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Fronteras entre la realidad y la ilusión en la novela Harraga de Antonio Lozanov

Author(s): Jamal Fajjaji / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 10/2019

Resumen: El orientalismo, como una investigación que pretende recoger y establecer los conocimientos que describen el Oriente, estaba en gran parte al servicio de los propósitos expansionistas del Occidente. De este modo, se ha construido la visión eurocéntrica que pondera la cultura occidental en comparación con la del ‘otro’ clasificado como inferior, retrasado y bárbaro. Los mismos estereotipos que se repetían para justificar el imperialismo siguen presentes en el imaginario occidental cuando se quiere describir y tratar al inmigrante. En la novela Harraga de Antonio Lozano, que estudiamos en este artículo, constatamos la situación de desgarro que dicho inmigrante sufre en la frontera entre dos culturas representadas por España y Marruecos, y que simbolizan la distancia entre el sueño y la realidad, entre el paraíso y el infierno. Abstract: Orientalism, as a discipline that claims to collect the knowledge that describes the East, was often employed in the service of the West’s expansionist goals. A Eurocentric vision has been constructed which favors Western culture in comparison with others that are classified as inferior, primitive or barbaric. These same stereotypes, that have been repeatedly used to justify imperialism, are present in the Western imagination when we want to describe the immigrant. In the novel Harraga by Antonio Lozano, which we are studying in this article, we describe the situation in which one such immigrant finds himself being torn apart and suffering at the border between the two cultures of Spain and Morocco, symbol of a distance between dream and reality, between paradise and hell.

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Transfer Points: Artistic Intersections and Cultural Transitions in John Dos Passos's Fiction of the 1920s

Author(s): Robert McParland / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

John Dos Passos conveyed multiple intersections of art and culture and the spirit of the 1920s in his prose. His novel Manhattan Transfer is characterized by intermediality: a combination of theatre, film, and visual art. With this novel, Dos Passos became a chronicler of American life. A passionate critique of modern society runs through Manhattan Transfer. The city is presented in this novel as a site of cultural intersections and transition and this focus is matched by the fragmentary qualities of the text. From his war novel Three Soldiers through his city novel Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos places his readers in the swirl of the human currents of his time and argues for the human spirit against the forces of a mechanistic world that would crush them. The harshness of the vibrant city is illustrated through the strivings and affairs of these immigrants, Broadway stage performers, journalists, and business aspirants. The relationships between Dos Passos’ experimental fiction and modern art and film are explored, along with the cultural transition of the American 1920s.

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'The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf': Constructing Diasporic Muslim Identities in a Coming-of-Age Narrative

Author(s): Lin Ling / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The paper explores the representation of diasporic Muslim identities in a coming-of-age narrative: Arab American female novelist Mojha Kahf’s bestseller The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf published in 2006. It examines how the religious diasporic hybrid identity is mobilized within the female protagonist Khadra Shamy, including the ways she struggles to negotiate her identity across different cultural terrains and gendered, racialised, intergenerational configurations. It attempts to show how these literary representations construct --and help conceptualize—the ways we understand diasporic Muslims in the U.S. The individual experiences as narrated in the novel illuminate a series of essential socio-political questions facing the community as a religious minority in a secular context. This study will address these questions through the representation of cultural hybridity in the literary narrative within the framework of postcolonial theory. It focuses on three constructs of the novel central to the conceptualizing of a hybrid identity of the female protagonist: firstly, the mirror images and moral panics that generate cultural clashes in the East-West encounter, which foreground, secondly, the predicament of an ambivalent existence of the protagonist as a diasporic individual, and thirdly, the ways she forges her hybrid identity as a New Woman within the diasporic context.

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Cyber Experience as a Resource for Making Alternative Worlds in the Georgian Postmodernist Novel "Chewing Dawns: Sugar-Free"

Author(s): Irakli Khvedelidze / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The paper analyses a contemporary Georgian novel – Zura Jishkariani’s Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free. The novel belongs to the sub-genre of bio-punk. The aim of the paper was to identify the defamiliarized and ironized socio-cultural processes taking place in the contemporary Georgian society, considering the narratological concept of alternative worlds and the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor. The outcomes of the research would draw the cultural-intellectual orientations of contemporary Georgian society. Based on these two conclusions, the paper aimed to find an age-long similarity between the social-political challenges of the 1920s and the contemporary problems of the Georgian society. Research has proved that numerous systems of values have been deconstructed and carnivalized by means of a play with alternative worlds. The development of the world depends on the activation of the human brain capacity, which ensures the cognition of the “higher reality“. The literary text under analysis reflects current achievements in cognitive sciences. The mental trips reflect the capacity of the human brain. The text describes the protagonist’s aspiration towards manipulating and stimulating of the human brain. This is the only way to overcome the banality of life. The manner of narration and the idealization of the aim serve the purpose of description of the revolutionary spirit.

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Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

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Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

Author(s): Andrei-Bogdan Popa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith's There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/ narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.

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Podgorje u pripovjednomu modelu Vjenceslava Novaka

Author(s): Sintija Čuljat / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1/2017

The paper analyses the methods of literary articulation of Podgorje in the narrative prose of Vjenceslav Novak (Pavao Šegota, Pod Nehajem, Posljednji Stipančići, Tito Dorčić, Dva svijeta). Podgorje was not noted as an idealised home region on the edge of the Austrian Empire, but was transformed into a poetic tool of the questioning of the personal and collective identity of the participants of this region, whose marginal position is also considered as a consequence of the conflicting and non-existent parts of Croatian individuality. A move in the analysis of the place of the story from the centre to the edge, as well as the transitions between the semantic fields of the metropolis and the provinces, make up a narrative creation with which Novak enriches his realist poetics, depicting the dimensions of political and class transitions in the separated,tucked away Croatian place, a subject outside of central European literary production. With his fictional configuration of the area, Novak aligns the division at the centre and periphery resulting from the distribution of the political and economic powers of 19th century Europe, as well as a valuable dividing line. Doubts about the affiliation of the original landscape make up a narrative structure of a European realist novel at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The narrative topography of Vjenceslav Novak extends the Croatian environment to the landscape of a smaller littoral town and the Podvelebit coast whose original extensibility and diversity add meanings developed from the tension in the interpretation of the relationship of a centre and a province. Novak’s narrative excursions about the features of Podgorje are interwoven with the common references of the geopolitical idea of a European province, which are distributed over this peripheral area.

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An Analysis of Paratexts in the (Re)translations of Oliver Twist into Croatian

Author(s): Edin Badić / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2020

The aim of the present study is to analyse paratextual elements in Croatian (re)translations of Charles Dickens’ classic social novel Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837–1839). We will explore the level of paratextual (in)visibility of translators in the (re)translations of Oliver Twist and observe how their (in)visibility might affect the reading and interpretation of the novel. The fact that Oliver Twist has been on the reading lists for Croatian primary schoolers ever since the early 1950s may account for the intense interest in the novel on the part of Croatian publishers. The first edition of Oliver Twist into Croatian appeared in 1901 and, since then, three (re)translations have been published, as well as a large number of reprints. The findings aim to contribute to a better understanding of Croatian translation history, shedding light on different approaches to translating children’s literature and the effects such translation practices may have had on the expectations of the target readership.

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(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Author(s): Sardar M. Anwaruddin / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2013

Literary critics admire George Eliot’s touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie’s character as a reworking of Eliot’s own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tess is a ‘low-born’ country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess’ social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families’ expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group—masculine.

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Да ли је Америка „крмача која прождире свој окот”: Апдајков „Терориста” као образовни роман

Author(s): Magda G. Milikić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 22/2020

In this paper we analysed John Updike’s 22nd novel, Terrorist, to ascertain whether this novel could be viewed as a Bildungsroman. Our investigation is based on theoretical insights that Hegel, Lukács and Bakhtin offered on this literary genre; furthermore, we acknowledged some contemporary theories regarding this issue as well. By analysing characters and relations among them, narrative layers of the text and intertextual dialogue in Updike’s Terrorist, we strove to point out how Updike deconstructs this literary genre by showing a young man, Ahmad, who – under the influence of an imam – considers and plans to become a suicide bomber. Also, we indicated how the author’s approach to this sensitive topic is a nuanced one: the novel is militant only on surface.

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The Presence of the Past: History and Imagination in Uday Prakāśs’ Vāren hesṭiṅgs kā sāḍ̃

Author(s): Veronica Ghirardi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The paper aims at discussing the role and meaning of history in a Hindi short story by Uday Prakāś, Vāren hesṭiṅgs kā sā̃ḍ (“Warren Hastings’ Bull”, 1996). Based on the historical figure of Warren Hastings, this work of fiction intermingles fantasy and facts, imagination and history. Significantly, Uday Prakāś warns his readers about this matter right at the beginning of the narrative: if readers look for history in his short story, they will be left “with a heap of sand in their hands”. This and similar statements immediately give rise to other crucial questions, i.e. what exactly is the history that the readers expect to find in the story? What are the strategies adopted by the author while addressing the subject of history? What is the role and meaning of the past in a postcolonial and progressively postmodern reality like that of India at the dawn of the new millennium? By focusing on some ‘dark areas’ of Warren Hastings’ private life, Uday Prakāś not only offers an unusual perspective from which to view the figure of the British Governor but also engages his readers in an explicit reflection on the meaning and the presence of the past in our own reality. A short story (kahanī), based on a two hundred-and-fifty-years old tale (kathā), becomes a powerful instrument for criticizing the anomalies of the contemporary world.

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“Helpless Indian”: The Sacred Cow as the Symbol of Hindu-Muslim Unity in a Late Nineteenth-Century Hindi Novel

Author(s): Justyna Wiśniewska-Singh / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

In the colonial North India of the late 19th century, the cow emerged as a powerful symbol of imagining the nation. The present paper explores how the image of the sacred cow was reinterpreted in the new sociopolitical context and subsequently employed in the Hindi novel, the development of which coincided with massive campaigns for cow protection. To this end, I study one of the earliest Hindi novels, Nissahāy hindū, written by Rādhākr̥ṣṇadās in 1881 and published in 1890. The novel can be read as a documentary evidence of polemics surrounding the process of identity formation and circumstances attending it, as articulated in the Hindi vernacular during the last decades of the 19th century. The agitation for cow protection is the novel’s leitmotif revolving around the theme of Hindu-Muslim unity, framed in an original and unconventional way. It introduces the bold idea of a Muslim agitating for cow protection and sacrificing himself for the movement. The analysis of the novel, alongside Bhāratendu Hariścandra’s seminal speech of 1884, reveals growing concerns regarding the Hindu-Muslim-British relations at the time of momentous religious, social and economic changes.

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Memory and Reflective Nostalgia in "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf and "The Go-Between" by L. P. Hartley

Author(s): Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska / Language(s): English Issue: 14(43)/2021

The mode of nostalgia for past happiness is central in contemporary accounts of earlier epochs, and it becomes particularly visible in British prose fiction set in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that in such accounts memories and recollections are shaped by the mode of nostalgia. This paper focuses on the aspects of reflective nostalgia as recently theorized by Svetlana Boym. It opens with a short introduction into the history of nostalgia and the experience of war for generating a nostalgic longing for the past. It also elaborates on the etymological issues and implications suggested by concepts of nostos [the return] and algos [pain]. I would argue that memories featured in British twentieth-century prose fiction are influenced by the workings of nostalgia which may be either idealizing or imbued with pain and sorrow. Consequently, I claim that the focus placed on the act of nostos promotes the interplay of nostalgia and the pastoral mode; by contrast, the expression of algos rather selects the elegiac mode. Thus, the paper seeks to prove that the different foci of nostalgia influence the modality of the twentieth-century prose fiction, as exemplified in “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf and “The Go-Between” by L. P. Hartley.

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Autotematyczna refleksja w intertekstualnym dialogu. Heretyckie telegramy Sándora Kányádiego w kontekście twórczości Zbigniewa Herberta

Author(s): Łukasz Woiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2020

Sándor Kányadi in his poetic cycle Heretic Telegrams enters into an intertextual dialogue with Zbigniew Herbert’s output. This article attempts to interpret those poems which contain an autothematic reflection on literary creation, artistic expression, ways of narrating or the role of a poet in shaping collective consciousness. Kányádi establishes the opposition of fable and novel, presenting them as literary genres belonging to separate traditions, based on different perceptual patterns. These theses are accompanied by direct allusions to Zbigniew Herbert’s works, what naturally leads to the adoption of comparative literary methods.

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Świat nowego mitu: Siostra Jáchyma Topola

Author(s): Piotr Gierowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2020

Sestra by Jáchym Topol is one of the most important Czech novels, which were published after the year 1989. It describes the new reality of the 1990s as a generational experience with the distinctive mythological features. The paper will be an attempt to describe the process of the mythologization of the fictional world and to indicate its distinguishing features and means of creation of myth-like universe. A special attention is directed to the questions of the intertextual links between Topol’s novel and a poem Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire and the problem of literary Cubism.

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Wielojęzyczność w literaturze dokumentu osobistego: funkcje wykładników transkodowych

Author(s): Elżbieta Sękowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 32/2021

The article is dedicated to semantic functions of transcode markers in Polish émigré literature. Two diaries, written respectively by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Jan Lechoń, constitute the exemplification material. The diary genre, similarly to letters and memoirs, lends itself to introducing this kind of markers. Their presence reflects the multilingual competence of the author, as well as his mental, social, and psychological experience. The second language enables broadening the referential space of the first language and conveying emotions. The strategy of code switching depends on the motivation and goal of writing a given text. In Herling-Grudziński’s Journal Written by Night, foreign words from different languages abound. They fulfill several functions in the text, namely: metalinguistic, index and stylistic function. Their presence is justified by the content and by the role adopted by the author – the one of an interpreter of the political and social reality. The Diary by Lechoń is different in terms of types of predominant functions which can be distinguished in his text. Besides commenting on the émigré life, the author focuses on his emotions and experiences. Therefore, index and metalinguistic functions turn out to be the most important. Pointing out different strategies of introducing transcode markers in a text by its author is fundamental for the research on bilingualism in émigré writing.

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“Wonder Boys” Book vs Movie Comparison: Do Wonder Boys Wander Through Joys?

Author(s): Teodora Leon / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2021

Comparisons between books and movies tend to instigate intense conversations. Adapting a film is no simple task, but contrasting the two products can also be an erratic process, regardless of how much one tries to gather all of their ideas together. A mere observation can bring about diverse opinions or daring suggestions on how readers / viewers would have portrayed a certain scene or a small but crucial detail. In the end, it comes down to the charm of taking on the active role of a “critic” and analyzing the choices that were made alongside possible alternatives. The respective article will talk about how the novel “Wonder Boys”, written by Michael Chabon, came to be interpreted in a different medium, as a comedy-drama film from 2000, directed by Curtis Hanson. “Wonder Boys” may be perceived as a world of freedom from various outlooks. In 1995, Chabon – already ahead of his time – produced a small universe in his novel, where his characters could express themselves candidly. In 2000, Hanson went from being a reader to an avid interpreter and creator of his own “Wonder Boys”. Up until today, fortunate people, who come across the book and the film, can spot the director’s ingenious approach, accompanied by his constant loyalty to the writer’s concepts. We are dealing with a piece of work which should be discussed more frequently in classrooms or university lectures, due to its representative teacher-student bonding, the twisted realistic world – in which troubled individuals can still become inspirations for others – and its quality to be replicated in such inventive ways.

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Transformative Voyages: The Boat and the Ship in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle

Author(s): Gabriela Debita / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

In her Earthsea cycle, Ursula K. Le Guin explores the finer nuances of itinerant heterotopias and the transitions and transformations they enable. Drawing mostly on Michel Foucault’s heterotopia of the boat/ship, but also on Margaret Cohen’s chronotope of the ship, this paper distinguishes between these two variations in Le Guin’s series. The fragile boats in which the young wizard Ged crosses the world of Earthsea and his own tormented mindscapes, in search of the shadow born of his reckless mishandling of magic, is a metaphor for the self, and the voyage is one of self-discovery and of passing from adolescence to maturity. By contrast, the majestic ship in which King Lebannen and his companions sail to parlay with the dragons represents a microcosm of Earthsea’s cultures and a union of previously disparate elements: a coming together which foreshadows the subsequent healing of an ancient rift. Thus, the different uses of the same heterotopic space in the first and last book of the series point to a shift in Le Guin’s focus, from the personal to the political, from magic to secular power, and from knowledge of the self to knowledge of the world.

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Intertextuality and Spatiotemporal Agency in Butor’s La Modification

Author(s): Erfan Fatehi / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

Michel Butor’s body of work has always defied the classic literary classification, which is the main reason why he is often, against his own accord, associated with the Nouveau Roman movement. His magnum opus, La Modification (1957) is the epitome of the time-space collateral where the linear time is deconstructed and is led towards being spatial. This paper intends to analyse the spatial and temporal semiotic world that the author creates by mean of intertexts and workings of time and memory, and therefore provides a better understanding of the work. Intertextuality is the main meaning making mechanism that Butor relies upon and the takeaway from this study, thus, can be summarized in a six-pronged model with regard to the references made to art and architecture in Paris and Rome throughout the novel. Time in the narrative of the work starts with the looming clock in the train station and slowly transforms from linear to a multi-layered form. Butor tamers with the concept of time, which only develops within the central character’s mind, throughout the novel with the technique of time-montage. Considering which, the eidetic image of time in the novel is investigated in this study and the eleven strata of time which the narration of the work is constructed on is enumerated.

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The Delusion of the Dream in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer

Author(s): Alicia Josey / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

The Lockless estate in Ta-Nehisi Coates' fantasy neo-slave narrative The Water Dancer mirrors the United States in terms of their treatment of race. Both Coates's two autobiographical works introduce the concept of family, from his childhood and from his young fatherhood, which highlights the lack of healthy familial relationships in The Water Dancer. The Walkers bastardize fatherhood and brotherhood with the protagonist, Hiram, who constantly vies for their affection despite their unequal relationship. Looking at the novel through a CRT lens allows us to break down this relationship. The Dream of hope, of race relations and treatment getting better in every single way throughout history is often weaponized by the dominant culture in order to force forgiveness, as well as a gruesome idea of family, and drive out the memory of the past.

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Эга-дакумент як камунiкатыўная падзея ў лiтаратурным працэсе (на прыкладзе аўтабiяграфiчнай аповесцi Алеся Адамовiча “Vixi”)

Author(s): Wolga Gubskaja / Language(s): Belarusian Issue: 13/2021

The article uses narrative techniques to explore the role of a fact in literary works. A. Adamovich’s autobiographical novel “Vixi” that serves as illustrative material has been analyzed. The purpose of the article is to examine a literary work at several textual levels: “event – naration – discourse”, “events in the novel – historical context (internal and external chronotope)”, the relationship of “author – narator – reader”. It is argued that the fact in the process of a narrative story cannot remain unchanged – a subjective interpretation of the writer expressed by narrator’s words changes it explicitly. It is emphasized that the fact can be used as a trigger for deploying the main action or changing the style of writing. For A. Adamovich self-reflection as the way of understanding reality is a means to create the world model which represents clear polarization.

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