An Analysis of the Image of Working Girls in America during Industrilization开题报告

Introduction:

The Remains of the Day: a 1989 novelwritten by the Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The storyis told from a first-person point of view, as were Ishiguro''''s two previousnovels. The narrator, Stevens, a butler, recalls his life in the form of adiary; the action progresses from the mid-1930s through to the present(1970). Much of the novel is concerned with Stevens'''' professional and, aboveall, personal relationship with a former colleague, the housekeeper, MissKenton. And the work received the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989. A filmadaptation of the novel, made in 1993 and starring Anthony Hopkins and EmmaThompson, was nominated for eight Academy Awards.

Kazuo Ishiguro(1954): a Nobel Prize-winningBritish novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was born inNagasaki, Japan; his family moved to the UK in 1960 when he was five.Ishiguro graduated from the University of Kent with a bachelor''''s degree inEnglish and Philosophy in 1978 and gained his master''''s from the University ofEast Anglia''''s creative writing course in 1980.

Judgments on Kazuo Ishiguro:

After Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize,one of his friends praised him as “an artist without ego, with deeply heldbeliefs”(Robert McCrum, 2017). And in his interviewing paper, he said that“my friend is witty, loving and discreet, with deep reserves of wisdom andsympathy. In a frantic, fretful and unstable world, he is a voice of sanity,decorum, humanity and grace.” (Robert McCrum, 2017)

Nicholas Wroe(2005) once praised him as“living memories”

Subtopics:

Analyzing papers on the novel:

Character and theme:

In the novel, Stevens tells us about whathappens in his traveling six days and what incident he recalls in the past.He is a man living under great self-restraint. In his mind, to be aprofessional butler, he should obey what has been told by the master.Although Stevens tries to convince himself and the readers that he has doneonly what is right, as the narration moves on, we can sense regret and lossare actually deeply buried in Stevens’heart. In Sun’s paper, (Sun Linlin,2014), she holds the opinion that “the linguistic theory of adaptationprovides a helpful perspective on the understanding of the character and thetheme of a novel. She analyzed in details about how Stevens makes linguisticchoices under different contexts whether or not himself is aware of theprocess”. By analyzing the conversations from the perspective of linguisticadaptation, we can sense the self-restraint in Stevens.

Comparison work:

Wendy Jones Nakanishi’s(2015) papercompares and contrasts two novels (Bruno’s Dreamamp; The Remains of the Day)that take as their theme the reflections and regrets of a lonely maleprotagonist entering the final phase of his life. “Ishiguo has admittedimpatience with critics who try to identify him as a Japanese author simplybecause he was born in Japan. He claims that, in The Remains of the Day, hewas trying to write as someone more English than the English. His sense ofambivalence about his nationality arises in part from the fact that, from anearly age, he was thoroughly immersed in English culture outside the familyhome while within it he was raised as a Japanese by parents who intended, oneday, to return to their home country. In Stevens, with his obsession aboutwork, Ishiguro managed to create a curiously Japanese figure.”(Wendy JonesNakanishi, 2015)

Language features:

One scholar(HAYASHI Yuji, 2011) analyzedthe language in this novel, pointing out the specialty of the characters’language. In the paper, the author demonstrates how and why native Englishspeakers use dysfluencies such as ‘er’, ‘erm’, ‘...’ , repeats and repair andtake Ishiguro’s novel as an example. By comparing the novel itself and itsadapted film, the author found that the film has a larger number and varietyof dysfluencies than the novel. “Never being at the end of sentences, filledpauses (= um, er, erm) signal that the speaker is still holding the floor.Concordance among hesitation pauses (=...) and filled pauses shows there isno repetition of the same dysfluency. Filled pauses are most frequentlyfollowed by ... (pause). ” (HAYASHI Yuji, 2011) In the end, the conclusionwas drawn that the more demanding your need of saying different things at thesame time, the less fluently you speak, thus more dysfluencies, discourse markers,and vocatives happen.

Narrative features:

The special narrative features of the novelcouldn’t be ignored for making contributions to the success.

Mohamed Fathi Helaly Khalaf(2017) analyzedthe deep reasons of the conflicts inner Mr. Stevens from unique perspectives.What Ishiguro concerned with is the reworking of the past from a latetwentieth century perspective. “As a postwar British individual, theprotagonist of the novel tries to practice suppression over his emotions atthe personal level as well as the professional level to construct a newidentity.” (Mohamed Fathi Helaly Khalaf, 2017) In the novel, Stevens appearssuffered between memories of the past and the representation of the present.He is suffering from an identity crisis and striving to create a meaningfulpresent for himself. “As a postmodern man, Stevens has to struggle atdifferent levels. He is leading a life riddled with inconsistencies andcontradictions. He can’t feel at home with the surrounding world as he isalways busy trying to achieve some perfection that is not attainable in aworld riddled with conflicts and struggle.” (Mohamed Fathi Helaly Khalaf,2017, 173-183)

The story was narrated from the firstperson perspective which contains the advantage of presenting strong andsensible emotions to readers and the disadvantage of unreliability.

Thus many scholars illustrated theunreliable narration in the novel. For example, Wei Yan tries to prove that alarge part of Mr Steven’s narration goes against the reality or covers hisown emotions. (Wei Yan, 2012)

While Zhou Xiaohua(2014) described thatthrough the recollection of Stevens, the novel uses the Proust-style mobilenarrative method, combined with the dual perspective of narrative self andexperience self and unreliable narrative strategy to successfully shape theclassic image of British veteran butler, and at the same time endow thenovel. “Combining the theory of classical narratology, this paper analyzeshow Kazuo Ishiguro uses unreliable narrative strategies to show themultifaceted nature of Stevens'''' character, the inner entanglement and pain,and then use Stevens'''' image to reflect on the characteristics of England''''snationality to construct the image of human pursuing selves. ”

As is known to all that both narratologyand stylistics complement each other in the analysis of the novel. However,unreliable narrative, as an important concept in narratology, its stylisticfeatures are often ignored by analysts. To reach that point, LiKunpeng’s(2010) essay takes The Remains of the Day as an example, analyzingthe three aspects of Stevens'''' vocabulary, double negation and interjectionused in his unreliable narration, and discussing the influence of thesestylistic factors on his narrative.

In addition, K.Scherzinger’s(2004) paperseeks to interrogate the apparently fixed opposition between the structuralrigidity of Stevens’ position (“his situation in the passage as an index ofhis situation as butler) at Darlington Hall and the liminal anti-structure ofStevens’s journey (in passage)” and offers some speculation about how thenovel’s thematic preoccupations are underscored by liminal narrativetechniques.

Comment:The Remains of the Day as the Nobel Prize winner must have various importantcontributors to its success. A masterpiece should be studied and researched alot to make people understand more and learn more from it. The differentanalysis of this novel provide different approaches to scholars. I wish Icould understand this book thoroughly by reading their researches intensivelyand find unique and significant aspects to analyze my paper.

References:

Khalaf, M. F. H. (2017).Reconstructing the Past as a Means of Rationalizing the Present: A Study ofKazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of The Day (1989). International Journal ofApplied Linguistics and English Literature, 6(4), 173-183.

McCrum, R. (2017, October 8). Myfriend Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘an artist without ego, with deeply held beliefs’. TheGuardian.

Nakanishi, W. J. (2015). The‘Insider Outsider’ in Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream and Kazuo Ishiguro’s TheRemains of the Day. Transnational Literature, 8(1).

Scherzinger, K. (2004). Thebutler in (the) passage: The liminal narrative of Kazuo Ishiguro’s TheRemains of the Day. Literator, 25(1)

Sun, L. L. (2014). The Remains ofthe Day Under the Perspective of Adaptation. Overseas English, (06), 188-191

Wei, Y. (2012). The UnreliableNarrator in the Remains of the Day. Literatures, (10), 251-252.

Wroe, N. (2005, February 19). TheGuardian. Retrieved October 6, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/19/fiction.kazuoishiguro

Yuji, H. (2011). Functions of Dysfluenciesin Conversation : Through The Remains of the Day. Teaching English throughmovies : ATEM journal, 65-78. doi: 10.24499/atem.16.0_65

李昆鹏.(2010). 论不可靠叙述的文体特征——以石黑一雄的《长日留痕》为例. 首都师范大学学报(社会科学版), (S3), 9-13

周晓华.(2014). 论《长日留痕》中的不可靠叙述与人物形象(硕士研究生学位论文). CNKI中国知网全文数据库.