Browsing by Author "Elbir,N.B."

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Journeying in Time and Space “through the Tall Heat That Slept”: Larkin's “the Whitsun Weddings”
(Ovidius University, 2019) Elbir,N.B.; Department of English Language and Literature; Department of English Language and Literature; 17. Graduate School of Social Sciences; 02. School of Arts and Sciences; 01. Atılım University
This paper examines Philip Larkin's use of the metaphor of a train journey in his famous poem “The Whitsun Weddings” to transform time into space in such a way so as to enable the speaker to present a geographical and historical survey of the rural, urban and industrial landscape of mid-twentieth-century, post-war England, registering the social and cultural changes brought about by the process of modernization. The paper argues that the train journey functions as a metaphor for an imaginative journey, through time and space, that brings, in a characteristically discursive manner, Larkin's solitary and contemplative speaker from a state of detachment and superiority to one of heightened and thoughtful realization of the deeper implications of his perceptions as the train, and the poem near the final destination. In other words, the railway journey through the spatial and temporal metaphor of “the tall heat that slept” becomes a means of revealing and patterning the speaker's changing responses to the modern English landscape and English people. © 2019 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.
Wartime Spaces in Elizabeth Bowen's “sunday Afternoon”
(Ovidius University, 2021) Elbir,N.B.; Department of English Language and Literature; Department of English Language and Literature; 17. Graduate School of Social Sciences; 02. School of Arts and Sciences; 01. Atılım University
This article examines the treatment of space and time in the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen's wartime short story “Sunday Afternoon” (1941), to discuss how the use of spatiality and spatial images in the narrative discourse of the story enables her to convey the social and physical reality of the Second World War, and the psychological, interior states and anxietiesof her characters, revealing their sense of dislocation and disorientation caused by wartime conditions. My argument is inspired mainly by Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the “chronotope” and Gaston Bachelard's definition of the house as “psychic space.” The protagonist of the story is an Anglo-Irish man who is on a visit to his old friends in Ireland from London, where his home has been destroyed by the Blitz. He is soon to return to his Ministry job in blitzed London and to an uncertain and frightening future. I argue that the setting of the story, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy big house and its environs in neutral Ireland, becomes a Bakhtinian chronotope where, as Bakhtin putsit, “time, asit were, thickens, takeson flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84), and the house portrayed as a familiar and well-remembered space that takes the protagonist back to his past functions as an image that, in Bachelard's words, “bespeaks intimacy”(72). Thus, the depiction of wartime spaces in “Sunday Afternoon” gains historical and personal significance that merges the past, present and future, and serves to emphasize the convergence of public and private moments of crisis. © 2021 Ovidius University. All rights reserved.