Academic literature on the topic '1857-1924 Victory'

Dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, les écrivains se heurtent à un monde perçu comme chaotique, dont l'espace maritime va devenir une image privilégiée. Ce monde nouveau met en question leur pouvoir de représentation et ébranle les fondements de l'identité de l'individu occidental. L'espace ouvert de l'océan semble témoigner de la perte de tout centre signifiant, de toute vérité établie qui marque l'entrée dans la modernité. Face à cette découverte, exaltante et terrifiante à la fois, les auteurs vont avoir recours à l'image ancienne du navire. Ce dernier, représentant d'une nation conçue comme une entité stable, semble un refuge dans cet univers livré au désordre. Mais la micro-société de l'équipage peut aussi servir d'espace d'expérimentation pour le modèle démocratique et le navire peut être perçu comme un instrument technique porteur de Progrès, à même de faire advenir l'utopie. Le passage de la voile à la vapeur figure en ce sens une véritable rupture épistémologique. Le navire est, en somme, un lieu de transition entre deux mondes, où vont se révéler et s'amplifier les conflits (raciaux, sociaux ou culturels) qui déchirent le rivage. Ces conflits se cristallisent le plus souvent autour de la figure d'un individu "déviant" par rapport au groupe des hommes embarqués ou sont mis au jour par un narrateur marginal. Cet "homme de trop à bord", personnage ou narrateur, va obliger chacun, lecteur compris, à se siturer, à s'engager et à interroger les fondements de sa propre identité comme les valeurs qui sont les siennes
In the second half of the 19th century, the world begins to change and to appear in many ways chaotic, challenging the writer's power of representation and questioning the basis of an individual's identity in Western countries. In the literature of the time, the apparent incoherence and mystery of maritime space thus become significant metaphors for this New World. The open space of the sea also gives evidence of the loss of the centre, which signals the emergence of modernity. In order to face the horrifying but also exhilarating prospects generated by a new perception of the world, the authors resort to the old image of the ship. The ship represents the nation, which is conceived as an irremovable entity. She seems as such to be one of the last refuges in a disorderly universe. But the crew as a micro-society can also be used to experiment a democratic existence and the ship can be perceived as a technical instrument, bearing Progress all around the world. In a way, the ship functions as a transitional space between two worlds, where the conflicts of the shore come to light and grow in intensity. These conflicts develop around a deviant character or else are revealed by a marginal narrator. The presence of this " extra man on board ", character or narrator compels everyone, readers included, to commit themselves and to examine the grounds of their own identity and values

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel.
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