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Liminality in Angela Carter’s Collection of Stories The Bloody Chamber

Author(s): Daina Miniotaitė / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

The article explores the theme of liminality – liminal experience and liminal human beings in Angela Carter’s collection of stories The Bloody Chamber in an attempt to reveal the complexity of human – female and male – identity, its transformations and outcomes. In literary and cultural theory, liminality is defined as a “space or state which is situated in between other, usually more clearly defined, spaces, periods or identities.” Thus, liminal human beings do not have one form of existence, they are naturally ambiguous. In the stories, Carter investigates liminality through half-beings who represent two sides of personality which are at odds with each other and do not make a harmonious whole, as well as the image of the bloody chamber. Moreover, neither of the character’s states is fully accepted. Carter considers the ways how to deal with each of them in order to regain integrity of mind and claim their full humanity.

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Empire and the Great War - rethinking Irish identity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way

Author(s): Ksenija M. Kondali / Language(s): English Issue: 17/2019

The staggering, unprecedented scale of human losses and other repercussions of what became the First World War continue to inspire many authors of fiction and nonfiction. The individual and collective fates of people caught in the traumatic years of the Great War also speak of the tensions created by imperial politics and issues of loyalty to a monarch, country, or family. In the case of the Irish in this war, their tragic experiences fighting "for King, country and empire" have been retrieved in a substantial manner through scholarly reexamination and literary descriptions only in the last couple of decades. Among such texts is also Sebastian Barry's novel A Long Long Way (2005), that depicts the sufferings of Irish servicemen in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who first fight the enemy on the Western Front and then receive an order to turn their weapons on Irish rebels against British rule in their own hometown during the Easter Rising. Drawing on critical readings, including those from Irish and memory studies, this paper analyzes the tragic challenges of Irish identity that is transformed in the First World War and symbolically represents the profound crisis of the Irish sense of belonging exemplified in Barry's novel.

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21(Im)Possible New Beginnings in Ali Smith’s “Spring”

Author(s): Mureșan Dorel-Aurel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Ali Smith’s novel depicts the gloomy state of post-Brexit England by focusing on the lives of two main characters: Richard and Brittany. Smith intersects the paths of the two depressed and depressing characters to that of Florence, a pure and almost magical child, insisting on the idea that opportunities of new beginnings are constantly granted to people, as long as they are willing to change. Far from being a fairy tale, “Spring” is a serious novel about harsh realities, thus, not all the characters receive a happy ending. However, Ali Smith’s novel encourages us that as we take advantage of the chances given and we accept the constancy of change, we are the ones that actually become a fairy story. Smith, A. (2020). Spring. Penguin Random House.

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NOT THE ONLY STORY: NARRATIVE, MEMORY, AND SELF-BECOMING IN JULIAN BARNES’ NOVEL

Author(s): Diana Melnic,Vlad Melnic / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Not the Only Story: Narrative, Memory and Self-becoming in Julian Barnes’ Novel. Julian Barnes’s The Only Story depicts the affair of the narrator, Paul, with an older, married woman, Susan. Yet while the obvious subject matter may be trite, the writer’s treatment of it is noteworthy. More specifically, the present paper aims to explore the manner in which this story is remembered by the narrator. Using Paul Ricoeur’s work on the narrative self, we suggest that the protagonist does not wish to deliver an accurate account of the events that shaped his life, but rather he attempts to come to terms with the latter through storytelling. Thus, “the only story” is not necessarily that of Paul’s first love. It is, rather, the only story that matters to him, which must include all others and which he must tell in order to shape and understand his own process of becoming.

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SPECULUM SPECULORUM: KINGSHIP AND SELFHOOD IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING RICHARD II

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

Speculum Speculorum: Kingship and Selfhood in Shakespeare’s King Richard II. Starting from the premise that the concept of the King’s Two Bodies generates the separation between two selves within the nature of a king, I argue that the medieval practice of the speculum principis – the mirror of the perfect prince – plays an important part in the process of fashioning the kingly stance. Given that, in the Christian tradition, the mirror stands on the polarized ground between resemblance to the divine and self-idolatry, the reflection of the self is always deceitful. Two Shakespearean plays will serve for the analysis of the link between mirrors and kings: Richard II and Richard III. In Richard II, Shakespeare creates a climactic scene in which, after having relinquished his crown to Bolingbroke, the newly deposed king demands a looking-glass to identify the remaining aspects of his former self. The article reads the reversal of the sanctified ceremonial coronation, the substitution of investiture by divestiture as a demonic rite of reciting Scripture passages backwards. This act activates the most dramatic effects, transforming Richard’s looking-glass into what Ernst Kantorowicz famously calls a “magic-mirror.” The ambivalence of the mirror is manipulated by Shakespeare in order to unveil Richard’s two-fold persona. The dissolution of kingship leaves behind a fragmented selfhood that can no longer ensure Richard’s survival, reducing him to nothing.

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E. M. Forster’s Ciphers, Puns and Ambiguities

Author(s): Dana Bădulescu / Language(s): English Issue: 1 (33)/2021

This study starts from the premise that a writer, and E. M. Forster makes a case in point, will always be a good reader of signs, be those the signs one discerns in the natural environment or the signs in the shape of letters forming words in a text. Forster wrote his first short story under the impression of the signs his eyes beheld in the Italian landscape of a valley, which suggested a plot of a fantastic nature to the then young man who found himself “in a receptive state” (Forster 1983: 290). Much later, in his most accomplished novel A Passage to India, Forster challenged his readers’ perception of the abstract geography of “fists and fingers” (Forster 2005: 7) in the remote distance to build the whole text in the key of a cipher. In the same key, pun and ambiguity contribute to the reader’s sense of active participation in decoding a prose of many-layered and deferred meanings.

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The Strain of Language in China Miéville’s Embassytown: between Multiculturalism, Oppression, and the Alien Society

Author(s): Alexandra Maria Ivan / Language(s): English Issue: 9/2020

Speculative fiction has long escaped the label of ‘frivolous’ literature, garnering respect in its continuous urge towards self-reflection through contrastive narratives. Given that the created languages of fiction, regardless of genre, are written with the overt purpose of being analyzed as intrinsic constituents of the fictional universes to which they belong, the intention behind created languages strips the narrative of an organic language development component, thus leaving behind only a language imbued with purpose reflected in the paradigm, the shifting syntax, vocabulary, and word choice, which aims to aid in the fleshing out of the fictional universe in which it resides.The present paper aims to analyze the language of the Ariekei (known as Language) in China Miéville’s Embassytown and the implications presented by the occurrence of a language functioning within the parameters of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the strain it poses on the interaction between cultures. As this paper is part of a doctoral thesis, the scope of the paper is restrained, to account for the present limitations. As such, the analysis will aim to highlight the main aspects of Language and Host culture and perception, and how these elements interact with the perceived notion of humanity.

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Poetic Madness in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

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Poetic Madness in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong

Author(s): Noureddine Friji / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

This article addresses the age-old correlation between poetic genius and madness as represented in Malcolm Bradbury’s academic novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959), zeroing in on a student-cum-poet and a novelistcum-poet called Louis Bates and Carey Willoughby, respectively. While probing this unexplored theme in Bradbury’s novel, I pursue three primary aims. To begin with, I seek to demonstrate that certain academics’ tendency to fuse or confuse the poetic genius of their students and colleagues with madness is not only rooted in inherited assumptions, generalizations, and exaggerations but also in their own antipathy towards poets on the grounds that they persistently diverge from social norms. Second, I endeavour to ignite readers’ enthusiasm about the academic novel subgenre by underscoring the vital role it plays in energizing scholarly debate about the appealing theme of poetic madness. Lastly, the study concedes that notwithstanding the prevalence of prejudice among their populations, universities, on the whole, do not relinquish their natural veneration for originality, discordant views, and rewarding dialogue

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MURDER AND CRIME-SOLVING STRATEGIES IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S WORKS

Author(s): Vedran Domjanović,Biljana Oklopčić / Language(s): English Issue: 39/2021

In Agatha Christie’s literary career, which spanned over more than fifty years, the tally of murdered people approached three hundred. Her job as a nurse during World War I left a lasting mark on her career because during that period she developed a special interest in chemistry, which later influenced her writing style and using poison became her forte. Consequently, many of her literary characters fell victim to some kind of toxin. However, a large part of her works features a wide array of more violent and manual death causes. Most of those crimes are solved by one of Christie’s two most prominent detectives, either a professional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot or a white-haired old lady Jane Marple. Due to their different lifestyles, both their characters and investigation methods largely differ, but they are both successful when tackling a crime. This paper attempts to offer deeper insight into some of the murder methods Christie resorted to in her oeuvre while simultaneously depicting the strategies Monsieur Poirot and Miss Marple employ solving murders. Consequently, the two detectives will be compared based on their crime-solving approach, as well as their overall personas.

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T.S. ELIOT AND EMILE DURKHEIM: SACRED AND PROFANE IN "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK"

Author(s): Mohammed Hussein Oroskhan,Hossein Jahantigh / Language(s): English Issue: 39/2021

Along history, sociology and literature have formed various associations with each other. From the sociology of literature that has considered literature as a social production to the usages of sociological perspectives as literary theories or the usage of literature as illustration of sociological abstract notions, literature and sociology have been constantly and interrelatedly studied. Nevertheless, this study aims at revealing another interrelation between literature and sociology by referring to the beginning of the twentieth century when the replacement of religious thinking with secular ideas was dominant in modern society. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim detected and studied this shift in modern society and later on literary authors of the time followed the promotion of secularism in their literary works. However, T.S. Eliot reacted to this replacement in his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". He wrote the poem while he was reviewing Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in the journal the Westminster Gazette. This paper argues that T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is written with a mindset loaded by Durkheim’s sociological perspectives such as the notions of the sacred and the profane to further conclude that T.S. Eliot’s creation of Prufrock is consistent with the view that the modern man is unable to establish himself in a society which is devoid of the notions of sacred and profane and that he may consider committing suicide to save himself as the final resort.

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TO THE SELFHOUSE: THE CENTRIPETAL MOVEMENT OF SYMBOLS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Author(s): Susan Poursanati,Yasaman Taheri / Language(s): English Issue: 39/2021

Modernism is a literary movement which appeared around 1914. New technologies and the horrible effect of World War I, made many authors question the future of this modern machine (human being) who declined any kind of tradition for the sake of the new sentiment. Modernist fiction used two significant tools: one is the stream of consciousness to reveal the inner self of the characters, and the other one is employing the symbol to reflect hidden reality through the life of the characters. Virginia Woolf is considered as one of the most prominent modernist authors who employ the various modern techniques in her fictions such as To the Lighthouse. The aim of this article is followed in two different steps: first, the discussion of the roles of different symbols and signs through the whole work to reflect how these symbols function in the novel as a web of signs; and second, the exploration of the centripetal movement of various symbols and colors to show an unattainable concept of reality in modern life.

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VIOLENCE AND BIGOTRY: REGRESSIVE INNOVATION IN KEVIN BARRY’S CITY OF BOHANE

Author(s): Hooman Keivanshokuh,Amirhossein Vafa / Language(s): English Issue: 39/2021

Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane is one of the most celebrated recent works of Irish fiction. It is set in 2053, and tells the story of a people living in an environment of constant conflict where senseless acts of violence and bigotry are prevalent. This surprisingly negative imagining of Ireland in the future cannot be ignored considering the modern history of the country. The contemporary history of Ireland is fraught with a long and desperate struggle against the English Empire and its colonial forces as they tried for centuries to take over their neighboring island and completely colonize Ireland and its people. The English used two main weapons to further their goals in this matter: brutal military force and cultural sabotage. The cultural sabotage that the English brought to Ireland was mainly done by replacing Gaelic with English as the language of the Irish, and portraying them as culturally inferior and uncivilized in comparison to their English neighbors. Irish literature of the past few centuries has struggled to come to terms with this history of violence and dehumanization perpetuated by the English. Surprisingly, Kevin Barry in his novel callously repeats and escalates most of these negative stereotypes that have plagued Irish literature for years. The following study takes a closer look at the history of colonial violence and negative Irish stereotypes, and argues that City of Bohane is regressive in its depiction of Ireland as culturally ignorant and violent. That is to say, while the story is set four decades into the future, the author inexplicably insists on moving back in time to unearth and repurpose major colonial stereotypes that portray the Irish as uncivilized and backwards, to the great detriment of his innovative style and creative use of language in this novel.

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LIONS AND SHE-WOLVES: KINGSHIP, QUEENSHIP AND THE LEGITIMACY OF POWER IN SHAKESPEARE’S HISTORICAL PLAYS

Author(s): Dana Percec,Andreea Şerban / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Lions and She-Wolves: Kingship, Queenship and the Legitimacy of Power in Shakespeare’s Historical Plays. A recent collection of studies about Shakespeare and animals (Raber and Dugan 2021) cogently points out that the playwright’s bestiary is so charged symbolically and metaphorically that these nonhuman creatures rarely speak for themselves. However, the benefit of (Shakespeare’s) animal studies lies in the intersectional framework, specifically, for the purposes of this paper, the discussion about the structures of power and subjugation with the combined tools of gender studies and animal studies, as theorized a few decades ago by Adams and Donovan (1995). Starting from the shared scope of these areas of research, the present paper discusses gender relations and the stratification of power described in Shakespeare’s historical plays by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of specific animal imagery. While the lion is a recurrent symbolic animal evoked in these plays with reference to kingship, bearing positive connotations of legitimate power, he is often contrasted with the wolf, symbolizing usurpation, misrule, lack of legitimate authority. The she-wolf, although mentioned only once, is evoked in order to suggest an equally stark contrast, between male (and native) kingship and female (and foreign) queenship. Drawing on Elizabeth Norton’s (2009) and Helen Castor’s (2011) use of this animal phrase to address the relevance of female sovereignty in medieval and early modern England, our paper discusses how the choice of animals and the number of occurrences in Shakespeare’s Henriad reflects the early modern perceptions about (monstrous) female rule.

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THE ANIMAL CAPITAL OF RECESSION IN DANIELLE MCLAUGHLIN’S DINOSAURS ON OTHER PLANETS

Author(s): Andrei-Bogdan Popa / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The Animal Capital of Recession in Danielle McLaughlin’s Dinosaurs on Other Planets. Following Nicole Shukin’s notion of “animal capital” (2009, 3), which “simultaneously notates the semiotic currency of animal signs and the carnal traffic in animal substances” (7), this article investigates the capitalist interdependence between the cultural and material dimensions of animal life as represented across Danielle McLaughlin’s short story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets. The first section highlights potential theoretical connections between Shukin’s notions of “rendering” as well as “animal’s saving grace” (2018, 95) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s conception of futurity under the “logic of debt” (2012, 25). The second section analyses the texts’ depiction of the “contingency” that market life has upon animal life, such that the system of debt exacerbates cruelty toward humans and nonhumans alike, with animal bodies being “rendered” as food or artefacts (Shukin 2009, 20). The third section reveals how the “ambivalence of animal signs,” meaning the “capacity of animal life to be taken both literally and figuratively” (Shukin 2009, 6), interacts with the characters’ anxieties regarding the recession and economic migration.

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THE CHAMELEON’S BLUSH AND THE POETIC IMAGINATION FROM SHAKESPEARE TO KEATS

Author(s): Jonathan P. A. Sell / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The Chameleon’s Blush and the Poetic Imagination from Shakespeare to Keats. When English Romantic poet John Keats likened William Shakespeare to a chameleon, far from being original, he was tapping into a venerable tradition of drawing analogies between human beings and the colour-changing reptile. In literary criticism, the analogy is usually taken to refer to poetic indeterminacy; in sociopsychology, to conscious or unconscious, opportunistic versatility of identity. This study traces the evolution of the polyvalent chameleon trope from the zoological treatises of antiquity, through wonder literature and Renaissance and early modern works on psychology and witchcraft, to Shakespeare’s plays. It shows more specifically how the chameleon came to acquire an imagination and how that imagination was, on the one hand, instrumental in prompting the sort of inter-subjective absorption Keats emblematised in the blush, and, on the other, projective in a sense akin to Hazlitt’s own theory of the imagination. As a result, new light is thrown not only onto specific features of Shakespeare’s art and Romantic poetics, but also onto past conceptions of the imagination and the generative role of zoological analogy in their formulations.

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“Generativity versus Stagnation”: Midlife Crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Author(s): Morteza Jafari,Nasser Motallebzadeh,Nasser Dashtpeyma / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This paper discusses midlife crisis as a driving force behind the thought and action of the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The whole novel contains a diary written by the English butler Stevens who relates his history of servitude at Darlington Hall and concludes with some revelations about the true nature of his past. Since the butler’s account gives hints of his concern for the extent of his achievement in life, his reassessing act of delving into the past can be taken as an attempt to resolve his midlife crisis. Being the seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s developmental psychology, a midlife crisis is primarily characterized by the binary “generativity versus stagnation” and the subject’s struggle to decide on the meaning of life. Occurring between 40 and 65, midlife crisis is stimulated by the reconsideration of social demands such as career and marriage. Applying this psychoanalytic approach to Stevens’ experience of midlife crisis, the present research investigates the place of Lord Darlington and Miss Kenton, the former Stevens’ employer and the latter his only love object, as embodiments of the social demands of career and marriage that the butler reviews in his midlife stage. Ultimately, this research discusses the butler’s success in resolving his midlife crisis through considering the individuation process, namely self-awareness, self-actualization, and the caring power, which the protagonist goes through.

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“Post‐Revolution Crisis, Migration, and the Quest for Self‐Identity” in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart

Author(s): Nureni Oyewole Fadare / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This paper examines post-revolution crises, migration, and the quest for self-identity in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart (2017). Gurnah is a postcolonial cosmopolitan Zanzibarian writer born and raised in Zanzibar, Tanzania, but who lives and writes in London. Gravel Heart reviews the 1964 post-independence revolution in Zanzibar with a focus on how it leads to the mass exodus of people of other ethnic backgrounds from Zanzibar. Among those forced to leave the island are the ruling Omani Arabs, the Yemenis, the Indians, and the Europeans. The paper adopts the Postcolonial theory in the analysis of the text with an emphasis on both remote and immediate causes of the revolution and the crises it generates. It is discovered that the 1964 revolution is an inevitable stage in the political development of Zanzibar going by the structure left behind by the British colonial government who fled the country in 1963. The text also reveals migration challenges faced by immigrants in the Diaspora, such as identity crises, unemployment, and accommodation problems. It can also be seen that the return of the leading migrant character serves as an epiphany for him regarding certain factors that culminated in the family and national crises. The narrator berates the revolution since the new emerging leaders failed to address the critical challenges faced by the people of Zanzibar; rather, they instituted a new government of terror. The post-revolution Zanzibar witnessed unjust arrest and detention of members of oppositions, corruption, high handedness, abuse of power and family disintegration. The paper thus concludes that forced migration, bad leadership, corruption, abuse of power, family disintegration, and crises of identity mar the post-revolution lives of Zanzibarians both at home and in the Diaspora.

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Vigyor macska nélkül. Lewis Carroll, Alice Csodaországban és az animalisztikus nonszensz

Author(s): Anna Kérchy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 07/2022

The Cheshire Cat who unexpectedly vanishes to leave only its grin behind is one of the most iconic characters of Lewis Carroll's Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasy duology Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. My essay argues that this feline bordercrosser figure embodies the subversive features of the literary nonsense genre distinguished by a strategic destabilisation of hierarchically organised power positionalities (sense/nonsense, adult/child, man/animal). The cat as a metamorphic trickster mockingly unsettles the naturalised preeminence of the anthropocentric perspective, and mankind's supremacy in the Great Chain of Being, while it also challenges the notion of the speaking subject through conveying language philosophical commentaries about the unmasterability of meanings. It reveals the anxieties and desires permeating 19th century human-animal relations and offers commentary on the epistemological crisis induced by the darwinian evolutionary theory, with the aim to promote an ethics grounded in the recognition of interspecies connectedness. Through its special dis/locations in the book-object the cat playing hide-and-seek in the Carrollian imagetext also acts as an agent inducing ludic iconotextual interactions

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"SOMETHING OUT OF HARMONY": REPRESENTATION OF NATURE IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Author(s): Nataša Tučev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The paper approaches Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse by viewing it as an example of a changed representation of nature which characterizes Modernist fiction in general. This representation is in stark contrast to the Romantic experience and the notion of the poet's communion with the natural world as one of the essential Romantic tropes. The general sentiment which the Modernist authors express in their works is that nature has lost a great deal of its healing potential due to the industrial developments of the modern era, and the devastation brought about by the First World War. This motif is especially stressed in the middle section of Woolf's novel, titled "Time Passes". Wolf's text conveys an experience of the natural world which is no longer empathetic, but marginalizing and diminishing individual human agency. Such representation implies that nature can no longer console the human spirit, or compensate for the dehumanizing practices of late industrial capitalism. This is why Woolf's vision finally turns to art itself, as the only realm where such compensation may still be found. In analysing these motifs, the paper relies on Randall Stevenson's studies Modernist Fiction (1992) and Literature and the Great War (2013).

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Canonul premia(n)ților. Cu Alice în Țara-Întrecerilor-fără-Noimă

Author(s): Ioana Pavel / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1 (35)/2022

Considering the aesthetic canon as a cultural construct or process that involves the whole cultural field, the concept is revisited nowadays in the spirit of World Literature theories. In this sense, there could be seen a rehabilitation of noncanonical genres or the circulation of values in the transnational space in order to cartography the (inter)national canon(s). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific scene from the well-known Lewis Carroll novel Alice in Wonderland (translated into Romanian) from this premises: the instable place in the frames of noncanonical genres or categories and the relationships between literary prizes and the mechanism of canonization.

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