The analysis at hand, of Graham Swift's novel Here We Are, consists of three main parts, which display a progressively increased degree of complexity. We are looking at the language of the ...entertainment business in post-war Brighton unpretentious summer shows. The first part focuses on linguistic terms and phrases that describe this business, i.e. the actual place and actors, so the level of interpretation is mainly the basic, denotative one. In the second part, we look at how the entertainer is described, drawing the conclusion that one of the main features assigned to him is versatility and a multifaceted personality. This versatility is further taken in the spotlight in the third part as the common denominator of the linguistic expression in the novel, and we look at the examples provided in the book and the subtle meanings that they convey. In the Conclusions, we pair this ambivalent linguistic manner of expression with the overall interpretations of the characters and situations, revealing the fact that they are mutually illustrative of each other. The approach is linguistics combined with cultural studies. Keywords: entertainment business, identity, post-WWII theatre culture, performance terminology
This essay examines the ways Graham Swift's novel Shuttlecock critically examines the dialectical construction of masculinity as the discourse of the patriarchal Other. Foregrounding a Lacanian ...reading of the text which locates the absence of signification at the level of the Symbolic which then paradoxically produces imaginary figurations and fictions of desire, I read the novel as using the paradigm of espionage (itself premised on possessing and inhabiting the secret of the Other) as a powerful way of interrogating Prentis' construction of his father's masculinity as well as his own understanding of power and violence within the social economy of patriarchy. I argue that Lacan's reading of psychoanalytic desire provides a useful paradigm through which to understand not only Prentis' unconscious projection of Oedipal ambivalence against father figures such as Quinn, but also Swift's deconstruction of the social and political constructs of masculine heroism as focalised through the war hero.
"Memory as forgetting": historical reference, ethics, and postmodernist fiction -- The pageantry of the past and the reflection of the present: history, reality, and feminism in Virginia Woolf's ...Between the acts -- "A knife blade called now": historiography, narrativity, and the "here and now" in Graham Swift's Waterland -- "What's real and what's true": metaphors, errata, and the shadow of the real in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children -- "It's enough stories": truth and experience in Art Spiegelman's Maus -- Expanding the field.
Cheng attends to the phenomenon that the detective figure, a constant of the detective story, becomes a variant in contemporary literature. It considers "the detective's story" a more adequate term ...than "the detective story" to discuss stories about the detective although it is not yet recognized as a generic category. This essay holds that the detective's story has always already coexisted with the detective story, and that the detective's story discloses epistemological and ontological issues the detective story ignores or obscures. Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Graham Swift's The Light of Day illustrate that the detective's story appropriates the generic form of the detective story but betrays the principles that establish it. The detective figure, when placed at the center of the storyline, is no longer an analytical apparatus but a confessing soul. Her/His logic is unexpressed. The detective's story thus does not promise the reader an occasion to escape but an opportunity to partake. It detains the reader in the labyrinth of the detective's mystery from which he or she alone must find the exit. The reader is at once entrusted with the obligation and endowed with the privilege to procure solutions for the mystery that the detective is.
This essay traces the emergence of efficiency as a significant ideology in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983). By dramatizing the process of engineering in the reclamation of water and the expansion of ...a business empire, Swift demonstrates that the Atkinsons were motivated by the pursuit of efficient outcomes rather than the quest for vulgar profit. This focus on efficiency foregrounds a pattern of unintended consequences, accounts for the increasing commodification of human beings, and contributes to a dialectical understanding of history. Last Orders (1996) also receives some attention.
Losing his job as a history teacher causes the narrator and protagonist of Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) to reflect on the past and chronicle the death of a local boy during his teenage years. In ...doing so, Tom Crick also offers what seems to be a redeeming account of his paternal family's role in the Fens, the land dominated over the centuries by his maternal ancestors, the Atkinsons. In telling their story, however, he exercises the same exclusion that once relegated the Cricks to the historical periphery. Self-appointed family chronicler, Crick imposes narrative representation as the only way to exert one's historical agency. Yet his half-brother Dick's suicide, which emerges as an impenetrable silence, brings the account to an abrupt end, revealing the representational inadequacy of Crick's project of historical restoration while, ironically, inaugurating a new horizon of possibility for the narrator's life.
The paper shows how Woolf and Swift wrote similar novels in two different contexts: that of modernism and that of postmodernism. The paper tries to find similarities between their novels as far as ...lyricism is concerned. Opposing feelings are used to create lyricism. Moments of being and perception are aspects which are analysed with respect to their ability to evince lyricism in the novels by Woolf and Swift. The paper draws parallels between Woolf's and Swift's use of lyricism in their novels.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse, comparatively, the theme of isolation in Woolf's and Swift's lyrical novels. The theme the two authors have in co mmon is also part of Romanticism; it reminds ...of Romantic lyric poetry. The way in which isolation as a trope in Romantic lyric poetry works to create the lyrical aspect in Woolf's and Swift's novels is explored. The characters' difficulty with communicatio n makes them retreat into themselves and, if the novel is composed of lyrical monologues, it reveals this idea through its very form. The characters' isolation is always connected to a poetic view of life. Sometimes, it is also connected, at the same time, with tragic view of life. For the Romantics, solitude was, however, coupled with the idea of sociability, in the sense that a balance was supposed to be achieved between public and private lives. Here characters such as Rachel, Septimus or Lucrezia in Woolf's novels, fail. Delgado Garcia suggests a narratological interpretation: the level of the story presents disconnected, isolated characters, while the level of narration shows that common memories about the war connect them. The characters' solitude is tied in with parts of their personalities. One significant aspect of Orlando's personality is his preference for solitude, which casts him in the role of a Romantic poet. Characters sometimes talk without actually having something meaningful to say, without connecting to those they talk to. For Swift's characters, conflictual relationships lead to the characters' isolation. The isolated characters talk, yet the others do not connect with them. The Romantic ideal of connecting private with public lives leads to a tragic result of being isolated from the others.
This article argues that Graham Swift's novel Last Orders addresses profound moral questions about what constitutes a person. The article takes its lead from John Habgood's question, "How complete ...does a human being have to be in order to qualify morally as a person?" and also draws on insights from other theologians to analyze the moral perspective of the novel. It shows how Last Orders looks for redemption in the face of broken relationships and radical crises of identity, and also shows how Swift defends the moral personhood of the disabled and the recently deceased.
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