Зарубежные литературы. Рубрика в журнале - Новый филологический вестник
‘The conflict of interpretation’ in Kazuo Ishiguro ‘Nocturne’ (2009)
Статья научная
The paper explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story Nocturne, which is placed in the short story collection, ‘Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ (2009) and, due to its oneiric and music narrative substance, may perplex a reader. We propose a draft of various hermeneutic strategies for reading this story. These strategies address the tale from different premises, leading to coherent yet seemingly ‘conflicting interpretations’ (Ricoeur). By application of the mimetic approach, we dwell on Marxist criticism, as well as celebrity studies, which help to reconstruct social and cultural contexts in their relation to the imagery of the story. In the framework of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings are shown as supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. The critical tools of an objective approach - formalism, narratology, and intermediality studies - reveal leitmotif clusters, structural patterns, and musical nocturne remediation in the textual poetics. Finally, the reader’s perception of any intratextual relations of this story with Ishiguro’s oeuvre as a whole lead to one of the focal points of his writing - appraisal through mastery, through continuous rehearsing and a nocturnal strumming effect of the same intimate motives of longing for lost love and public recognition. The short story abandons the typical Ishiguro imagery easily found in his earlier novels, and can be viewed as a confessional ‘self-recollection’ remediation and narrative project.
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Статья научная
The article analyzes Juan Benet’s essays on Victorian literature, short stories “De lejos”, “Una linea incompleta” and “Viator” and his non-fiction book “Londres victoriano” in which the Spanish writer addresses 19th century Anglo-Saxon writers from Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad. Benet is mostly known as an author who brought the discourse of European and American modernism to Spanish literature and as the creator of the Spanish new novel, who consciously renounced Spanish realism of both 19th and 20th century. However, his standing as a postmodernist writer is often debated, as the neomythologism and complex narrative structure of his novels are more often associated with American and European modernist landmarks. Proustian, Joycean and Faulknerian heritage of Benet is widely studied, while his connection to Victorian literature stays largely overlooked. Meanwhile, in his essays as well as in his short fiction, the author addresses his favourite 19th century writers, and in short stories he establishes intertextual dialogue with many of them, producing some of his greater postmodernist works. It demonstrates that pastiche, parody and allusions to Victorian discourse in his work are examples of Benet’s postmodernist prose, only comparable epistemologically to his novel “En el estado”. Therein, intertextuality serves a goal that is undoubtedly postmodernist - that of showing the textual, fictional nature of narrated events, establishing an ironic dialogue with the reader and revealing the nature of the narrator as an entity that creates an illusion of reality rather than describing it, and deconstructing the author’s own narrative practices.
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