Paper Status Tracking
Contact us
[email protected]
Click here to send a message to me 3275638434
Paper Publishing WeChat

Article
Affiliation(s)

University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the narrative construction of the moment of death as depicted in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and in Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Following Orr’s definition of positive influence, described as a “site for cultural renewal”, it pursues the analysis of complexity and confluence of literary traditions in these texts. Though both Anna Karenina and The Sense of an Ending seem to insist on portraying a chronicle of struggle between a moment and a process of dying, it is nevertheless a physical moment of life ending which becomes an intensely condensed, and almost photographic, representation of the intimate, psychologically depicted, dying process. It is argued that the moment of death reveals, for instance, Anna’s unresolved internal conflict between psychological and physiological phenomena shaping human behaviour. Similarly, Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending builds upon a subtle dialogic tension between a process of psychological dying and a moment of physically conceived death. Specifically, this paper brings to light the repetitive occurence of the intense epiphanic moments which shape the thematic and the structural development of both Anna Karenina and The Sense of an Ending.

KEYWORDS

comparative criticism, moment, death, life, J. Barnes, L. Tolstoy

Cite this paper

References
Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural memory and early civilization. Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Attridge, D. (2004). The singularity of literature. London and New York: Routledge. 
Bakhtin, M. (1982). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barnes, J. (2012a). A life with books. In Through the window. Seventeen essays and a short story (pp. ix-xix). New York: Vintage International.
Barnes, J. (2012b). George Orwell and the fucking elephant. In Through the window. Seventeen essays and a short story (pp. 26-41). New York: Vintage International. 
Barnes, J. (2012c). The sense of an ending. London: Vintage.
Barnes, J. (2014). The lemon table. London: Vintage. 
Childs, P. (2011). Contemporary British novelists. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 
Guignery, V. (2009). Conversations with Julian Barnes. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. 
Kristeva, J. (1969). Semeiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Points. 
Orr, M. (2003). Intertextuality. Debates and contexts. Cambridge: Polity Press. 
Paperno, I. (2014). Who, what am I? Tolstoy struggles to narrate the self. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Russia Beyond. (November 29, 2016). Retrieved January 21, 2019 from https://www.rbth.com
Schopenhauer, A. (1818/2014). The world as will and representation. Vol. 1. (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Tolstoy, L. (1877/2014). Anna Karenina. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by R. Bartlett. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Tolstoy, L. (1898/1995). What is art? (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. 
Woolf, V. (1966/1967). The moment: Summer’s night. In L. Woolf (Ed.), Collected essays (pp. 293-298). London: Chatto and Windus.  

About | Terms & Conditions | Issue | Privacy | Contact us
Copyright © 2001 - David Publishing Company All rights reserved, www.davidpublisher.com
3 Germay Dr., Unit 4 #4651, Wilmington DE 19804; Tel: 1-323-984-7526; Email: [email protected]