Download or read book Metafictional Aspects in Novels by Muriel Spark written by Gesa Giesing and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-08-30 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Leipzig (Institute for Anglistics), language: English, abstract: ANYTHING WRITTEN IN ENGLISH IS A LIE Anything written in English is a lie. This is by no means a new idea, with many people having given thought and expression to it (recently and rather extensively so, for instance, Jeanette Winterson). One way to handle this sentence is to relate it to the idea that something written can never be reality. That then, though, some things written (or only fictional texts?; or even fictional texts?; or anything produced?) might have a reality of their own, and that finally these realities might be part of another, larger and encompassing reality – they might. There need not be such a larger idea beyond things. All novelists have been faced with the question of how to deal with this multilayered reality, novels that deal with it explicitly being called metafictional novels. Metafictional literature has come up with innumerable ways of handling and playing with the notion of what is being real and what fictitious. Anything written in English is a lie. This sentence is also putting into other words the famous paradox of the Cretan stating that all Cretans are liars. For with both, as with many other paradoxes, the paradox is a result of the statement′s self-reference. Since the statement is written in English, it denies its own truth, which it actually does not if it is a lie – it would stop being a lie then, though. Any attempt to solve the paradox will end in moving in circles. The only way not to go insane when trying to find a solution is to accept that the sentence is made up and that it cannot be true in terms of our familiar logic. Once we view it as artificial, as something that has been made up to be not solvable (which need not be the case), we adopt another perspective and for instance allow ourselves to be entertained by contemplating paradoxes. Confronted with any paradoxical or otherwise inexplicable situation human beings still feel an urge to ascribe explanations and reasons to it and often turn to religion, commonplace theories or superstition to find them. Religions explain how the Earth came into existence. If we drop a cup or spill hot milk, it happened because our boss was being a strain. If we got an unjustified salary rise, the stars would have favoured us. A religious woman might regard it as God’s punishment when she falls in love with her husband’s lover. Seldom are we at a loss for an explanation which we may well believe in but which cannot be proved to be causative...
Download or read book Loitering with Intent written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.
Download or read book Loitering with Intent written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In mid-century London, aspiring writer Fleur becomes secretary to a group of egotists who are writing their memoirs in advance and uncovers material enough for any novelist, but is perplexed by the familiarity of their lives.
Download or read book The Comforters written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.
Download or read book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.
Download or read book Muriel Spark written by David Herman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A substantial addition to Spark criticism, of which there has been surprisingly little published in recent years."--Aileen Christianson, University of Edinburgh --Book Jacket
Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark written by Michael Gardiner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-06 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion brings together an international 'Brodie set' of critics to trace the history, impact, reception and major themes of Spark's work, from her early poetry to her last novel. It encompasses the range of Spark's output, pursuing contextual lines of approach including biography, geography, gender, identity, nation and religion, and considering her legacy and continuing influence in the twenty-first century. Spark emerges here as a serious thinker on issues as diverse as the Welfare State, secularisation, decolonisation, and anti-psychiatry, and a writer whose work may be placed alongside Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and Lessing. The critics collected here are mindful of how, although overwhelmingly known as a novelist, by the time of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, Spark already had a significant profile through poetry, biographical criticism, and literary journalism, as chair of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, and as author or co-author of a number of scholarly studies of writers including Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Cardinal Newman, and John Masefield. Within a relatively modest space this Companion touches on the whole range of Spark's work and, in introducing the oeuvre thematically for those looking to explore this elegant and challenging author further, also sets the agenda for future Spark studies.
Download or read book Not to Disturb A Novel written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-29 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb. A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron’s lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary’s friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend’s services are needed for an impromptu wedding—and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.
Download or read book Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women s Writing written by A. Heilmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers' reconfigurations of history.
Download or read book Muriel Spark Time in her Fiction written by Linette Arthurton Bruno and published by Editions Publibook. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark seems to have seen the world as a stage where all the men and women are merely players having their "moments" on the stage of life. "One's prime is the moment one was born for" she has been known to say, and it is those moments, mere spots in time, that she describes in her fiction. Old people become babes again. School-boys (or girls) grow into their prime. That is the cycle of life that can be traced throughout her work, a pattern of birth, growth, and decay that is akin to the seasons. Through the analysis of these five finely chosen novels – Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate and The Driver’s Seat – Linette Arthurton Bruno attempts to show how Muriel Spark adapts her time-structure to her theme. A great piece of work that underlines the skills of a woman considered as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Download or read book Metafiction written by Patricia Waugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Lie With Me written by Philippe Besson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson—“this year’s Call Me By Your Name” (Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Out—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress and writer Molly Ringwald. In this “sexy, pure, and radiant story” (Out), Philippe chances upon a young man outside a hotel in Bordeaux who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Thomas is the son of a farmer; Philippe the son of a school principal. At school, they don’t acknowledge each other. But they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Despite the intensity of their attraction, from the beginning Thomas knows how it will end: “Because you will leave and we will stay,” he says. Philippe becomes a writer and travels the world, though as this “tender, sensuous novel” (The New York Times Book Review) shows, he never lets go of the relationship that shaped him, and every story he’s ever told. “Beautifully translated by Ringwald” (NPR), this is “Philippe Besson’s book of a lifetime...an elegiac tale of first, hidden love” (The New Yorker).
Download or read book Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark s Fiction written by Phōteinē Apostolou and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as The Comforters (1957), ^The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction. The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.
Download or read book The Meaning of Metafiction written by Inger Christensen and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 20th century literature, a kind of fiction has come much to the fore where the narrator discusses his own craft and frequently addresses the reader. However, Laurence Sterneʼs Tristram Shandy may serve as a striking example of the fact that metafiction is no modern phenomenon. Metafiction has been criticized for solipsism and regarded as a final proof of ʼthe novel no longer novelʼ. Discussing works of three contemporary novelists, Nobokov, Barth and Beckett, and Sterneʼs eighteenth century novel, the author argues that with their tricks, parodies and humour (humor) the metafictionists are concerned with a central human problem: communication. Should literature entertain, come up with ideas about the meaning of existence or give the reader a purely aesthetic experience? The four novelists examined in this study give different and rather exciting answers to these questions and to the problem of bringing their intentions across to the reader. Book cover.
Download or read book Muriel Spark Time in Her Fiction written by Linette Arthurton Bruno and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-03-23 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's preoccupation with man's inability to control his own destiny seems to be accompanied by a mischievous curiosity concerning the supernatural and a wish to delve into its secrets. Miss Brodie exerts a strange power over her pupils. There are prophetic utterances in "The Girls of Slender Means" which announce the coming of tragedy. In "The Driver's Seat" we find Lise's uncanny sixth sense and Mrs, Fiedke's prediction. In "Memento Mori" there is the strange voice on the telephone which warns the aged to remember they must die.Muriel Spark's real concern, however, is a realistic representation of life in her fiction. The better to convey the idea of life as a series of moments, Spark adapts the structure in her novels to embody moments representing the uncertainties of life. Sometimes Time follows an uninterrupted flow and nothing happens to alter its course. At other times, obstacles spring up and bring about a change in direction. Some trivial object may produce an association which sends a character's memory racing back to the past.A sympathetic obedience to the cycle of life and that of the seasons can also be traced throughout the five novels discussed, which treat respectively youth, man in his prime, death and decay which have their parallel in the seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Miss Brodie sits under the big elm in the school grounds with her girls (in the Spring of their lives) while Autumn leaves fall. The inhabitants of the Maud Long Ward are in the 'winter' of their lives. The cycles of life and of the seasons form part of the pattern which Muriel Spark imposes on her work to give it more coherence.
Download or read book A Comparative Analysis of Violence in Margaret Drabble and Four Selected Iraqi Novels written by Bushra Juhi Jani and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first work comparing Margaret Drabble with key Iraqi novelists. It analyses physical and soft violence in Drabble’s novels and the works of four Iraqi contemporary novelists, including Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013). The book argues that physical and soft violence are interwoven and interconnected, meaning that, where there is physical violence, there is nearly always soft violence and, though to a lesser extent, vice versa. Thus, soft violence can cause just as much damage, psychologically or literally, as hard violence.
Download or read book The Black Madonna by Muriel Spark Analysis and Comment written by Lukas Lischeid and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presentation / Essay (Pre-University) from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: "-", Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium Lüdenscheid (Lüdenscheid), language: English, abstract: The short story “The Black Madonna“, written by Muriel Spark, gives a vivid portrait of the dormant and hidden racism of British inhabitants in the 1950s. It can also be understood as a criticism on people who pretend to be religious but do not behave like that.
