![William Wolak (SUA).](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2022_71572.jpg)
William Wolak (SUA).
Poems by William Wolak - "Dragostea le cuprinde pe toate / Love embraces everything"," În Craiova / In Craiova", "Să nu le spui/Do not tell them".
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Poems by William Wolak - "Dragostea le cuprinde pe toate / Love embraces everything"," În Craiova / In Craiova", "Să nu le spui/Do not tell them".
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This article presents an archetypal reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine that foregrounds the narrator’s agency in her sequential transformations in the narrative. The critic starts from a broader conception of the term agency that encapsulates those instinctive types of actions in which the protagonist, and people in everyday life, find themselves implicated. In other words, the term agency should not be limited to fully conscious and deliberate acts, hence the concept “instinctive agency.” Other scholars have seen that the denomination factor in Jasmine, i.e. the fact that every characterological transformation the narrator experiences coincides with a name given to her by a male partner, is a clear sign of her diminishing subjectivity and lack of agency. This study refutes this claim by foregrounding the agentive role of her personal history, and by presenting a thorough psychological and archetypal analysis of the male partners with whom she relates. This article also refutes Mukherjee’s claim that complete abnegation of the old self is required for transformation to occur. By highlighting the ways in which the protagonist’s old Indian self comes to the surface time and again throughout her journey, the article evidences that the author’s views regarding self-transformation are psychologically unrealistic. The article concludes with the perspective that it is inaccurate to regard Jasmine as a sheer receptacle of male power and postcolonial influence, and that a deeper psychological reading substantiates her agency and subjectivity in the postmodern world in which her narrative of self-transformation unfolds.
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This paper aims to tease out multimodal and narrative affordances of an auction catalogue, adapted by Leanne Shapton for novelistic purposes in Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry. In doing so, Shapton develops a new form of realism, in which the presumed physicality of photographically represented objects appears to anchor the fictional universe in empirical reality. Hers is thus a truly hybrid project: combining verbalisation and visualisation, enumeration and narration, functionality and literariness, her book continually oscillates between the real and the fictional.
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This article considers the position of the wall in media and literary studies. It posits that the wall encompasses qualities that justify its examination as a medium. The widespread presence of the wall in fiction suggests this structure is an important, yet neglected actor in the transmission of material communication. When the wall functions as a medium, its endurance, visibility, and materiality actively influence the messages it channels. As demonstrated through a close reading of Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words, the study of the wall represents a unique opportunity to engage in a novel approach to the study of media in fiction.
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With the objective of understanding the historical figure of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653), this article analyses and compares the construction of some works by the artist and the character Artemisia in The Passion of Artemisia (2002) Susan Vreeland’s novel. Inspired by the life and work of the Italian painter, the narrative uses pictorial markers to tell the story of the character.
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This paper is an attempt to describe some ways of seeing Edgar Allan Poe’s work through some of its afterlives, many of them literary but also intermedial ones – drawings, paintings, films, plays and musical pieces. Products inspired by the poem “The Raven” will be characterized as adaptation, translation, ekphrasis, transmediation, representation or else – in their new configurations: drawings , concrete poems, films, novels, paintings, charges, comic books, graphic novels, pieces of music and so on. Because Poe’s work is so extensive and appreciated – and therefore imitated – a variety of processes can be exemplified.
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In our media-saturated society popular culture assumes a quasi-religious function, offering mythic narratives and associated mediated rituals that provide audiences with equipment for living. The United States has developed its own distinctive mythos, termed the American monomyth, which celebrates the restoration and perpetuation of social order through heroic means. This optimistic mythic narrative formula shapes storylines within a wide range of genres, such as film noir, sci-fi, and Westerns. In this study, the authors note the surging popularity of a distinctively different mythic formula: post-apocalyptic narratives. It is argued that these darkly pessimistic narratives give ritual expression to the rage, regret, and resignation prompted by a perceived or real irreparable rupture of the social order. The authors offer illustrative examples of post-apocalyptic storylines in books, films, televisions, and other media; identify some of the contemporary socio-cultural concerns addressed by these stories; and suggest that post-apocalyptic narratives pose a potential challenge to the perennial dominance of the traditional American monomyth by joining – although not displacing or replacing – it as a fixture American popular culture.
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I argue that The Aspern Papers takes up the question of aesthetic chastity in terms of the unnamed narrator’s pretended courtship of Tina when he was a lodger in her home, through which she finally achieves aesthetic-ethical freedom as a single woman. Like Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady, Tina at first does not appreciate her suitor’s self-interestedness, but then manages to establish her aesthetic-ethical autonomy by rendering her virginal spirit proof against its objectification and exploitation by the lodger, in a Kantian parable of freedom. Juliana’s jealous possession of Jeffrey Aspern’s papers and her imperious guardianship of Tina prompt a sustained exploration of Kantian and Saidian notions of interest and disinterest, in which Juliana’s machinations are generally comparable to Madame Merle’s. Kant’s idea of interest refers to bias in the formulation of aesthetic judgement, lacking the disinterest of a truly dispassionate judgement of beauty. Edward Said’s notion of interest represents imperial prejudice. From these two complementary perspectives, Tina’s struggle to transform her presumed feminine interest in masculine sponsorship allows her finally to attain complete disinterestedness in relation to the sexual, familial, historical, and political forces that press on her. On the other hand, the lodger’s ardent pursuit of Aspern’s private papers, tokens of the poet’s aesthetic achievement, involves an imperial agenda to wrest control of them for his own interest as a man of letters and connoisseur of poetry.
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This paper aims to examine the miraculous encounters between various saints and wolves which were described in the medieval legends retold by Abbie Farwell Brown in “The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts”(1900). The article analyzes the texts brought into discussion starting from the presentation of two medieval symbols: the saint and the wolf. The paper will show that the frightning wolf that appears in the writings is a necessary disruptive element meant to reveal the purity of the holy man and to trigger the manifestation of the divine love and order in the material universe. By taming the wild, ferocious wolf, the saint restores the harmony of Paradise to the natural world.
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In a broader context, the text explains the publishing formula and the nature of the content of “Heavy Metal” magazine, which is the oldest American, periodically published anthology of shorter and longer picture stories and comics. In a narrower sense — short, closed comic stories published in the magazine in 2021 were analyzed. The plot directions, themes and motifs of several dozen texts are discussed. The conclusions enabled the drawing up a partial characterization of the content of the magazine and presenting existing trends in the selection of topics raised on its pages.
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Review of: Julie Otsuka: Buddha a padláson. Magvető, 2022. Morcsányi Júlia fordítása
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The poetry of Richard Hugo (1923-1982) often explores the transformative effect of the sea in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Navigating the descriptive extremes of inhumanist naturalism and confessional candor, his poems update the Wordsworthian exploration of the Romantic self in a natural setting as well as the representations of the private voice of the landscape poet, whose identity as an obsessive home-seeker in deserted spaces is constructed as well as questioned by his response to the dynamism and changeability of the coastal setting. Hugo’s poems, from early to late, project his thoughts onto the environment with the ambition to internalize the landscape and make sense of his feelings about the place, space, and himself. Drawing on criticism of Hugo’s work and recent studies of American travel and landscape poetry, the article argues that Hugo’s beach poems are a unique response to a tradition of American sea poetry that includes Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke. As Harold P. Simonson (1980, 150) explains, the landscape poet reaches the shores of the Pacific Northwest, “finding something of himself amid the barnacled rocks and oozing moss” while realizing, as Theodore Roethke (1962, 202) notes, that “his place, where sea and fresh water meet, / is important.” The Hugo beach poems work as the loci of the lyric transformation of the self toward self-acceptance while celebrating the rugged elemental beauty of the Northwestern coast.
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The creative practices of a postmodernist artist are characterized by the postmodern project’s resistance to modernist ideas about art, in particular, about an artist’s activity. Therefore, the gesture of a modernist artist, being expressed in the rejection of everyday external reality in favor of transcendental spheres, is perceived by postmodernity as one of the possible strategies of self-representation, eventually bringing it back to the context determined by social conventions. In addition to this, postmodernity rethinks the category of sincerity. The development of the media forces the postmodernist artist to construct a media image, thus the same referent is perceived by the audience in two different ways: through the media and through the artistic text. The aim of the study is to identify poetological devices in the short stories by the American writer Charles Bukowski, which are helpful for expressing the authenticity and veracity of the narrative, contributing to the enhancement of the reality effect. The relevance of the work lies in the insufficient study of Bukowski’s small prose and the need to consider the category of sincerity in the context of postmodernity. As a result of the analysis of Bukowski’s stories, it is concluded that the transformation of one’s experience into a literary work becomes a way for a postmodernist artist to reveal that modernity’s sincerity is artificial due to its nature of artistic device and gesture.
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The aim of this paper is to examine the various aspects of character-building (including some supernatural magic powers involved in the process) and how they shaped the identity of two main characters in George R. R. Martin’s A game of thrones (1996; the first book of the fantasy series known as The song of ice and fire). Considering the Campbellian model of the hero’s journey, we will resort to several critical approaches (adopted mainly from the works of Eliade, Baudrillard, Bachelard, Peter Brooks, Jonathan Culler and Daniel Boorstin) in order to find possible interpretations for dislocation and exile, i.e. the two most important types of forceful events that affected the two protagonists, Daenerys Stormborn (the “Princess of Dragonstone”) and Jon Snow (the “bastard and oathbreaker, motherless, friendless, and damned,” the son of the Lord of Winterfell & Warden of the North, Eddard Stark). Considering the resilience and always-moving-forward mentality that shape strong characters in the face of trauma and adversity, we will resort to several scenes in Martin’s fantasy universe to explore and exemplify their moral strength and supernatural power.
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Written in 2003, Craig Thompson’s graphic memoir Blankets manages to arouse readers’ attention through its complex emotional background that entwines the protagonist’s constant attempts to live a normal, happy life with his psychological instability, as well as his personal coming-of-age and first love with strict religious education and a detachment from his childhood memories. This paper, however, attempts to analyse the concepts of space and time from the point of view of visual representation. I argue that the artist succeeds in creating the idea of temporal development through constant flashbacks, and inner space representations in a graphic narrative that is retrospectively narrated; at the same time, I identify a series of artfully coined images that symbolise winter’s purity and cleanliness which come to oppose the ugliness of the social context (unspoiled versus ravaged outer space) that traps the hero in an impossible universe that annihilates any outbursts of creativity, ingenuity and love.
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Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 makes use of humour and satire in order to portray a world where the war and its effects are unbelievably overwhelming. Many of the moments of the novel that are best remembered are undoubtedly hilarious, managing to create a bond between comedy and tragedy, thus, linking humour to traumatizing events. Dark humour is certainly the way Heller chooses to deal with the atrocities of war and its importance in the novel should not be overlooked when commenting on its impact and popularity.
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This study focuses on the manner in which humour is achieved in Liz Tuccillo’s novel How to Be Single. We start from introducing the background of the story, then, in the most complex section of the paper, we proceed to look at the means through which contextual humour is created at the level of the text. Here, we analyse some methods such as the juxtaposition of incongruent or contrasting meanings, the neglect of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, the baffling of the reader’s expectations, polysemy, stereotyping, feminist outlooks, plays-upon-words, witticism and even intertextuality or repetition as sources of humour. Then, we look at the particular category of humorous effect being drawn from analogies, metaphors and comparisons. Last but not least, we mention and explain a few examples of situational humor in the fourth section of the body of the research. The perspective on the material combines elements from cultural studies, linguistics, pragmatics, imagology and feminism.
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A true classic of English language fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) has stood the test of time not only thanks to its compelling characters and impeccable prose, but also due to its profound reflections on the class system, the individual’s place within society at large and the corruption of the American dream. In this paper, I will argue that the conflict between appearance and reality serves as a framework for understanding the hero’s journey, from the creation of a false identity to his romantic idealization of the past and its resulting consequences. Indeed, if solitude is the price to pay for having climbed the social ladder without ever really belonging with the elites, then Gatsby’s tragic destiny stems from his inability – or even refusal – to see the world for what it is and from his relentless pursuit of a noble, but ultimately hollow idea.
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The current study argues that even though Castillo’s So Far from God bears different features of a postmodern literary text, the novel challenges turning the characters into postmodern subjectivity or mestizo consciousness. The defiance of singular metanarrative logic in Castillo’s novel reflects the characters’ alienation from dominant forms of reasoning. Her novel advocates a practical, flexible politics as an antidote to totalizing, rigid value systems, which Castillo identifies much more strongly with dominant culture than with regional and ethnic identity. Her characters prioritize their own communities’ needs and goals through their willingness to incorporate new ideas. This fluid use of identity contradicts the common critiques of identity politics as essentialist, reductive, or prescriptive. This use of identity as a flexible strategy of resistance inverts the common idea that identity politics are rigid and limiting while general, dominant politics are universal and therefore unlimited. It also questions all handed-down wisdom—does not necessarily reject it, but questions it— encouraging people and communities to draw their own conclusions about which aspects are valid or useful for them and which are not. This perception, therefore, forms a type of double consciousness in which the characters base their view of their home town on the assumptions of the dominant culture rather than on their own experiences and values.
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