakdown of communication in the novels written by Doris Lessing, and investigate into the nature of experience that is conveyed despite the failure of language. Lessing's fiction is abundant with the symptoms of breakdown, and the heroines' experience is often rendered by means of fragmentation of the narrative form. Anna Wulf, the heroine of The Golden Notebook, can only deal with her experience by writing about it in separate notebooks; the protagonist of Memoirs of a Survivor delivers a most confusing memoir in which facts and events intertwine with dreams and visions. According to Lacan's theory of the three registers of human experience, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, language fails in the face of the real. Nevertheless, the twentieth-century trauma theory allows for investigating into the realm of the real. Critics such as Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman emphasise the importance of reaching for what is without words, reading despite the silence and fragmentation. By applying their approach to Doris Lessing's fiction one can truly appreciate her recognition of the human condition in the modern world, and read beyond the breakdown of communication. Despite the fact that Doris Lessing's fiction has earned her worldwide recognition and acclaim, not to mention the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, it has also received a considerable dose of critique. The 2007 Nobel Prize, which was awarded to "that epicist of the female experience, who with 95
IJRAR, 2019
Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winner of 2007 is one of the outstanding novelists of modern English literature. In her novels, there is space for memories, retrospection, introspection, foreshadow, flashback and terrible recognitions that are hued by torment and trauma. She displays a well-crafted plot, occurrence, meditative or philosophical description that suggest the workings of the deep layers of the mind. Her writing embodies and extends open panoply of subjects explicit to late-twentieth-century consciousness: race; the conflict of the generations; psychological dimensions of male female relations; philosophical inquiries regarding life; the nature and planes of the real world; exploration of psychological illness, and modes of consciousness. Her writing portrays realism, and is packed with the technique of myth and speculation. In spite of her genius, she set her characters against the backdrop of human history to demonstrate their experience.
Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande portray the sociological effect on the psyche of women. Through their fiction they provide a wealth of understanding in women’s issues, such as psychological, emotional and spiritual crisis experienced by the Indian woman folk. The traumatic psychic experiences faced by women in the conservative male-dominated society and their survival are the main focus of the novels of Desai and Deshpande. They seek liberty at least in the house itself not from outside, without showing their artificial sentiments. She portrays the interior landscape of the mind and psychic elements completely. Her later novels show a sharp shift in her themes. The protagonists try to escape from convulsions and tensions. The Women characters are trying to come to a new understanding and reinstate themselves in the society. Like Desai’s novels Deshpande’s are also dealt with the problems and personal agonies of women in our patriarchal society. Deshpande’s protagonists set out in search of self-expression and self-fulfillment. The women characters crave for freedom from oppressive bonds exercised by the patriarchal society. They try to face the challenges of contemporary life imposed upon them and reconstruct the norms and patterns of womanhood. They want to find out their identities. Her novels dealt with various forms of suppression faced by women in our society. Deshpande wants to establish a new dimension of presentation. Despande presents women who prove themselves adaptable. Keywords: Stereotyping, neur