Počátky paranormálního modu v americké fantastické literatuře: Charles Brockden Brown

Author(s): Michal Peprník / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2018

The paper argues that the beginning of the paranormal mode in English and American literature should be traced back to Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic novel Wieland (1798). The concept of the paranormal mode is based on Nancy H. Traill's scale of modes of the fantastic. While various fantastic phenomena feature in Wieland as well as in other Brown's novels, it is the motif of spontaneous combustion and a prophetic dream which provide the best evidence for the employment of the paranormal mode. The last part of the paper explicates the thematic employment of the paranormal mode and fantastic elements in Wieland.

Záhada naivního umění: Deník „Heleny Morleyové“ a Elizabeth Bishopová

Author(s): Mariana Machová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 57/2018

The essay examines the role of primitive art and “non-artistic” genres in the works of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop, similarly to other authors, believed that primitive artists and the authors of works which art not primarily intended as art can “naturally” achieve effects which artists have difficulties achieving intentionally. Bishop’s translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley” and its relationship to her own texts is examined to illustrate the point.

Surviving the Borderlands:

Author(s): Markéta Riebová / Language(s): English Issue: 65/2022

The following study deals with the evolution of the centre-periphery dynamics in Chicano/a cultural and literary space of the Mexican American borderland region. With a brief overview of the socio-historical and geopolitical context in the background the article offers insight into the gradual formation of the cultural/literary capital of the Mexican American and later Chicano/a community, and inquiries into its possible emergence out of the formerly peripheral position in relation to the literary centres of Spain, Mexico or United States.

Витман и Шели у есејима Анице Савић Ребац

Author(s): Bojana Aćamović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 175/2021

PRECARITY AND HEALING: ON THE ROLE OF GRIEF IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S THE FARMING OF BONES (1998)

Author(s): Ágnes Zsófia Kovács / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Precarity and Healing: On the Role of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998). Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) is a fictional account of the undocumented Parsley massacre of 1937, when black Haitian migrant workers were killed by Rafael Trujillo’s government in the Dominican Republic. The paper places the novel in the African diasporic tradition of writing about the traumatic past, with the Parsley massacre being one such traumatic event of Haitian diasporic writing. The paper highlights the critical problem that unlike most post-colonial fiction, this Haitian diasporic story about gaining voice and agency fails to provide a satisfactory therapeutic valence or an explanation for individual suffering. The paper proposes an application of Judith Butler’s concept of precarity in order to reconsider the problem of healing the wounds of the past in Danticat’s novel. For Butler, social relationality makes subjects vulnerable within the social structure they inhabit, but this vulnerability may also carry a potentiality for the experience of social vulnerability to be shared in makeshift acts of solidarity. The paper claims that precarity does have a limited potential in the novel, which can be detected through the analysis of the water imagery. Amabelle Désir, the protagonist, is already living a precarious life before the Parsley massacre, but the brutality to which she is subjected isolates her socially even more afterwards. She is unable to bear her testimony, living in the past, mourning her lost lover. The representation of precarity in the novel’s water imagery indicates that making contact with her former employer in 1961 brings a momentary sense of connection and community that enables her to commit suicide eventually. This element of truncated healing can be read as the limited potential of precarity available in the Haitian diasporic context.

“A STRANGER IN MITTELEUROPA”

Author(s): Cristina Chevereșan / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2021

Starting from the premise that, as one of Roth’s shorter works, Philip Roth’s 1985 novella, The Prague Orgy, may have been insufficiently explored, the paper sets out to analyze its interconnectedness with and indebtedness to the Central-European historical and literary space. As part of a vaster project, via close readings in context, it will retrace the author’s preoccupation with major issues that, in time, shaped individual and collective, real and fictional trajectories across The Other Europe.

KARNEVAL INTERTEKSTUALNOSTI: TIMEQUAKE KURTA VONNEGUTA

Author(s): Lovorka Gruić-Grmuša / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 26/2021

This paper analyzes Kurt Vonnegut’s hybrid genre text Timequake (1997), which with its dialogism and intertextual references to other texts and film creates new meanings and appears as a carnival of intertextuality. The study is informed by Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, which perceives the text as an open productivity (Kristeva, 1980), and by Bakhtin’s theory of carnival conflated with polyphony and dialogism, which articulate a unity of uninterrupted continuity and metamorphosis, “of the world’s revival and renewal” (Bakhtin, 1984), where a variety of colliding voices come into contact in a collective dialogue. The dynamic relationship of comic and dramatic recontextualizations between this and other texts, or body of texts, and mediums, illuminates how this interrelationship highlights the transposition and subversion of meaning, as well as the transgression and carnivalization, which augment the discursive reversals between referential and self-referential, fact and fiction.

NARRATIVES OF SURVIVAL: INVISIBLE OPPRESSION AND RETALIATION IN JOYCE CAROL OATES’ MARYA: A LIFE

Author(s): Tamilmani Rathinasamy Nagalakshmi Kulamangalam Thiagarajan / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2021

Joyce Carol Oates, a postmodern American woman writer, has been featuring the narratives of survival in her works. In Marya: A Life, she attunes the void experienced by humans, and scrutinizes how survival is ensued from the remnants of disquietude. Marya, the protagonist, is as an archetype of the postmodern survivor, living in fragments. The novel discloses the post-traumatic phase of Marya’s life. It presents the invisible oppression and the tangential thoughts that condition her to behave submissively. This article attempts to study how the fragmentation facilitates her survival and how the retention of violence reinforces the efficacy of life.

THE CENTRAL MOTIF OF A ROAD IN THE NOVELLA PIC BY J. KEROUAC

Author(s): Elena Sergeevna Sedova / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2022

The novella Pic by Jack Kerouac is the author’s last work which reveals how his characters continue wandering on the roads of life. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the central motif of the road in this novella, which includes both a real geographical space (the characters’ route from the East to the West of the country, where they hope to find their “paradise”), and a symbolic-philosophical space (the search for oneself and one’s place in life, God in oneself, truth, inner maturity, etc.). The guide on the road (Slim) is especially important here. He turns out to be not just a companion, but also a spiritual mentor of the main character (Pic), a new saint, who is eager to spread his religion and share it with others. Thus, the road is not only a way of travelling, but it is a way of learning about life.

Válkov Havran. Báseň Miroslava Válka Večer ako subverzia tradičného symbolistického modelu lyriky

Author(s): Matúš Mikšík / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 5/2022

The article reads Miroslav Válek’s (1927 – 1991) poem “Večer [Evening]” published in the poet’s first collection of verse Dotyky ([Touches], 1959) as a deconstructive subversion of lyric tradition – of Ivan Krasko’s (1876 – 1958) symbolist model of the lyric and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809 – 1849) “The Raven” (1845). The author argues that Válek subverts the tradition by the specific way he tackles the motifs of the night, rain, and raven known in the Slovak poetry mainly from the writing of Ivan Krasko and by the way the poet updates the lyric situation of Poe’s notoriously well-known poem and its central motif. Another aspect that gets subverted is the tragic-elegiac melancholic modality of the poem. The analysis notices the first line of the poem where the night setting is outlined, then moves on to the key image of rain “without melancholy” and the updated motif of the raven. Finally, it discusses the detachment of the speaker from what goes on in the poem – the speaker in the poem is different from the subject affected by emotions and moods modelled in the lines. The reading grasps Válek’s poem and sophisticated subversive deconstruction of the traditional model of symbolic poem concerned with romantic love.

Kartografie utraty. Poezja Elizabeth Bishop w przekładach i twórczości Andrzeja Sosnowskiego

Author(s): Grzegorz Czemiel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 50/2021

Little attention has been devoted so far to the relation between the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and works by Andrzej Sosnowski, which include translations of Bishop’s poems. This is despite many similarities the two poets share: a peculiar position within the literary tradition, a specific sensibility, an interest in sophisticated forms, or various affinities in terms of subject matter, especially nautical topics. More resemblances can be also identified at a deeper level, where they manifest in subtle ways: both poets are inclined to reflect on loss and the limits of poetic expression, ultimately scrutinizing (albeit indirectly) the relationship between death and literature. Exploring the connection between the two writers also makes it possible to highlight the role played by translation in poetry. As shown, the boundary between original works and translations can be blurred, offering a new model for reading and interpreting poetry – one based not on hierarchies but a community of thought.

Emily Dickinson in the Work of Polish Translators. Continuation of Research

Author(s): Małgorzata Krzysztofik,Anna Wzorek / Language(s): English Issue: 42(47)/2022

This article deals with the Polish translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and correspondence. It is a continuation of the reflection in The Emily Dickinson Journal’s pages, which started in 2022. This time we present translations of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, Andrzej Szuba, Krystyna Lenkowska, Ryszard Mierzejewski, Tadeusz Sławek, Teresa Pelka, Artur Międzyrzecki, Lilla Latus, Agnieszka Osiecka, Agnieszka Kreczmar and Ewa Kuryluk. We discuss a selection of Dickinson’s letters translated by Danuta Piestrzyńska. We emphasize the characteristic features of each of the discussed translations. Although Iłłakowiczówna discovered Dickinson for Polish readers, her translations are perceived as archaic. Szuba mainly translates aphoristic texts. Lenkowska makes an effort to be faithful to the original. The newest translators introduce Poles to unknown poems and make new translations of the texts previously rendered into Polish.

To the springs, to the mountains: Proto-ecocritical readings of H.D. Thoreau’s Walden and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Na przełęczy

Author(s): Agnieszka Budnik / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

In the article, I focus on the comparative approach to the images of nature in literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. I analyse H.D. Thoreau’s Walden, or life in the woods and Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Na przełęczy [On the mountain pass]. The starting point for examining the origins of nature writing is a close reading of Henry David Thoreau’s essay, which marks the beginning of ecocriticism: it combines an activist and revisionist approach towards the relationship between human and more-than-human nature. Although nature writing has not developed as a distinct tradition in Polish literary studies, in my analysis I demonstrate that Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Na Przełęczy (1891) is essentially an example of this genre, as discussed by Lawrence Buell in reference to H.D. Thoreau’s essay.

The music of the abyss: Nature in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann

Author(s): Bartosz Kowalczyk / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

The article analyzes Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s short story The Music of Erich Zann, with a view to presenting the conflict between modernity and nature in Lovecraft’s works. The text in question, along with supplementary texts, provides information that allows us to reformulate the perception of Lovecraft’s works, or more precisely, the category of “supernatural horror.”

Matter as the New Wilderness: Cognitive Obstacles, Radium, and Radioactivity in British and American Popular Fiction from the 1910s

Author(s): Paweł Stachura / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

At the beginning of the 20th century, the radical paradigm shift in atomic physics and chemistry attracted attention from non-scientific culture, and provided a new set of imagery in literary representation of matter, particularly in popular fiction. The article presents a number of texts whose themes and plots were rooted in a peculiar manner of writing, featuring a radical and consistent projection of emotions and desires onto literary representation of matter. The theoretical background has been derived from recent discussion of cultural materialism, and from Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. The selection of literary texts covers popular novels and short stories published in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1918. The conclusions present a somewhat surprising link between the new developments in atomic theory, and the tradition of frontier settings in the American adventure romance.

Autobiography, Time and the Palimpsest in Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then: A Novel

Author(s): Bárbara Arizti / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This article analyses Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiographical novel See Now Then through the metaphor of the palimpsest with the aim of exploring the frictions between the different generic and thematic layers that make up the text. It argues that despite the novel’s generic openness, its thematic concerns, most notably its treatment of time and narrative temporality, encourage a backward-looking stance that reasserts the past. The theories of Sarah Dillon and Lene Johannessen on the nature of palimpsests, especially the difference between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous and the interaction between the horizontal and the vertical, the new and the old, will be drawn upon in conjunction with Leigh Gilmore’s investigations into limit case autobiographies – works, like Kincaid’s, that question the borders between fiction and life-writing under the pressure of traumatic experiences.

A recondite connection: culture and religion in Tracy Chevalier’s The Virgin blue

Author(s): Aba-Carina Pârlog / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The American writer Tracy Chevalier – an English resident since 1984 – bridges a multicultural gap through her novel The Virgin blue (1997). In this narrative, the 16th-century French Isabelle du Moulin, a profound believer in God and the Virgin Mary, is affectively connected to the 20th-century Ella Turner / Tournier (who is an American) through a lingering bad dream based on the laws of association (cf. Baudouin 1945: 19, 24). The rich cultural background of the book mirrors the dissimilar American, French and Swiss ways of life. The open American space meets the closed rural French space (as if echoing the problem Ella has to solve) and the even more private Swiss space. The clarification of the sacrifice of Isabelle du Moulin’s daughter (on purpose called Marie) is made through the dreams which take Ella deeper and deeper into the past. Dreams are seen by rabbis as a way of getting closer to God (Cohen 2002: 389), while the Bible verses that Ella recites in French when she wakes up (Psalm 31) make her a minor prophet (Cohen 2002: 387), especially since she does not speak the French language almost at all. Dreams retrace states of the soul under different guises reminding one of quite important issues when they are premonitory. A verse from the Book of Deuteronomy (29: 29) conveys the fact that everything secret belongs to God and what is revealed is offered so that the words of the Law of God may be done. The history of this literary work takes us back to one of the religious French wars caused by the exaggerated ambition to maintain power, which determined Catherine De Medicis to plot the massacre of 1572 (the famous Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day) and which made Isabelle du Moulin flee France and settle in Switzerland. She disliked the latter because of its rough climate – being close to the Jura mountains – its low temperatures, harsh life and unhealthy living conditions. This paper will discuss the importance of religion and culture as essential elements that can explain the substance of Chevalier’s literary work.

Nieznośna ciężkość resentymentu. Analiza bazy narracyjnej Zmierzchu demokracji Anne Applebaum

Author(s): Roland Zarzycki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2021

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum is a unique book for at least two reasons. Firstly, thanks to the artistry of synthesis, the narrative structure used by the author perfectly exhibits the ideological core of the contemporary discourse of (neo)liberal opposition. At the same time, thanks to her eristic talent, the very persuasive load of the text is worth recognition and in-depth insight. This publication aims to reconstruct the narrative base of the Twilight of Democracy and to reveal its persuasive apparatus. Then this case study is used to identify the more widely functioning ideological patterns associated with political actions, which are based on resentment, bitterness and the longing of (neo)liberals who were left out of power.

Here Be Dragons: The Evolution of Cyberspace from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson

Author(s): Pol Donets,Nataliya Krynytska / Language(s): English Issue: 38/2022

The article focuses on the evolution of cyberspace from a myth-critical perspective: the presence of irrational and fantasy elements in seemingly rational and scientific cyberpunk as a subgenre of hard science fiction. Our research primarily focuses on two significant works: William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), an icon of early cyberpunk, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a switch to postcyberpunk. Moreover, we consider the other works of a broad genre of cyberpunk including The Matrix movies and conclude that the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s presented cyberspace as an enchanted Terra incognita and blurred the line between rationality and irrationality, technology and magic. Emerging as a way of escaping the real world, as hope for immortality, transcendence or transgression (Foucault), the cyberpunk ‘matrix’ followed in the footsteps of fantasy, myth, religion, and utopia. In our view, the postcyberpunk ‘Metaverse’ of the 1990s is more ironical and ‘realistic’ as it appears, and the more familiar and routine the cyberspace became to people, the less romantic and mysterious it turned out to be. Nevertheless, the nostalgic attempts to return to the old, fantasy model of cyberspace were made in postcyberpunk almost immediately after its emergence.

Women’s Drive for Power: Women and Cars in Selected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author(s): Marija Miljković / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

This paper examines the relation between female characters and cars in three F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and Damned. The introduction offers a brief explanation of the role of stereotyping and generalisation, while the analytical part of the paper examines a concrete stereotype that depicts women as bad drivers, and it also draws a parallel between driving a car and handling power and authority. The main part of the paper focuses on illuminating the characterisation of women through the lens of correlation between their driving skills and gender. Female characters at the steering wheel are portrayed as a danger to themselves and everyone else on the road. Their feminine qualities hinder their driving abilities, thus making them incapable of controlling the power the car gives them and, by extension, any type of power.