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Author(s): Veron Dobroshi / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 17/2019

Portnoy’s Complaint is a novel that, through the main character, reveals Philip Roth’s deep irony. The author, through his character,reveals dissatisfaction with his Jewish origin,criticizes society, and seeks release. The whole novel takes place in the form of a monologue between Alexander Portnoy and the therapist before whom he openly recounts details about his family, society,and sexual frustrations. This is a novel that strips the taboo and helps the sexual revolution. Roth’s novel is at the same time a literary revolution that is notable for its thematic and narrative technique.

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Ethical Dilemmas of Trauma Representation; Considering Art Spiegelman as a Liminal Mediator

Author(s): Maya Gal / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Theodor Adorno famously proclaims that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (285). Undoubtedly, he does not attempt to silence narratives of the Holocaust through this oft-cited remark. With this paradox began a conversation that proceeds to this day and resulted in a paradigm that haunts all trauma narratives: “who has the right to speak or write? What are the appropriate forms for their utterance to take?” and finally, “who is speaking, to whom, on whose behalf, and in what context?” (Godard 18).An author inevitably distorts and modifies an original traumatic experience by inserting his voice into the narrative via stylistic choices, formatting, narration, etc. By default, he is thus positioned as a liminal mediator between the experiencer of the story and the reader. He must ethically avoid distortions of the subject’s story, despite such responsibility creating a difficult paradox to resolve. I consider this conflict through Art Spiegelman’s Maus volumes I and II. Maus raises the same questions of censorship, authorship, and responsibility through its subject matter of the Holocaust and its medium as a graphic novel. I focus primarily on Art, the narrator, as a mediator between Spiegelman the author, his father, mother, and the written page.

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“Beyond the Threshold of War, There Seemed to Be No Reality and No Past”: Third Generation Jewish American Writers and the Inherited Memory of the Holocaust

Author(s): Laura Gimeno-Pahissa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

“Beyond the threshold of war, there seemed to be no reality and no past” (Hoffman 13). In her celebrated book After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2004), Hoffman discusses the pervading presence of the Shoah in Jewish culture and memory, its psychological, emotional, and the historical reverberations of such catastrophe but, above all, she analyzes the effects this has had on the survivors’ descendants. Also described by Hirsch, members of the second generation—like Hoffman and herself—established a strong relationship to “the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” so much so that their parents’ memories “constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 5). This has had such a powerful influence on later generations who have grown up with such inherited memories of catastrophe and trauma, that many of them have started questioning some of these accounts. One such writer is the Jewish American author Nathan Englander who, in his critically acclaimed short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk Anne Frank (2012), engages in a discussion regarding postmemory and its influence on the creation of both a Jewish cultural narrative and collective memory, and how this affects the characters’ lives on many different levels, as well as the voices of third generation authors indirectly. In his work, Englander addresses the discussion of the memory of the Shoah and its later rewritings in quite a provocative way: by means of humor which, as scholars such as Rosenberg and Krijnen maintain, seems to constitute one of the main characteristics of contemporary Jewish writing (Rosenberg 2015; Krijnen 2016). Therefore, it is the aim of this article to analyze Englander’s use of such technique to provide new insights on what it means to be Jewish American today and the effects of the Shoah and its inherited memory on third-generation Jewish American intellectuals.

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Disaster and Emotion in Richard Matheson’s Novel I Am Legend

Author(s): Shpëtim Madani / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This article seeks to examine the emotional impact of disaster in the novel I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, one of the most celebrated writers of science fiction and horror genre in the 20th century. A global pandemic appears to have transformed all people into vampires, except for Robert Neville, the hero, who is immune to the virus. The only human survivor now, he is nightly faced with the massive threat of these infected living and undead vampires, whom the hero kills without mercy day by day, drastically reducing their numbers. While striving to survive at all costs, he tries hard to find a cure for the disease but is finally caught by the living vampires and condemned to death due to his unrestrained violence against them. As the last representative of the ‘old society’, he must relinquish the Earth to the ‘new society’, which is now able to keep the disease in check with a pill. Based on a qualitative research, the analysis begins with an introduction into the concepts of disaster and emotion. It subsequently elaborates on a range of emotions and feelings resulting from the catastrophe in the novel: fear and anxiety; sadness and grief; interest and anticipation, with a view to analyzing the hero’s capability of managing and regulating his emotions and the others’ emotions under psychologically and emotionally distressing circumstances. It is concluded that Neville is not particularly able to effectively manage his emotions, which translates into excessive violence against others. Becoming aware of the consequences of his destructive acts, he accepts his tragic end with courage.

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From Stephen King’s Jake Epping to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Rodion Raskolnikov: How good intentions could lead to the apocalypse

Author(s): Maria Anastasova,Pavel Filipov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The article focuses on one of Stephen King’s 21st-century novels, 11.22.63, about a time traveller who tries to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy. Although King’s name has been associated primarily with horror fiction, horror is by no means the only domain the author dares to explore. His works often blur genre distinctions, present a scathing criticism of American politics, and pose some philosophical questions. As the end of 11.22.63 reveals a pre-apocalyptic vision of the world in which President Kennedy would have lived, the present study is interested in the reasons behind this plot development. Attention is paid to the personality of John Kennedy and to the motivations behind the decision-making of the main character in the novel. The analysis has led us to certain parallels with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classics Crime and Punishment, as both protagonists—Jake Epping in 11.22.63 and Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment—can be seen as utopists who believe that they can make the world a better place by eliminating people who do wrong. We argue that the single-handed doing of justice is the main reason behind the dystopian visions in the two novels, which is why the characters’ good intentions have a disastrous result.

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O jednym odczytaniu Song of Solomon

Author(s): Elżbieta Binczycka-Gacek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2023

Subject to analysis in this article will be two related texts: the novel Song of Solo-mon by Toni Morrison, published in 1977, and Ewa Łuczak’s article devoted thereto, entitled Homecoming in „Song of Solomon”: Nostalgia and the Construction ofIdentity. I would like to partially focus on examining Łuczak’s text, for whom politicaland social contexts depicted in the novel are the point of departure. Łuczakanalyses the Song of Solomon in view of the ‘discourse of home’ present in Morrison’swork, and through the category of nostalgia. In my article, I would like todraw attention to other possible interpretations of the Nobel Prize winner’s text,thus complementing the interpretation offered by Ewa Łuczak by introducingnew contexts.I propose to replace the category of nostalgia by interpreting the Song of Solomonin the light of one of the most important myths of the African diaspora, around whichthe entire novel is structured – the myth of the Flying Africans. Łuczak notes thismyth in just one sentence. Although this article contains some grounds for a polemic,I would like it to be, above all, an interesting starting point for a broader discussion of the cultural hegemony of Western readings of postcolonial literary texts.

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Historic(al) New York as Fictional Object

Author(s): Alexandru Oraviţan / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

This paper aims to investigate the portrayal of New York City in prominent American literary works, ranging from Washington Irving’s (1809) A History of New York to contemporary post-9/11 novels through an analysis of how evolving depictions of the city have been transformed into potent and revealing fictional objects that enrich the literary works into which they have been integrated. By employing the classification of fictional objects into native, immigrant, and surrogate set forth by Terrence Parsons (1980) in his landmark work Nonexistent Objects, this applied study on New York posits that, within the larger literary framework of the novels under discussion, cities construed as fictional objects manage to stimulate an active reading of the text and prompt diverse interpretations of their broader cultural significance. Essentially, this paper illustrates how the historical identity of New York City has been continually reimagined in American literature and how these imaginative representations continue to influence our contemporary popular perception of the city.

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The Elasticity of Space in Karen Tei Yamashita’s "Tropic of Orange"

Author(s): Milos Blahut / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange is a study of space shaped by history, urbanism, globalisation, and ecology. Yamashita explores the social injustice, urban, and environmental changes happening in postmodern and futuristic Los Angeles through seven characters and their respective storylines, narrated by various narrators with different styles. Most characters experience spatial and temporal distortions in their everyday lives, allowing them to try to understand the events unfolding around them. Yamashita depicts space as an organic, changeable, and elastic unity. I argue that by viewing space more holistically, Yamashita offers solutions to some of the overarching problems California has been facing for a long time, namely racism, displacement, class differences, transformation of urban space, violence, and the threat of ecological catastrophe. The convergence of space and time in the narrative, mixed with magic realist tropes, enables Yamashita to interrogate and critique the contemporary socio-economic conditions of the Latin American community in Los Angeles.

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Silent Sites of Memory in Paule Marshall’s "The Chosen Place, The Timeless People"

Author(s): Florentina Roșca / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

As the title of the book suggests, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) is place-focused; it is indeed a narrative of place and its people. The main fictional setting is a fictive Caribbean island, which acts as an essential locale in the protagonists’ act of (re)memory and (com)memoration. An emotionally charged place, this apparently insignificant island acquires a majestic stature in the book; it is space and place, home and exile, paradise and purgatory, past and present, remembrance and forgetfulness. This paper focuses on specific sites which are emblematic of the island community, given the complex role they play in the restoration of memory and identity. Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire will be used here with an understanding that, in a Caribbean setting, places record the monumentality of loss caused by colonialism and its aftermath. The cane field and Sugar’s bar are places where the past lives, bearing constant proof of terrifying colonial abuse. Other locales, however, mainly dwellings and gardens, will be identified and examined as a solution to the protagonists’ exile. The paper aims to demonstrate that all these locales are the essence of the island or, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, they are the genuine fresco, map-less, history-less yet quintessential for the ‘persistence of memory.’

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JEWISHNESS AND WORLD HISTORY IN CLIVE SINCLAIR’S DEATH & TEXAS

Author(s): Petr Anténe / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The title of British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair's fourth collection of short stories, Death & Texas (2014), is somewhat misleading because Texas is not the local setting for all of the stories, as some of them take place in other parts of the United States, and even in other countries. Death is a central theme in all eight stories, as characters face the threat of death or cope with the death of loved ones. Some stories place the topic of death in the context of historical violence, especially from the perspective of Jewish heroes, writers or artists dealing with world history and the portrayal of historical events in popular culture. This article therefore aims to examine the representation of Judaism and the reflection of world history in the collection of stories in question.

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Biografemy w popkulturowych biofikcjach literackich: przypadek Edgara Allana Poego

Author(s): Barbara Braid / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2023

The following article briefly presents a narrative practice of biofiction, focusing predominantly on popular biofiction and its specific subtype, literary biofiction, which fictionalises a well-known writer. Once a general definition of biofiction is established, the article offers an examination of the role of referential elements, which are identified as biographemes – understood here as bio- graphical memes – especially literary biographemes, which play a specific role in popular literary bioficitons. The features enumerated in this paper situate biofiction as a post-authentic practice, typical for the contemporary remix culture. In the final section, Poe biofictions are discussed to examine the emblematisation of the biofictional character and metafictionality of biofiction.

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cronică literară

Author(s): Alex Goldiș / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 9/2023

Review of: Andrew Piper, Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 82 p.

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Noćna šuma

Author(s): Djuna Barnes / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1/2024

Chapter of the Novel by Djuna Barnes: "Nightwood".

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The Pivotal Decade Revisited, or the Contemporary Novel of the Seventies

Author(s): DAVIS SMITH-BRECHEISEN / Language(s): English Issue: 50/2024

This paper takes up the recent turn in the contemporary novel to the aesthetic and economic debates of the 1970s as ways of thematizing their own aesthetic and political ambitions. Turning to art’s legibility within a matrix of global economic relations, I argue for the political importance of two recent novels — Percival Everett’s So Much Blue and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers — that not only dramatize a particular moment of economic violence in the 1970s (the expansion of US hegemony via financial instruments), but formalize the era’s aesthetic upheaval (the turn from modernism to postmodernism). In doing so, they offer a vision of the politics of literature not dependent on our experience of capitalism but which looks instead to the formation of a political and economic regime that has come to govern the world system under capitalism in the twenty-first century.

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OPOWIEŚĆ O KAPITALIZMIE INWIGILACJI. ZAPISKI NA MARGINESIE

Author(s): Anna Ząbkowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2022

The article speaks on the recent book by Shoshana Zuboff on capitalism of surveillance. However, it aims at better understanding of the subject rather than at promotion of the book. The analytical approach to the substance helps to expose new phenomena and, especially, new notions that build Zuboff’s vision of recent configuration of capitalism. Her story in brief says, that digitalization and smart machines enable behavioral invigi- lance of persons active online, often without them being conscious either without their acceptance, in aim to make and sell predictions.Those who own smart machines create targeting algorithms, going beyond what users are willing to reveal.The article deals with following questions: Along with development of digital technolo- gies and artificial intelligence, is the change rightly described as information society? is Zuboff’s stress on invigilation by intelligent machines actually true and based on facts? is the finding, that capitalism of surveillance has no precedence, enough to claim that this means historical regularities matter no more? As far as the last question concerned, after comparing Zuboff’s argumentation with some synthetized knowledge on capitalism, the response must be negative.

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The Life is a Journey Metaphor in Emily Dickinson’s Individual Conceptual Framework

Author(s): Larisa Shpakovskaya,Natalia Pasichnyk,Nataliia Hotsa,Nataliia Zakordonets,Tetiana Harasym,Inna OBIKHOD / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2023

The features of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY complex conceptual metaphor in Emily Dickinson’s cognitive arsenal were traced in the article. A comparative analysis of the functioning of the metaphor in the author’s conceptual universe and the conceptual framework of the cultural community she belonged to was carried out. This type of analysis is considered as a valuable tool for the identification of cognitive mechanisms underlying the integration of complex conceptual metaphors into individual conceptual frameworks. The analysis is performed according to the paradigm of cognitive linguistics.

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(Mother)Monsterhood: The Reclaiming of Female Identity in Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

Author(s): Alexandra Maria Ivan / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2023

Motherhood can be an alienating experience for all, especially when social media veils the unaesthetic facets of caring for the young, turning it into an idealized version of parenthood which gives the illusion that it should be easy, and if it is not—the fault is your own. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder presents this isolating existence through its main character, the mother—whose name is absent from the narrative, narrowing the scope of her identity to that of a caregiver—who attempts to navigate motherhood surrounded by mothers living seemingly perfect scenarios of motherhood. It is only when she starts turning into a dog, or the “nightbitch,” as she calls it, that she begins to question her identity and what she is missing. The present paper aims to analyze the process of the main character of Nightbitch in her attempt to reclaim her identity, a process triggered by her body and later embraced by her in her quest to reclaim her life and identity, as well as to strengthen the bond with her child.

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Dreams and the Non-human in A Song for Lya and Mass Effect

Author(s): Nizar Zouidi / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2023

Dreams are sometimes used as a central narrative device in a number of literary works. In modern and contemporary science fiction as in ancient epics, dreams are useful in creating central mysteries that drive the plot forward. As far as the representation of dreams is concerned, the similarities between classical epics and modern science fiction go beyond the plot to the themes. The nature of dreams and their origins are almost the same in both genres. They are structured in a similar manner and are usually attributed to non-human entities that are either benevolent or malevolent. This article studies the relationship between dreams and the non-human in George R.R. Martin’s novella A Song for Lya (1975) and BioWare game series Mass Effect (2007-2017). In this article, I argue that in both works, dreams are portrayed as hostile non-human spaces that threaten the human mind. They subject the dreamers to intense emotional experiences caused by (evil) non-human entities that seek to dominate or destroy humanity. Although the protagonists are not the only special characters in their stories, they are the only ones who are capable of surviving the dehumanizing dreaming experience. Their ability to control and temper their emotional responses protects their humanness. This concept refers to a cultural and ideological category rather than a merely biological one. It privileges a hegemonic model of subjectivity and existence that regards emotions as dangerous and inhuman.

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Sen i nie/możliwość czekania. Formy biernego oporu w późnej nowoczesności

Author(s): Olga Szmidt / Language(s): Polish Issue: 31/2022

The article is devoted to strategies of resistance in late modernity, in particular the forms that find expression in the literature of the generation that entered adulthood during the global financial crisis (2008). The two most important strategies analysed in the article are sleep and other forms of passivity, which have been observed in both the works of millennials and the forms of refusal and resistance in the areas of work and politics in recent years. The theoretical inspirations of the article include Lauren Berlant and her Cruel Optimism and Judith Butler’s works on gathering in public space, as well as another study touching upon the issues of passivity, waiting and opposition. Th e article considers the possibility of reversing the traditional hierarchy of protest and resistance, and reflects on the possible meaning that the refusal to gather or sleep or, on the other hand, the refusal to be patient and wait may have in modern times.

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Self-sculpting in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden

Author(s): Justyna Fruzińska / Language(s): English Issue: 05 (44)/2024

Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden features arguably the strongest and most transgressive heroine in the writer’s work. Catherine Bourne replays a fear present in other novels by Hemingway and in his view of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage: she is the rich and controlling wife of a writer, whose masculinity is threatened by her financial position. Additionally, Catherine starts a series of experiments connected to gender and sexuality, testing her and her husband’s limits, and ultimately putting at risk their relationship. The paper discusses Catherine’s gender-bending practices as a form of self-expression and self-sculpting, looking for an identity beyond the limitations imposed on her by society. Her transgression is analyzed both as an aim in itself and as a means in the process of self-fashioning, in which Catherine is more determined not only than Hemingway’s other female protagonists but also than her husband David

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