Фантастиката – медиум на модерността: Светослав Минков

Author(s): Nikolina Burneva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

The article introduces the reader to the context of the momentous transformations of the aesthetic and worldview paradigms at the end of ‘the long 19th century’ and the arrival of modernity in Bulgarian culture which had– until then – been traditional and folklore-based. In this context, the author traces the early work of Svetoslav Minkov – a distinguished author of fantastic literature and cofounder of Bulgarian diabolical literature. The article focuses on comparative reading of several short stories by Gustav Meyrink and Svetoslav Minkov in order to highlight the arguments supporting the discussion of this literary movement in a broad, European context.

Les errances d’un chevalier solitaire dans L’épopée du Livre sacré d’Anton Dontchev

Author(s): Alain Vuillemin / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2021

The Strange Knight of the Sacred Book is a novel by Anton Dontchev, a Bulgarian author, published in 1998 in Bulgaria and translated in France in 1999. It tells how, around 1218-1219, the secret Book of the Bulgarian Bogomils arrived in France to their Albigensian brothers, in Languedoc, in Occitan country. It is inspired by numerous readings of epic and courtly literature of the thirteenth century, in Latin and French, in the languages of oc and oïl, and more recent, historical and literary sources, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are also references to medieval tapestries, to 15th century religious paintings, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, and to modern, English and French painters of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a singular, Bulgarian look, rare in modern literature, and devoted to the history of the crusade carried out at the beginning of the 13th century, in Occitania, against the Albigensians. It is a long solitary, pseudo-autobiographical reverie, a long return to oneself nourished by past adventures, intimate thoughts and moral and spiritual reflections of the narrator: a French knight, at first a crusader, later a rebel against the papacy and the Inquisition.

„Самотният крояч“ на романа

Author(s): Roumiana L. Stantcheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2021

In the 1920s and 1930s, the theory of the novel started becoming visible in the texts of novels themselves. This article examines novels with experimental narrative structures, comparing for the first time Bulgarian, Romanian, and French texts that tried new literary ‘cuts’. These writers discussed the role of the narrator throughout the text itself, either in their own name or through the narrator’s voice. They declared a search for authenticity and sought the connection of literature with another ‘fashionable tailor’: Cubism in art. It became apparent that these Modernists displayed a negative attitude towards Paul Bourget, a French writer who had at the time ‘cut out’ an emblematic figure of a successful European novelist. An increased interest in America and the Americans – in a tentative mixture of admiration or rejection – could also be observed in these novels.

Литературна компаративистика под друго име

Author(s): Cleo Protokhristova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2021

This article discusses Ian Bostridge’s book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, which – beyond the label of musicological research dedicated to Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise” (“Winter Journey”), a masterpiece of Romanticism that was based on poems by Wilhelm Müller – stands out with its remarkable achievements in the field of comparative literature and calls attention to the contemporary state of this academic discipline.

On the Threshold: Gendered Spaces in Home, by Manju Kapur

Author(s): Elisabetta Marino / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

Starting from her first, award-winning novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), Manju Kapur has always chosen to focus her narratives on the controversial condition of women in the context of Indian patriarchal society. Moreover, her characters’ struggle to balance tradition and modernity, their attempts at reconciling the demands of their families and their own individual aspirations, have often been reflected in the tension between the spaces women are entitled to inhabit and those from which they are supposedly excluded. By employing the approach of close reading and critical analysis, this essay sets out to explore the way physical and metaphorical thresholds are trespassed in Kapur’s Home (2006). Therefore, family values symbolically identified with domestic spaces are challenged and transgressed to attain the freedom and self-fulfillment the characters long for.

Technology-prompted Crisis in the 22nd Century – Susan Greenfield’s 2121 – A Tale from the Next Century

Author(s): Andreia Irina Suciu,Mihaela Culea / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

The article focuses on an envisaged crisis of humanity in one hundred years’ time, as it is presented in the novel 2121 (2013) by English neuroscientist and writer Susan Greenfield. Greenfield transfers her scientific expertise and pours into the mould of a dystopian view of the future her knowledge of the way in which technology has already, and will, potentially, change people’s brains and the entire course of mankind. The novel, having received mixed reviews, is a “translation”, a transfer or a carrying forward into (the world and language of) fiction of her studies and convictions from her scientific research. The article explores the depicted crisis caused mainly by the excessive and irrational use of technology, with its consequences at individual and collective levels and various types of associated loss and impairment connected to the imagined crisis: loss of measure, loss of control, loss of emotion, loss of the ability to interconnect, loss of environmental equilibrium and connection with nature, loss of purpose, loss of the ability to form mental processes and, subsequently, loss of a sense of identity.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred: The Cultural Context of Production

Author(s): Marietta Kosma / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

Through Butler’s Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. Through rendering disability both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present and the future. The different figurations of space and time exposed through Dana’s time travelling help conceptualize her accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has been extensively focusing on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century, however, there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological displacement of Dana, as a black female body, exposes her traumatization and the difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a history of violence and exploitation. Even though Kindred was written before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, it could be analysed in a way that asserts the continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in USA and the crisis of blackness in the future. Systematic violence threatens black women’s wholeness and renders their bodies at risk.

Romanian migration reflected in recent Portuguese literature: the Roma ethnicity as a case in point

Author(s): Catalina Iliescu-Gheorghiu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This article focuses on three contemporary Portuguese literary works that feature Roma characters and culture-specific elements within a wider selection of authors who mention or delve into past and present Romanian realities. This selection was aimed at determining which are the themes, historical events, lived or narrated memories, symbols, images, and ethnotypes that interest contemporary Portuguese authors in relation with the Romanian immigrant segment, a population fairly representative in Portugal (ninth largest minority group, with some 31,000 residents and an annual immigration rate of 2,000 new arrivals). My exploration (through several channels: library catalogues, oral sources, databases) revealed ten literary works which tackle elements related to: the Roma ethnic group and the negative ethnotype of prostitution, crime and begging; the former elite (aristocracy, intelligentsia), above all, temporally anchored in the early years of the 20th century; and the Communist regime, its apparatus (party and secret police) and its fall at the end of the eighth decade of the 20th century. In this article I shall focus on the analysis of the first group, basing this on the concept of “ethnotype”, observing how the image of a given immigrant population is constructed, and how this image affects its members in the public and private spheres.This article focuses on three contemporary Portuguese literary works that feature Roma characters and culture-specific elements within a wider selection of authors who mention or delve into past and present Romanian realities. This selection was aimed at determining which are the themes, historical events, lived or narrated memories, symbols, images, and ethnotypes that interest contemporary Portuguese authors in relation with the Romanian immigrant segment, a population fairly representative in Portugal (ninth largest minority group, with some 31,000 residents and an annual immigration rate of 2,000 new arrivals). My exploration (through several channels: library catalogues, oral sources, databases) revealed ten literary works which tackle elements related to: the Roma ethnic group and the negative ethnotype of prostitution, crime and begging; the former elite (aristocracy, intelligentsia), above all, temporally anchored in the early years of the 20th century; and the Communist regime, its apparatus (party and secret police) and its fall at the end of the eighth decade of the 20th century. In this article I shall focus on the analysis of the first group, basing this on the concept of “ethnotype”, observing how the image of a given immigrant population is constructed, and how this image affects its members in the public and private spheres.

Instances of (un)translatability in Ion Creangă’s “Amintiri din copilărie”/ ”Memories of my boyhood”

Author(s): Andra Iulia Ursa / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

These days, writing about untranslatability may seem courageous, as more and more voices associate this issue with translation incapacity and, instead, advocate for creative remedies or even reject such an instance. This study does not deal with a contemporary novel, nor does it have to do with a powerful textual space. However, we believe that translation theories mainly focus on analyses of a certain category of languages, and raise questions of discrepancies between subordinate and dominant cultures, a tendency which derives from the proneness of the international publishing industry to favour certain languages and types of writing. We are not aiming for a debate around the subject of publishing politics or endeavours, but rather we try to cast some light on the ambitious project of rendering vernacular into a powerful language. This paper deals with the work of a great Moldavian storyteller who contributes significantly to the enhancement of expressiveness through linguistic characteristics that occur informally. We hypothesise that the vibrant vernacular writing “Memories of my boyhood” creates potential instances of untranslatability, due to significant differences between the Romanian variety and English, not necessarily in the linguistic inventory but rather in the cognitive structures of the readership. Therefore, the case study focuses on how source text and target text readers infer meaning from interjections and terms of address, originally belonging to the Moldavian modes of expression. Although the translators re-create these short utterances, due to a lack of a similar background from the part of the receiving culture, we witness a limitation on conveying their original intentionality, emotion and plethora of meanings.

Lectură și interpretare a Bibliei în romanul „Muncile lui Persiles și ale Sigismundei” al lui Miguel de Cervantes

Author(s): Anca Crivat / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2021

In this study, we propose the analysis of a series of biblical quotations in the last Cervantine novel in order to identify the role that these could play in highlighting the meanings of the book and in the narrative strategy of the author.

ТРАКИЯ И ТРАКИТЕ В СВЕТА НА АНТИЧНИЯ РОМАН: ТЕМИ, ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ, ТОПОСИ

Author(s): Mina Tasseva Bencheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2022

The ancient novels, written in Greek or Latin, appeared around the Ist century AD and quickly became a popular genre. Drawing from a number of topoi and common themes, both in their narratives and in their style, these works reflected perceptions of the present, problems and questionings of their time. The genre of the ancient novel also shared numerous themes and means of expression with ‘higher’ literary genres from the same period, such as those of the Second sophistic. Later, the novels enjoyed popularity in the Byzantine empire and in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The paper aims at exploring there presentation of Thrace and the Thracians in the works of several authors of ancient novels such as Apuleius, Longus, Helliodorus and Pseudo-Callisthenes by gathering and analyzing interpretations of various figures from the history and the mythology of the region as well as generic representations and themes related to it. The paper will thus contribute to the main subject of the readings by bringing into light some of the manners in which the image of Thrace and the Thracians evolved in the Graeco-Roman culture from the first centuries of the Empire.

МИТ ИЛИ РЕАЛНОСТ – ТРАКИЯ И ТРАКИТЕ В МЕТАМОРФОЗИ НА АПУЛЕЙ

Author(s): Slavtcho Kirov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2022

This article discusses the various stereotypes associated with Thrace and the Thracians during the Roman era, not only drawn from the Greek literary tradition, but also directly inspired by the political situation in Rome and the Balkans, skillfully intertwined by Apuleius to offer different levels of interpretation.

Editor’s Introduction

Author(s): / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Tihana Klepač. 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑅𝑒𝑑 𝑆ℎ𝑜𝑒𝑠: 𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑎 𝐵𝑎𝑦𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑀𝑦𝑡ℎ

Author(s): Vanja Polić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Loss of Home and Loathing Nostalgia in the English Writing of Central and Eastern European Exiles

Author(s): Christoph Houswitschka / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Writers who are forced into exile by a hostile government tend to suffer from the grievances of loss and deprivation. They either divorce themselves completely from their former home country or they look back in nostalgia. After 1989, leaving central and eastern European homes was not only a free decision, but could also be an act of liberation. Leaving had not been an easy option before the Iron Curtain had come down. Changing one’s language and writing in English represented this act of liberation. Creating a new memory (e.g. Eva Hoffman) and a literary persona in the language of globalization and cosmopolitanism meant to look back and to discover the new at the same time. This article investigates this tension by reading writers who have published books about both their former home countries and their new English-speaking environments. Loathing nostalgia in the creative process of writing has helped authors, such as Bulgarian Kapka Kassabova and Miroslav Penkov and Czech writer Jan Novak, to imagine new spaces of cosmopolitan belonging without being in denial about the places of their childhood thus redefining the concept of eastern Europe altogether.

𝐶𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝐹𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑠 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒, edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen

Author(s): Ioana Baciu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Диалогът на културите в романите на български и турски автори „мигранти“ (Емине Йоцдамар, Феридун Заимоглу, Илия Троянов, Димитър Динев)

Author(s): Snezhana Boycheva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

The basic link between the four authors, mentioned in the title of the present research, is the constituting of the dialogue between the cultures in the topos of ‘between’, ‘the border space’. Central to the plotline of the novels are the so-called ‘not-places’ (non-lieux, Nicht-Orte) (Auge), transtopoi (Foucault) - airports, railway stations, harbours, planes, trains, ships, refugee camps, hotels, vacation places, parking lots, gas-stations, shopping malls. „The open“ spaces are not the only local markers; they often turn into a main character in that type of literary texts. These are the spaces that question standard models of behaviour and thinking; that change identities, transfer and gather together different cultural standards.

Достоевски през погледа на полски писатели емигранти след 1939 г.

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2022

The text presents the views on Dostoevsky’s work of Polish emigrant writers after 1939, who published in the emigrant publishing house “Culture”: Witołd Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Lem, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Stanisław Mackiewicz, Jerzy Stempowski, Józef Czapski. Their main texts are analyzed, in which the following issues are covered: the Russian specificity of his religious and philosophical views; Polish-Russian relations and the question of Dostoevsky’s „polonophobia”, relations between Russia and the West; universal philosophical-psychological and existential views of man and society; literary polyphony.

За книгата: Надежда Стоянова. Украси и гримаси. Мода и модерност в българската литература от 20-те и 30-те години на ХХ век. София, Изд. „Парадигма“, 2022, 378 с.

Author(s): Alexander Hristov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Nadezhda Stoyanova. Adornments and Grimaces. Fashion and Modernity in 1920s and 1930s Bulgarian Literature. Sofia, Paradigma Press, 2022

За книгата: Миглена Николчина. Бог с машина. Изваждане на човека (от романтизма до трансхуманизма). София, „Версус“, 2022.

Author(s): Kamelia Spassova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Miglena Nikolchina, God with Machine. Subtracting the Human (From Romanticism to Transhumanism). Sofia, Versus Publishing, 2022