Out of the Closet, into the World: The Power of Puppets in Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist

The present paper examines the tropological significance of miniature figures in Jessie Burton’s novel The Miniaturist. By highlighting the ways in which the narrative’s figural system negotiates the structural and conceptual dichotomies of human/doll, object/thing, interiority/exteriority, authenticity/artificiality, and mobility/stasis, this reading of Burton’s novel attempts to show how the literary text rethinks the social life of things and the ambiguity of subject-object relations in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Aligned with the commercial circuits of material culture, which underscore the moral ambivalence of the novel’s Dutch society, material objects are shown to exceed their decorative function and reveal their destructive purchase on human life.Pasitelkiant naujojo materializmo, daikto teorijos, Jurijaus Lotmano, Kennetho Grosso ir šiuolaikinės fenomenologijos samprotavimus apie medžiagiškumą bei subjekto ir objekto santykius, straipsnyje aptariama lėlės figūros reikšmė anglų rašytojos Jessie Burton istorinio romano Miniatiūristas (2014) tropologinėje sistemoje. XVII a. Amsterdamo visuomenės kontekste pagrindinės veikėjos lėlių namelis įkūnija kertines semantines įtampas, struktūruojančias pasakojimo dinamiką: išorė / vidus, žmogus / lėlė, daiktas / objektas, mobilumas / statiškumas, autentiškas / pseudo gyvenimas, gyvenimas / mirtis. Homologinio santykio tarp romano veikėjų ir daiktų ar dalykų išryškinimas analizėje leidžia daryti prielaidą, kad lėlės pasakojime veikia, viena vertus, kaip neautentiško gyvenimo tropas, liudijantis vartotojiškumo ir modernaus subjektyvumo genealoginę samplaiką, ir, antra vertus, kaip išmanaus medžiagiškumo (sapient materiality) figūros, kvestionuojančios subjekto / objekto dichotomiją Vakarų metafizinėje tradicijoje. Kitaip tariant, tiek žmonės, tiek lėlės Miniatiūriste gyvuoja daiktiškumo kontinuume, kurio reikšmės ekonomiją struktūruoja etiškai įpareigota santykiškumo ontologija (relational ontology)

Multikultūralizmo problema Kanados literatūroje

The present article addresses the problem of multiculturalism in Canadian literature. While focusing on the major concerns of Canadian critical discourse on multiculturalism and ethnic minority writing, this theorising of Canadian multicultural literature highlights three areas of research – the definition of the notion, studies of postcolonialism and postmodernism and the simulative character of literary politics – that have been instrumental in conceptualising our understanding of Canadian multiculturalism and its reflections in literary texts. Alongside the theoretical observations about the problematic nature of the dominant forms of literary criticism on Canadian multiculturalism, the article offers a hypothesis of the multicultural aesthetic as a system of recurrent tropes that construct our reception of multicultural writing. Eventually, to illustrate the ambivalences of the multicultural aesthetic in Canadian literature, the article provides a brief reading of Anita Rau Badami’s novel Tamarind Mem as an example of the simulated multicultural exotic

Intertekstinis Margaretos Atwood romano Tarnaitės pasakojimas skaitymas

Since its publication in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale has prominently secured its place among the most widely read novels of Canadian literature. The present article offers a reading of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a narrative built on intertextual relationships with other texts, which are directly or implicitly referred to in the novel. This analysis of the novel emphasizes reading as a dynamic semiotic process and employs Gérard Genette’s notion of transtextuality to look into the narrative’s semantic field from the perspective of its paratextual, intertextual and metatextualrelationships. While focusing on the Bible as the major intertext that structures the semantic space of Atwood’s narrative, this intertextual reading of The Handmaid’s Tale also looks at the ways in which the biblical context of Atwood’s novel correlates with the paratexts of Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal and sufi philosophy to delineate the dominant strategies of the reading and interpreting of Atwood’s text. Finally, the article analyzes the metatextual level of Atwood’s novel and points out the ways in which the writer ironizes the intertextual nature of her own text and fictionalizes its intertexts, thereby suggesting the impossibility of narrative and interpretative closure

Imperial (s)kin: The orthography of the wake in Esi Edugyan’s "Washington Black"

The publication of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black has placed the novel among other works of history and art, which recall the material and epistemic violence of institutional racism and the lasting trauma of its legacy. Thus by interlacing, within the context of black critical theory, Yogita Goyal’s and Laura T. Murphy’s examining of the neo-slave narrative with Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of the wake and Alexander G. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus as critical frames for the discussion of racialized subjectivity, I consider how Edugyan’s use of the conventions of Victorian adventure literature and the slave narrative rethinks the entanglements between the imperial commodification of life and the scientific agenda of natural history. Given how the narrative emphasizes the somatic register and its epidermal terms as a scene of meaning, I bring together Frantz Fanon’s idea of epidermalization, Steven Connor’s phenomenological reading of the skin, and Calvin L. Warren’s reasoning about blackness in an attempt to highlight the metalepsis resulting from the novel’s use of the hot air-balloon and the octopus as dermatropes that cast the empire as simultaneously a dysfunctional family and a scientific laboratory. Loaded into the skin as a master trope is the conceptual cross-over between consciousness and conscience, whose narrative performance in the novel nourishes the affective labour of its reader as an agent of memory

Narrating the body in Rohinto Mistry’s “Swimming Lessons”

The present reading of Rohinton Mistry’s short story Swimming Lessons is a modest attempt to apply the phenomenological approach to the aesthetic interpretation of the immigrant experience in fiction. By way of looking at the body as incorporated consciousness, this analysis of Mistry’s narrative focuses on the ways in which the Parsi protagonist’s senses articulate the complex process of his adaptation in Canadian society. In other words, the immigrant’s body is seen as a site of collision between India and Canada, past and present, reality and fiction. This reading of Mistry’s narrative suggests that rather than unfolding the experience of cultural displacement characteristic of contemporary multicultural fiction in Canada, Swimming Lessons problematises the issue of the immigrant experience by way of exploring the issues of the nature and source of writing. Anchored in the body, the immigrant experience here reveals the anxieties of the creative consciousness which is trying to find balance between past and present, Bombay and Toronto, empirical experience and talent for fiction

Nurodymai autoriams ir bibliografiniai duomenys

 &nbsp