Психотерапевтичний роман: специфіка авторського метажанру

Author(s): Yuliya Dzhugastryanska / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 87/2013

The purpose of the research is to assay the therapy novel as meta-genre and to examine some of its specifics by author. The article deals with certain methods of approach to the definition of meta-genre including the cognitive literary criticism. The subjects of research are cognitive models that are also genre characteristics of the work from the standpoint of traditional generics. For therapy novel these are: non-valuation discovery and self-acceptance mental world of the characters, the appeal to philosophical (“eternal”) issues being illustrated with plot turns; non-valuation type of narration; specific rhythm and structure of the text. Consequently this is the first attempt in Ukrainian literary criticism to describe the therapy novel as a meta-genre. The benefits of this study are also the concord of different theories of genre and investigating the therapy novel from the reader`s point of view and as a source of answers for “eternal questions”.The material for analysis consists of selected novels written by I. Yalom, “When Nietzsche wept”, “The Schopenhauer cure”, the story written by A. Marshall “Whispering in the Wind”. Also, to illustrate certain positions partially deployed J. Gaarder novel “Sophie's World” and the monograph written by M. Csikszentmihalyi “Flow. Psychology of optimal experience”.

Автобографическое начало в творчестве Дженис Кулык Кифер (от романа „The Green Library” к книге мемуаров „Honey and Ashes”)

Author(s): Anastasiia Davydova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 87/2013

Modern society is in conditions of indeterminacy: there is a tendency to create an integrated social foundation, which would be free from racial or national prejudices and would give a powerful creative urge, – on the one hand, and on the other hand − such processes inevitably destroy the borders of national identity what causes the crisis of national identities. In this context it is very interesting to analyze works by the authors who are possessed of an ambivalent identity, what in fact inspires them to create transcultural texts with real events and historical facts assumed as the basis. That is why the article deals with the problem of autobiographical character of works by modern Canadian writer – Janice Kulyk Keefer. The study examines the correlation of the novel “The Green Library” and the memoir book “Honey and Ashes” due to the context of national identity’s crisis, which has keenly revealed in modern social globalization processes. The text of the novel is analyzed in terms of the identity’s research method. The study highlights as a result that Janice Kulyk Keefer deals with the problem of “The Old Place” history and her family roots because she is looking for an answer to the question “who am I?”, caused by the difficulty of national self-identification by the second and third immigrant generations. This article will be useful for those who are interested in modern Canadian women writing, in the problem of national identity and autobiographical character.

Post-industrial America and Neo-imperialism in Russell Banks’s Novel Rule of the Bone

Author(s): Lilijana Burcar / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2018

Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone (1995) is a rare instance of a contemporary socially engaged American novel of development and maturation that rests, as this paper argues, on a systemic analysis of post-industrial Western reality and contemporary forms of Western-led imperialism. Grasping this reality and not coming to terms with it constitutes an essential part of the adolescent’s trajectory of growth and maturation. Rule of the Bone is America’s post-industrial working-class novel of maturation, the understanding of which lies at the intersection of Marxist and postcolonial theory. The novel addresses these complex social issues on a more basic but still insightful level accessible to teenagers and at the same time on a more intricate level that easily engages a more informed adult readership. In this sense, Rule of the Bone stands for what can be termed a crossover novel. Targeted primarily at an adult readership, it can prove to be of huge benefit to adolescents seeking to break out of the generic confines of contemporary, mainstream adolescent literature.

Stulecie amerykańskiej literatury o Polonii 1900-2000

Author(s): Adam Walaszek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2004

Anarchetypal Journeys in Post-apocalyptic Narratives. The Implacable Darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Author(s): Maria Barbu / Language(s): English Issue: 46/2024

Cormac McCarthy is well-known within the literary world for his rather bleak writing, and The Road (2006) is without doubt one of the novels that exemplifies this characteristic the most. In an attempt to join the already extensive critical literature on McCarthy from an original perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine The Road by combining the analysis of the post-apocalyptic narrative’s elements with a focus on the characters’ journey itself. To this end, my approach would bring into discussion Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”, the opposite term for the archetype understood in a cultural sense, namely as a recurring model or an artistic constant. I argue that this concept, representative for the vision of the decentred postmodern subject, structures McCarthy’s novel through the way in which it builds the plot out of episodes that succeed one another in an unpredictable way.

Przestrzeń rozłożona w czasie – przypadek Here Richarda McGuire’a

Author(s): Julia Dynkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 23/2023

The article concerns the experimental graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire, which is a specific attempt to read time in space. The novel consists of a set of boards depicting the same place in New Jersey at different historical moments. In my work, I reflect on the category of chronotope in the comics medium and try to consider to what extent (and if) Here complements or expands understanding of chronotope in this context.

QUEER TRANSFORMATION AND INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES: ANALYZING RACE AND SEXUALITY IN RANDALL KENAN’S A VISITATION OF SPIRITS

Author(s): Elżbieta Binczycka-Gacek / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

This article offers an in-depth examination of Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, contextualizing its narrative within the frameworks of Queer theory and African American cultural studies. Set against the backdrop of a rural North Carolina community, the novel focuses on the ex- periences of Horace Cross, a young African American grappling with his homosexuality amidst the constraints of a Christian Fundamentalist society. The analysis explores how the novel navigates themes of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly through Horace’s quest for self-transformation. This study underscores the novel’s intricate exploration of these themes, positing queer transfor- mation as a pivotal element that provides insight into the complexities of identity and community within the African American context. Additionally, the article examines the novel’s integration of popular culture references, revealing their role in bridging the discussions of racial and sexual iden- tity. The aim is to shed light on Kenan’s narrative as a significant contribution to the discourse on in- tersectionality in literature, highlighting its impact in the broader fields of Black and queer studies.

“GAYL JONES AND TRAVEL NO-WHERE”

Author(s): Wyn Kelley / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Ame- ricas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palma- res did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.

“TRAVELERS BY NECESSITY” – RUTH BEHAR ON THE WAY IN SEARCH OF ROOTS OR HOME

Author(s): Grażyna Zygadło / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Ruth Behar, a Cuban-born immigrant to the US with Polish, Jew- ish, and Turkish background, begins her memoir Traveling Heavy. A Memoir in between Journeys, published in 2013, with the following citation “I love to travel. But I’m also terrified of traveling” (3). Later she describes the “vari- ous good luck rituals” that she performs before starting a journey, such as checking if she has her “Turkish evil eye bracelet,” “a handmade necklaceGrażyna Zygadło University of Łódź, Poland [...] to be protected from illness or sudden death” or “rubbing the turquoise glass beads to keep the plane from falling out of the sky” (3). She links all these habits to both her Jewish and Cuban ancestry. And although she calls herself a professional traveler, she also describes herself as “an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness,” which perfectly reveals the contradictions related to the notion of traveling. As a relatively new phenomenon, available and affordable to few, traveling can be an exciting, desired, and adventurous experience that opens us up to diversity and enriches us. At the same time, since it involves meeting with the Other, it can be a threatening and exhausting incident that causes nostalgia for home. Hence, the journey is an existential experience including the change, the philosophical exploration of oneself, the search for and dissemination of knowledge, and a sense of discovery (actual of places and communities and symbolical of cultural values and ideas). In this paper, I am going to analyze Behar’s writings as narratives representing ficti- tious fragments of experienced or/and imagined realities (Letters from Cuba 2020) vs. the non-fictional dimension of memoir or travel writing (Traveling Heavy 2013). Still, what joins the two types of narratives is the issue of mem- ory – how/what do we remember? How are our memories changing depending on the time and person we relate them to?

THE LAND OF HEATHENS VERSUS THE LAND OF LIBERTY: MARK TWAIN’S THE INNOCENTS ABROAD AND UBEYDULLAH EFENDI’S TRAVELS

Author(s): S.Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Mark Twain’s (1835–1910) literary travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869), remarks on and/or subverts previously established interpretations of places and objects. Twain’s adopted persona allows him to assume the double role of a fool and an intellectual, simultaneously, by deploying a peculiar type of humor. By openly distaining and emphasizing certain aspects of his travel experiences, Twain’s narrator seems naïve on the one hand, but a savvy socialcritic on the other. Twain’s account of Istanbul (Constantinople) streets, drink- ing Turkish coffee, and Turkish bath experience become farcical descriptions of the Ottoman Empire. His choice of words—such as “the rustiest old barn in heathendom”—also confirms his ideological viewpoint of Ottoman lands.Unlike Twain, Ubeydullah Efendi (1858–1937), who travels in the opposite direction, to the United States from the Ottoman Empire, paints a positive picture of American urban life. He spends most of his time at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, which he describes in detail. One could argue that since the Ottoman Empire was on the cusp of becoming the Turkish Repub- lic, Ubeydullah Efendi’s descriptions of his American voyage were naturally written in a progressive tone. Yet, a closer inspection reveals subtle criticism, as well as an awareness of how others viewed him as an Ottoman gentleman. Thus, his portrayals do not stem from internalized Orientalism; rather, they are the result of informed observations based on his cultural experiences.Neither Mark Twain’s nor Ubeydullah Efendi’s journalistic travel accounts to each other’s countries can be separated from the ideological and rhetorical dimensions of the era’s travel writing. This article will focus on both narrators’ approach and gaze in a comparative manner. While Twain portrays Ottoman lands in a hostile or condescending manner, with descriptors such as “filthy,”“ brutish,” “ignorant,” or “unprogressive,” Ubeydullah Efendi’s accounts are not so one-dimensional. Twain’s peculiar humor and narrative attitude were obviously influenced by the political events of the time, and his views were tainted by his orientalist approach. Conversely, Ubeydullah Efendi’s straight- forward depictions and occasional humor are connected to his personality and offer a far more realistic portrayal of late nineteenth-century America.

A. K. RAMANUJAN’S INSIGHTFUL OBSERVATIONS ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: LOOKING BRIEFLY AT THE DIARY ENTRIES

Author(s): Jolly Das / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929–13 July 1993) traveled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it was not difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Ful- bright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton, where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth, which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his“Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York,” in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018). The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excite-ment and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country which he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher at the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A. K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler—a man from a South-Indian milieu, who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic, and a keen observer. Theories that engage with the akam- puram paradigm, the environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) will be employed as analytical tools to examine and evaluate the selected texts.

TRAVEL AND THE SELF IN MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD’S THE GREAT CIRCLE

Author(s): Elisa Pesce / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

This article presents travel as the nexus between the two protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s The Great Circle (2021): aviator Marian Graves, whose passion for flight and physical travels double as, and intensify, an inner journey of self-discovery, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress who interprets Marian in a biopic and, through this experience, identifies with her, expanding her consciousness and constructing herself as woman. Marian and Hadley have similar, tragic family histories and, despite living a century apart, are both subject to the violence and constraints of a patriarchal society that deprives women of agency and condemns the transgression of gender roles. Consequently, the novel deploys multiple forms of travel and travel writing to ask what it means to be a woman in the United States and explore the contri- bution of physical and metaphorical journey to the discovery of the self, other people and the world. While close in scope to canonical male travel narratives, I argue that The Great Circle juxtaposes different stories (Marian’s logbook, a novel and a biography based on it, and Hadley’s movie) and, therefore, dif- ferent accounts of Marian’s life, to raise questions about the very possibility of knowing anything or anybody. The novel simultaneously denounces women’s objectification by presenting both Marian and Hadley as public fig-ures constructed by others: Marian’s logbook is fictionalized and published without her consent, while Hadley exists only in the characters that she plays and the image that the tabloids project of her. Shipstead’s ambiguous use of the symbolism of the circle further complicates the novel’s epistemological inquiry by betraying expectations about continuity and closure. All circles and journeys in the novel remain open-ended and merge with one another, connecting people and experiences across space and time.

Timing Modernity: Factory, Prison, Narrative

Author(s): Elaine Freedgood / Language(s): English Issue: 37/2024

This essay explores how regimes of time-discipline have operated—and metwith forms of resistance—across three critical sites of modernity: the factory,narrative, and the prison. Through a historical discussion of factory labor anddrawing on E. P. Thompson’s analysis of time and work-discipline, the essayexamines the industrial capitalist methods of timing that underwrote workers’exploitation and large-scale theft of life and health. Readings of modernistauthors show how the non-plots of modernist narrative push, within a limitedsphere, against the imposition of progressive, developmental time. Finally, theessay examines the empty time of incarceration—modern time-disciplinethrough a mirror darkly. In their prison writings, Black revolutionaries such asGeorge Jackson wrested with the reality of a stolen futurity, illuminatingempty time with liberatory political philosophy and anger.

Stories of Water/Storied Water: Agential Realism and New Thalassology in the 21st-century Literary Classroom

Author(s): Jasmine Sharma / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2024

The article examines water as a nonhuman agent while discussing the relevanceof hydrofiction in a literary classroom. It substantiates storied water as a signifying subjectof expressive potential in building a posthuman relationship of care and empathy. Thisarticle will attempt to make four contributions: (1) it will describe the concepts of materialistecocriticism, and new thalassology, and situate the conceptualizations within the broaderfields of environmental humanities, (2) it will reinscribe the image of water as a denselyplural and a tentacular living organism using Karen Barad’s theory of agential realismand Stacy Alaimo’s notion of transcorporeality, (3) it will briefly overview hydroficionas a critically apt genre for interrogating the disoriented dialectics between humans andnonhumans, and consider Emmi Itäranta’s young adult dystopian fiction, Memory of Water(2012) as the primary entry point in de-anthropocising wet matter, and (4) it will delineatethe relevance of water narratives and the inclusion of such narratives in higher educationcurricula. In conclusion, the article hopes to academically sacralize water as a medium ofplanetary commitment endowed with the agency to narrate its story of dispossession andrender itself resilient to vulnerability and misuse.

NEW ENGLAND AND LITERARY TRADITION: EMILY DICKINSON AND ROBERT FROST

Author(s): Smaranda Ștefanovici / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2024

This study explores how New England's cultural, historical, and environmental contexts have deeply influenced its literary tradition. By analyzing works from notable New England authors like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, the research investigates how the region's unique characteristics impact American literature's themes and storytelling styles. The paper establishes a theoretical foundation based on regionalism and sense of place theory to guide the in-depth analysis of literary texts. The main focus is on themes such as nature, morality, and community life that define New England's literary identity. This examination reveals the significant influence of the region on its writers. It contributes to a broader understanding of how geographical settings shape literary creativity.

DISCOURSE DYNAMICS AND LITERARY ESSENCE IN TEXT ANALYSIS

Author(s): Dana Rus,Nicoleta Aurelia MARCU / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2024

The paper approaches the topic of discourse by performing a dual analysis of a literary excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. After suggesting a theoretical framework based on theories on discourse, discourse typology and analysis, and features of literary discourses, the study continues with a dual-layer analysis of the literary excerpt. In the first layer, the study identifies general discourse features, such as cohesion, coherence, and context. The second part of the analysis evaluates the excerpt’s literariness based on concepts derived from literary theory, including fictionality, poeticity, inquisitoriality, licence, and contemplation.

Religijna materialność świata w powieści Grace McCleen Świat Judyty

Author(s): Malgorzata Kowalcze / Language(s): Polish Issue: 40/2023

The article discusses the novel The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen’s applying elementsof selected posthumanist theories, mainly object-oriented ontology (G. Harman, T. Morton) andnew materialism (J. Bennett). It considers the assumption that in the novel, the ontological status ofhuman beings as well as material objects is fluid, as both play the role of a prop and the entity ma-nipulating the prop. The author focuses on the main character’s religious cognitive perspective andher relations with her (im)material surroundings. An attempt is made to point out certain similaritiesbetween the religious worldview and the posthumanist approach. To this end, the author discussesseveral issues related to the dualistic categories of material vs. immaterial, rational vs. irrational, aswell as human vs. non-human.

„Po raz pierwszy zobaczyła kogoś równie czarnego jak ona” – inkluzywność w przekładzie intralingwalnym baśni (na przykładzie wybranych opowiadań ze zbioru Piękno i bestie. Niebezpieczne baśnie Somana Chainaniego)

Author(s): Kinga Matuszko / Language(s): English Issue: 65/2024

The article analyses the refractions introduced in the retellings (intralin- gual translation) of fairy tales from Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales by Soman Chainani. These transformations have their source in cultural translation and concern broadly understood inclusivity (e.g. change of skin colour, biological sex and sexual orientation, deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity). Possible sources of the introduced modifications were also indicated (an attempt to expand the recipient circle, representation of pre- viously excluded minorities, but also the desire to stir emotions).

New Dimensions of FEAR: Conceptual and Intermedial Analysis

Author(s): Iryna Biskub,Anna Smoliar / Language(s): English Issue: 9/2024

The paper presents anew intermedial perspective onthemultidimensional concept of fear in the literary works of modern American writer Stephen King. The intricate and contradictory nature of fear stands at the core of a popular literary genre – horror fiction. The multifaceted nature of the horror genre attests to its inherent complexity, particularly in its exploration of fear. The article addresses the following key functions of horror fiction: 1) to specify the associations arising from the experience of fear, 2) to offer a structured methodological background for examining the given emotion, and 3) to provide a fertile ground for social introspection. It has been justified that the reflective nature of literary texts makes them a representative repository for elucidating specific concepts or social sentiments, hence the growing number of literary pieces reflective ofone oftheprimary human emotions – fear. This correlates with modern social, economic, and technological challenges that have reshapedthe past few decades. The conducted research has indicated that shifts and modifications in the perception of fear have found their reflection in horror fiction. Thelexicosemantic analysis ofthelexemes used byS. King toindicate fear enabled delineating the core and periphery of the concept FEAR. By applying the intermedial perspective and text interpretation techniques, we established the crucial roles of visual and auditory sensory systems in representing the discussed concept by the author and its further perception by the readers. Themain conclusion ofthepaper enables viewing theconcept FEAR asacomplex semiotic and linguistic artifact, a primary emotion, and a multifaceted psycholinguistic phenomenon. Thus, the concept FEAR resembles an intricate semiotic system that integrates different verbal and non-verbal means. In the paper, fear is understood as a neural and physical reaction in response to internal and external sources of danger, as well as the embodiment of reverence, bewilderment, and despair grounded in different sensorimotor systems. Being a complex psycholinguistic phenomenon of multimodal nature, fear is dynamically represented in literary prose by various intermediality tools that have been evolving in response to social, political, and economic changes in the modern world.

From a Botched Body without Organs to a Plastic Brain. A Reading of P.K. Dick’s "A Scanner Darkly"

Author(s): Piotr Płomiński / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article analyzes the 1977 science-fiction novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, and focuses on the split personalities of the main character: Bob/Fred/Bruce. The reading is supplemented by the use of the concepts of Line of Flight and Body without Organs introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia as well as Catherine Malabou’s concept of brain plasticity. The article argues that the progressing deterioration of the protagonist’s mental state caused by drug abuse and social environment may be seen as a representation of a “botched BwO” – a body that has lost its productive potential and cannot be reintegrated into a stable territory. At the same time, I contend that the final chapter of the novel depicts a reparative transformation in which, thanks to brain plasticity, he is integrated into an autopoietic system of his environment.