Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations: A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie (original) (raw)
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2015
A novel cannot narrate time, experience or memory of the past accurately but can reconstruct history and then recount the events of history and violence. The literary devices and narrative techniques used to write history also have to be unusual to depict the past: especially the history which holds memory of war, colonization and destruction. Postmodernism proposes that history cannot be absolutely narrated as the authenticity and referent cannot be relied upon. So a subversive approach in the narrative technique-like non-linear narration, ironic representation, blending of history with fiction and magic-realism-are unconventional and postmodern approaches that can depict the violence and trauma of war, colonization, racism and displacement in writings or novels narrating history. Therefore this dissertation attempts to examine how history and violence are treated and depicted in three different postmodern novels, set in three different geographical contexts. The three novels Time's Arrow, Midnight's Children and Disgrace remarkably depict Nazi holocaust, India's history, tracing 30 years after Independence, and Post-Apartheid condition respectively. This paper will also explore how and why the postmodern techniques such as backward narration, use of magic realism, representation through irony are used in the novels to deconstruct the previous form of narrative techniques and to deal with serious themes and issues like war, colonization, displacement, racism and trauma. Finally the paper will examine and critique the representation of violence through the events in the novels. Mehruna 2
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2017
This article examines the implications of history in Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips's Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), and Colum McCann's TransAtlantic (2013). History plays an important role in discriminating and distinguishing the proper characteristics of certain nations and people of a specific historical era. The purpose of the current paper is to scrutinize the historical components in the selected novels. These novels incarnate the authors' visions of the silenced minorities depicted in the fictional plots. They embody the sense of individual sufferings at the time of human devastation and retardation caused by historical events. In essence, my study focuses on the authors' abstract voices which are uttered through the fictional characters' dialogic voices. That is, the authors portray the neglected and suppressed voices which need alleviation and freedom. Thus, the authors do not tend to express their authorial voices directly in the novels. Instead, they convey their literary meanings through the characters' voices. Thus, my analysis will focus on both the authors' implied voices and their manifestation in the characters' direct fictional voices. The methodological analysis of the study will concentrate on the way by which the authors present the peculiarities of their fictional characters and discourses.
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Whose perspective, whose truth, whose version of history can survive? Postmodern historiographic metafiction challenges the authority of the truth by highlighting alternative or small partial histories that have been neglected, ignored, untold, forgotten, bypassed, distorted, hidden, changed, omitted, eliminated, and eradicated. In this respect, history cannot be described as one concrete formulation or as a stable history but a collection of fragmented multiple histories. Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980) both deal with the historical facts, one in a playful and the other in a magical way, questioning what would happen if "the" history is rewritten by the other, ex-centric, excluded, unseen, unclean, abnormal, the victim or the ordinary people whose personal stories shape and deconstruct "the" history. What Barnes and Rushdie offer is "a" history of the world rather than the totalizing nature of "the" history of the world, demonstrating many possible partial histories and personal (hi)stories or (her)stories interrelated to the grand history or national history. This article examines how Barnes and Rushdie portrays an alternative historical rewriting by blurring the line between the factual and fictional history that makes readers question the assumptions about the objectivity and truthiness of history. Öz Kimin bakış açısı, kimin hakikati, kimin tarih versiyonu ayakta kalabilir? Postmodern tarihyazımsal üstkurgu, ihmal edilmiş, göz ardı edilmiş, anlatılmamış, unutulmuş, atlanmış, çarpıtılmış, gizlenmiş, değiştirilmiş, atlanmış, ortadan kaldırılmış ve silinmiş alternatif veya küçük taraflı tarihleri vurgulayarak gerçeğin otoritesine meydan okur. Bu bakımdan tarih, tek bir somut formülasyon ya da istikrarlı bir tarih olarak değil, parçalanmış çoklu tarihlerin bir koleksiyonu olarak tanımlanabilir. Julian Barnes'ın On 1 This article is a revised and extended version of the paper presented at romanların her ikisi de eğer kişisel öyküleri ile "tekil" tarihi şekillendiren ve yeniden yapılandıran öteki, ek-santrik, dışlanmış, görünmeyen, kirli, anormal, kurban ve sıradan insanlar tarafından tarih yeniden yazılırsa ne olacağını sorgulayarak-biri latifeci diğeri de büyülü gerçekçi bir yolla-tarihsel gerçekleri ele alırlar. Barnes ve Rushdie'nin sunduğu, büyük tarih veya ulusal tarihle karşılıklı ilişkili olan birçok olası taraflı tarihleri ve kişisel (eril-dişil) öyküleri açımlayan tümleyici doğası ile "tekil" dünya tarihinden ziyade "herhangi bir" dünya tarihidir. Bu makale, Barnes ve Rushdie'nin, okuyucuların tarihin tarafsızlığı ve doğruluğu hakkındaki varsayımları sorgulamasına neden olan gerçekçi ve kurgusal tarih arasındaki çizgiyi bulanıklaştırarak alternatif bir tarihsel yeniden yazımı nasıl tasvir ettiğini inceliyor.
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This article investigates the impossibility of bearing witness. It exposes a negative dialectics that dwells on the lacuna at the heart of every act of witnessing, an act that is made possible by its own limitation which revolves around the death of the other. One cannot bear witness to death from inside death. One can only bear witness having escaped death. Dwelling on Agamben’s concept of the impossibility to bear witness, we concentrated on a few of Lanzmann’s interviews in the documentary film Shoah and interrogated such issues as memory, solitude, death, both as they are at work in the narratives of the survivors and how they are dealt with by the art that comes in the aftermath of the Holocaust. We explored what art tells us about the meaning of solitude and how it speaks (and to what extent that speech is possible) on behalf of the other. We were interested in how art grasps the narratives of absence and death and how it interrogates and builds on the lacuna of memory and of witnessing at the same time.
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Narration and Historiography in McEwan’s Selected Novels
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 2015
As we saw in these three novels rewriting history may bring change of perspective, ideology and moral awakening for the reader. Linearity of history is challenged through depicting fragmented and multi-voiced personal histories. Historical traumas, although painful, bring an opportunity for revision and correction of our deeds. Without them human beings become complacent and immoral. For McEwan, writing about historical traumas is a solution to make historical traumas unforgettable and reminded to help us deal with our present situation which is vulnerable, violent and traumalogical. In these novels, self-reflection and self-transformation happens through writing about history