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"Only in Dying Life": Ursula K. Le Guin's Dry Land and Its Cultural Contestations

Author(s): Gabriela Debita / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

In his seminal essay theorizing the concept of heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault insists that his focus is on external spaces. However, given the ability of certain spaces, especially those associated with trauma and torment, to simultaneously be inhabited and inhabit the psyches of their denizens, it stands to reason that some heterotopic spaces are internal as well. One such example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land, an inner hellscape which appears throughout her Earthsea series. The Dry Land serves to mirror, invert, and contest not only the world of Earthsea, but also the pervasiveness of Western literary and cultural influences on the genre of fantasy itself. Inspired by classical and Renaissance sources (Homer and Dante) and modernist ones (Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot), the Dry Land, a jarring spatial and literary aberration in the context of Earthsea’s Taoist framework, serves to confront both the resistance to the finality of death and the supremacy of the Western literary canon. In doing so, it demonstrates Le Guin’s desire to distance herself from Western canonical influences, while nevertheless highlighting the fact that, given the cyclicity of literary rebellion, she is, in fact, walking in Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s shoes.

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"Who Was Ever Only Themselves?”— Precocity, Vulnerability, and Interbeing in Forrest Gander’s Be With

Author(s): Julia Fiedorczuk / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2020

This article aims to read Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer-winning 2018 volume, Be With, in the context of Judith Butler’s notion of vulnerability and the Buddhist concept of interbeing, introduced by Thích Nhất Hạnh. Gander’s search for a poetics of listening reaches a new intensity in Be With, a poetic lament for a deceased beloved. In this groundbreaking work, grief becomes a means of knowing the world where knowledge is understood “not as recitation but as/ the unhinging somatic event” (Gander 2018, 28). The new way of engaging with the world triggers a subjective reconfiguration that leads to the articulation of a deeply empathic poetics of vulnerability which becomes the basis for telling new stories of human, interspecies, and mineral entanglements.

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"ЧОВЕК У ВИСОКОМ ДВОРЦУ" ФИЛИПА К. ДИКА: МОГУЋИ СВЕТ КОНТРАЧИЊЕНИЧНЕ ИСТОРИЈСКЕ ФИКЦИЈЕ ИЛИ НАУЧНЕ ФАНТАСТИКЕ?

Author(s): Mirko Ž. Šešlak / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 70/2019

Approaching Philip K. Dick’s novel "The Man in the High Castle" through possible worlds theory in fiction according to Lubomír Doležel as well as the research into the poetics of science fiction by Darko Suvin, this paper attempts to solve the dilemma whether the possible world constructed by the text of the novel in question should be categorised as a possible world belonging to counterfactual historical fiction, a mode of historical fiction, as Doležel argues, or it should be categorised as belonging to the genre of science fiction, a view held by many a theorist in this field. In order to acquaint ourselves better with the possible worlds of counterfactual historical fiction, we shall also deal with the problem of the postmodern challenge which attempts to abolish the differences between the historical and fictional dis- courses by proclaiming the former yet another mode of fiction. The distinction here in question becomes doubly important if we wish to speak of the possible worlds of counterfactual historical fiction as different compared to the possible worlds of history, be they counterfactual or not.

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

Author(s): Magdalena Łapińska / 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 Aleksić / 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)

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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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A Case of Mutilation: Translating Hemingway (and his life) in Communist Romania in the 1960s

Author(s): Dan Horaţiu Popescu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The paper is a case study, part of a larger and older research project on the reception of modernist American literature in the cultural press of communist Romania in the 1960s. If the 1950s were the toughest years, in terms of censorship and physical atrocities, the 1960s could be considered the milder ones, while also anticipating the enlightened 1970s. We have been analyzing the Romanian cultural press as going beyond the role of an interface between an ecriture terminal and a network of readers: firstly, via translations, more or less accurate, secondly, through interviews and memories from journalists, fellow-writers, friends, family members, as reproduced from publications belonging mainly to the Eastern / Communist Bloc (Cuba included). Our research is also based on investigations run in the archives of the former secret police, the infamous Securitate. The relation between censorship and ideology, between institutionalized and self-censorship is underlined, as well as their effect in the act of literary translation. Our paper focuses on Hemingway as a result of him being the most popular representative of the Lost Generation at the time, in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. The main text we had in view was How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? by Lilian Ross.

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A Deleuzian Analysis of Capitalism in Scott Fitzgerald’s Novels

Author(s): Narges Bayat,Ali Taghizadeh,Nasser Maleki / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This paper analyzes Scott Fitzgerald’s novels in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism. While Deleuze and Guattari’s capitalist social machine is a break from Marxism, it decodes the traditions that define subjective desires or concepts like beauty and ethics. Under capitalism, subjective desire arises as a capitalist desire and reproduces the capitalist power. In his novels, Fitzgerald addresses the idea of the American dream in a similar way. His characters often embody the contradictions of American experience such as success and failure, dream and nightmare, illusion and disillusionment. This paper critically analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of desire within Marx’s work and the role of the American dream in a capitalist system as a sort of anti-production. It seeks to illustrate how the concept of love in Fitzgerald’s novels is tied to the idea of money and how their connection delineates, in the same way, the commodification of the desire that Deleuze traces in his reading of Marx. Accordingly, this paper also argues that similar to philosophy, fiction can be employed to provide a better understanding of our represented world.

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A Formalist Reading of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Author(s): Adna Oković / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2017

Sandra Cisneros’s first novel, The House on Mango Street, was hailed as one of the most important works in Chicana literature and American literature in general. The novel has been a subject of different readings, which usually offer feminist or postcolonial interpretations. However, one of the main features of Cisneros’s writing is her innovative use of language. To that end, the aim of this article is to analyze Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street through the lens of the Russian Formalist criticism, focusing primarily on its language and structure. The article first discusses the concept of defamiliarization and provides examples from Cisneros’s novel that testify to the authoress’ skill to present ordinary images and events in a strange and unfamiliar way. Furthermore, the article points out the distinction between the theoretical concepts of fabula (“story”) and syuzhet (“plot”), through the analysis of Cisneros’s narrative structure, recurring images and vivid and colorful language which secured her place in the American literary canon.

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A GLIMPSE OF CULTURAL DIVISION IN THE NOVEL MIDNIGHT AT THE DRAGON CAFÉ

Author(s): Cristina Nicolaescu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The huge issue of identity representation in fiction seems to have gained ever more weight over the past decades by an unprecedented variety of problematics in the “ethnic writing” by authors from minority communities that have been marginalized before the favorable cultural shift occurred in the Canadian society of a recent past through more hospitable legislation. Such ethnic writers expand the social concept of identity more often than not by blending sexuality and race, nationality and ethnicity in their narrated experiences with the struggles for recognition and integration. Cultural division in such a society is the focus of this article, in conjunction with a Chinese family’s drama which particularly affects the child protagonist and her personal experiences during the process of acculturation in the novel Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates.

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A Posthuman Quest for Establishing Self-Image through Nature in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Author(s): Pelin Kümbet / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2022

Virginia Woolf, in her highly experimental modernist novel The Waves (1931), depicts the psychological depth and texture of human experience through a series of fragmented and disjointed images, interior monologues and soliloquies, highlighting the feeling of loss, disillusionment, and brokenness. Throughout The Waves (1931), the characters strive to express themselves, and engage in a posthuman quest for a construction of a self-image through interactions with human and nonhuman life forms, and co-existence with the environment. This paper explores The Waves from a material posthumanist approach to offer a new perspective to Woolf’s understanding of the interface of nature and culture, self and the environment, the human and nonhuman agencies. This approach would be useful means to analyze the characters’ yearning for unification and their embodiment with nature, and explore the posthuman materiality of living and non-living beings that would help them redefine their shattered images and modern way of living.

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A Rhetorical Approach to Aspects of Philip Roth’s Narration Technique in the Zuckerman Project

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 17/2014

The Zuckerman project is characterized by a variety of narration techniques. The first book of the project is a first-person narration. A different narration technique (third-person narration) is adopted with the second installment, i.e. Zuckerman Unbound (also maintained through The Anatomy Lesson). Then Roth switches back to first-person narration and the diary style in the “Prague Orgy” and introduces fractures specific to metafiction in The Counterlife. Next, with the American trilogy he draws heavily on the technique called paralepsis. Finally, with Exist Ghost he surprises again. Over the course of the Zuckerman project, Roth submits his authorial audience to a continuous puzzlement, disregarding expectations or better said mocking at their expectations and their urge for the logical linkage with what the previous autonomous books conveyed.

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ABOUT THE RAVEN GIFT, WITH DON REARDEN

Author(s): Neil Diamond,Marija Krivokapić,Don Rearden / Language(s): English Issue: 14/2016

Interview with Don Rearden by Neil Diamond and Marija Krivokapić

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Acting out Trauma and Violence in Viramontes, Kingston, and Silko

Author(s): Radmila Nastić / Language(s): English Issue: 8/2013

The ethnic writing of Helena Maria Viramontes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston offers patterns of the so called “redressive” rituals, the term introduced by the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner. According to this author, redress is the third stage of what he calls “social drama” or a crisis, which tends to be resolved in terms scripted by theatrical and fictional models.

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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 Bubeníček / 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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Alzheimer. Sposoby językowego konceptualizowania choroby na podstawie książki Still Alice (pl. Motyl) Lisy Genovy

Author(s): Diana Saniewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 19/2019

This article, based on the material from the book Still Alice (Polish: Motyl) by Lisa Genova, discusses metaphors connected with the picture of Alzheimer’s Disease, experience and impressions of being sick, the way of thinking about the disease, its symptoms and being in the role of a patient. I analyse what is the purpose of such conceptualisations (familiarisation, disenchantment, education) and how they fit into everyday individual and social experiences. The background for my considerations is a metaphorical perspective at a disease in the culture and in works that serve as canons for contemporary humanities (Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Georg Lakoff and Mark Johnson).

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Američka gotska književnost – C. B. Brown i ponovno rođenje žanra

Author(s): Marko Lukić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1-2/2010

The transitional period which preceded the formation of a completely authentic American literary voice was influenced not only by the European mainstream literary production but also by the Gothic literary tradition which introduced specific narrative structures almost exclusively dedicated to a critical questioning of society and various social phenomena and the expression of numerous national anxieties. Charles Brockton Brown stands out as a key contributor to the successful adaptation of the Gothic genre, which until then was strongly defined by European social and cultural influences. By combining certain European features of the genre with some of the features that dominated the imagination of the emerging nation, Brown succeeded in creating a contemporary critique of the American society while at the same time giving new impetus to a genre that would in many ways define the future development of American literature.

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AMERIČKI REVOLUCIONARNI RAT IZ PERA MERSI OTIS VOREN

Author(s): Violeta M. Janjatović / 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 Barlık / 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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