Sorrow Guglani, Sam
The Lancet (British edition),
12/2019, Letnik:
394, Številka:
10215
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Someone says the work must be very sad—the bad news, all the deaths—too sad to weather, day to day, for a career, to not burn out. Their face wrinkles to a shape of fatigue or grand wisdom or ...distaste, and their voice breaks from its singsong sympathy into other notes: embarrassment, disappointment, even rage—that sorrowful events intrude in this way, here at the business of progress. That they're wider than we hold them to be, more than just aberrations turned from at life's sharp edges, the way we turn our eyes from an eclipse. That the world, parallel to its joys, brims with sorrow. George Saunders, a novelist, sees this, sees us all labouring “under some burden of sorrow…that…its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time”. And we see it too, in medicine, in our topography of loss, but we are at odds with it. As surely we should be? At odds, not just accepting? Surely this is required of us, for the very conception of medicine? And surely it's necessary, and understandable, caught here in drifts of sorrow, that we move with caution? Perhaps, but not like this. Not through a culture that parades Lady Macbeth's maxim to “consider it not so deeply”; that favours its own analgesia over the attendant ache of caring well; that even diminishes care into some decorative frill.
The Civil War (1861-65) and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln have been game-changers in the history of America predominantly because of the Emancipation Proclamation that provided freedom to the ...slaves. George Saunders' debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo extends the scope of the plot through the fictional depiction of Abraham Lincoln's personal and presidential roles. The paper seeks to focus on the in-between state/s of the fictional character of Abraham Lincoln influenced by the settings and situation that produces transitional attributes to the novel. Availing the 'processual framework' of liminality proposed by Victor Turner, the liminal existence of Abraham Lincoln in the novel caused by the demise of his son Willie Lincoln and the savage political situation in America is traced. The findings derived from the analytical interpretation of the text reveal the presence of multiple liminal experiences in the character of Abraham Lincoln.
David Foster Wallace witnessed how postmodern irony erodes cultural values by exposing the artifice of language and its human construction. The most egregious example Wallace found was the bestseller ...American Psycho (1991), by Bret Easton Ellis, which used postmodern irony to satirize American consumer culture in a way Wallace found overly cynical and too reductive. In this article, I explain how Wallace attempted his own critique of American consumer culture with Infinite Jest (1996) but used character-driven narratives to both critique consumerism and offer a humanistic alternative. I end with a discussion of how "New Sincerity," a literary movement typified by Wallace and George Saunders, provides a model that uses postmodern irony to critique social structures that damage human lives, demonstrated by the narratives of Infinite Jest and Saunders's short story "Sea Oak."
A narrativa literária se materializa em variados formatos, entre eles o diário, no qual o indivíduo enunciador escreve sobre suas vivências cotidianas. Ainda que existam diários lastreados na ...realidade, como O diário de Anne Frank, histórias ficcionalizadas no formato de diários são frequentes na literatura e, em ambos os casos, podemos estudar, por meio desses relatos, valores da época em que foram escritos. Como em outros estudos, que integram nossa pesquisa sobre aspectos do consumo a partir de obras literárias, vamos investigar aspectos desse fenômeno central e complexo do mundo contemporâneo por meio do conto Semplica girl – Os diários, do escritor norte-americano George Saunders. Para isso, mobilizaremos conceitos da Análise do Discurso de linha francesa, da linguagem publicitária e teorias sobre o consumo (material e simbólico).
This paper offers a semiotic analysis of Abraham Lincoln's role in American cultural memory by addressing the interaction in George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) between Lincoln's two roles ...as a larger than life persona and a relatable 'common' man. By using the literary tropes of synecdoche and metonym, and Ernst Kantorowicz's notion of the King's two bodies ('body natural' and 'body politic'), this paper examines Lincoln's roles in the novel and argues that his portrayal as a synecdochic representation of the nation (his body natural) is crucial to the formation of his metonymic representation (his body politic). Discussing examples that range from the connection between the White House and the nation during the Civil War, to Lincoln's remarkable appearance and his role in the abolition of slavery, we reach the conclusion that Lincoln's popularity in American cultural memory is owing to the interweaving of these two semiotic relations.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Previous scholars have noted George Saunders’s interest in critiquing American consumerist mentality and satirizing corporate ethics. A smaller number have studied Saunders’s interest in the human ...experience as defined through a spiritual quest. The material and spiritual collide in this essay, which studies Saunders’s use of the Semplica Girls, in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” to embody an intersection between our human limitations and our responses to those limitations through material, aesthetic, and spiritual avenues.
Method Reading Thompson, Lucas
New literary history,
2019, Letnik:
50, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article sets forth a new way of thinking about the act of reading, by developing a generative metaphor that bypasses many of the problems inherent to critique—reading as a form of spontaneous ...method acting. This metaphor takes literary texts as invitations to engage in a particular kind of activity, wherein the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize themselves in a fictional character, but actually performs as someone else. Using the theory and principles derived from the field of method acting, it unfolds a new model for understanding literary and aesthetic experience. This model of method reading is explored through George Saunders's 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, along with examples from the fiction of Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and others. The article ultimately claims that this metaphor has important implications for the fields of postcritique, affect studies, and literary ethics.
This article suggests how Michael Thompson's 'Rubbish Theory' (1979), specifically the model of the life cycle of rubbish, might be applied to the dystopian workplace environments of George ...Saunders's surreal and, often, dystopian collection 'Pastoralia' (2000). 'Pastoralia' foregrounds rubbish through depictions of live waste (rubbish employees and re-animated corpses), wasted lives, and waste disposal methods within the workplace. I focus on the short stories "Pastoralia" and "Sea Oak" to reveal the mechanisms behind the conversion of human employee to human waste both in, and out of, the workplace. I suggest how waste-theory further advances our understanding of Saunders's fiction as the literary depictions of human waste in the workplace function as a critique of the dominant ideologies that govern American culture.
This essay responds to the critique of my work advanced by Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts in “White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest’s New Sincerity,” published in Orbit in March 2017. In ...addition to refuting their misrepresentations of my work, I provide a positive re-articulation of my core reading of the New Sincerity aesthetic, outlining its connection to concepts such as affect, intention, undecidability, literature, and neoliberalism.
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