Verbalization of grief in David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time
David Grossman’s experimental text Falling Out of Time (2011) examines the theme of death of a child and parents’ attempt to understand the loss and cope with it. In order to represent and articulate the sense of unbearable pain and grief, Grossman employs several strategies and techniques related to both content and form which allow for a perspective that is both artistically engaging and sensitive. One of the obvious formal features of the text is his use of poetry which seemingly represents the most natural means to express raw emotions and pain of his characters. The paper seeks to examine Grossman’s techniques that help him verbalize the grieving experience of his characters while it focuses on his use of poetic language. It seems that the capacity of poetry to rely on meaningful silences and multi-layered interpretive potential enables one to create a healing space which facilitates the process of reconciliation.
Suffering as one of the Determinant Factors in the Initiation of the Main Protagonist in the Slovak Folk Tale O troch zhravranelých bratoch (About Three Brothers Who Turned into Ravens)
In an in-depth interpretation of this magical tale about three brothers who turned into ravens, our primary goal is to conceptually define the archetypal meaning of the protagonist's suffering and determine the role it played in the depiction of the society-wide initiation and/or individuation process.
Empathy and Qualia: Intersemiotic View on Suffering in Fiction
Love Story as a Potential Grief Story. (The conflict of ideality and reality in prose thematising the loss of a partner)
The study focuses on the reception of a work of literature communicating the subject of death. Thematically related texts are subjected to interpretative probes revolving around the topic of the loss of a partner. The author of this study focuses on the conception of the writer’s creation, along with the ideological parameters of ideal and real [Miko 1989] that are shifting into a tensional–detensional relation in the depicted topic. The author of the study captures the unfolding of the protagonist’s psychic state in interpretative observations and clarifies the supporting system aiding the protagonist in overcoming the initial feelings of desolation, anxiety and void, among others. Death as a phenomenon is examined in the texts of contemporary British writers Julian Barnes [Levels of Life 2014] and Clive Staples Lewis [A Grief Observed 2012]. Both writers approached the topic from various vantage points such as the writer’s effort in translating a new experience into a work of literature; limitations and capability of language in conveying a life-changing event, about a pursuit for the appropriate metaphor and others. This study juxtaposes current texts with selected mythological stories that exhibited similarities in the topic and motivic composition.
Iconization of Suffering in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale
Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a dystopic novel that presents manipulative practices primarily annihilating elementary women’s rights.The setting of the novel is the United States turned into the Republic of Gilead - a country that masks the infringement of human rights and its totalitarian structure by noble interests of life preservation, and service to God. Situating the existential dillemmas of the protagonist (Offred) in the highly decorative setting of theocratic state, Margaret Atwood, allows for the reading of the text through the conceptual framework of the carnival. The spectacle of the carnivalesque in Handmaid’s Tale, moves away from its liberating quality erasing boundaries and distinctions, on the contrary, it is complicit to reinforce, and maintain the existing order. The female body cloaked in the crossform of Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Van Eyck’s Arnolfini’s Marriage is subjet to gaze, manipulative practices, and sexually abusive rituals projecting thus the uncanny, alien, grotesque world of demonic forces. The paper focuses on the examination of representational practices that convey the “exclusion of already marginalized”, such as the function of the narrative frame, grotesque and carnivalesque elements.
Verbalization of grief in David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time
David Grossman’s experimental text Falling Out of Time (2011) examines the theme of death of a child and parents’ attempt to understand the loss and cope with it. In order to represent and articulate the sense of unbearable pain and grief, Grossman employs several strategies and techniques related to both content and form which allow for a perspective that is both artistically engaging and sensitive. One of the obvious formal features of the text is his use of poetry which seemingly represents the most natural means to express raw emotions and pain of his characters. The paper seeks to examine Grossman’s techniques that help him verbalize the grieving experience of his characters while it focuses on his use of poetic language. It seems that the capacity of poetry to rely on meaningful silences and multi-layered interpretive potential enables one to create a healing space which facilitates the process of reconciliation.
Otherness and Suffering in Polish and Slovenian Children's Literature: Chosen Examples
The author is focused on chosen examples of representation of otherness in contemporary Polish and Slovenian children's literature, including the most known writers from Poland and Slovenia: Dorota Terakowska, Jana Bauer, Marcin Szczygielski, Majda Koren, Barbara Ciwoniuk and Svetlana Makarovič. The aim of this paper is presentation of philosophical and cultural aspects of suffering in these two Central European cultures (Christianity, including both Catholic and Protestant theologies, neoliberal ideology after the collapse of Communism, Romanticism, Slavic pagan heritage, experience of Holocaust) and their influence on the representation of suffering in chosen literary works. It includes also explanaition of active discussion with traditional representations of suffering in these cultures. The author is focused on mental and emotional suffering from otherness, which is in fact representation of contemporary cultural shift from large group mentality to individualism. She also explains different ways of overpassing this kind of suffering: self-acceptance, activity, inclusion toward institution and colleagues, imagination and internal discussion with official discourses. These images from contemporary children's literature are good examples of cultural change in the context of mental suffering.
Iconisation of Suffering in Czech Artificial Music of the 20th Century
The study concerns about various types of reflections and artificial expressions of the subject of “suffering” in Czech artificial music of the 20th century - answering the framework of questions in what kind of circumstances, led by which motives, why, when, how, and using which artistic means, those compositions came into a being. The epoch brought many dramas to a life of a Czech nation, but also, due to all the important changes in social structure, mode of living, and technological developments of civilisation, in general, many dramatic breaks showed up, and struck, an individual life of a human. Stories of suffering, narrated between national, individual and existential perspectives, through the expressive power of musical art work - allowing to overcome many difficulties of language usage solely; present an essential testimony about the importance of the culture for transferring basic human values, forming the continuity of an idea of a free society, and help with a regeneration of identity structures of Humanity, through generations; especially under difficult conditions. The focus of a study presented, should offer an insight into a process of iconisation, how it appears, and - by the current state of research involved - works, in a multilayered field of music, and it's diverse contexts.
Iconization of the deathly affliction in Andersen’s Fairytales
The contribution focuses on a thematological interpretation of the existentials of misery and extinction, using a corpus of selected fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. In explaining the specificity of Andersen’s concept and presenting life’s givenness (the parameters of being-inthe-world) he verifies the relevance of several existentials which were explained by Heidegger in connection with the use of factual existence (Dasein). The use of existentials as real facts in describing a textual model of the world is justified by the thematic concept as a proposition of modes of existence by Ricouer.
Iconization, Diagrammatization and Allegorization of Suffering in Slovak and North-American Culture-forming Texts
The Concept of Suffering in the Literary and Medical Discourse of the 20th century U.S. Prose
The article examines the narrative mechanisms of implementing the concept of suffering based on the prose works, focused on medical issues. The author analyzes the artistic means of representing the category of suffering in the works by the American writers of the 20th century, in particular, in the literary heritage of the “Southern Gothic” representatives (Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike and others). The research discloses the receptive resource of literary works, wherein the concept of corporal and spiritual suffering becomes a counterpoint of the author's intention and the reader's perception.Key words: literary and medical discourse, the U.S. prose, the 20th century literature, narrator, the concept of suffering.
Iconisation of Painful Flow of History /Interpretation Probes into a Theatre Work/
The Iconisation of Suffering in the Intermedial Mode of Blues
In the introduction to our paper, we ask how it is possible to proceed during the iconisation of suffering in contemporary literature and whether it is possible to achieve originality and uniqueness at all when trying to depict it in the current social paradigm so that it catches the readers’ attention. We try to answer this question by interpreting a novel by a contemporary Czech author Markéta Pilátová called Tsunami Blues (2014). The novel is situated in an exotic environment, but a major part is played by music, namely the blues, not the exotic environment as might be expected. Blues becomes an intermedial mode of depicting the suffering of the story’s protagonist. In our paper we observe and name various types of intermedial references (to music) which participate in the depiction of the heroine’s heart and soul, her emotional world, attitude values, and manners of communication with the world. We conclude that suffering is iconised in Markéta Pilátová’s novel by using intermedial references, which makes the novel unique. The author models the atmosphere of the novel in a blues mood; she presents the protagonist’s musical language, her playing, composing and the effects music has on her in order to approach the naturalness of musical expression and intensify the reader’s emotional experience.
Narrating the Extremes: The Language of Suffering and Survival in Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account
In the 16th century, the tragic Narvaez expedition to the New World ended with only four survivors: three Spaniard masters and a Moor slave-who had never had a chance to give his testimony as his companions had. In the fictional memoir The Moor’s Account (2014), Laila Lalami gives voice to Mustafa/Estebanico; to narrate the hardships they go through from his perspective, which reflects his Arabic and Islamic identity. His story depicts several forms of human suffering: deprivation and poverty in his home country Morocco under the Portuguese conquest, slavery and torment while in Spain and eight years of privation and wondering in the wildness of North America. The paper will employ postcolonial poetics to reveal the literary devices used to recount these forms of human suffering as they are represented through the ethnicity of the narrator. This in-text analysis attempts to link the linguistic and the aesthetic signs in the text to their interpretative functions in cultural reconciliation. Therefore, it will highlight the ideological and aesthetic aspects which classify the novel as postcolonial writing. Then, it will focus on the suffering-survival dichotomy and its representation in the narrative discourse.
Karma, Reincarnation, Attachment, Detachment in Hinduism
An extreme and massive expression of the iconization of suffering: The Cult of the "abandoned souls" in Naples.
‘Sentenced to live? – first-person narration as apologetics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels’
This talk examines the place that the idea of ‘defence mechanisms’ occupies in Ishiguro’s novels using psychoanalytic literary theory. It starts from the premise that protagonists reinterpret the events of their life following the pattern of a plea in order to come to terms with their overwhelming suffering. The question that is posed to what extent the first-person singular narration of main protagonists can be interpreted as a void to face responsibility and how can it act as a defensive tool for reframing past and painful events. Focusing on A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day, this paper brings to the fore some of the main points by which protagonists first-person narration act as a self-justifying tool for hiding, deflecting and distorting stories recounted. In case of main characters of Ishiguro, their arbitrary story-telling provokes the idea that by sublimation and projection their deeds can be forgiven or at least understood.
The Iconization of Terror in the Algerian Literature of the Black Decade
After thirty years of latent post-independence crises, Algeria lapsed in the 1990s into a “black decade” of suffering from which it seemed difficult to remerge. There was a surge of violence not only against the authorities, but also against foreigners and intellectuals. Writers, in particular, were the targets of murderers in an attempt to “muzzle” the people. Their scapegoat situation notwithstanding, writers preferred to bear witness for the horror in which their country was. Threatened with death at any moment, their testimonial writing was motivated by the urge to describe a country in a state of emergency. To illustrate this view, my paper relies on Rachid Mimouni’s La malédiction (1993) [The Curse] and Yasmina Khadra’s A quoi rêvent les loups (1999) [Wolf Dreams]. In these testimonial texts ingrained in Algerian culture and ideology, the authors provide a semiotic representation of the trauma of terror. To understand their semiotic underpinnings, I will rely on Jean Baudrillard’s Esprit du terrorisme (2002) [The Spirit of Terrorism], a seminal work based on the premise that terrorism is violence vested in symbolic action.