CEEOL - Browse Subjects Result

We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.

(RE)CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY IN SANDRA CISNERO'S “LITTLE MIRACLES, KEPT PROMISES”

Author(s): Ivana Aleksic / Language(s): English / Issue: 21/2018

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the path which Sandra Cisneros’s characters from the short story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” undergo in order to overcome the gap between the demands of the new world which denies their former identities and the tradition which forces them to maintain former patterns and live within the past forms. The main focus is placed on Rosario and her cyclic path from deconstructing to reconstructing broken identity; the path which makes her fight the battles of rejection, confrontation, understanding and finally acceptance of what was once considered unacceptable.

More...

AMERIČKI REVOLUCIONARNI RAT IZ PERA MERSI OTIS VOREN

Author(s): Violeta M. Janjatovic / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 17/2017

The second half of the eighteenth century and the American War for Independence represent an extremely important period, not only because of the historical context and the birth of a new nation, but because of its relevance to the literary history of America. This period records a huge literary output of patriot authors devoted to the struggle for independence, the celebration of the American nation, glorification of prominent individuals in the revolutionary struggle, but also anti-revolutionary inspired works that called for loyalty to the UK. American drama writers took an active part in the American revolutionary struggle, and this paper will analyze the text and context of the war from the patriot's perspective through the works of one of the first female dramatists in America, Mercy Otis Warren.

More...

AND ACTION!: REINTERPRETATION AND SIMULATION OF HISTORY THROUGH FILM IN DELILLO’S AMERICANA AND LIBRA

Author(s): Sladana S. Stamenkovic / Language(s): English / Issue: 26/2019

Linda Hutcheon claimed that the only way to access the past is to use texts and textual recordings of it. Today, we can interpret the mass media as textual evidence of the past which is at the same time an artifact and a means of rewriting history. Modern mass media seem to shape and reshape history and even our whole reality. Therefore, one can argue that history may be interpreted as what Baudrillard defined as a simulacrum. In Don DeLillo’s novels, media are frequently used to give access to or retell past events. In both Americana and Libra, DeLillo introduces the film as a piece of evidence which offers insight into history. In Americana, David Bell sets to make a documentary on one Native American tribe, yet he decides to overtake the film and shoot the story of his life. In Libra, it is the media, and specifically the Zapruder film, which helps Nicholas Branch track the story of Kennedy’s assassination. In both novels, history is revealed to be a simulation, but also a basis upon which our everyday reality exists.

More...

Bībeles motīvi Stīvena Kinga romānā “Zvēru kapiņi”

Author(s): Barbala Simsone / Language(s): Latvian / Issue: 1/2014

The theme of this article is devoted to the creative works of Stephen King, the living classic of horror literature. Biblical motifs frequently play a significant role in his works and they are included in his novels from the positions of peculiar inversion. This article focuses on the novel “Pet Sematary” published in 1983 that analyses one of the most universal fears of human beings from various points of views: the fear from death. The article examines the deliberate author ’s periphrasis of the biblical motif in this novel, particularly the Gospel of the New Testament, where the central event is the death of Jesus Christ and resurrection or the so-called Easter story. The article analyses the way how S. King, resorting random allusions, other means of language and thematic interconnections, deconstructs several biblical notions in a peculiar way and offers solutions for the theme of the inevitability of the cycle of life and death in a modern context.

More...

BODY MEMORY AND THE DE/RE-CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY IN OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED

Author(s): Suzana Režic Miler,Sanja Runtic / Language(s): English / Issue: 17/2017

This paper examines the interaction between the physical and the historical in Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979). It focuses on Butler's envisioning of the heroine's body as a site of repressed traumatic memory and its potential to reconstruct the dominant national narrative in both historical and contemporary terms. Acknowledging the universal experience of trauma and its emotional scars, Butler's novel retrieves and rewrites the history of slavery from within the body of the oppressed. Analyzing the slave mentality concomitant to bodily dispossession through inflicted torture and sexual abuse, the paper shows that history is inevitably written in the body itself, emphasizing the fact that bodies interacting with history can never be removed from it. It also explores the de/reconstructive scope of the fantastic genre in conveying the historical immediacy and uncovering the resistance consciousness and its adept subversion of the power structures. Finally, it highlights the significance of the novel's time frame, characters' names, and geographic sites as the nexus between the individual and national history.

More...

Characters as Animals in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Author(s): Arda Arikan / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

Theodore Dreiser’s treatment of his characters as animals in society has been studied from various vantage points. In this study, I offer an impressionistic look at how Dreiser treats his characters in close association with animals. I argue that while characters are treated as animals in line with a deterministic view of the socio-biological world, such representation brings the metaphor of the city substituting the natural habitat of such (hum)animals. Hence, Dreiser’s technique in characterization jumps over his philosophical attachment with social determinism as the energy created in his treatment of his characters as animals moves readers to a unique space in which understanding his characters fully may only be possible when their identities as animals are explored.

More...

Culture Clash in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

Author(s): Sorin Cazacu / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

Tar Baby has always been considered different from other Toni Morrison’s novels even though her thematic preoccupations remain similar. Strong visions of detachment,physical and psychological exile, and a certain state of cultural conflict are experienced throughout the novel. The result of these adverse conditions is that characters remain disconnected from identity and place, from culture and traditions and are held separate by dreams and dream visions from community and memory, even from their own past. This paper aims to investigate how conflict is reflected in these fixed and complex images of lack,expressing the difficulty and impossibility of preserving continuity and collective consciousness within an increasingly fragmented culture.

More...

EDNA PONTELLIER’S DIGRESSIVE QUEST FOR THE MATERNAL IN KATE CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING

Author(s): Nilsen Gökçen / Language(s): English / Issue: 24/2018

The quest that Kate Chopin’s heroine Edna Pontellier undertakes in The Awakening begins in the summer she spends in Grand Isle in the sensuous atmosphere of the Creole society and her newly found self with Madame Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun. The former, whom Chopin calls mother-woman, embodies all the qualities of womanly beauty, virtue and motherly attachment. With her, Edna, an orphan who lost her mother at a very young age, awakens to an emptiness left by her mother’s loss, which she had formerly tried to repress. Although the novel has often been read from the perspective of sexual awakening, her awakening involves a deeper and archaic need for mother. Edna tries to satisfy her maternal yearnings first with Madame Ratignolle and then with Robert, who has to compete with her for priority in Edna’s life. Next to these flesh and blood substitutes for mother, there is the sea, a stronger maternal force that murmurs to Edna in sonorous tones at the key points of her gradual awakening. In the end, Edna answers the entreaty of the sea leaving behind not only her husband and children but also the two characters that had substituted for her mother. At the end Edna’s need for mother is seen to be a need for transcendence rather than a physical embodiment that can be found in the immanent world, and despite their competitive representations, both Madame Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun prove in the end to be digressions on her journey to her final destination, the sea.

More...

EDWARD ALBEE’S THESANDBOXIN THE LIGHT OF NEW HISTORICISM

Author(s): Elmira Bazregarzadeh / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

History is an important part of human being’s life in that it plays an important role in shaping our private, public, and political viewpoints. It serves as a mirror to life because it connects past events with present ones and may at times affect the future as well. Likewise, history enables us to ponder about the reason behind some past events and their influence on the individuals’ present lives. The wide range of history and its broad coverage of different causes and effects of life events are the two focal issues that open the readers’ eyes to the inherent features of the New Historicists’ examinations of various works of literature. With this critical standpoint in mind, the present paper intends to study Edward Albee’s play The Sandbox to reveal the existing factors that link the play with the previous historical events present in the American history of the time. By choosing New Historicism as the main model, the paper will shed light on such issues as power, resistance, and subversion put forward by such leading figures of this critical approach as Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt.

More...

FROM JYOTI TO JASMINE: MUKHERJEE’S QUEST FOR HYBRID IDENTITY IN JASMINE

Author(s): Ali Salami,Farnoosh Pirayesh / Language(s): English / Issue: 21/2018

The present paper investigates the empowering force of hybridity in female diasporant in Bharati Mukherjee’s outstanding novel Jasmine. The novel depicts Jasmine’s journey of transformation from a passive, traditional girl at the mercy of fate in a village in India to an active, modern, and most importantly cross-cultural hybrid woman in America. All through the novel, her identity is transformed in line with shifts in her name from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jazzy to Jane. Accordingly, she stands in-between two cultures, shuttles between identities, welds opposing identities, enters the third space and emerges as a hybrid. The present study in the light of Homi Bhabha's insights seeks to demonstrate that immigrating, experiencing displacement and in-betweenness, and being positioned in the third space pave the way for Jasmine’s becoming a hybrid and being liberated. Besides, the study is to depict by creating a hybrid character, Bharati Mukherjee, the author, alludes to her own very hybridity.

More...

Life, Death and Identity as a Matter of Chronology in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Author(s): Mihaela Roibu / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

In Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" the normal cycle of birth, death and the degenerative process of aging, growing young respectively are reversed, therefore creating an abnormal time frame. The personal past of the individual becomes his present and vice versa. In the present study I will focus my attention on the analysis of the psychological and physical chronology of the main character, pointing out the importance of normality. Time becomes a character in itself, generating a completely different life situation.

More...

MYSTICISM IN THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON: A THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Author(s): Jamal Subhi Nafi,Randa Hashem Abu Hilal,Farah Rasheed Jayousi / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

This paper is an attempt to analyze the poetry of Miss Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) in order to reveal the extent of mysticism in it, and it focuses on the concept of “theology.” Mysticism involves a deep, almost obsessive, concern with such problems as death, the existence of the soul, immortality, the existence of God and heaven, salvation or redemption, etc. The critical approach was used to analyze some of Dickinson’s major poems. A glance at her poetry reveals that it shows an extreme preoccupation with the effect of death and explores various themes such as the nature of the soul, the problem of immortality, the possibility of faith and the reality of God. The researchers also tried to reveal the internal and external influences that shaped Dickinson’s poetry. The paper concluded that the theme of death was inexhaustible for her. If her poetry seldom became “lyrical,” seldom departed from the colorless sobriety of its bare iambics and toneless assonance, it did so most of all when the subject was death. Although Dickinson’s poetry contains some mystical elements, mystical poetry, in the traditional sense, at least, is not her special poetic gift.

More...

OCCASIONALLY, HE’S A SOMNIATICIDAL MANIAC: STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES RECLAIMS HOME AND HISTORY

Author(s): Theodore C. Van Alst Jr / Language(s): English / Issue: 26/2019

Environmental activism and preservation of the land, acknowledgement of our shared responsibilities to the planet, to unci maka, to Mother Earth, to our home; these are obligations of love we as human beings embrace with devoted regularity. But what happens when we look at stories that might destroy the world entirely, might remold, reshape, reclaim and remake (or perhaps even “rename” in a restorative move) our histories and homes? What is the reception for works that defy the expectations of devotion to the environment in Native American literature one genre at a time? That address historic erasure by reshaping the future? This paper will examine some of Stephen Graham Jones’s prolific works, including Sterling City, “How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Earth, and Everyone on It,” as well as Chapter Six, all published in a variety of platforms and collections. In each instance, the worlds as home and future history described are decidedly reclaimed, perhaps for good reasons, and perhaps for not so good reasons.

More...

PARIS AND SPAIN IN ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S NOVEL THE SUN ALSO RISES

Author(s): Ivana Culjak / Language(s): English / Issue: 24/2018

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois yet he wrote more about other places than about his birthplace. His first novel The Sun Also Rises has Paris and Spain for the setting. It starts in Paris, culminates in Spain, and ends with Jake and Brett leaving Spain. In Hemingway’s novel, a group of friends wanders from place to place with no fixed destination showing that they are the lost generation with no aim in their lives. This paper will show how this group of friends is affected by their destinations with modern, cool Paris that mutes and controls their passions and Spain’s fiesta where they go berserk. In Hemingway’s novel, Paris and Spain are the two ends of the spectrum. In Paris one can see everything ‒ from homosexuals to prostitutes, and Spain is more traditional and looks down on Brett because of her hairstyle and her wardrobe. One perceives Paris and Spain as romantic places, yet Hemingway shows that Paris is the place of twisted sexuality while Spain is more conservative.

More...

Post-industrial America and Neo-imperialism in Russell Banks’s Novel Rule of the Bone

Author(s): Lilijana Burcar / Language(s): English / Issue: 01/2018

Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone (1995) is a rare instance of a contemporary socially engaged American novel of development and maturation that rests, as this paper argues, on a systemic analysis of post-industrial Western reality and contemporary forms of Western-led imperialism. Grasping this reality and not coming to terms with it constitutes an essential part of the adolescent’s trajectory of growth and maturation. Rule of the Bone is America’s post-industrial working-class novel of maturation, the understanding of which lies at the intersection of Marxist and postcolonial theory. The novel addresses these complex social issues on a more basic but still insightful level accessible to teenagers and at the same time on a more intricate level that easily engages a more informed adult readership. In this sense, Rule of the Bone stands for what can be termed a crossover novel. Targeted primarily at an adult readership, it can prove to be of huge benefit to adolescents seeking to break out of the generic confines of contemporary, mainstream adolescent literature.

More...

Recenzija, Prikaz

Author(s): Josipa Hotovec / Language(s): English / Issue: 01/2018

Review of: Roni Natov. 2018. The Courage to Imagine: The Child Hero in Children’s Literature. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 205 pp. ISBN 978-1-4742-2122-1

More...

Recenzija, Prikaz

Author(s): Jennifer Harrison / Language(s): English / Issue: 01/2018

Review of: Marek C. Oziewicz. 2015. Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction: A Cognitive Reading. New York: Routledge. 257 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-80943-7

More...

Remnants of the Past in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Author(s): Anda Dimitriu / Language(s): English / Issue: XVIII/2017

Generally branded a post-apocalyptic work, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road represents more than this, transcending its label by the complexity of the themes it touches upon. From images of relics to words echoing other famous authors, McCarthy’s writings always hint at the crucial importance of the past. His last novel is no exception,and the present article will focus on the recurrence and significance of this concept, by analysing the constant opposition between the bleak present and the fading past, shaped directly through symbols, as well as through the Man’s dreams, his words and the lessons he chooses to teach his Son.

More...

RETHINKING ROMANCE IN THE AGE OF AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

Author(s): Saša Simovic,Marija Mijuškovic / Language(s): English / Issue: 17/2017

According to modern criticism romance can be considered the most distinguished genre of medieval composition. It was created from numerous sources and its “heritage” in literary history has been enormous.Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vision of romance was rather different from traditional romance. Hawthorne was a psychological romancer preoccupied with the themes of alienation, sinfulness, moral downfall, infamy and guilt. Typical Hawthornian romances embody a highly dichotomized world burdened with the past, shrouded in an air of mystery, only suggesting but never giving the precise or “the most appropriate” meaning of the text. These romances express a series of antagonisms, ambiguities and allusions. The aim of this paper is to show the most relevant features of Hawthorne’s romances which distinguish this writer from his peers in the age of American Romanticism primarily commenting on essential dualisms, the specific use of archaisms as well as discussing the very genre of romance.

More...

SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE AND THE IMAGE OF THE SOUTH IN THE 1940S-1960S AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

Author(s): Biljana Oklopcic / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2017

History textbooks are based on facts. Occasionally, however, history textbook authors cannot escape emplotting fictional elements into their writings. Those fictional elements transform them into story tellers whose view of certain events, persons, or things might be clouded by cultural, social, or literary currents of their time. This paper aims to detect such ―cloudings‖ in the selected American history textbooks published between the 1940s and 1960s by taking as its orientation point literary and cultural changes introduced by Southern Renaissance. As a reinvigoration of literature and other types of writing in the 1930s-1950s American South, Southern Renaissance especially challenged the viability of stereotypes and clichés about the American South (the view of the South as the region burdened by its past, the notion of a ―house divided,‖ the concept of Southern paternalism, the Southern code of honor, the plantation myth, the Cavalier myth, and Southern male and female stereotypes) in the South of the 20th century. The presence or absence of those stereotypes and clichés in the selected 1940s-1960s American history textbooks will show whether the views of Southern Renaissance authors can be discerned in them and thus eventually testify to/reject historical cultural, and literary overlapping.

More...