Imagining of Literature

The long-lasting tradition of print has established certain patterns of comprehension. Although literature is still and probably for a long time will be considered high-brow art, it is also a business based on profit and sales. Ever since the Gutenberg press came into being literature started to sell itself to wider and wider circles of people until it gained status of mass product. Literature is commodity. As Pierre Bourdieu asks in The Field of Cultural Production “Who is the true producer of the value of the work – the painter or the dealer, the writer or the publisher, the playwright or the theatre manager?” ( Bourdieu, 76 ). 

My Memories are Vultures They seek a decaying corpse Lying in a lush green field Of forget-me-knots To tear its flesh apart and Build a nest оf sun-dried bones Which would hold white illusions Of my days that are to come My Fancy drinks the corpse’s blood And Grins to ask : “You want some more?” “Yes!”, I scream, “Yes!” “Revive that ugly monstrous flesh And fill the void that held the eye And give the blood back to the heart And color back the death-ful hair.” “Let us dance once more through the endless field, Drink the odor of a cloudless summer, Or naked swim among the soft sun-rays, Until our senses are but scattered dull, ‘Till intoxicated with ecstasy We fall laughing, stupid with happiness.” But Fancy would not have it so, O! The blood dripping off her smile It kills the flowers at her feet.

The Cinderella complex [1] and Ugly Betty The Cinderella story is one of the most popular tales with strong roots in cultures all around the globe. It was adapted and re-told multiple times eventually becoming a productive and even archetypical theme especially in Western culture. The Cinderella story is almost synonymous with the quest of a person to endure injustice and to evolve in a higher society role overcoming the odds. Similar motifs were categorized and analyzed in theory by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp [2] and his analytical approach proved to be very influential. His work scrutinizes the folk tales and develops a pattern of well organized repeatable structures and motifs. 

I.                   Introduction Unlike Atonement , where at the very beginning the reader encounters an epigraph from Jane Austin that more or less pre-supposes intertextual clues for further reading, On Chesil Beach does not offer such accommodating leading first steps into its highly condensed narrative. Preoccupied with a single event that provides multivalent analyzing points, the dramatic intensity of the whole book is encoded in that condensed way of telling.