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Considered by Harold Bloom “the most charming novel written by José Saramago”, The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989) is not only an exquisitely constructed book, but also a perfect example of the Portuguese Nobel’s aesthetics. Convinced that everything that matters in life is literature and that human existence itself is an expression of literature, Saramago underlines the relationship between historiography and the art of the novel in order to show that fiction is ever-present in each written text, be it a historical treaty or a deliberately artistic creation. The same is true as far as another of Saramago’s novels is concerned, namely The Cave (2000), where the author also expresses his high regard for Plato’s philosophy, his goal being to depict the contemporary challenges each individual has to face during their life.
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The aim of this article is to re-examine the links between Heart of Darkness and the Aeneid—the Latin epic which is already known to have served as the main hypotext for Joseph Conrad’s novella. The transformation of several important motifs—such as those of the sacrifice, white worsted, the ivory gate and, finally, that of the prophetic voice—reveals that Conrad has shifted the focal point of Virgil’s dark tale, placing the figure of the Oracle—who has been disguised and transformed in a highly sophisticated manner—to its very centre.
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The present paper begins by arguing that, unlike the omnipresent phrase “one of us” in Lord Jim which has two easily identifiable primary sources, namely Genesis 3:22 and Poetics II, the source of the related poetic leitmotif which imagines grief or shame as a clouded sky is multiple and protean. What Conrad called “the common expressions, ‘under a cloud’” (LJ 259) is shown to have travelled through such grand narratives as Homer’s Iliad (750-700 BC), Sophocles’ Antigone (442- 441 BC), and Euripides’ Hippolytus (428 BC), before gracing the pages of Lord Jim. In the shame culture of epic, the clouded-sky motif is identified as signaling the warrior’s rising ire through the pathetic fallacy. In tragedy, on the other hand, the same motif in conjunction with the convention of the theatrical mask is said to signify the opaqueness and inaccessibility of the human psyche which necessitates the construction of identity while facilitating the production of scapegoats. However, in keeping with the anti-Gnostic pessimism that Conrad shares with the Greek tragedians, Lord Jim presents the ontological and moral fog surrounding the protagonist as a blessing in disguise since, as Oedipus’ fate illustrates, there may be more danger finally in being understood than in being misunderstood. Thus, given that Jim is “one of us”, his clouded countenance—akin to a mask shielding an actor’s face from himself as much as from the audience—is presented by the novel as humanity’s last line of defense against tragic knowledge.
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This essay analyzes the interpretative situation of Razumov, the main hero of Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes (1910). Challenged by a fellow student named Victor Haldin, Razumov must navigate through his internal experiences (past, present, and those anticipated by him in the future), as well as through external stimuli—which he has little experience to understand fully—in order to arrive at morally meaningful decisions. Communicative aspects of Razumov’s encounters, first with Haldin, then with his sister Natalie, are discussed in greater detail; particularly Razumov’s use of speech and silence, first to conceal but ultimately to reveal the truth.
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The article aims at discussing the interdependence of the marine and the land spaces in Conrad’s works. Although they serve the same purpose—they constitute the background, and set the scene for Conrad’s tales, the marine space works quite frequently as a catalyst for human actions. The Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories volume is analysed in order to present the image of land and sea as created by the writer. Moreover, the voyage, the element joining the tales, will be considered from the perspective suggested by Juliet McLauchlan in her inspiring article Conrad’s ‘Three Ages of Man’: The ‘Youth’ Volume.
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This paper examines the sense of physical presence in The Secret Sharer, and analyzes how the narrator matures into a seaman worthy of a command by developing this sense. The paper is part of my research on the emotional sub-text of Conrad’s works. According to Najder, the work is based on Conrad’s “specialist knowledge as a seaman.” Seamanship demands a developed sense of physical presence. This theme is also important in Under Western Eyes, written during the same period. However, according to Jeremy Hawthorn, Conrad’s concern with “communicative and expressive potentialities of the physical human body” has not been given suffi cient attention, and the same can be said about this work. In this paper, first, I will discuss the theme of physical presence; second, I will analyze the captain’s relationship with Leggett from this perspective; and, finally, I will argue that the captain’s relation with the ship changes as he develops his physical sense.
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The exotic setting of Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly suggests the novel’s affinity to the adventure romance, a genre popular in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, readers expecting a story of dangerous exploits in the remote lands (or seas) must be disappointed. As Andrea White showed in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Conrad challenges the romance convention by contrasting a life full of adventures, which can only be glimpsed from afar, with the protagonist’s mundane existence. The aim of my paper is to take White’s argument further, and to present Conrad’s first novel not only as a challenge to the late-Victorian romance tradition but also to any narrative of (economic) success which accompanied colonial ventures. Conrad exposes both the myth of the adventurer, whose luck coupled with daring enables him to find a treasure, and the myth of a self-made man, whose perseverance and hard work in the colonies ensure his financial success.
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Joseph Conrad wrote The Shadow-Line. A Confession at the end of 1916, when Europe was in the middle of the Great War. As he mentions in the “Author’s Note” (written in 1920), the purpose of the work was to present certain events connected with the passage from youth to maturity. However, in the course of time the expression “shadow line” gained more universal meaning, and now the phrase “to cross the shadow-line” refers not only to crossing the border between youth and maturity, but to passing from one period of life into another. The literary output of Joseph Conrad, had considerable influence not only on his contemporaries or immediate followers, but on the modern artists as well. One of them was Stanisław Lem—philosopher, essayist, author of excellent Science-Fiction novels and short stories, peopled with such characters as Ijon Tichy, Professor Tarantoga or the unforgettable Pirx the pilot. Although in his works Lem, save a few exceptions, does not make direct references to Joseph Conrad and his fiction, Conradian motifs can be traced in most of his novels. One of them is the motif of crossing the shadow-line, noticeable in such works as Return from the Stars, The Invincible, Tales of Pirx the Pilot. The article shows how the author of Solaris used the motif of Conradian “shadow-line” to present the difficult moments, decisions and dilemmas of his protagonists.
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“Only connect,” this is the philosophy E. M. Forster popularizes in Howard’s End and it becomes the central idea in his subsequent writings. Both Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster speak of crossing the boundaries of culture and reaching out to the ‘Other,’ thereby turning their fictions into grand narratives of transculturalism. Conrad, in his novella, Heart of Darkness, and E. M. Forster, in his novel A Passage to India, feel an urgency to bridge up the gap between European imperialists and the natives, between the colonizer and the colonized, the exploiter and the exploited, whites and blacks, between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ thus advocating obliteration of all binary oppositions. Achebe might have criticized Conrad for his ‘racist’ bias but throughout his novel the focus is on tansculturalism, going across boundaries. Kurtz failed because he could not ‘connect’ properly. Forster speaks of the same in A Passage to India on a larger scale but in a more explicit manner. There are several attempts to ‘connect’ at personal, social, cultural, political, and even spiritual levels in the book. In the course of the novel Forster is in search of a ‘lasting home’ (“The Hill of Devi”) under an open sky where people can come together on equal terms putting aside their racial and religious identities. Both Conrad and Forster are, thus, to be examined not just from a post-colonial perspective but from a broader philosophical one, where all lines of demarcation become dissolved and human entity is upheld. In this respect, both writers cross temporal and spatial boundaries and become universal.
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It is a small but important feature of Conrad’s work that “sternness” as a character trait is almost never used to build the atmosphere that its definition of strictness and severity suggests. Instead, acting sternly tends to undercut the authority and sense of personal awareness of characters who attempt it, often contributing to moments of levity or outright comic relief. Conrad was not alone in this use of sternness but, like his contemporary Barrie, he absorbed it from Victorian writers, including Dickens, whose work he read and admired. This paper traces the uses of sternness through Conrad’s canon, showing how its manifestations help to create Conrad’s singular sense of humor. Special attention is paid to the use of the word “sternly” in the last line of “The Tale,” where its interpretation is critical to readerly projections of the story’s future action. Selections from Dickens and Barrie are also discussed in order to contextualize and illuminate Conrad’s own uses of sternness.
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My article compares the narrative attributes of classic early modern literary utopias (by More, Bacon and Campanella) to the shape they take in well-known 20th century literary dystopias (by Orwell, Huxley and Zamyatin). On a formal level, I conclude that only a minor difference separates the two: the awakening of a critical/narrative subject completely reconfigures a formerly static and utopian space of collective happiness into a narrative, historical, dystopian space of individual struggle.
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The author studied the poetic functions of verbal forms in the corpus of the poetry of Yehudah ha-Levi. To illustrate those functions she presented a selection of poems accompanied by the literary translation into Polish. For fuller understanding she also commented on the historical-linguistic background of Medieval Hebrew and the linguistic activities of medieval Jewish authors. Passages from ha-Levi’s philosophical treaty Sefer ha-Kuzari were quoted where the poet expressed his views on the uniqueness of Hebrew language - especially its communicative, prosodic and literary functions. Further on, she aimed to define the grammatical and poetic resources by which ha-Levi managed to introduce corresponding qualities within the frames of his own poetic language and to achieve an effect of literary continuity with Biblical poetry. Those poetic functions were to a large extent subscribed to the verbal forms of his language. Thus in the process of analysis the very specific character of the poetic genre and its consequences on the functioning of the grammatical units had to be taken into account. The author renounced from treating the basic grammatical categories of tense and aspect as prior and discussed the functioning of the forms by applying the tools offered by pragmatics and the grammar of discourse. This led to a more accurate characteristic which allowed to identify the functioning of verbal forms as both coherent within the system of ha-Levi’s language and innovative (more specialised) in comparison to the role-model of Classical Hebrew. It was demonstrated that in ha-Levi’s poetic discourse the functions of verbal forms are broaden to those of rhetorical devices.
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Miniature urban-tourist perspectives of Karel Čapek – in the essay, I make an attempt to cast some light on the Czech writer’s affection for detail of which poetics wields a description of space discovered by the author of Hordubal during his European voyages. Derived from a concept of “small nation”, interpreted – on the contrary to Milan Kundera – in the spirit of affirmation, this affection is expressed by a specific rhetorical dialectics of litotes and hyperbole which generates a narrative about small and often one-time “memorials” to the places visited by Čapek. Miniaturowe perspektywy urbanistyczno-krajoznawcze Karela Čapka – w eseju próbuję rzucić nieco światła na umiłowanie detalu władającego opisem przestrzeni odkrywanej przez twórcę Hordubala w czasie jego europejskich wojaży. Wywiedzione z koncepcji „małego narodu”, interpretowanej – w przeciwieństwie do Milana Kundery – w duchu afirmacji, umiłowanie to wyrażane jest poprzez szczególną retoryczną dialektykę litoty oraz hiperboli, która wytwarza narrację o małych, często jednorazowych „pomnikach” miejsc przez Čapka odwiedzanych.
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The purpose of this article is to discuss the Umberto Eco’s novel “Numero Zero” published in 2015. The image of mass media, presented by the Italian author, is compared to the earlier literary works portraying the work of journalists in previous literary epochs. Outlined analyzes concentrate on Eco’s media reflection, which appears in his novel as well as in his earlier discursive works.
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The gods from Homer’s epics are not something opposite to or excluded from nature (φύσις). Their world is an expression of nature (φύσις), the world from which аrrangement will the term cosmos arise where the geometric order will connotate a justice (δίκη) and its limit. Identity from the topic comes from the indetermination and not from the considering of that divine and natural in itself. The identity of divine and nature (φύσις) is substantial insofar as divine exists in the Homer world in a natural way, just as natural exists in the divine way. Moreover, we can say that Homer understands the life strength as the expression of the natural, which in his epic is nothing other than the expression of the divine. But they, the gods and the nature, are not intertwined only by a simple epic image, nor are the terms that this work forms within the frame of Homer's understanding of the life strength, just metaphors. They are united by the events of the world, contain the reflection of a living event, determine the causes that trigger events, and in that sense they are on the other side of ontological dualism. Therefore, the paper considers the thesis that the ontological dualism of the soul and body finds its roots in antiquity, and explores, through an analytical diachronic and hermeneutical method, whether and in what context we can recognize it in Homer's epic poetry. The basic thesis, of the previous studies in the literature, about Homer's psychological terminology is rejected. Instead, the work starts from the aforementioned organic unity of the divine and the nature (φύσις) in the terms of the life strength which the Iliad and Odyssey sing about. The question of the distinction between the soul and the body this work sees as a consequence of the metaphysical reduction of the term of life strength, and not as the original homeric question. The paper makes the classification of terms that describe the life strength on: the life strength of heartbeat (ἦτορ, κῆρ, φρένες/φρήν, κραδίη, πραπίδες.), the life strength of observation (βουλή, νόος, ψυχὴ i θυμός) and the life strength of limbs (δέμας, γυῖα, μέλεα, χρώς, σῶμα). Homer's rich terminological mismatch, which shows the first explanations of movement and driving forces inseparable from the notions of life and death, allows us to understand the connection between soul (ψυχὴ) and life (ζωή) and to make a way to the philosophy of the nature of early Pre-socratics.
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This essay draws upon the contention that posthuman subjects, such as androids, clones, and robots, can experience psychological trauma. The aim of the paper is to examine this notion in three science fiction texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘Nine Lives’. What these narratives illustrate is that trauma manifestations contribute to a disruption of ontological frameworks that regard categories such as ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ as permanent and distinct. As a result, it might be argued that these texts undermine anthropocentrism and invite a reconceptualising around the term ‘human’, but also around trauma as an experience that is conventionally understood as a primarily human experience. Science fiction is thereby a significant genre when it comes to debunking anthropocentric perspectives. Using posthuman theory and trauma studies, I argue here that these three texts portray their respective posthuman subjects as trauma victims, and further that they demonstrate how the experience of trauma carries with it the potential to bridge the gap between human and posthuman through the act of bearing witness to one another’s trauma.
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The aim of the following paper is to analyse Margaret Atwood’s 2009 speculative fiction novel The Year of the Flood, drawing from the theories of such ecofeminist critics as Maria Mies and Karen Warren. The paper discusses the parallels between the exploitation of nature and animals as well as the oppression of women in the capitalist patriarchy. It explores the construction of women, nature and animals as dominated Others. Special attention is paid to the metaphors binding women and nature as well as to the development of ecological consciousness in female characters. Atwood undoubtedly criticises capitalism as well as genetic engineering, which contribute to the pollution and devastation of nature as well as have negative impact on human beings.
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Fictional serial killers often appear attractive, since the authors and film directors deliberately employ certain techniques to depict the villains as seductive and manipulate readers/spectators into forming a bond with devious protagonists. This article argues that by virtue of different stylistic and literary devices, the villains presented in contemporary texts are aestheticized. Moreover, it also explains why the reader/audience often sympathizes with the murderer rather than the victim.
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