Secularism and Its Discontents: The Moor’s Last Sigh and Riot

Author(s): Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The recurrent theme of dropping frontiers in a world which has become increasingly heterogeneous but intolerant is the leitmotif of Sashi Tharoor’s Riot and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The figure of the Moor and his hybrid genealogy is central to Rushdie’s vision, as he reconstructs a syncretic, tolerant Moorish Spain and juxtaposes it with Bombay, his haven of pluralism. He celebrates Nehru’s vision of a new Indian nation which, in keeping with the traditions of western modernity, promised to be above religion, clan, and narrow parochial considerations. With the vanishing of such ideals and hopes, as boundaries and religious communalism are getting intensified these diasporic cosmopolitan writers make a case for a boundless world. Their response is a human subjectivity which transcends color, class, narrow parochialism, tribalism and fundamentalism. Secularism is the very base of their humane approach. This essay, therefore, analyzes the theme of secularism and its discontents, particularly in the context of the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India, as it runs through Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Tharoor’s Riot by exploring the various layers of allegories related to pluralism and the critique of fundamentalism in them. Toward this end, it will focus on the recent debates on Indian secularism by scholars to interrogate the relevance of the European model of secularism which argues for the separation of state and religion.

The Narrator’s Identity and the Pursuit of Trespassing Boundaries in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Author(s): Katarzyna Filutowska / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The article focuses on the problem of the narrator’s and the author’s identity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to Charles Taylor’s philosophy of subjectivity in order to have an identity we have to know what kind of good we would like to fulfil in our life. Such an orientation to the good (an orientation in moral space) and an endeavour after realizing this main value defines us as ourselves. In the paper it is argued that the pursuit of trespassing boundaries is constitutive to the narrator’s identity in the novel as it is such kind of an aim without which they could not have been themselves. It is also the key to the author’s identity. Through the medium of the stories of her male story-tellers she confronts her own demons, explores the territories of the subconscious beyond the bounds of understanding and depicts her struggle with the limitations she overcame as a woman in a patriarchal society and as a person who invented a new literary genre – science-fiction literature

“Reread me backwards”: Deciphering the Past in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day

Author(s): Stephanie Johnson / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

Set during the midst of the London Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day revolves around a narrative of espionage, but unlike many novels from the spy genre, it refuses to disclose all of its secrets. Instead, the novel’s dense and complex language, which so effectively expresses the dislocating effects of a city under attack, resists an easy or uncomplicated reading. This article examines the motif of reading within the novel, which manifests when its protagonist, Stella Rodney, learns her lover Robert is a Nazi spy. In her efforts to locate proof of his defection, Stella becomes caught in a recurrent but indeterminable task of rereading past events, a movement which attempts to remember the past but also foregrounds a fundamental inability to ever wholly resolve its enigmas. When Stella fails to read her past for lost clues, she is prevented from viewing the events of her life as a coherent and meaningful narrative. The novel’s difficult language reflects this lack of resolution, refusing to assimilate the events it depicts into a straightforward account. With its wartime setting as a disorienting backdrop, The Heat of the Day undermines the purpose of reading as the discovery of sense and meaning, producing instead only more questions and mysteries

Communality and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Author(s): Jędrzej Tazbir / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The subject of the article is the analysis of the notion of communality in the relation between the two protagonists of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Traversing the post-apocalyptic landscape populated mostly by wretched savages harbouring ill intent towards other human beings, the heroes ostensibly seek a place where establishing a sustainable society composed of the “good guys” can still be possible. However, while for the young son this goal implies the necessity of maintaining a sense of openness and hospitality towards the other, for the father it is the matter of day-to-day survival that takes precedence, which leads to repeated instances of withdrawing help from destitute survivors and avoiding human contact. The boy objects to this behavior, despite being wholly dependent on his father, as his sense of responsibility seems innate and unconditional. The man, on the other hand, gradually recognizes that he was so profoundly afflicted by the experience of losing his world that he cannot overcome his radical pessimism and distrust of the other. Therefore, when the man arrives at the end of his life, he comes to understand that it is only without him at his side that the son can enter a larger community.

The Power of Poetic Praxis in the Literature of Pat Mora and Ana Castillo

Author(s): Amara Graf / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Chicana literary work is predominantly characterized by poetry. Lyrical poetic phrases are interwoven into Chicanas’ short stories, novels, theoretical, and critical essays. Why poetry? What is distinct about poetry as a literary genre or the process of writing poetry that facilitates Chicanas’ self-expression? Various Chicana writers refer to the process of writing poetry as essential to the (trans)formation of identity and society. Poetry allows Chicanas to transform their own identities and to re-define the contours of the world by creating a new or distinct reality from which to act. Collectively, Chicana writers produce a corpus of literary work that is characterized by the commingling of poetry, theory, and criticism. In this article I illustrate that these three phenomena are inextricably linked and that theoretical and critical essays written by and about Chicanas often grow out of and through their more creative, poetic literary work. My analysis focuses primarily on two Chicana authors, Pat Mora and Ana Castillo, and examines how their poetry exemplifies and contextualizes some of their abstract claims and critical theories, as well as how the blending of poetry, theory, and criticism functions as a powerful tool to create socio-political change both in the academy and beyond.

Roll a Hard Six: Losing Your Noodle in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing

Author(s): Shawna Guenther / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing is a convoluted representation of the mentallyunstable mind existing as a series of six characters that are at once separate and conjoined: the horrors and traumatic events of the narrative past dismantle the unified subject into a series of schizophrenic sub-personalities, parts of the destabilized Author’s psyche, existing as separate fragments that eventually collide. Further, the imaginary room emerges as the Fifth Person, promising, but failing, to be a central stabilizer of the other fractured selves. Finally, the design of the text echoes the patterns of the traumatized mind, illustrating the inability of a narrative to construct a stable, unified subject and demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional narrative forms. The text, with its obliterations, cropped phrases, and pictorial manifestations, becomes the Sixth Person. However, in the end, the text shows that the past cannot be erased, explained, or reversed; neither can the experimental nature of the novel reach beyond the traumatized, schizoid subject to represent the horrors of the past that caused the Author’s psychotic breach. Federman has rolled a hard six that will repeatedly fragment and unite, just as the traumatic past continues to repeat itself as one that defies representation.

Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty Shades Trilogy

Author(s): Jodi McAlister / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

The Fifty Shades series has brought erotic fiction to a broader and more mainstream audience than ever before. In its wake, a number of erotic romance series have achieved unprecedented popularity, such as Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series and Lisa Renee Jones’ Inside Out series. These books do not fit comfortably into the genres of romance or pornography: rather, they fuse the romantic and pornographic together. This locates the multiple climaxes of pornography within the overarching emotional climax of romance and creates a structure that is both finite and infinite, allowing the books to create both instant and delayed gratification. This article examines The Sheik as a textual forebear to Fifty Shades before moving on to examine the ways in which romance and pornography are fused, overcoming the limits of serialization in romance, and creating a romantic “pornotopia.”

Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Author(s): Peggy D. Otto / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin dynamics of desire and destruction.

Laying Bare: Agamben, Chandler, and The Responsibility to Protect

Author(s): Gabriel Quigley / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

This paper demonstrates the hidden similarities between Raymond Chandler’s prototypical noir The Big Sleep, and the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document. By taking up the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this paper shows that the bare life produces the form of protection embodied by Philip Marlowe in Chandler’s novel and by the United Nations Security Council in R2P. Agamben’s theorizing of the extra-legal status of the sovereign pertains to both texts, in which the protector exists outside of the law. Philip Marlowe, tasked with preventing the distribution of pornographic images, commits breaking-and-entering, withholding evidence, and murder. Analogously, R2P advocates for the Security Council’s ability to trespass laws that safeguard national sovereignty in order to prevent “bare” atrocities against human life. As Agamben demonstrates, the extra-legal position of the protector is made possible by “stripping bare” human life. This paper also gestures towards limitations of Agamben’s thought by indicating, through a comparison of these two texts, that bare life produces states of exception as the object of protection rather than punishment.

The American Dream and American Greed in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: Sentimental and Satirical Christian Discourse in the Popular Domestic Tale

Author(s): Alison Van Nyhuis / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Although Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time originally was a widely popular book in the nineteenth century, Fern and Ruth Hall were criticized after readers learned about the similarities among Fern’s life and book. Contemporary critics have recovered Ruth Hall from the literary margins and situated Ruth’s story in the context of the popular American dream story while emphasizing the book’s satirical elements. Reexamining the novel’s originally popular sentimental elements alongside the novel’s more recently popular satirical elements expands the literary critical focus from Ruth’s sentimental struggles and Fern’s satirical accomplishments to Ruth Hall’s equally important critique of American greed, especially among wealthy and socially-conscious Christians.

KNJIŽEVNA ALHEMIJA I BLASFEMIJA PAULA COELHA

Author(s): Isnam Taljić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 17/2004

In this issue of our magazine, the readers may find the second sequel of Geography of A Poet, the extraordinary essay by Annemarie Schimmel and several marvelous stories by Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi. For these two supplements (in)directly reveal the entire literary alchemy of Paul Coelho whose novel Alchemist made him a well-known writer, despite the fact that, as demonstrated herein, he did little more than copied from the famous Rumi. His novel proves that Coehlo is, himself, a good alchemist, while displaying his own blasphemy, in the form of a story which takes place in the Islamic milieu of Sahara desert, the story jam-packed with lies about Muslims, who, ‘bang their heads against the ground’ and alike; but that is the way it should be in the world where the theft is considered ‘permissible borrowing’, and where the words are written in order to deceive and enable the writer to creep into good graces of a Western reader.

AHMED MUJEZINZADEOV PEDAGOŠKI OPUS U DJELU ENISU'L-VA'IZIN

Author(s): Muhamed Mehanović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 7/2001

Ahmad Muyezinzade, known as Ahmad ibn Mustafa al-Mustari Mu'ezinzade, as he signed his works, is only one of many distinguished scholars. Unfortunately, the life of this 17th century Mostar scholar is, for the most part, a mystery to us. The exact date of his birth is unknown. No reliable information regarding his education and employment is available and there is no consensus among researches regarding the exact date of his death. Therefore, a study of pedagogical and educational work of this scholar can only be based on his works, and, for the most part, on his most famous work titled Anesu'l wa'ezeen. This article is a modest attempt to do just that. However, this article is, in effect, a horizontal kind of study, insofar that it deals with the entire work Anesu'l wa'ezeen and it describes the general characteristics, goals, means and methods of Muyezinade's work in the field of education.

Composing the Self: Writing and Power in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Author(s): Demir Alihodžić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 13/2016

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the protagonist resists the structures in which she lives by engaging in composition. Offred orally records her story, the materials and opportunity for writing completely denied her as a woman. In this paper, I will focus specifically on the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale by discussing the role of writing and language in the sexual rebellion of the protagonist. I will first of all examine the role of writing within the society presented, discussing the reasons for any repression or prohibition of writing. I will then discuss the way in which the protagonist begins to compose the self by rebelling against the state through the heretical act of writing or recording. I will then discuss the subversive nature of language. Dystopian societies usually assert control over the use of and access to language in order to forestall resistance. If one does not have the power to fully employ language, then one does not have the power to question or challenge the regime. However, in Atwood’s dystopia, the protagonist manages to use language in subversive ways.

KAZIVANJE O ZAPADNOM IZGONSTVU

Author(s): Shaykh Shihabuddin Suhrawardi al-Maqtul / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 5/2001

Ostvarivši cjelovit uvid u djelo živi sin Budnoga zacijelo sam ostao zabezeknut čudesnošću duhovnog pojmovlja i dubokih simbolièkih aluzija, koji isključivaše bilo kakve refleksije na Najviši dogaðaj, odnosno na Strašnu kataklizmu koja je spominjana u Božijim Knjigama, a pohranjena u jezičkim obrascima simbola i tajanstveno ukrivena u Kazivanju o živom sinu Budnoga.

Злочином до читалаца

Author(s): Uroš Tomić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 151/2013

The crime novel in British literature and culture has long held a significant place. Since the beginnings of the genre many critically acknowledged authors have,with more or less ardor and success, tried themselves within the field, of ten times combining crime fiction with the so called high literature. The scope of its historical development exemplifies the significance of this genre, as do the many subgenres determined by the presence of varied aspects of crime fiction. During the 20th century the crime novel has gradually assumed the serious role of the interpreter of the human condition and psyche, and has become the indicator of social and individual states of being. Thus it has completed a major shift into the main and critically acclaimed stream of contemporary British literature through unique creative poetics of individual authors.

Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006): an Illustration of Post–verbatim theatre

Author(s): Milena M. Kaličanin / Language(s): English Issue: 160/2016

Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) is a documentary play based on the common soldiers’ authentic accounts of the war in Iraq. Coinciding with the foundation of the National Theatre of Scotland, Burke’s play was innovative in the sense that it “departed from the hyperrealist trend of verbatim plays of the post 9/11 era, infusing music, projection, movement and song to contextualize the accounts of local soldiers caught amidst a foreign policy disaster“ (Beck 2013: 131). Taking into account the political, in–yer–face and verbatim influences of theatre, whose main postulates are detected in Burke’s play and illustrated in the paper, the study focuses on Beck’s claim that Black Watch represents a vivid example of a post–verbatim theatre, employed in the service of demystification of the prevalent Western imperiali stand nationalist tendencies. Apart from Beck’s inspiring analytical views, the theoretical framework of the paper relies on acutely relevant critical insights of Cull, Hammond, Soans, Sierz, Rich, as well as Burke himself.

Komizm a wojna. Wybrane dzieła satyryczne współczesnej literatury hebrajskiej jako reakcja na rzeczywistość kraju pogrążonego w konflikcie

Author(s): Anna Piątek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 04/2017

The aim of this article is to show how Hebrew writers, from the 1960s to the second decade of the 21st century, have been using humour in their texts referring to contemporary socio-political realities. For a start, the author looks at the role of satire as, on the one hand, a way of venting the growing social discontent, and as a tool of political struggle on the other. From there she goes on to pinpoint the association between individual works (pieces from Hanoch Lewin’s cabaret shows, written around 1970, Yitzhak Laor’s poem from the late 1980s, a lyrical piece by Avner Treinin from the early 21st century and Etgar Keret’s short stories published three years ago) with cultural, historical, social and political determinants, with special emphasis on the Israeli-Arab conflict, which has been casting a shadow on the life of the Israeli people and Hebrew artists for decades. Thanks to the fact that she stays focused on a single subject over a long period of time the author manages to demonstrate how the attitude of the Israeli people to the authorities’ policies evolved over the years and how the Israeli satirical writings changed along with this evolution. Each piece is accompanied by the author’s bio and the historical and social background and an analysis of the means of artistic expression employed in order to achieve the desired comical effects.

The First World War and Forms of Pacifism in Great Britain

Author(s): Peter Hühn / Language(s): English Issue: 162/2017

Књижевност у револуцији и револуција у књижевности: Мануелова књига Хулија Кортасара

Author(s): Ksenija M. Vulović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 163/2017

Although absent from the first three novels by the Argentinean author JulioCortázar, the topic of revolution occupies the central position in A Manual for Manuel. Cortázar’s fourth novel deals with the conquest of liberty at a number of different,yet interconnected levels, among which the political and the literary levels are especially emphasized. Depending on their own political affinities and as a reaction to the highly fictional plot of the novel, the critics have either condemned or praised the presence of the everyday politics in the novel. Nevertheless, the presence of the political and philosophical idea of the necessity of the existence of “a new man” in the contemporary society repositions A Manual for Manuel from the sphere of political pamphlets into the category of innovative thesis novels. The political revolutionary ideas in Cortázar’s novel are followed closely by the aspirations of a literary revolution as a prerequisite for all social changes. Cortázar is opposing the fictional plot of the novel to the newspaper clippings, which are incorporated into the text in their entirety, and by using this technique, he questions the genre definition of A Manual for Manuel. Through the process of reduplication of the narrating instancesand through reiteration of the authorial figures, and by the death of one of the dominant narrators and the writer’s alter ego, Cortázar manages to relativize the privileged role of the author and grants particular significance to the reader. The experimental narrative techniques invite the reader to an active and involved reading,in spite of the simplicity of the plot that renders the reading more passive and deprived of an even greater responsibility. The reader’s task in A Manual for Manuel seems to be less important in the theoretical terms and less innovative in comparison to Cortázar’s previous novels, but this is compensated by the extraordinary life significance and the influence of reading on the creation of the revolutionary changes in society.

Csodaország itt és ott

Author(s): Balázs Sánta / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1-2/2017

Anna Kérchy: Transmedia Wonderland. Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. McFarland, Jefferson, 2016. 268 oldal