Language and Symbols in Contemporary Fiction - Alexandra Marginean

It would perhaps be unnecessary to argue that literature mirrors mentalities, as it is intuitive and somewhat universally acknowledged. It is the thought that lies at the foundation of this book. I have studied various pieces of literature in order to uncover commonplaces in the mindsets that they put forth. One of the ideas that I have pursued in writing the research was looking into the way in which people from very different backgrounds envisaged reality. My interest was to determine what haunted them, in terms of topics and ideas. It was important to see if they had the same or dissimilar obsessions, coming from various cultures and upbringings. Which is why I chose authors from several continents, with different origins. Also, I have concentrated on works from the last few years, ranging from 2016 to 2018, to justify the timeline that I called “contemporary” in the title. Moreover, I picked novels with more complex imagery and approaching a diversity of themes, avoiding too simple or focused ones – which is visible in the considerable number of pages that they all have as well (even though this was not, of course, a criterion in itself, it was just that it indeed pointed to and reflected complexity of topics as well). Guillermo del Toro is Mexican and has completed his academic studies in Guadalajara. He has also been raised a Catholic, but from his statements in interviews he demonstrates that he is not one in the traditional sense, as he is not really a Christian or a believer either (Guillermo del Toro, n. d., Wikipedia, https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Guillermo_del_Toro). This does not take away his spirituality, though, as he believes in epiphany at the dawn of one’s life, the moment one leaves this world (ibidem). With such a profile, his ideas are borderline and challenging, and what seems clear is that he has a preoccupation with the spiritual in an original acceptation of the term, and with fringe concepts, ideas, images and thinking in general. He also views the horror as political, in both the sense that it represents traumatizing oppression potentially engendering monstrosity, and in being the manifestation of protest against authority (going beyond it) and of anarchy (ibidem). The co-author of The Shape of Water, Daniel Kraus, is American, and known for various children and young adult’s books, which share the elements of fantasy and the supernatural, as well as the use of monstrous beings as characters (Daniel Kraus, n. d., Wikipedia, https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Daniel_Kraus_(author)). His collaboration with del Toro began before The Shape of Water, in Trollhunters, later made into an animated series (ibidem). Zadie Smith is born and educated in London, moreover at Cambridge, also having become a teacher of fiction at Columbia University of New York in her adult years, after previously authoring an anthology as a result of her writer-in-residence time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (Zadie Smith, n. d., Wikipedia, https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Zadie_Smith). In America, she has also collaborated to “polish” language in film dialogues, as a guest-editor with BBC Radio 4, and as a book reviewer for renowned New York magazines (ibidem). All of these occupations rely on a mastery of English that makes her a representative person for Englishness in this respect. However, there is yet another facet of her personality, which reminds us of her being half-Jamaican, as her mother was born and raised in Jamaica, and only immigrated to England as a teenager. This origin perhaps manifested itself in her desire to change her first name, Sadie, to Zadie, when she was fourteen (ibidem). The latter sounds more Caribbean, reflecting the predilection for voiced consonants, the existence of names beginning with “Z” (6 in the list I have consulted), and central and back vowels, often in diphthongs, encountered in women’s first names in this region (Jamaican Baby Girl Names, 2017, http://www. babynames. org. uk/jamaican-girl-baby-names. htm), unlike Sadie, which reflects the preference for more subdued sonority and consonants in girls’ names, for the letter “s” either at the beginning or in the middle of the name, and for the diphthong “/eɪ/” and front-close vowel “/i/”, as it is visible in a study on most popular names in the seventies (when the author was born), where there is no name beginning with a “Z” in the list, and nearly no names to contain a “z” (other than Elizabeth, which ranks 12, probably due to the popularity of actress Elizabeth Taylor, and Suzanne, which ranks only 107) (Popular names of the period 1970s, 2019, Social Security, https://www. ssa. gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s. html). Also, Zadie Smith liked tap dancing and considered acting in musicals, as well as earned money as a jazz singer in her academic years – both preoccupations rooted in African culture (Zadie Smith, n. d., Wikipedia, https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Zadie_Smith). Smith has often ...