Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №1 Course paper

UZBEKISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY OF WORLD LANGUAGES

ENGLISH LANGUAGE FACULTY № 1
Course paper

Theme: Problem of “family roots” in John Cheever’s stories

Scientific advisor Group:

____________ ____________

_____________ Name of the student:

Shovriqov Shaxbos

Tashkent 2023
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: John Cheever

1. 
   “Family roots” in literature
   

1.2. Finding family roots in fiction
Chapter 2: Problems of the “family roots” in John Cheever’s stories
2.1 Unnecessary Fiction: John Cheever’s Critics
2.2 Problems of the the “family roots” in John Cheever’s stories
Conclusion
List of used literature

Introduction

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspects of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show:
you wonder why he is alive. (Camus 15)
The aim of the work is that there are inescapable limits to the human capacity to know and to understand is perhaps not the simplest, best or most convincing way to begin an argument. Admitting these limits from the outset is a concession that demands an essentially perplexing question: why go on? This apparently senseless need to continue in the face of irrelevance is part of the sensation Albert Camus terms “absurdity” – a near ineffable state of self-awareness brought about by intense levels of self-reflection and provoked by an admission of subjectivity. Absurdity can generate a perspective on the world that makes it seem unfamiliar, arbitrary, and peopled by bodies divested of value.
The object of research is camus’ “dumb show” and “mechanical pantomime” (15) might evoke the characterisation of figures from the work of both John Cheever and Richard Ford, writers for whom subjective anxiety surfaces in variously depicted scenes of alienation, desperation, or comic displays of futility. Some of the most evocative moments in their fictions turn on this anxiety and draw their tone from a sense of individual aimlessness. But when Camus asks the question: “is an absurd work of art possible?” (96) his discussion of absurdity necessarily extends outward. He invites an assessment of the subject-positions of readers and critics who, in perceiving absurdity, must bring a certain amount of their own worldview to bear on the text.
Camus argues that many philosophers have arrived at the point of absurdity: a point where logic finds its limits, where knowledge can extend no further and where an assertion cannot be justified without recourse to something unverifiable (9). “The real effort,” writes Camus “is to stay there, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions” (10). “Staying there” is for Camus a suspension of hyper-consciousness that claims only an awareness of how little able humans are to extend this state of consciousness any further than their own subjectivity can allow. Camus presents absurdity as a mental state difficult to maintain because of its instability and its own internal contradiction: it paradoxically makes a claim to know, and to pronounce as fact, the position that we do not have the ability to know.
For Camus, literature is the place in which our “temptation to explain remains the greatest” (99) and therefore the art form in which the capacity to maintain absurdity struggles hardest against the desire for reason. The order and logic provided by our linguistic habits and our most reassuring narratives appear to contest the illogical impetus of absurd awareness. In the years following Camus’s essay, poststructuralism has assumed a central role in furthering this understanding of language; language and discourse are argued to be the central orders by which meanings, values and cultural and socio-political identifications are constructed, perpetuated, grounded, or reformed. The order of language envelops, inscribes or subsumes utterances into its pre-determined system and the logic that underpins it. In this light the notion that something as illogical as absurdity could be conveyed through forms of story-telling appears increasingly unsound, while desires to conform to the conventions of closure, continuity or morality tales further complicate absurdity’s portrayal.
Suburban fiction initially presents itself as the last potential field in which to locate an example of Camus’ absurd text. For some the traditional image of the suburb suggests rigidity, conformity and a lack of socio-political awareness. The suburb seems to generate an immediate association with order, or with the temptation to explain, to fulfil, to make meaningful, to attain and to satisfy. The contemporary currency of this image in popular novels and films relies in part on the subversion of just such an original stereotype wherein the suburb’s supposed conformity in turn masks and oppresses a seemingly sinister or variously opposed undercurrent. This presumption positions itself according to a long-standing binary perpetuated by critics, readers, and social and cultural commentary: the distinction between the idealised suburb and the ‘real thing’ lying somewhere beneath or behind an inflexible false image of a physically and psychologically ordered landscape.