65 research outputs found
Midlands Cadences: Narrative Voices in the Work of Alan Sillitoe
This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoeâs prose fiction, most notably Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the textsâ representations of Midlands English demotic. Both texts enact Bakhtinâs notion of novelistic dialogism and find much expressive capital in the tension between discourses: between the oral and the written. Indeed, it could be argued that much of Sillitoeâs work functions as a direct challenge to dominant notions of the literary. The narrative discourse attempts to trace a link between the quotidian experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language which they speak. His technique also explores the link between language and sensibility; i.e. verbal articulacy need not be a limit to expression of a characterâs distinctive identity. In contrast to the more radical techniques of novelists like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, all instances of phonetically-rendered demotic remain imprisoned by what Joyce called âperverted commasâ â as direct speech. However, the diegetic narrative discourse itself is redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonistsâ consciousness through their own idiolect. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this is evidenced by the use of the second person âyouâ. It functions simultaneously as a representation of Seatonâs consciousness in the oral register which he might choose to articulate it, and as a dialogic âsideways glanceâ at the reader and assumed shared experience. The second is more redolent of internal monologue, using the first-person form (as seen in the homodiegetic narration of the second novel); crucially, though, it remains in Standard English, if explicitly orientated towards oral register.
Sillitoeâs is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral â asserting the right of a characterâs dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as âworking classâ, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography
Picasso, CĂ©zanne
Stein Gertrude, Eikhenbaum Voline Marc. Picasso, Cézanne. In: Les Cahiers du GRIF, n°21-22, 1978. Gertrude Stein. pp. 8-10
Composition et explication
Stein Gertrude, Eikhenbaum Voline Marc. Composition et explication. In: Les Cahiers du GRIF, n°21-22, 1978. Gertrude Stein. pp. 22-30
Voix de dames
Stein Gertrude, Eikhenbaum Voline Marc. Voix de dames. In: Les Cahiers du GRIF, n°21-22, 1978. Gertrude Stein. pp. 16-17
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