Haunted Empire shows that Gothic elements in Russian literature frequently expressed deep-set anxieties about the Russian imperial and national identity. Valeria Sobol argues that the persistent ...presence of Gothic tropes in the literature of the Russian Empire is a key literary form that enacts deep historical and cultural tensions arising from Russia's idiosyncratic imperial experience. Her book brings together theories of empire and colonialism with close readings of canonical and less-studied literary texts as she explores how Gothic horror arises from the threatening ambiguity of Russia's own past and present, producing the effect Sobol terms "the imperial uncanny." Focusing on two spaces of the imperial uncanny—the Baltic north/Finland and the Ukrainian south— Haunted Empire reconstructs a powerful discursive tradition that reveals the mechanisms of the Russian imperial imagination that are still at work today.
La Grande Guerre a hante non seulement l'imaginaire du XXe siecle mais aussi la fiction du XXIe siecle. La reecriture de ce conflit mondial a traverse sa fonction informative et didactique de ce que ...fut la guerre et d'autres part, elle traverse une fonction symbolique en laissant lire une vision personnelle de la Grande Guerre et de l'Histoire chez le lecteur. A ce juste titre, Jean Echenoz dans son 14, a bien effectue le travail de l'enqueteur et revisite la guerre a son tour. Echenoz effectue une representation de la Grande Guerre a travers des procedes que l'ecrivain contemporain francais met en place pour realiser une reecriture de ce premier conflit mondial tels que l'ironie et les listes. Il s'agit d'un panorama complexe et tres riche en meme temps qui constitue une attribution des traces et d'autres elements dans 14. On trouve dans le texte, parmi d'autres, differentes etapes de la guerre et la frayeur du champ de bataille. Dans ce court roman, le nombre de pages n'est pas proportionnel a ce phenomene repandu qu'est la guerre. Echenoz a tente de reveler dans un texte assez court la plupart des elements qui l'avait frappe en les traitant de maniere plus etroite, plus tendue, plus allusive tout en essayant de restaurer l'ampleur de la Grande Guerre.
The Wild Goose Mori, Ogai
11/2020, Volume:
14
eBook, Book
Open access
Mori Ogai (1862–1922), one of the giants of modern Japanese literature, wrote The Wild Goose at the turn of the century. Set in the early 1880s, it was, for contemporary readers, a nostalgic return ...to a time when the nation was embarking on an era of dramatic change. Ogai’s narrator is a middle-aged man reminiscing about an unconsummated affair, dating to his student days, between his classmate and a young woman kept by a moneylender. At a time when writers tended to depict modern, alienated male intellectuals, the characters of The Wild Goose are diverse, including not only students preparing for a privileged intellectual life and members of the plebeian classes who provide services to them, but also a pair of highly developed female characters. The author’s sympathetic and penetrating portrayal of the dilemmas and frustrations faced by women in this early period of Japan’s modernization makes the story of particular interest to readers today. Ogai was not only a prolific and popular writer, but also a protean figure in early modern Japan: critic, translator, physician, military officer, and eventually Japan’s Surgeon General. His rigorous and broad education included the Chinese classics as well as Dutch and German; he gained admittance to the Medical School of Tokyo Imperial University at the age of only fifteen. Once established as a military physician, he was sent to Germany for four years to study aspects of European medicine still unfamiliar to the Japanese. Upon his return, he produced his first works of fiction and translations of English and European literature. Ogai’s writing is extolled for its unparalleled style and psychological insight, nowhere better demonstrated than in The Wild Goose.
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