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Journal of European Studies 24 (March 1994): 41-54. Presented by Evelyn Sung

Know the past: know thyself. Literary pursuits and quest for identity in A.S. Byatt ’ s Possession and F. Duranti ’ s Effetti Personali by Giuliana Giobbi. Journal of European Studies 24 (March 1994): 41-54. Presented by Evelyn Sung. Thesis.

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Journal of European Studies 24 (March 1994): 41-54. Presented by Evelyn Sung

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  1. Know the past: know thyself. Literary pursuits and quest for identity in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and F. Duranti’s Effetti Personali by Giuliana Giobbi Journal of European Studies 24 (March 1994): 41-54. Presented by Evelyn Sung

  2. Thesis • Though in a different frame and with a different sensibility, there is in these two novels a similar interweaving of the personal quest for identity with a literary (detective-like) search and elements of romance (41). • The patterns of mythic quest, Romance and spy-story.

  3. Quest for identity • The Victorian frame of mind, including faith and doubt, amateur biology, Darwinism, and spiritualism (42). • Self-explaining, analysis of one’s own world, lovers come from different worlds (43). • A novel of initiation (43), Bildungsroman genre (44).

  4. Quest for identity (2) • Definition of Bildungsroman: The story of the formation of a character up to the moment when he ceases to be self-centered, and becomes society-centered, thus beginning to shape his true self (44).

  5. Romance (1) • quote Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The House of the Seven Gables: When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation…The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.

  6. Romance (2) • Justifying in the ways of conventional ending, elements of fantasy, the wishing full-filling postscript, to prevent conformism (46). • post-modernist remarks, meta-fictional remarks (46): Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess…All that was the plot of a Romance. He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously, a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him

  7. Romance (3) • Such post-modernist remarks allow Byatt to take the distance from traditional fictional patterns with irony and nonchalance (47). • Historical extra-dimension (47) The Victorians do seem much more our contemporaries in many ways. The kinds of problems which confronted them—political, educational, religious, cultural—bear a strong resemblance to and are often continuous with the problems which confront us at the present time.

  8. Spy-story structure • A literary mystery, obscure periods of two Victorian poets’ lives (47). • Maud’s and Roland’s keeness to discover the truth and the ingenious working of their minds (47). • Byatt scatter along their plots evidence, reversals and coups-de-theatre, to hold the attention of the reader all along the narrative until a final solution is given to the puzzle (47).

  9. Spy-story structure (2) • Byatt keeps astonishing the reader with sudden revelations and changes of perspective, which not only heighten the suspense, but also contribute to the overall debate about truth and appearance, as well as on the unknowable in each of us (49). • Henry James, art and the artist, writer and his time (50) • Byatt is ironical about the habit of encasing certain well-known authors into definite categories, Romantic, Victorian, Classical…. (51) • All traditional interpretations of Ash and LaMotte turn out to be mere rigid definition, often do not take into account into the poets’ true lives(51).

  10. Conclusion • The facts of the past are not important in themselves, but in the influence they have upon us, in what we can learn from them, both in the negative and in the positive sense. Mystifications, adultery, illegitimate children, are not necessarily matters for sensational scandals or reprobation. They are first of all facts to be meditated on and understood, because they are fruits of human action.

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