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In this interview, the well-known Albanian writer Fatos Kongoli talks about literature, tyranny, democracy, transition, the authors he read, and how he created. As one of the most successful Albanian writers, he talks about the socio-political context that affected his creations, which were dominated by characters traumatized by their past.
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Në këtë intervistë, shkrimtari i njohur shqiptar, Fatos Kongoli, flet për letërsinë, tiraninë, demokracinë, tranzicionin, për autorët që ka lexuar dhe mënyrën si ka krijuar. Si një prej autorëve më të suksesshëm shqiptarë, ai këtu flet për kontekstin social-politik që ndikoi në veprat e tij, ku dominojnë karakterer e traumatizuar nga e kaluara e tyre.
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The natural elements of inhabited areas often shape people’s lifestyles, psychology and worldviews, influencing their moods, decisions and actions. Rivers in particular are often associated with the historical development of human relationships and the emergence of settlements and urban life. This paper explores the representations of the Danube in four contemporary novels by Hungarian authors or set in Hungary: The White King (2008) by György Dragomán, Train to Budapest (2008) by Dacia Maraini, Under Budapest (2013) by Ailsa Kay and Los Amantes Bajo el Danubio (2016) by Federico Andahazi. The aim of this analysis is to show how the river operates as a framework of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2000) in each of these works, it has a representative power of its own and determines people’s destinies and human relationships in heterogeneous cultural contexts. It functions both as a natural backdrop for historical events and as a means of expressing and conveying emotions, creating a transnational political identity that is both socio-cultural and deeply intimate.
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The article is devoted to a subplot of molestation of a girl, which is repeated in several works by F. M. Dostoevsky, in the context of the 19th-century legislation. We focus on two works: “Crime and Punishment” and the chapter “At Tikhon’s” that was originally intended to be a part of “Demons.” Molestation occurs in both texts, and there are intersections in a number of details. Both victims (the drowned girl and Matresha) are poorly socialized and suffer from abuse in their families. Both girls are fourteen years old. Researchers have already pointed out that a possible source for this plot was an article in “Severnaya pchela” covering the suicide of a thirteen-year-old girl, Marfa Arkhipova, who was accused of stealing. Dostoevsky significantly expanded the plot, adding molestation and making the girls older. This article is intended to prove that the change in victim’s age was not accidental. The age of fourteen years in the 19th century legislation is the boundary that separates sexual crimes in general from sexual crimes against children. There was no direct ban on such plots in censorship regulations. However, it appears that an author who decided to depict this crime would at least have to deal with their editor’s discontent. This is exactly what happened with the chapter “At Tikhon’s,” when M. N. Katkov, the editor of “Russkiy Vestnik,” refused to publish it. It is difficult to speculate and say what reaction this text would have caused among censors, and readers — if published. We know, however, that this subplot later served as a reason for N. N. Strakhov to accuse Dostoevsky of pedophilia.
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As well as being an academic, Chicago-born Tony Ardizzone is one of the most prominent American writers of Sicilian origin. In 1985 he travelled to Morocco and settled in Rabat, where he taught at Mohammed V University. As he has elucidated in more than one interview, he had no intention of writing about Morocco, even though, during his stay, he kept a diary. He travelled to Morocco a second time, in 1988, and, when he came back, he decided to weave some of the stories he had already started to draft into one collection of fourteen interlaced pieces, entitled Larabi’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, re-issued in 2018 as The Arab’s Ox to mark the 25th anniversary of the book publication. As this essay sets out to demonstrate, by setting the collection in a foreign territory at the crossroads (between Europe, Africa, and the Arab world), by choosing American characters (not just Italian Americans) who are struggling to balance their identity in a country whose mores they do not fully understand, Ardizzone aims at casting light on the difficulties and the negotiations each person of ethnic origin has to grapple with, in his/her path of recognition in America.
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The present paper aims to discuss the journey from page to screen of ”The Invention” of Hugo Cabret, a gripping novel written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. Throughout this process, critical approaches will be examined to understand how specific narrative elements have been condensed or reimagined for the purpose of cinematic flow. This article delves into the fascinating world of film production and emphasizes the harmonious relationship between film and literature.
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In his last novel, “The abyss. From the Notes of a Doctor” (1936) Anton Strashimirov continues to show interest in the collective stereotypes and the social preconditions that shape a person’s behavior and emotional attitudes towards the world around him/her. With its polyphony of human voices and interpretations, the work under comment intersects different, even incompatible, individual interpretations of essential aspects of existence, seeking answers to questions related to the boundaries between good and evil, freedom and coercion, sin and crime.
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The text aims to present one of the aspects of Madеleine’s image in Maupassant’s novel “Bel-Ami” by focusing on her physical features. The ambiguous nature of the specific female character is analyzed as part of doubled image which also includes that of the Le Madеleine church in the light of the characteristic for the French fiction writer stylistic specifics of repetition, dispersal and multiplication on different textual levels. Different reasons for doing so presented are reported: scientific, contextual and biographical; toward the artistic work an approach is laid through linguistic and literature prism.
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The article analyzes four novels by the Swiss authors Max Frisch and Urs Widmer, as well as by the Austrian Thomas Bernhard. In all of them the narration is of the so called “unreliable” kind, which is to be explained by the modern problem of the relation between life and literature and the different ways the texts approach that problem. The conclusion is that during the second half of the 20th century writing and fiction were gradually losing the aura of being “the other” to life which Modernism used to ascribe to them.
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The novel 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐼𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛: A Love Story by the British and Serbian writer Vesna Goldsworthy is set in London and in the capital of an unnamed state-socialist country behind the Iron Curtain. It follows the fate of young Milena Urbanska, a privileged “red princess” but also a victim of the communist regime, both in exile and on her return to her homeland. The protagonist leaves her homeland in pursuit of freedom and love, but her return becomes an act of vengeance, casting her in the role of a latter-day Medea. This article focuses on the themes of border crossing and exile, which are central to this exophonic novel.
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This article focuses on the gaze of the flâneuse as portrayed in the novel Sieviete (The Woman, 1930) by Tija Banga (1882–1957), the collection of prose poems Ielu maldos (Delusion in the Streets, 1923) by Lūcija Zamaiča (1893–1965), and the collection Dzejas (Poems, 1932) by Austra Skujiņa (1909–1932). These works of Latvian feminist modernist literature call for a reevaluation of women’s place in the city and, therefore, in society. The concept of flâneur, the idle street-walker of 19th century Paris, was initially developed by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and other French writers, eventually becoming a key figure of modernity, as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). However, this concept lacked a female counterpart, as women’s presence in public spaces was often limited to specific social roles that usually were not compatible with respectability. During the interwar period of the 20th century, albeit unusual, the existence of the flâneuse in Western metropolises seemed less implausible. In Latvian interwar literature, a few voices of urban women emerged to challenge the dominance of the male gaze. Writers, such as Banga, Zamaiča, and Skujiņa placed the female perspective at the forefront of their work, questioned the masculinity of urban men, and contemplated the presence of women in urban environment.
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The aim of this paper is to provide a contextual insight in the story of two novels written by Alberts Bels in the late 1960s: Izmeklētājs (The Investigator) published in 1966, and Bezmiegs (Insomnia), which was written in 1967 but denied publication by Latvian SSR officials. Analysis of the situation in the Latvian SSR at the time in question allows us to understand the reception of Bels’s published novel by the literary critics of that time, as well as the conditions that prevented the publication of his second novel. Instead of providing a textual analysis of the novels’ poetic and stylistic qualities, my intention is to look at these literary texts as indicators of the cultural and political situation of that period.
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This text is an introduction to the theme of this issue. First, it briefly overviews the place and the functions of the literary genre of dystopia in present-day world literature. It then outlines the history of the genre in Bulgarian literature from its almost complete absence until 1989 to the rise of a true dystopian wave in the second decade of the new century. In its last part, the text points out how the thirteen articles published inside can be divided into three groups in terms of their subject matter and disciplinary approach.
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The current text’s purpose is to compare the two novels mentioned in the article’s title, so it could examine some differences and some similarities in creating a fictional world, while emphasizing on the political dimensions of a dystopian narrative. The machine of power is a metaphor used in both novels, which are also comparable in their intention to show general mechanisms that take place within similar political regimes.
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Rooted in the dystopian tradition, 2084 : la fin du monde [2084: The End of the World] by Algerian author Boualem Sansal stands out for its inclusion of elements reminiscent of the philosophical tale, particularly Voltaire’s Candide ou l’Optimisme [Candide, or Optimism], such as the use of descriptive intertitles in the form of completive propositions, the schematic nature of the characters and the use of irony. It is this second generic affiliation that we will focus on in this article.
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The article based on the comparative principle seeks to introduce to a wide audience two novels by Lithuanian writers Kęstutis Navakas (Vyno kopija [“The Wine Copy”], 2016) and Marius Ivaškevičius (Tomas Mūras, 2022), whose authors wish to reflect on the status of the artist in the current era of excess and prosperity. The myth of the artist began taking shape in the 19th century and remained at its height throughout the 20th century, even though art itself underwent many changes. Is the artist still the representative of the elite in society in a post-modern age, when the line between art and pop, between personality and promotional image is almost blurred? These are the questions the authors ask and try to answer, joining inevitably those European authors who placed the creative person at the centre of their fictional world over the last two centuries. Anyone who writes on this subject almost inevitably becomes an author of World literature, as we have understood it since Goethe. The study seeks to reveal the diversity of literary associations, sometimes unconsciously touched upon by the authors, and the tradition of the European novel in dealing with questions of art, man, and his meaning on Earth.
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This article tries to show how the cinematic transposition of two horror novels by Stephen King (“The Shining” and “Christine”) into remarkable horror films of the 1980s may make the genre of horror movies a postmodern art, by using certain specific cinematic means, which induce both attraction and fear to the audience: colour and light contrast; music; beginnings and endings; agency; setting; buildings and entrances; vehicles; physiognomy; metamorphosis; monsters, ghosts and corpses; abnormal speech or writing; claustrophobia; dreams, hallucinations, premonition, telepathy. The ambivalent effect of horror and pleasure is obtained by specific techniques, suggested by the plots of the books, and also by the tradition of scary movies and the respective film directors’ artistry.
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The purpose of the paper is to offer a panoramic view of Canadian society at the beginning of the last century. We discuss the challenges of this society on the eve of the Second World War and we see the discrepancy between the bad and good people and how discrimination holds a special place at the heart of the French-Canadian society. Also, we are interested in taking an exam of the regional language which was used at the turn of the century. To offer an abundant view of the subjectivity in this novel, we used the close reading of the insolate book, focusing on how to explain and give an entire view of a depraved world where the people are oppressed by some physical and moral defaults.
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While positive aesthetic expressions, those of ‘beauty’ are often associated with travel literature, it is important to understand its corresponding antithesis, ugliness. As aesthetic factors can be a reason for one to undergo the process of travelling to another place, it should be proposed that ugliness, in its ability to subvert expectations, is a major player in the traveller’s experience. To see how it does that, we must first understand where does ugliness stand in relation to one’s view; exploring then the reactions to such a phenomenon.
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My scientific interest is founded on researching travel literature and anthropology. These two essential aspects of modern literature can explain how we can see and analyze the importance of auctorial narrativity in offering a view of a visited or imagined place in the world. Also, to give a high definition of these two concepts, I centered the entire activity on researching the principles that are the cradle of this relationship. We have provided a rich and useful point of view of the subjectivity in contemporaneity. By using the technique of closely reading some secondary scientific texts, we were able to offer a response to this relationship in contemporaneity.
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