The Figures of “The City” and of “Utopia
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern
ALASDAIR GRAY AND THE POSTMODERN Neil James Rhind PhD in English Literature The University Of Edinburgh 2008 2 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis has been composed by me; that it is entirely my own work, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified on the title page. Signed: Neil James Rhind 3 CONTENTS Title……………………………………….…………………………………………..1 Declaration……………………………….…………………………………………...2 Contents………………………………………………………………………………3 Abstract………………………………….………………………………..…………..4 Note on Abbreviations…………………………………………………………….….6 1. Alasdair Gray : Sick of Being A Postmodernist……………………………..…….7 2. The Generic Blending of Lanark and the Birth of Postmodern Glasgow…….…..60 3. RHETORIC RULES, OK? : 1982, Janine and selected shorter novels………….122 4. Reforming The Victorians: Poor Things and Postmodern History………………170 5. After Postmodernism? : A History Maker………………………………………….239 6. Conclusion: Reading Postmodernism in Gray…………………………………....303 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………………..320 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….324 4 ABSTRACT The prominence of the term ‘Postmodernism’ in critical responses to the work of Alasdair Gray has often appeared at odds with Gray’s own writing, both in his commitment to seemingly non-postmodernist concerns and his own repeatedly stated rejection of the label. In order to better understand Gray’s relationship to postmodernism, this thesis begins by outlining Gray’s reservations in this regard. Principally, this is taken as the result of his concerns -
Reciprocity in Experimental Writing, Hypertext Fiction, and Video Games
UNDERSTANDING INTERACTIVE FICTIONS AS A CONTINUUM: RECIPROCITY IN EXPERIMENTAL WRITING, HYPERTEXT FICTION, AND VIDEO GAMES. A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2015 ELIZABETH BURGESS SCHOOL OF ARTS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES 2 LIST OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 Chapter One: Materially Experimental Writing 30 1.1 Introduction.........................................................................................30 1.2 Context: metafiction, realism, telling the truth, and public opinion....36 1.3 Randomness, political implications, and potentiality..........................53 1.4 Instructions..........................................................................................69 1.41 Hopscotch...................................................................................69 1.42 The Unfortunates........................................................................83 1.43 Composition No. 1......................................................................87 1.5 Conclusion...........................................................................................94 Chapter Two: Hypertext Fiction 96 2.1 Introduction.........................................................................................96 2.2 Hypertexts: books that don’t end?......................................................102 2.3 Footnotes and telling the truth............................................................119 -
The Characters' Response to Social Structures in Alasdair Gray's Lanark
Compliance Versus Defiance: The Characters’ Response to Social Structures in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and 1982 Janine Markéta Gregorová Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic Abstract The article focuses on two novels by Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and 1982 Janine (1984), in particular on the ways in which the characters are influenced by externally imposed social structures and the attitudes they assume in dealing with them. The adverse workings of official institutions, such as education and employment facilities, are received with compliance on the part of the protagonist in 1982 Janine but meet with resistance from both of the two mirror protagonists in Lanark. In the context of the standing of Scotland within the United Kingdom, institutions represent the interests of the powerful English majority rather than the dependent Scottish minority, and therefore any act of rebellion against them is charged with a subversive potential. Besides the political implications, the article explores the social dimensions of the novels and illustrates by means of individual examples the means used by the powerful to exploit the powerless, as well as the strategies the latter employ to defend themselves. Keywords Alasdair Gray; Lanark; 1982 Janine; politics in literature; sexuality; twentieth-century Scottish literature When Alasdair Gray was asked by an interviewer whether the concern with monstrous institutions recurrent in his writing is a “kind of obstreperousness” springing from “a genetic perturbation” of the author, he replied: My approach to institutional dogma and criteria—let’s call it my approach to institutions—reflects their approach to me. Nations, cities, schools, marketing companies, hospitals, police forces have been made by people for the good of people. -
Typography, Illustration and Narration in Three Novels by Alasdair Gray
Title Page. Typography, Illustration and Narration in Three Novels by Alasdair Gray: Lanark, 1982, Janine and Poor Things. Craig Linwood Bachelor of Arts (Honours) School of Humanities Arts, Education and Law Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2017 Abstract. The impetus of the thesis emerged through an academic interest in how experimental uses of typography and illustration functioned as a method of narration within literature. This was followed by investigations into the use of typography and illustration yielded that while there is a growing field of literary study examining non-linguistic elements within narratives, there are few studies into typography and illustration and how an author utilises and develops them as a method of narration. In light of this, this thesis examines attempts to expand upon the act of narration through the use of typography and illustration in both experimental and common forms. This is focused through Scottish artist Alasdair Gray and three of his novels: Lanark: A Life in Four Books, 1982, Janine and Poor Things. While Gray’s novels are contemporary his use of typography and illustration engages in wider print cultures that facilitated experiment into literature involving the manipulation of typography, illustration and the traditions of narrative. Experimentation in literature from 1650 to 1990, be it through illustration, typography or the composition of narrative, often emerged when printing practice and its product were no longer seen as efficient at communicating to modernising audiences. This act often coincided with larger changes within print cultures that affected laws, politics, the means of distribution, views of design i and methods of distribution. -
1 the New Scottish Renaissance? Scott Hames for Peter Boxall And
The New Scottish Renaissance? Scott Hames for Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7, British and Irish Fiction Since 1940 (Oxford University Press, 2016) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-history-of-the-novel-in- english-9780198749394?cc=gb&lang=en& In his judicious but untimely survey of the Scottish novel, Francis Russell Hart observed that ‘a distinctive feature of modern Scotland’s literary establishment has been its hostility to, or relative lack of interest in, the novel as a form’ (Hart 1978, p. vii). Poetry was the medium of the nationalist literary renaissance of the 1920s-30s, and its dominant figure, Hugh MacDiarmid, had ‘frankly and influentially expressed the view that the novel is an inferior kind of literary expression, that “prose” is “non- creative”’ (vii.). But from the revivalist perspective the real failing of modern fiction was not generative but recuperative. The territory of the novel was off-limits to cultural revival of MacDiarmid’s kind, being impervious to the willed recovery of latent nationality.1 ‘The trouble with nearly all modern Scottish literature’, he wrote in 1946, is that it deals with the past, with pre-Industrial-Revolution times or with rural areas where ‘the old ways’ to a large extent continue. But as soon as it tackles urban problems and the conditions and prospects of modern life it peters out. This is because we have no writer yet big enough to carry over the independent Scots literary tradition from the bucolic and non-industrialised milieu in which it flourished into the contemporary scene. -
Contributors to SSL 43:2
Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 43 | Issue 2 Article 35 12-15-2017 Contributors to SSL 43:2 Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation (2017) "Contributors to SSL 43:2," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 43: Iss. 2, 364–370. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol43/iss2/35 This Back Matter is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS TO SSL 43:2 Timothy C. Baker is Senior Lecturer in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009) and Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014). Forthcoming projects include a study of the relation between animality, suffering, and language in contemporary fiction and another on gender and space in mid-twentieth-century women’s fiction. Jamie Reid Baxter has long been active in scholarship on, and performance of, Renaissance Scottish drama, poetry and music, with a principal research focus is the interaction of religion, politics and culture in Scotland from the 1540s to the 1640s. He is currently completing an edition of the writings of Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross. Iain Beavan is Keeper of Rare Books, emeritus, University of Aberdeen, and honorary research fellow, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. He contributed to the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vols. -
(Para)Text in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
John Carroll University Carroll Collected Masters Essays Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects Spring 2015 THE DECONSTRUCTION OF (PARA)TEXT IN ALASDAIR GRAY’S POOR THINGS Lila Ibrahim John Carroll University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ibrahim, Lila, "THE DECONSTRUCTION OF (PARA)TEXT IN ALASDAIR GRAY’S POOR THINGS" (2015). Masters Essays. 4. http://collected.jcu.edu/mastersessays/4 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects at Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Essays by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE DECONSTRUCTION OF (PARA)TEXT IN ALASDAIR GRAY’S POOR THINGS An Essay Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts & Sciences of John Carroll University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts By Lila Ibrahim 2015 In “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Jacques Derrida asserts that the archive is the place “where things commence ” and “where men and gods command ,” the place “where authority [and] social order are exercised” (9). Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things commences with the fictional discovery of potential archival matter and a desire to “preserve evidence of local culture that was being hustled into the past” (Gray vii).1 Wisam Mansour observes that “for ages the archive has been regarded as the major distinguishing feature for the construction of history, especially for those who work in the academic arena” (41). -
The Poetry of Civic Nationalism: Jackie Kay's 'Bronze Head from Ife'
Article How to Cite: McFarlane, A 2017 The Poetry of Civic Nationalism: Jackie Kay’s ‘Bronze Head From Ife’. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 5(2): 5, pp. 1–18, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.23 Published: 10 March 2017 Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Anna McFarlane, ‘The Poetry of Civic Nationalism: Jackie Kay’s ‘Bronze Head From Ife’’ (2017) 5(2): 5 C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.23 ARTICLE The Poetry of Civic Nationalism: Jackie Kay’s ‘Bronze Head From Ife’ Anna McFarlane University of Glasgow, GB [email protected] This article examines the work of the newly-minted Scots makar, Jackie Kay, charting her development as a black Scottish writer committed to the interrogation of identity categories. -
Translating the Truest Voice Irony and Unreliable Narrators in Alasdair Gray’S Poor Things
Translating the Truest Voice Irony and Unreliable Narrators in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things MA-Thesis Translation Studies (Master Vertalen) Utrecht University Faculty of Humanities English Department Noa Tims (4240863) Supervisor: dr. Onno Kosters Second reader: Lette Vos MA April 2019 Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 3 1. The Truth in Poor Things 5 1.1 The Novel and its Author 5 1.2 Poor Things as Historiographic Metafiction 8 2. Irony in Poor Things 12 2.1 Identifying Irony 12 2.2 Translating Irony 15 2.3 Identifying and Translating Irony in Poor Things 18 2.3.1 Straightforward warnings in the author’s own voice 18 2.3.2 Known error proclaimed 21 2.3.3 Conflicts of fact within the work 23 2.3.4 Clashes of Style 24 2.3.5 Conflicts of belief 25 2.4 The Translator and Irony in Poor Things 27 3. Unreliability in Poor Things 29 3.1 Translating Unreliability 29 3.1.1 Discourse Situation 29 3.1.2 Unreliability in fiction 30 3.1.3 Translation Problems of Unreliability 33 3.2 Identifying and Translating Unreliability in Poor Things 35 3.2.1 Archibald McCandless 35 3.2.2 Editor Gray 41 3.2.3 Bella Baxter 46 3.3 The Translator and Unreliability in Poor Things 52 4. Conclusion 54 5. Annotated Translation 57 5.1 Archibald McCandless 57 5.2 Editor Gray 60 5.2.1 Introductie 60 5.2.2 Kritische en historische annotaties 63 5.3 Bella Baxter 64 5.3.1 Bella Baxters Brief: Een geweten creëren 64 5.3.2 Een brief van Victoria McCandless M.D. -
Modern Scottish Fiction: Telling Stories in Order to Live
Modern Scottish Fiction: Telling Stories in Order to Live David Goldie Scottish fiction has been lauded in recent years for its formal and linguistic inventiveness, its diversity, and the sense it gives of an increasingly self- confident culture edging closer to a distinctive expression of national self- determination. This, though, is a relatively recent phenomenon: the result of only thirty years or so of experiment and development. For much of the second-half of the twentieth-century, in the years before the political and social changes brought about by the Thatcher governments’ assault on the post-war settlement and the consequent destabilisation of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements, Scottish fiction, like Scottish culture more generally, was arguably much less ambitious, less focused, and less self-assured. Like a set of disconnected stories in search of a theme, Scottish fiction might be said, in the years following 1945, to have suffered a deep and disorientating crisis of confidence. The Scottish Literary Renaissance movement that had gained prominence in the decade before the Second World War had brought with it an expansive sense of the possibilities open to a self-assured, assertive national literature. Although it had sometimes fallen far short of the political and aesthetic aspirations of its remarkable animateur, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, the Renaissance had created the conditions for a literature confident in the lyrical and expressive power of Scots dialect and aware of its potential to grasp and bend the -
If Full Stop – Alasdair Gray and Grant Morrison
WARNING This essay begins with a “spoiler” and carries on through many more after that. If you have not read the titles in the box here, and like to read a text like you live your life, in blissful ignorance of the next plot-point, then put this down and repair with all due alacrity, to your nearest library/comic shop/book shop/ amazon browser tab. Come back when you’re done. Graphic Novels by Grant Morrison: Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (with Frank Quitely) The Invisibles (with various artists) The Filth (Chris Weston and Gary Erskine) All Star Superman, (with Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant) Graphically Novels by Alasdair Gray: Lanark 1982 Janine Poor Things A History Maker Old Men in Love And also… At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O’Brien Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 60 THE DROUTH SUMMER/AUTUMN 2013 ISSUE 46 IF FULL STOP Grant Morrison Alasdair Gray & the Politics of ScottishMagickalRealism. At the end of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s The climax to Flex Mentallo is the perfect primer Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery, the titular for those wishing to engage with the work of Grant character (a superhero so muscularly developed just Morrison. Its signature use of fractal realities, militant flexing his lats and ‘ceps and maximi alters reality), levels of reflexivity, and chaos magick would suffuse confronts Wally Sage, the drug addled, suicidal, The Invisibles, The Filth and All Star Superman scared eternal teenager who dreamed him up. and countless of his other interventions into the Backed into a corner, his pitch towards self- comics medium. -
Speaker Profiles
Spinning Scotland Conference Speaker Profiles Anne Donovan Anne Donovan is a prize-winning writer who has been published in various anthologies and broadcast on BBC radio. In 2001 Canongate published her collection Hieroglyphics and Other Stories which met with critical acclaim. She followed this with her debut novel Buddha Da in 2003 , a strong narrative infused with the Scots language which tells of a working class Glaswegian painter who begins to explore Buddhism. Buddha Da was a huge success and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2003. She has recently published a new novel, Being Emily in which a young girl relates to the novelist Emily Bronte and the novel explores teenagers negotiating the events of life. Alasdair Gray Alasdair Gray is not only one of Scotland’s most famous writers, named by Anthony Burgess ‘the greatest Scottish writer since Walter Scott’, he is also a painter, illustrator and book designer. Born and brought up in Glasgow, he was a muralist and theatrical scene painter and designs his own books from dustjacket to illustration. He was a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s writers’ group alongside James Kelman, Liz Lochead and Tom Leonard. His novel Lanark published in 1981 has been acclaimed as one of the greatest Scottish novels of the Twentieth century and his 1992 novel Poor Things won the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize . Other publications include a wide variety of fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction including, Unlikely Stories Mostly (1983), Janine (1984), Something Leather (1984), Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), A History Maker (1994), Working Legs – A Play for those Without Them (1997) and A Short Survery of Classic Scottish Writing (2001).