Identity and Memory in Marina Lewycka’s Novel "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian"

Identity and Memory in Marina Lewycka’s Novel

Author: Shanna Große

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2020-07-02

Total Pages: 17

ISBN-13: 334619406X

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Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, Saarland University (Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen), course: Proseminar Britische Literaturen und Kulturen, language: English, abstract: This short paper intends to answer the questions how the identities of the two sisters in Marina Lewycka’s novel "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" (2005) are shaped. As the novel contains various flashbacks through past telling, which again influences the different characters of Vera and Nadia, this paper also tries to explain to which extent a personal past memory plays a role within this process of forming their self-concept. This is made by the theoretical constructs and definitions of identity and memory and the thought of how these two constructs are linked, meaning identity being created through memory. Through analyzing selected passages from the book, the theory is applied on the characters of both Nadia and Vera to find out more about their different identities and search for possible reasons in their past. The concept of collective and individual memory (Assmann) will play an important role to give possible reasons for their different perceptions of the past, which thus lead to many conflicts throughout the novel. Lewycka uses memory, especially Nadia’s and Vera’s different perceptions of the past, to determine the sisters’ identities, which also serves as legitimization of their immigration to Great Britain. Selected close readings will show how both sisters developed two different self-concepts out of their memory and how this identification influences their attitude towards migration into a country.


Facing the East in the West

Facing the East in the West

Author: Barbara Korte

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2010-01

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9042030496

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Over the last decade, migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe have become an issue in political debates about human rights, social integration, multiculturalism and citizenship in Great Britain. The increasing number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain has provoked ambivalent and diverse responses, including representations in film and literature that range from travel writing, humorous fiction, mockumentaries, musicals, drama and children's literature to the thriller. The present volume discusses a wide range of representations of Eastern and Central Europe and its people as reflected in British literature, film and culture. The book offers new readings of authors who have influenced the cultural imagination since the nineteenth century, such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Arthur Koestler. It also discusses the work of more contemporary writers and film directors including Sacha Baron Cohen, David Cronenberg, Vesna Goldsworthy, Kapka Kassabova, Marina Lewycka, Ken Loach, Mike Phillips, Joanne K. Rowling and Rose Tremain. With its focus on post-Wall Europe, Facing the East in the Westgoes beyond discussions of migration to Britain from an established postcolonial perspective and contributes to the current exploration of 'new' European identities.


A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Author: Marina Lewycka

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2006-03-02

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0141900520

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WINNER OF THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN PRIZE FOR COMIC FICTION WINNER OF THE SAGA AWARD FOR WIT 2005 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2005 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget . . . A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel. 'It's rare to find a first novel that gets so much right . . . Lewycka is a seriously talented comic writer' Time Out 'Hugely enjoyable...yields a golden harvest of family truths' Daily Telegraph 'Delightful, funny, touching' Spectator Bestselling author Marina Lewkyca has received great critical acclaim since the publication of her hilarious first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian in 2005, which was the winner of the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction 2005, winner of the Saga Award for Wit 2005, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005 and longlisted for the Booker prize 2005. Her other humorous novels Two Caravans (published as Strawberry Fields in the USA and Canada), We Are All Made of Glue and Various Pets Alive and Dead are also available from Penguin.


Panic in a Suitcase

Panic in a Suitcase

Author: Yelena Akhtiorskaya

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1594633827

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“A virtuosic debut [and] a wry look at immigrant life in the global age.” —Vogue Having left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a sense of finality, the Nasmertov family has discovered that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they had imagined. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, returning is just a matter of a plane ticket, and the Russian-owned shops in their adopted neighborhood stock even the most obscure comforts of home. Pursuing the American Dream once meant giving up everything, but does the dream still work if the past refuses to grow distant and mythical, remaining alarmingly within reach? If the Nasmertov parents can afford only to look forward, learning the rules of aspiration, the family’s youngest, Frida, can’t help looking back—and asking far too many questions. Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s exceptional debut has been hailed not only as the great novel of Brighton Beach but as a “breath of fresh air … [and] a testament to Akhtiorskaya’s wit, generosity, and immense talent as a young American author” (NPR).


Fictional Discourse

Fictional Discourse

Author: Stefano Predelli

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0192595962

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Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.


Identity and Translation Trouble

Identity and Translation Trouble

Author: Ivana Hostová

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-08-21

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1527500802

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Besides providing a thorough overview of advances in the concept of identity in Translation Studies, the book brings together a variety of approaches to identity as seen through the prism of translation. Individual chapters are united by the topic and their predominantly cultural approach, but they also supply dynamic impulses for the reader, since their methodologies, level of abstraction, and subject matter differ. The theoretical impulses brought together here include a call for the ecology of translational attention, a proposal of transcultural and farcical translation and a rethinking of Bourdieu’s habitus in terms of František Miko’s experiential complex. The book also offers first-hand insights into such topics as post-communist translation practices, provides sociological insights into the role politics played during state socialism in the creation of fields of translated fiction and the way imported fiction was able to subvert the intentions of the state, gives evidence of the struggles of small locales trying to be recognised though their literature, and draws links between local theory and more widely-known concepts.


Writing Across Worlds

Writing Across Worlds

Author: John Connell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 113484641X

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Drawing on a wide range of migrants' writings, this collection reveals an extraordinary diversity of global migratory experience while illustrating the realities and emotions shared by all who leave their home and culture and must adapt to another.