(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despre scris și alți demoni

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Author(s): Rodica Grigore / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 1-2/2018

This is a review of a foreign book.

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.

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.

From Democracy to Totalitarian Theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Author(s): Mihaela Roibu / Language(s): English / Issue: XIX/2018

Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel The Handmaid’s Tale represents a prime example of political and religious transition. The democratic American society and all of its liberties is overthrown and a totalitarian theocracy violently replaces it. People are divided into new categories and the Republic of Gilead preaches a form of phoney morality based on an extreme version of the Old Testament. This new order is founded on terror and oppression. Various roles are designated to women. Such women as Offred, the protagonist of Atwood’s novel, have no choice but to lend their bodies to the goals of the new regime. Their sole function is to breed. However, this generation of transition remembers the past and is unwilling to blindly embrace the newly established order.Secret acts of rebellion become the norm and people try to keep their memories alive, no matter how much the Republic of Gilead strive at complete oblivion. The text of the novel is interspersed with flashbacks and the chronology is often broken, just as the individuals themselves are physically crushed under the burden of transition and change.

From Fairy Tales to Realist Fiction: Young Adult Literature on the Threshold between Children’s and Adult’s Literature

Author(s): Mihaela Sandu / Language(s): English / Issue: XIX/2018

Adolescence, the transitional stage in one’s life marked by identity crisis, confusion and conflict is a developmental stage that inspired writers in the construction of fictional characters trapped between childhood and adulthood. One can safely say today that the particular subgenre this article focuses upon, Young Adult Literature (YAL), which exists on the threshold between children’s literature and adult literature (Trites, 2000, 7) was born not long ago, went through young childhood and adolescence, having already reached its maturity. It is time to look back and see the story of this development and its significance to adults and teenagers alike. Both age groups were once children,and all ages are worth examining, remembering, anticipating their experience. Adolescence, being more than a blessed and wonderful condition to be remembered with nostalgia when one is old, is part of a considerably larger picture. This makes both the transitional condition of adolescence and its literary representations amenable to interpretation in the plurality of their contexts which led me towards theoretical materials that would provide the support for the understanding of a series of cultural aspects involved in the reading and writing of books in a by now thriving genre in America.

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.

Frontiers of influence: language and technology in the Japanese American fictions of Etsu I. Sugimoto and Karen Tei Yamashita

Author(s): ANDREEA AVRAM / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The following paper analyzes internal and external factors that can influence the creation of a literary work. There can be a great range of factors that fit well in these two categories, so much so that hereby we shall focus mainly on one major factor from each category (namely, linguistic inheritance and technology), exemplifying the way they work with instances from Japanese American literature. We will limit the examples we use to Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s A daughter of the Samurai and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the arc of the rain forest, as we are mostly interested in the way the two types of factors can impact the portrayal of women in these novels. As concepts, the internal and the external will be discussed in detail using Takeo Doi’s theory of uchi (Jap. = “in”) and soto (Jap. = “out”). Applying Doi’s research in psychology to literature enables us to better understand how internal and external factors influence the creation and development of characters. Language as an uchi factor will be discussed in reference with Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Language, thought and reality. Whorf shows that the languages we speak (native or acquired) can broaden our horizons and influence the way we think. Normally, the way we think influences the way we express our thoughts and the literature we produce. It also means that it influences our perspective on things, on situations and on people. Technology will be discussed as a soto factor, with emphasis on two of its connections to the literary work: as presence/absence in the narrative and the repercussions of that presence/absence in the destiny of the characters.

Joy Harjo’s Memoir: A Portrayal of Native American Identity in the Modern World

Author(s): Mihaela Vasile / Language(s): English / Issue: XIX/2018

Native American women’s writings stand as evidence of their strength and resilience against the discrimination of the mainstream society. In a world where stereotypical views of Native American women dominate, Harjo portrays in her memoir Native women’s newfound identity that relies on traditional tribal elements but also acknowledges the Euro- American ones as part of it. Joy Harjo states that one major theme in her life is “this struggle with transitions: between night and day, here and there, desert and water, earth and sky, and beginnings and endings” (Crazy Brave: A Memoir 17). Crazy Brave: A Memoir shows the struggle undertaken by the writer to overcome mainstream society’s discrimination, counteract stereotypical views related to Native Americans and succeed in making her voice heard. Native American women’s current identity is a transitional one, as they still try to reassert their powerful tribal identities in a world that sees them as extinct by emphasizing the importance of traditional Native identity components, such as the land, the environment, cultural heritage and language in the process of identity reaffirmation. Joy Harjo’s autobiography stands as both a “door to memory” (14) and a milestone for the next generation of Native women and their identity construction.

LEFT WITH TINA: ART, ALIENATION AND ANTI-COMMUNISM

Author(s): Angela Dimitrakaki / Language(s): English / Issue: 31/2019

The article traces the haunting of the contemporary art field by a post-1989 cultural and political imaginary captured in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). This was a formative literary work for its anti-work stance but also the narrativisation of withdrawal in awe of processes of acceleration that saw production principles translating into “dazed and confused” lifestyles. The preference of Gen-Xers for “microcosms”, where withdrawal encountered low-fi collectivism, became more prevalent in subsequent decades and aligned with a democracy realised, and idealised, as the politics of “anti” (including anti-fascism) – exemplified in the art field in its association with an ethical left. Constant and glorified antagonisms join the liberal art field to the social field, forever re-scripting ‘anti’ as TINA – the principle that “there is no alternative”. TINA, it is argued, is assuming specific figurations within the largely left-inclined art terrain where commoning practices remain cut off from the propositional politics of communism while, both within and beyond the art field, technophilia is legitimised left and right as a substitute for the desire for communism.

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.

Metaphors of Crossing in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Author(s): Sorin Cazacu / Language(s): English / Issue: XIX/2018

Nella Larsen's Quicksand brings about an in-depth character analysis of a biracial, binational protagonist in her attempt to negotiate issues of historical, cultural and spiritual freedom.The author examines the way in which race, gender, and nationality interfere in a liminal space epitomized by main character Helga Crane. By employing the journey metaphor, Nella Larsen builds upon the interconnection between physical migration, psychological space, and individual identity.To fulfill her identity quest, Helga travels from southern to northern America, and then crosses the ocean to Denmark, only to return back to the American South. During her crossings she is driven by a desire to fathom her destiny and place in the world but proves to be unable to circumscribe within any distinct social category. In Helga Crane’s case, traveling stands for crossing, with its multiple meanings: geographical relocation, transgressing of boundaries, hybridization, alterity. This is mainly due to the fact that she is a hybrid herself - the result of biracial marriage – and, much like her creator, continually crosses geographical lines, finding herself in the position of both migrant and immigrant, without ever attaining a clear sense of her own identity.