Ambiguity is an indispensable part of modern fiction that has always implied what is always merited as the 'literariness' and 'sophistication' of that fiction. In modern fiction, particularly in James Joyce's Dubliners, ambiguity and indeterminacy transcend the textual difficulty and achieve a 'mysterious' level. That is to say, Joyce renders the frequent unfinished and elliptical sentences, as well as the absent words, phrases, paragraphs, and even characters more significant than all those present. In Dubliners, this unique concept of ambiguity and indeterminacy, that tends to be Joyce's narrative signature, is called "gnomonic"-a term derived from Euclid's gnomon. A gnomon is formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. Gnomons in Dubliners indicate not only the incompletion and failure, but also the dialectical cycle of presence and absence. Words prove mostly insufficient to convey meaning, and actions are subject to failure even before they start. But Joyce's approach to gnomon is not a passively confirming one. Joyce skillfully benefits the mysterious condition that his gnomonics make for sustaining his creativity in order to overwhelm intellectually the distorting powers in his society. Therefore, if Joyce's stories seem unsolvable and vague, it is not because of their merely textual difficulties. They present, instead, some gnomonic mysteries of varying degrees and depths. As a way to get readers to read Joyce thoughtfully, this study is going to shed light on this unique gnomonic nature of Joycean mysteries in "An Encounter", one of the childhood stories in Dubliners.
This article was a study of different but synchronized discourses mirrored in Tennessee Williams"s Hollywood adaptations in the 50s. It discussed the effect of artistic agencies of censorship on the hows and whys of Willaims"s adaptations. Most notably, PCA and HUAC were in charge of cultural and political regulations that no Hollywood film was immune from. Until the early 60, HUAC and PCA imposed religious values to supplant Communism, happy ending to replace the intellectual fad of pessimism and strict dressing code to restore the innocence of the Freud-conscious moviegoers. However, these agencies were not omnipotent. The voice of those discourses that the agencies were fighting against were heard in Hollywood. Hollywood achieved the subversion with the help of William"s controversial plots albeit tamed by some reinforcing discourses of optimism and diluted religious values.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is a Hemingway's masterpiece based on his own experiences of the Spanish Civil War. The novel tells the story of an anti-fascist Spanish group of guerillas which the American protagonist, Robert Jordan, joins in order to blow up a bridge. The only two women among the characters, Pilar and Maria, represent matching and also different views on female gender roles in the male-dominated environment. The present study employs the ideas of Sara Mills, the English scholar on Linguistic Feminism and draws a feminist analysis on gender roles and the use of sexist language in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The article concludes that although Maria and Pilar stand on far extremes of femininity, both are challenged with the male preferential language and sexist pejoration.
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