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Stories and restoring: narrative, techology and rituals of womanhood

Author(s): Vladislava Gordić Petković / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2012

Although the challenges women have had to face in their attempt to create and circulate their intimate and public histories are much older than computers and informational highways, this paper will mostly focus on the ways women’s testimonies are mediated through the fictional and existential frames enabled by technology. The identification of women’s social self in Jelena Lengold’s Baltimore, will be, as a process that lavishly uses computer mediated communication, compared with the social and cultural reconstruction of motherhood in David Albahari’s novel Bait, and to the bleak dystopian confession of betrayal within the borders of an alienated technology-enhanced society in “The Gospel According to A Thirsty Woman” by Mirjana Novaković. The three novels are based on different kinds of women’s narratives, mediated through technology.

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Двостабла истина

Author(s): Valentina Milekić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 5/2012

Review of: Macura, Sanja (2011), Epitaf zatrtima, Laktaši: Grafomark.

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Representations of the Upper-Class Victorian Father in Ellen Pickering‘s The Fright

Author(s): Alina Pintilii / Language(s): English Issue: 7/2017

The Fright by Ellen Pickering deals with parental roles within a wide range of foster families of early Victorian upper classes and with parent-child relationships these roles imply. A special attention is drawn to the paternal figure as it is depicted in the characters of Mr Bradley and Mr Rolleston, and to the relationships they develop with Grace, whom they foster one after another. Mr Bradley is a kind and loving foster parent to Grace, but his physical and psychological absence and lack of domestic authority allow his wife and children to mistreat her. In contrast, Mr Rolleston is described as a sovereign father who is always present, being actively and directly involved with his foster daughter, but whose parental involvement derives from self-oriented reasons, making his fatherhood swing from stern coldness to affection. The contention is that the portrayals of Mr Bradley‘s and Mr Rolleston’s fatherhood depart from the socio-historical prototype of early Victorian wealthy fathers, who were often absent from their households, but nonetheless ruled them with undisputed power. By comparing the literary representations of the upper-class English father to the typical historical construct, this article aims at proving, through the deviation existing between these two, that the realism of the Victorian novel does not consist in rendering characters and their actions in consistency with socio-historical templates.

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Hi(s)story Gone Wrong. Martin Amis on the Holocaust in Time‘s Arrow

Author(s): Michaela Praisler / Language(s): English Issue: 7/2017

A historical novel told backwards, Martin Amis‘s Time‘s Arrow recycles the shared memories of the Holocaust, experiments with narrative representation and uses black irony throughout, in an attempt at healing the past and avenging the dead, while shedding surgical light on the present and the living. The paper focuses on the aforementioned, analysing the way in which form supports content, and his story (that of a Nazi doctor) rewrites history (which emerges as a series of consecutive dystopias).

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Des Lettres de la religieuse portugaise aux Nouvelles Lettres portugaises: la conquête de la solitude à l'aube de l'âge moderne et son palimpseste féministe

Author(s): Ewa ŁUKASZYK / Language(s): English,French Issue: 1/2020

The intertextual relation between Letters of a Portuguese Nun attributed to Guilleragues and New Portuguese Letters written by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta is being analysed as an adaptation to the changing cultural conditions of the epoch. In the 17th-century version, the female figure goes through a process of egotistic revitalisation. The disaster of a love relationship, just like the shipwreck in Hans Blumenberg’s essay, leads to a radical individualisation and the conquest of solitude, a process that characterises the dawn of modern age. On the contrary, the adaptation of the same literary figure by the Portuguese feminist writers appears as a reaction against the solitude of women at the end of modernity. It is rather a “we” that is revitalised through a novel ‘couple experience’ or a community inhabiting a utopian “house of females”.

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Male Representations in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Author(s): Çelen Dimililer,Nurdan Atamtürk / Language(s): English Issue: 97-1/2019

A Room of One's Own can be categorized as a 'feminist manifesto' because it discusses the role of women in the history of literature. Woolf argues that women are oppressed and explains why women are prevented from writing fiction. Further, A Room of One's Own raises many critical issues that are still significant for women of our contemporary world and hence suggests some of the materialist reasons for the oppression of women from Antigone to the present. To Woolf, educating women is the major momentum in their liberation because that is the only way for them to be treated 'equally'. Through female representations in the book, Woolf presents the conditions of men and the mindset of the society. This qualitative study aimed to determine male representations as perceived by undergraduate English Language and Literature students. Male chauvinism, male domination and male freedom were found to be the dominant themes.

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Scyzoryk Mojżesza. O marańskiej homoteologii Juliana Stryjkowskiego

Author(s): Adam Lipszyc / Language(s): Polish Issue: 40/2019

The paper deals with a variety of ways in which the phenomenon of Marranism can be perceived as being at play within the work of the Polish-Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski. First, the author discusses Stryjkowski’s explicit references to Marranism in a novel and two short stories where this historical phenomenon becomes a point of reference for a reflection upon contemporary Jewish condition. Then, by means of a close reading of the first chapter of Stryjkowski’s first novel (Voices in the Dark), the author shows a deeper, implicit and metaphorical understanding of “Marranism”: this time the term would refer to the disguised presence of the homosexual desire within the framework of the traditional Jewish life. The author points to the complex relation between homosexuality and the transgressive lure of Christianity within Stryjkowski’s work, as well as to the ways in which the Frankist heresy can be seen as offering a historical precedence and context for Stryjkowski’s ‘homotheology’. Finally, the third and most comprehensive understanding of Marranism is presented. This time the term refers to the fragile identity of the Polish-Jewish writer himself, which precisely due to its fractured nature enables the writer to capture a whole universe of tensions within the Jewish world and the complex dialectics of heretical homotheology.

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The Green Gables Utopia. On the Novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Author(s): Piotr Oczko / Language(s): English Issue: 41/2019

This paper deals with the issue of “utopianism” in L.M. Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), a book which has been translated into Polish many times and has been shaping the worldview and mentality of Polish female readers for over a century. This utopianism is here presented in three separate approaches. Firstly, the study investigates the “translatological utopianism” of the first translation of the novel (by R. Bernstein, published in 1911), which, as a result of the linguistic and stylistic decisions of the translator, has been significantly naturalised and domesticised, as well as adapted to the multiple (genological, social, and cultural) expectations and conceptions of the Polish implied audience. Secondly, attention was drawn to the fact that Avonlea as presented in the novel is a kind of social “matriarchal utopia”, emphasising the issues of women’s solidarity, responsibility, and education, at the same time strongly referring to the Arcadian trend in utopian literature. Thirdly, it was suggested that in Moira Walley-Beckett’s film adaptation Anne of Green Gables (Anne with an E, 2017-2018), the reading “between the lines” of Montgomery’s novel and the application of the hermeneutics of suspicion by the screenwriter made the idyllic utopia of the original resemble a dystopia.

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„Realizm profetyczny”: emancypacyjna poetyka powieści George Sand

Author(s): Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 42/2019

The article recalls George Sand as a writer whose works, especially those of the 1830s and 1840s, inspired the development of a democratic European society. It shows how Sand’s involvement in the democratisation of post-revolutionary France is intertwined with the poetics of her prose. The author introduces the term “not-entirely-realistic” to describe Sand’s writing, which at the same time consciously uses and transcends the poetics of contemporary realism, introducing into the novel the idealisation of chosen characters and fabulous or idyllic motifs in the creation of the world. On the example of selected works, the article discusses common features of typical Sandian protagonists. They are at the same time idealised (noble, selfless, generous, compassionate, and helpful) and idealists themselves, who dream of a better, more equitable social world, and believe that social commitment is consistent with the true message of the Gospel. The article also demonstrates how idyllic space in Sand’s fiction becomes a utopian sphere in which people from different social strata meet and interact as equals.

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Praca socjalna z dzieckiem – refleksje na podstawie książki Agresja – nowe tabu? Jespera Juula

Author(s): Dominika Beszłej / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

The main aim of this paper is to present a new approach to working with children and young people, as described in Jesper Juul’s book Aggression. A New and Dangerous Taboo? This approach consists of treating a child as a subject, following his or her needs, avoiding stigmatization and paying special attention to building a healthy self-esteem. These issues are considered mainly from the perspective of a social worker, educator, pedagogue. In order to understand the validity of Jesper Juul’s educational concept, the work places great emphasis on raising awareness of the unequal treatment of a child and its issues in relation to adults.

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The Shaman, the Greengrocer, and “Living in Truth”

Author(s): Jonathan Bolton / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2018

This article turns to Havel’s contemporaries in the Czech music underground to look at earlier uses of the phrase “living in truth.” I focus on Egon Bondy’s 1976 novel The Shaman, where truth is portrayed in mystical terms as a form of transcendence achieved through solitary spiritual training—a mental state that is divorced from political opposition. Havel repurposes the idea of “living in truth,” avoiding mystical notions in favor of civic engagement, but he also steers clear of the romance of “dissident stories” about people persecuted for such engagement. I explore why Havel’s famous story of the greengrocer is so weak on motivation; rather than painting a scene or creating a three-dimensional character, Havel gestures weakly at the greengrocer’s sudden transformation into an oppositional figure. Havel also consistently uses scare quotes around the phrase “living in truth,” registering his own discomfort with a phrase that is inspiring, yet plays into dissident clichés. I see The Power of the Powerless as delineating a version of dissident truth while remaining skeptical about its transmission; Havel skillfully mixes pathos and irony as he considers the role of “dissidents” caught between Czechoslovak realities and Western expectations.

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The Sacred and the Myth. Havel’s Greengrocer, Twenty Years Later

Author(s): Marci Shore / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2018

This essay juxtaposes two thinkers: the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) and the Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident Václav Havel (1936–2011). In particular, the text examines Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless through the lens of Girard’s structuralist model of mimetic desire, violent sacrifice, and a cultural order sustained by prohibition, ritual, and myth. Arguing against the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Girard insisted on a reality behind the text: myths disclosed real victims. Girard and Havel shared a merciless anti-populism: society was guilty. They shared something else as well: in an age of a loss of faith in Marxism and all grand narratives, and of skepticism about the possibility of any stable meaning, subjectivity, and truth, Havel and Girard insisted on the ontological reality of both truth and lies, and on the ontological reality of the distinction between them.

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Vašar taštine i Lomača taština: prolegomena za poetiku modernog realizma

Author(s): Stefan S. Alidini / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 21/2020

This paper examines intertextual influences and ties between Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. After an analysis of the problems of intertextuality as applied to complex literary structures, Gerard Genette’s systematisation of intertextual phenomena is concluded to be the most suitable model. The paper focuses on examining parallelisms through contrasting texts directly, as well as placing the findings in a broader context concerning modern realist and realism-inspired novels, otherwise labelled under the term ”Neo-Realism”. The analysis itself focuses on examining intertextuality within the titles, the serial form of both novels and its situational influence on plot and structure. This is followed by an examination of other microstructures (plot devices, narrative voice, and thematic parallelisms) with the aim of understanding the intent and meaning of Wolfe’s alterations to the self-chosen Thackereyan model. Finally, the characteristics, as defined throughout the paper, are reconceptualised through the lens of Wolfe’s explicitly poetic texts. From this perspective, The Bonfire of the Vanities emerges as one of the key novels in modern neorealist prose.

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Socialism, Synecdoche, and Tadeusz Konwicki’s Palace of Culture

Author(s): Ewa V. Wampuszyc / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2013

Tadeusz Konwicki’s literary and cinematic treatment of the Palace of Culture and Science has had a significant influence on the perception and meaning of this Stalinist edifice. In his novels, Wniebowstąpienie [Ascension] (1967) and A Minor Apocalypse (1979), Konwicki uses the Palace as a means of critiquing communist ideology by adopting a Christian discourse that, in turn, invokes and questions the Polish Romantic messianic and martyrological tradition. In the 1989 film Lawa: Opowieść o “Dziadach” Adama Mickiewicza, Konwicki’s presentation of the Palace visually explodes into what seems to be the author’s “final” statement on the signification of the Palace. By examining the poetics of the Palace of Culture in Wniebowstąpienie, A Minor Apocalypse, and Lawa, this essay considers how over a period of twenty years Konwicki appropriated the meaning of the Palace by playing on the tension between the intended original signification of the building (as a Stalinist structure) and its function as a dynamic edifice that could be redefined in a localized (Polish), urban (Varsovian), and historical context.

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On Power and Time. Reflections on The Fortress by Meša Selimović

Author(s): Filip Kovačević / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2011

In this article, the author examines the relationship between power, time, and human reality. Using a novel by the Bosnian writer Meša Selimović as a case study, the author tests two metaphysical claims: power submits to power only, and the passage of time empties the significance of each and every human activity. The author finds that Selimović’s novel confirms both. The conclusion is profoundly pessimistic. The lives of human beings are doubly unhappy: they are spent in protracted struggles for resources and recognition that yield power, and also even the accomplishments of the victorious in these struggles will be erased by the passage of time. However, the understanding of the second claim might retroactively ameliorate the conditions of human life. Yet as evidenced by Selimović’s novel, in the world dominated by power, this does not happen. The case of Šehaga Sočo shows that even the one whose personal experience convinced him of the meaninglessness of it all is unable to break out of the cycle of rivalry and revenge. At his deathbed, he orders the death of his rivals, though he knows that to him dying, it makes no difference whether they live or die. Why not opt for forgiveness? Because, as Selimović emphasizes, power’s insistence on self-perpetuation is illogical, and it is logic that tells us not to engage in meaningless tasks. In other words, human reason is powerless to provide us with a more tolerant world.

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Ismail Kadaré’s The Shadow. Literature, Dissidence, and Albanian Identity

Author(s): Peter Morgan / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2008

In the article, Ismail Kadaré’s 1986 novel, The Shadow, is analysed as a form of apologia pro vita sua about the deformations of life under a dictatorial regime. This interpretation demonstrates that Kadaré was a dissident in his own terms during the reign of the dictatorial regime and that this type of opposition was something different from the political and ideological critique of post-totalitarianism. Throughout his work, Kadaré has suggested the existence of an alternative Albania to that of the regime, intimating that the historical roots of his nation can give birth to different versions of Albanian identity to that propagated by the Albanian Party of Labour. Using the figure of the legendary Albanian hero, Konstantine, in The Shadow, The Twilight of the Steppe Gods, and elsewhere in his oeuvre, Kadaré links the contemporary problematics of dissidence and existential authenticity under the dictatorship to historical patterns of Albanian culture and individual existence.

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The Parallels and Differences between the Urban and Country Ways of Socializing in the Worlds of Jane Austen and Helen Fielding

Author(s): Katarína Brziaková / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2020

This paper focused on several aspects of life in Great Britain. I wanted to concentrate chiefly on two important points. Firstly, I tried to find and compare the differences in lifestyle and related entertainment in the country villages, towns and cities in the early years of the nineteenth century which I perceived as largely dominated by deeply rooted traditions and strict social norms. As the basic source for my research I selected some of Jane Austen’s novels as they serve as real social chronicles of her times. Secondly, I did a similar analysis and comparison of the same aspects at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as they were reflected in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’ Diary. I thoroughly analysed and compared the aspects of life, the habits, norms, rules and views, class affiliations, the snobbery, vanity and conceit of middle and upper classes in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The findings, based mostly on the strictly observed and applied rules of socializing showed that no matter what century we live in now, nothing much has changed between Austen’s and present times when speaking of social rules, norms, class distinctions and equally importantly – position of women.

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The Indian Social Novel in English: A Neo-Victorian Encounter

Author(s): Carmen Escobedo de Tapia / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2020

The influence of the Victorian on postcolonial Indian narratives in English dates to the 1930s with the Founding Fathers: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. There is a clear development of the Indian social novel that emerges in the Gandhian era to the connexions with the Victorian, underlying the relationship between neo-Victorianism and globalization. It is the aim of this article to highlight a Dickensian pervasive presence in the first stages of Indian narratives in English, specifically the Indian social novel. I will establish a comparative approach between Dickens’ celebrated novel Great Expectations (1860-61) and Coolie (1936) by Mulk Raj Anand, the social Indian writer par excellence. I suggest a neo-Victorian encounter framed within a colonial/postcolonial encounter, making explicit how different historical processes – late eighteenth-century England and the Gandhian era in India – cause a similar social impact on so different contexts. Mulk Raj Anand adapts and appropriates the Victorian in Coolie, showing deep social concern and claiming against social evils, injustice and hypocrisy in India. This analysis stands as a transcultural exercise that shows Dickens’ universal scope regardless of time and space.

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The Role of Food and Foodways in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Author(s): Dorota Rygiel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The primary function of food is to regulate basic body processes and support its functions. However, the role of food is more than just the satisfaction of physiological needs. Food and foodways are important elements of each culture deeply rooted in individual and collective memory. They define specific ethnic groups and mark particular cultures. The aim of this paper is to show multidimensional roles that food plays in the lives of the community and an individual on the example of Brick Lane by Monica Ali. An emphasis is put not only on the psychological, cultural, aesthetic and social functions of food but also on the constructive role of nostalgic food memories. Food and culinary rituals play a crucial role in the protagonist’s life, as they symbolically accompany the process of the identity formation and the personal transformation she undergoes. Jedzenie jako jedna z najbardziej podstawowych potrzeb człowieka służy podtrzymywaniu funkcji życiowych i regulacji podstawowych procesów organizmu. Trzeba jednak pamiętać, że rola jedzenia nie sprowadza się jedynie do wymiaru fizjologicznego. Jest ono bowiem istotnym elementem każdej kultury głęboko zakorzenionym w pamięci indywidualnej i zbiorowej. Tradycje kulinarne definiują grupy etniczne i charakteryzują poszczególne kultury. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie wielowymiarowej roli jedzenia w życiu zbiorowości oraz jednostki na przykładzie powieści Brick Lane autorstwa Moniki Ali. Autorka niniejszego artykułu koncentruje uwagę nie tylko na psychologicznej, kulturowej estetycznej czy społecznej funkcji jedzenia ale także na konstruktywnej roli nostalgicznych wspomnień, które wywołują tradycje kulinarne. Jedzenie i praktyki kulinarne pełnią ważną rolę w życiu głównej bohaterki powieści, bowiem symbolicznie towarzyszą jej w procesie kształtowania tożsamości i osobistej transformacji.

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"Only in Dying Life": Ursula K. Le Guin's Dry Land and Its Cultural Contestations

Author(s): Gabriela Debita / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

In his seminal essay theorizing the concept of heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault insists that his focus is on external spaces. However, given the ability of certain spaces, especially those associated with trauma and torment, to simultaneously be inhabited and inhabit the psyches of their denizens, it stands to reason that some heterotopic spaces are internal as well. One such example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land, an inner hellscape which appears throughout her Earthsea series. The Dry Land serves to mirror, invert, and contest not only the world of Earthsea, but also the pervasiveness of Western literary and cultural influences on the genre of fantasy itself. Inspired by classical and Renaissance sources (Homer and Dante) and modernist ones (Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot), the Dry Land, a jarring spatial and literary aberration in the context of Earthsea’s Taoist framework, serves to confront both the resistance to the finality of death and the supremacy of the Western literary canon. In doing so, it demonstrates Le Guin’s desire to distance herself from Western canonical influences, while nevertheless highlighting the fact that, given the cyclicity of literary rebellion, she is, in fact, walking in Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s shoes.

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