Graduate Student of English Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran (original) (raw)
Related papers
University of Kurdistan, 2019
The present study attempts to demonstrate how different texts with various author attitudes depict the oppressed subjects of Stalin's time. For this purpose, Roland Barthes' notion of 'Modes of Writing' and Michel Foucault's concept of 'author' are employed in reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time (2016). The two novels mainly address the politically subjected characters in the Stalinist regime with different standpoints of author figure. Originating the authors' modes of writing in the mentioned texts, on one hand, and the analysis of author-function, on the other, shall satisfy the comparative tendencies in this research and show how these theoretical frameworks can help a critical understanding of the texts. The subjects described in these novels, although similar in their situations and characteristics and subjected to the same institution of power, are narrated from different author roles and provide a somewhat similar subjectivity. The author figure as a subject of ideology and the text as a created object of an author can be thoroughly analyzed within the proposed theoretical framework; therefore, the main objective of this paper is to explore the depicted subjectivities of similar subjects from different standpoints of distinguishable author figures.
A Possible Poetics of the Subversive Prose under Communist Regimes
2017
The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the politics of Stalinism. Influenced by Vincent Jouveʼs analysis of the mise-en-texte of values, the paper emphasizes on undermining rhetorical strategies such as ellipsis, narrative focus or sympathy towards certain characters. One of the first occurrences of the ephemeral genre known as “the novel of the obsessive decade”, Marin Predaʼs Risipitorii (1962) is used as a case study for defending a poetics of subversion.
APPROACHING AN AUTHORITARIAN LITERARY DISCOURSE: THE STALINIST PROCESS IN POLISH PRODUCTION NOVELS
This study explores the Stalinist process in Polish production novels. Produced from 1948 to 1955 through interaction between the political and literary discourses of Stalinism, these novels exemplify the extreme subjugation of literature to politics. This project argues that production literature served to substantiate the political raison d'être of Stalinism in Poland under the slogan of constructing socialism. The thesis examines the Stalinist search for a literary formula structuring the novels according to political demands. Our dominant sociological approach combines discourse analysis with socio-cultural, literary and contemporary feminist perspectives. This interdisciplinarity makes possible a comprehensive investigation of three production novels in relation to documentary and literary sources, both historical and contemporary. The interplay between the discourses is explored within the dynamics of Stalinism: the fictional representation is scrutinised for its cohesion, its compliance with political discourse, and its effectiveness in supporting Stalinism. Expanding the perspective of research, this study fills a gap in existing knowledge of the genre by exploring production literature as a politically determined process. The project is the first to interpret the Stalinist socio-political objective of building socialism as a new literary theme. As well as being governed by the building of socialism, these production novels also argue for it in an attempt to substantiate Stalinism. The study argues that the search for the literary representation of Stalinism developed in three phases: the introduction, reinforcement and sustaining of socialism. The evidence, as seen in the literary representation, shows inconsistencies between the political and literary discourses as well as historical and contemporary facts. This study, therefore, demonstrates that production literature exposes contradictions within Stalinism itself, which unmasks the fallacies and artificiality of the Stalinist socio-political venture in Poland. In so doing, this project not only contributes to an understanding of interrelationships between politics and literature under Stalinism, but also advances our knowledge of Polish Stalinism.
Colloquia
A discussion on methodology for researching soviet literary space (Concluding discussion of the conference “Literary Field Under the Communist Regime: Structure, Functions, Illusio,” October 7–9, 2015. Moderated by Prof. Violeta Kelertas, with the participation of Prof. Marina Balina, Prof. Katerina Clark, Dr. Violeta Davoliūtė, Prof. Evgeny Dobrenko, Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich, Dr. Vilius Ivanauskas, Prof. Aušra Jurgutienė, Dr. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Dr. Dalia Satkauskytė).
LangLit, 2019
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a Physics Professor was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. He was a moral and spiritual leader, whose books were noted as much for their ethical dimension as for their aesthetic qualities. Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was not easily earned. It was the fruit, in part, of bitter personal experience in Stalin's labor camps. But the lessons he drew from his experience, and the manner in which he voiced the sufferings of three generations of Soviet victims in powerful novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle secured for him the role of conscience of the nation Later, his The Gulag Archipelago showed unmatched physical and moral courage in depicting a torrential narrative mixing history, politics, autobiography, documentary, corrosive personal comment and philosophical speculation into one of the most extraordinary epics of 20th-century literature. Gulag was a system of places of confinement where there were many violations of human rights. It is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the Soviet Secret Police and is nowadays a vivid symbol of the lawlessness, slave labor and tyranny of the Stalin era. Gulag had a great impact on the minds of those who have undergone imprisonment and also on the thinkers who wanted to eradicate it from its root and make aware the entire humanity its disastrous consequences in the life of Russians. This paper is an attempt to focus on the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Dolgun and also women writers who have dared to write on such issues. Among them are Anna Larina, Evgeniia Ginzburg and others.
European Journal of Political Science Studies, 2018
Marxism in Literary or Art in our 21 St centuries is built around a debate of methodology and application when a critic is requested to evaluate a literary text or genre. Though disparities of thoughts in the point of views of some scholars such as: Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser etc. have been involved in scientific debates whether Marxism as a sociological approach finds a better reliable application in literature. Marxism as a political ideology of Karl Marx was not designed for literary study, literature in terms of form, politics, ideology, and consciousness, numbers of research skills are required for a critic in almost literary components. While the question of methodology and application in literary analysis is still unsettled in the areas of literary studies so, it appears very difficult and ambiguous to some literary students and English teachers in our local universities in Bukavu (DRC) when prior involving in literary evaluation. Furthermore, sometimes students get involved into confusion mixing theories of new literary criticism or traditional literary criticism for Marxist literary interpretation. The work has enriched the debate by suggesting a critic engaging into the Marxism analysis to base his interpretation framing linguistic features as observable phenomena in literature or art in all its form affecting characters' life flashing back to Karl Marx ideology of class struggle to avoid him draining into confusion of interweaving his analysis with either traditional or new literary school criticism. Determining the focus of literary theory according to the text and genre, classical categorization distinguishes between genres and their own sub-genres: poetry, plays, (drama), novels and short stories (fiction).Research must be focused with regards to the area of application of research paradigms. The common topics dealt with under the traditional literary criticism have been: Plot, Setting, and Narration, Point of View, Characterization, Symbol, Metaphor, Genre, Irony/Ambiguity. Such literary analyses have been useful for the discussion of the following issues: How the various components of an individual work relate to each other. The tradition has ignored to deal with a question ‚how concepts and forms in literary works relate to larger political, social,
La fattualità del male: la Nonfiction Novel e le sue versioni sovietiche
Europa Orientalis 42, 2023
Two books which appeared almost simultaneously on both sides of the Iron Curtain share similar, analytical and unusual, indications as to their genre: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: “The true account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences” (the author would usually refer to his text as “Non-fiction Novel”) and Lev Ginzburg’s The Abyss “A Narrative Based on Documents”. A similarity can be traced on the thematic plan as well: In Cold Blood is centered on the murders’ story, while The Abyss is based on the records of a trial to collaborationists serving in the SS during the war and taking part in the mass murders of Soviet civilians, reporting for the first time in the Soviet Union about their personal histories: both authors undertake an inquiry on the nature of Evil – they are both, probably, written under the impression of Eichmann’s trial and possibly of Arendt’s book – and, in order to undertake this task, they both challenge traditional literary categories. Is there a necessary connection between the thematic and the generic plans? A definitive answer can hardly be reached. A parallel reading of the American debate on Capote and the Soviet one – not on Ginzburg in particular, but about the blooming genre that at the time was beginning to be called “documentary literature” - can help shed some light. Both Capote and Ginzburg aim at a narrative of reality clearly detached from novelist traditions, however different those were in their respective countries. In the United States, this meant setting oneself apart from a modernist tradition that had renounced to any pretense to depict society; in the Soviet Union, to set oneself free from the Socialist Realist canon, doubting of its capacity to give a meaningful depiction of the horrors of the Twentieth Century (a tradition which will develop up to Svetlana Aleksievich). In both cases, anyway, a criticism of the conventions of Realism was implied, clearly resounding, at a glance from today, the late avant-garde. In the Soviet debate of the Sixties, however, any reminding of it was significantly missing – the only mention of Sergei Tretyakov and the “literature of fact” are in quotations from an American review of Capote. The disappearing of Tretyakov from the Soviet debate has yet to be explained: was censorship the reading, or was his name totally unknown to the younger writers? A renewed interest in the avant-garde can, anyway, be observed in the Soviet Union in the Sixties, clearly connected with the atmosphere of destalinization. A resurgence of avant-gard experimentation is characteristic for the Western world in the same era. Both Capote’s and Ginzburg’s texts are conceived in this atmosphere, and after the Eichmann trial, which is considered a milestone in the development of a new attitude towards the Shoah and its witnesses. On both sides of the divide, it seems – and as several further instances show - it was the attempt to “write poetry after Auschwitz” that caused to question novelistic conventions.