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(Im)Perfect memories in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

Author(s): Magdalena Lapinska / Language(s): English / Issue: XXX/2018

The article entitled “(Im)Perfect Memories in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn” explores the fallibility of memory as presented in Another Brooklyn, a novel by an African American author Jacqueline Woodson. The text presents the idea that personal memories change due to the passage of time along with the new experiences of an individual, and relates it to the studied novel. Special attention is given to different dimensions of grief and loss presented in the analyzed story. The mourning after the loss of loved ones is explored through the use of concepts such as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, the selective amnesia and the idea of continuing bonds. The process of growing up is also briefly considered as a mourning process over losing the innocence and safety provided by childhood. Further, the article presents the hardships of growing up without a mother in an unsafe neighbourhood, the loss of vital friendships and the search of a better life - all introduced through the recollections which occurred after a significant passage of time and the accumulation of experiences which lend themselves to the change of the mindset of the main character.

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(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.

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A Brief View over American Most Prominent Abolitionist Newspapers and Writings during the Mid XIX Century (1820-1850’s)

Author(s): Borislav Momchilov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

The main purpose of this article is to show the different aspects of abolitionist literature in United States during the mid-nineteen century. The wide historiographical view of this subject brings to the reader chance to receive accurate knowledge over this object. Over the last few decades the rhetoric over the abolitionism debate is circulating in many aspects, in a slightly range of historical researchers. Important target of this lemma is to show the main and impacting literature and newspaper writings in USA during relevant period.

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Adapting Zen to challenge Orientalism: trans-border representations in two short stories by J. D. Salinger

Author(s): Tomoko Oda / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

In Nine Stories (1953), J. D. Salinger presents both Eastern and Western thematic features in balance to each other, with what seems nonchalance, but is actually utmost care and attention. This way of balanced thematic representation prefigures Fred R. Dallmayr’s convincing argument of going “beyond Orientalism.” Dallmayr indicates the importance of heterogeneity (diversity) – the condition in which both Orientalists and “the Orient” can speak out and discuss with each other – and recognizes the high value of the coexistence of “the Orient” and “the Occident.” I will therefore discuss how Salinger’s Nine Stories is coherent in its treatment of the concept of going “beyond Orientalism” in Dallmayr’s acceptation. Firstly, I will indicate an ambivalent aspect of the Zen kōan – Orientalism and/or heterogeneity of “the Occident” and “the Orient.” Secondly, I will explore A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948) and For Esmé – with Love and Squalor (1950) as examples of pieces collected in Nine Stories (1953) that go “beyond Orientalism,” focusing on an interactive aspect of dialogue scenes that are similar to kōan practices. I will then argue that the way Salinger attempts to write about Caucasian characters’ kōan-like dialogue leads to the transcendence of binary oppositions, such as the opposition between “the Occident” and “the Orient,” i.e. the division which constitutes Orientalism itself. Finally, I will demonstrate that Salinger tries to create a heterogeneous (diversity-based) literary space, challenging the appropriative and consumerist attitude of Americans towards “the Orient” in the mid-20th century.

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Airing The Jade Cabinet: Aerial Imagination in Rikki Ducornet’s Fourth Elemental Novel

Author(s): Julia Nikiel / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2019

In the article, I analyze Rikki Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet and argue in favor of it being a novel of aerial imagination and airy imagery. To this end, I highlight the main character’s, Etheria’s, status as the book’s uncontained element and contrast imagination and logic, closed and open spaces, gravity and surreality, elaborating thus on Etheria’s impossible marriage of polarities and showing how various attributes of air correspond to people’s traits of character. Subsequently, I introduce the concept of aerial imagination, and investigate the transient nature of magic and illusions. As I proceed to explore the strange affinity existing between air and light on the one side and language and memory on the other, I endeavor to show that in The Jade Cabinet air is seen as the universal carrier of voice and as such it is equated with the divine language, which grants enlightenment and has creative powers. Finally, drawing on such airy qualities as ubiquity, restlessness, and changeability, I argue that in the novel, human memory is equated with a magical act of ongoing reconstruction, essential for the translation of perceptions into words, but also responsible for the subjectivity, and hence the volatility, that is the lack of fixedness, of the narrative itself.

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Alegorické a reálné v románu a filmu Cesta

Author(s): Petr Bubenícek / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 1/2018

The study is concerned with The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, and with its film adaptation. It follows the artistic configurations involved, as they reduce people to their biological foundations while, at the same time, pointing to the survival of rudimentary ethical consciousness even in individuals living in extremely strained conditions. The film, especially, shows the downfall of the protagonist into post-apocalyptic horror as leading to the eventual discovery of his quintessential humanity. Moreover, the text by McCarthy can also be read as a postmodern argument against the rationale of modernism: instrumental behaviours stand opposed to ethical behaviour, which is irrational in that it disadvantages those who engage in it. The study examines why, in McCarthy, this divine, ethical principle does not go the way of the rest of the bygone symbolic system, i.e. devolves into a mere phantasma.

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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.

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Amerikan Şiirinde Avangart Geleneğin Elektronik Yansıması: Dijital Şiir

Author(s): Memet Metin Barlik / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 99/2019

The avant-garde movements of American poetry after the 1950s, criticizing the traditional norms of the former periods, were eager to form an alternative renewing and developing culture, and tended to consider the demands of the populace of the readers. Black Mountain College (1950—56), Greenwich Village (1950—63), the Black Arts Movement (1962—70), the Language poets of New York and San Francisco (1979—89) were among the major avant-garde movements. The avant-garde approach was not only affective in literature but also in other genres of art, such as music and painting. The expressionist painting and Jazz music brought a new function to these genres of art. Avant-gardism also created a warm communication among different genres of arts, and changed the traditional norms of the presentation of the new forms. Powerful computer technologies and the new innovations of telecommunication created sites such as e-identity, e-education, digital art and digital criticism.

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An Alternative Model of Totalitarian Society (Through the Example of Leigh Brackett’s “Book of Skaith”)

Author(s): Olena Sergeevna Kolesnyk / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

The purpose of the research is to go beyond the strict borders of the genre of anti-utopia and to study the depiction of dystopic social system in a work of the science fiction. The main methods are hermeneutics and the comparative analysis. The scientific novelty. For the first time Leigh Brackett‘s work is researched as an example of sociological and culturological modelling with considerable prognostic potential. Conclusion. In Brackett‘s ―The Book of Skaith we see not a typical for anti-utopia ―island society, but a whole planet. This implies a whole new level of complexity. The author shows how the changes in environment influence different interconnected societies. This modelling of civilization under pressure can be seen as an implicitly-culturological study of political, social and cultural dynamics. An important ethical topic concerns the degradation of the best ideological principles if they are not adapted to the changing reality. The image of society, where social programs breed a considerable strata of people, who never worked is disturbingly relevant. Almost all depicted social groups develop such protective reaction to the crisis, as the search for oblivion. Brackett shows different variants of escaping from the unbearable knowledge of the impending catastrophe: hedonistic attempts of living in a moment, totalitarian religions etc. Even such intellectual activity as studying history can become an obsessive immersion in the past as a way of escaping the present. That is why ―The Book of Skaith can be viewed as a warning about the consequences of some tendencies of the contemporary (late ХХ – early ХХI ct.) civilization. In this it differs from many anti-utopias, whose futuristic entourage masks the habit of depiction of the already well-known social ills, and in the forms more typical for the first half of the XX ct., than for our own days.

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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.

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Aniołki Pynchona. Wieczny wrzesień, wieczna kobiecość? (W sieci)

Author(s): Alicja Piechucka / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

Thomas Pynchon is an acclaimed American writer associated with postmodernism. His fiction offers complex insights into the social, cultural and political dimensions of American life, describing a variety of important phenomena, such as the invasion of entertainment industry, the expansion of new technologies, the strengthening of regimes within apparently democratic establishments. Pynchon dissects the linguistic mechanisms of communication and of shaping human consciousness.

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ANN PETRY VE AMERİKAN ROMANINDA ETNİSİTE VE IRKÇILIK

Author(s): Önder ÇAKIRTAS / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 3/2012

This paper, through the novel of Black woman novelist Ann Petry, aims to clarify the social and psychological impacts of the period in which the Blacks were pointed as a target for racist discriminations. In this study, we tried to show the survival of a black heroine against all the injustices and tortures towards her and her portrayal in respect with psycho-social perspectives together with the partiality of Ann Petry as a black person. Ann Petry tries to display the identity problem in American community by portraying a character who is a victim of racist behaviors just because of her skin color.

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Aural/Oral Sonnets of Ted Berrigan

Author(s): Slawomir Wacior / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2019

The present paper attempts to investigate the problem of interaction of the visual and sound dominants in the composition of a canonical now cycle of The Sonnets created by Ted Berrigan—an American poet of the second generation of New York Poets. The topic is all the more interesting as the sonnet as a poetic form represents a closed form which by definition foregrounds shape and pattern rather than sound. Berrigan’s uniqueness of technique bridges the two extremes of representation by disintegrating the rigid structure of the sonnet and allows the poet to build the poems not out of the blocks of three/four/six/eight line stanzas but out of a single unit of a one line stanza. They undergo, in turn, a dynamic process of random permutations in keeping with theories of aleatory music and collage composition. Furthermore, Berrigan supplements the visual dominant with language substance of colloquial American speech which is “overheard,” appropriated and variously recycled in successive poems. Both theoretical comments of Berrigan and the poems he included in the sequence confirm the centrality of aural/oral dimension of his sonnets.

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Baranek czy tygrys? Nie-ludzkie oblicza Boga w poezji T.S. Eliota i R.S. Thomasa

Author(s): Malgorzata Grzegorzewska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 3/2018

The text illustrates the changes in representations of the Invisible in religious poetry: the crisis of language caused by the rejection of the idea of the Logos in Western culture leads to the obscuring of the symbolic transparency present in the sacred art created in the medieval and early modern period. The traditional animal imagery used in the past to illustrate the mysteries of the faith is replaced in twentieth-century poetry by opaque representations of the non-human face of God. The argument is illustrated by reference to the “speaking” and simultaneously “mute” pictures in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. The poems of Thomas, which reveal clear traces of apophatic theology, can be viewed as a response to the challenges of the post-secular age.

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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.

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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.

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Bohemians, Vagabonds, and Wanderers of the “Ragged Promised Land” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Author(s): Daria Anna Urbanska / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/2018

The article focuses on the journey into the “ragged promised land” (80) in On the Road. It can be seen as an escape of the main protagonist Sal Paradise from his roots and from the conformity of American society. Kerouac, having a Franco-Canadian heritage, presents a marginal possibility of heterogeneity in a homogenous postwar America. The author depicts additional mentors and heroes met along the way. They are, among others, tramps and hoboes, ragged wanderers and the Fellahin of Mexico, as well as Sal’s travel companion Dean Moriarty. Sal experiences something true and meaningful among those living on the margin of society. He travels considerable distances: from coast to coast across the United States, from boarder to boarder and to Mexico. The real journey, though, is inward, a passage through the wilderness of the self, the true “ragged promised land”.

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BÖLÜM 4 ELIA KAZAN’IN ROMANLARINDA VE AMERİKA AMERİKA FİLMİNDE GÖÇ ÖYKÜSÜ

Author(s): Tanju Inal,Burcak Yakici / Language(s): Turkish / Publication Year: 0

1912, Türk, Ermeni ve Rumların yaşadığı Kayseri’nin Germir kasabasından Amerika’ya göç eden Stavros Topuzoğlu’nun kulaktan kulağa yayılan serüven dolu göç öyküsünün tüm hanelerde yankılandığı bir yıl. Bu ilk ve öncü göçü, ailenin diğer bireyleri; baba Serafim Topuzoğlu’nun ve ailesinin Amerika’ya göçü izleyecektir. Bu göçmenler arasında dört yaşında, İstanbul doğumlu, daha sonra Amerika’nın ünlü yönetmenleri arasında sayılacak olan Elia Kazan da vardır. Babası, kardeşinin New York’ta başlattığı halı ticaretine güvenerek tüm ailesiyle birlikte büyük umutlarla Amerika’ya göç eder. Amerika’da yerleştikleri bölgenin demografik yapısı Ermeni-Rum ve Araplardan oluşur. Yabancılar “getto”larda “azınlıkta” ve “kapalı bir toplum” olarak yeni bir yaşama başlarlar. Elia Kazan da New York, New Rochell’de bu şekilde yaşama adım atar. Dört yaşında Amerika’yı tanımış, on iki yaşında Türkiye’ye tatile gelmiş; değişik yıllarda da babasının doğduğu yeri Germir’i ziyaret ederek köklerini tanımıştır.

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Brownstones with Stories to Tell: Houses in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude

Author(s): Izabella Kimak / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2019

This article constitutes an analysis of the depiction of houses in Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude, universally labeled a novel of gentrification. It is my contention that despite being criticized for its alleged celebration of the process the text nevertheless paints a more nuanced picture of gentrification. It does so through the depiction of houses—t he titular brownstones of this essay—that function both as a synecdoche for a larger neighborhood or community that they are situated in and as a reflection of the dynamics of the family units that occupy them.

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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.

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