In Dystopian Retrospect of a Crisis Mood: My Life as a Spy by Katherine Verdery

Author(s): Anca Peiu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

My essay bears a deliberately oxymoronic title as it offers, on the one hand, a reminiscence of 1984, as a most depressing year in the actual history of Romania and likewise in my own earliest career memories. On the other hand, it proposes a contemplation of George Orwell’s British postmodern dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Last but not least, it presents certain 1984 aspects as rendered by the following exceptional book, a great challenge for any scholar of my homeland and my generation: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018). Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, its author, a contemporary American scholar, belongs now also to our Romanian academic elite. Yet this book testifies to her darkest experience in our country, just before the Iron Curtain fell down. Although the parallel between these two books may seem risky at first sight, they share much more than meets the eye; and my claim endeavors to go beyond this visible pretext of the new COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis which has intruded upon all our lives – just like a spy.

Loneliness in Philip K. Dick’s Novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

Author(s): Miljana Đorović / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

The inhabitants of eerily desolated and bleak San Francisco in Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” are all depressed, lonely, isolated, and alienated. The paper strives to analyze the characters of John Isidore, Rick and Iran Deckard, Pris Stratton, and Rachael Rosen, as well as the boundaries between the human and the android based on the notion of inverse parallelism—while humans program their emotions with mood organs and thus are becoming more similar to androids, androids yearn to possess human-like emotions and become humans. The paper argues that it is loneliness that is the prime driving force behind the process of inverse parallelism.

Environmentální Průkopníci (1823) Jamese Fenimora Coopera ve světle literární ekokritiky

Author(s): Michal Peprník / Language(s): Czech Issue: 66/2022

Od Muira k Abbeymu: Americká literatura a environmentální hnutí

Author(s): Petr Kopecký / Language(s): Czech Issue: 66/2022

This article examines the influence of the work of three selected American writers (John Muir, Robinson Jeffers and Edward Abbey) on environmental movement. Thus, it directly addresses a link between literature and environmentalism that has been sometimes discussed in rather general terms. It documents the interface between the literary representation of the landscapes of the American Southwest and the campaigns and movements intent on their preservation. Moreover, it analyzes the evocative and transformative potential of three selected metaphorical frames widely used by the authors: the biblical, the anatomical, and the wild.

Matka Země a její setba:

Author(s): Karla Rohová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 66/2022

Zločin v divočině: Environmentální rozměr současné americké detektivní prózy

Author(s): Šárka Bubíková,Olga Roebuck / Language(s): Czech Issue: 66/2022

In the last decades, crime fiction has proliferated into many subgenres, which are often analyzed from feminist, neo-Marxist, psychoanalytical, or postcolonial perspectives; however, hardly any attention has been paid to ecocritical approach. Focusing on the so-called Navajo mysteries by Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne, on Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series set in Alaskan Bush and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series situated in a variety of US national parks, the article attempts to show how contemporary crime fiction can be approached from ecocritical perspective. It analyzes how the setting is treated as an environment and how a range of ecological topics can be woven into the structure of a crime narrative.

Faulkner and the labyrinth of memory - Jacek Gutorow in conversation with Michael Gorra

Author(s): Jacek Gutorow / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2022

Faulkner and the labyrinth of memory - Jacek Gutorow in conversation with Michael Gorra

The Return of the Sublime and the Transcendental in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

Author(s): Barbara Jadwiga Pawlak / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2022

This article focuses on the sublime experience in Don DeLillo’s recent novel Zero K, framing it as a return, via sublime, to a possible, albeit vicarious, experience of the transcendental. General consensus on the sublime gravitates towards awe and terror upon encountering phenomena that overwhelm the mind, forcing it to become conscious of its limits. However, postmodern theory has largely departed from the idea of the transcendental in the sublime, focusing instead on the failure of representation itself. Don DeLillo’s novels often problematize this very failure. In Zero K he has arguably reinjected the possibility of the transcendental into the idea of the sublime. Despite main protagonist Jeffrey Lockhart’s various doubts, his visit to the Convergence – a cutting-edge cryonic facility, designed to emphasize the spiritual and religious side of an experiment with immortality – proves solemn and awe-inspiring, and he is overwhelmed by the project’s ingenuity, massiveness, and all-encompassing spiritual atmosphere.

Ursula K. Le Guin’in Karanlığın Sol Eli Eserinde Genly’nin Öznelerarası Karşılaşma ile Benlik Reformasyonu

Author(s): Yağmur Sönmez Demir / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 02/2022

The purpose of this study is to display the transformation in the self and identity of the protagonist Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Having spent two years on what he calls as a “damned planet”, Genly (master) has a chance to recognize the other (the slave), namely Estraven closely, thus experiences intersubjective encounter. In the framework of the Hegelian dialectic, Genly comes outside of his own self on Gethen and recognizes the other as a self consciousness that is other than himself. This process makes him transform as a person, develop an attachment to Gethen, and feel at home there. Hence, this study claims that Genly, an alien on another planet, reconstitutes his own self in three stages: journey, intersubjective encounter, and feeling at home on Gethen.

Prędkość detonacji. Dialektyka wolności w "Nakręcanej dziewczynie" Paola Bacigalupiego

Author(s): Maciej Dajnowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2021

The article explores the relationship between speed and freedom in Paolo Bcigalupi’s dystopian novel The windup girl. Detailed analyses have been devoted to the main character of the piece – an artificial, genetically modified woman. The contexts for them were both the feminist, postcolonial, and posthumanist reflection, as well as the genre determinants of the novel.

Literary Cousins of Reservation Dogs : A Comparative Analysis of Works by Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie

Author(s): Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch / Language(s): English Issue: 4 (252)/2022

The article is a comparative analysis of contemporary Native American fiction (Louise Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace, Sherman Alexie’s short story collec­tion The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and the series Reservation Dogs by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. The aim of the article is to indicate similarities in the construction of young protagonists of the selected literary texts and the series, with an emphasis on Indian stereotype deconstruction, survival humour and the genres. This last category encompasses bildungsroman, road novel/story, homing novel/story and magical realism. The methodology used in the article includes cultural studies, postcolonialism and postmodernism. The author of the article wants to argue that many stylistic devices used in the character construction in Reservation Dogs have appeared much earlier in the canonical works of Native American fiction and Waititi and Harjo seem to enter into an intelligent dialogue with the literary tradition because similarly to it, they affirm contemporary indigenous culture, stress its connection with popular culture and very often introduce the black humour which turns Native Americans into subjects of their narratives and gives them back control over their own stories.

Quelques précisions sur « L’image de l’autre dans Aaron, roman montréalais d’Yves Thériault » par Natalie Mojžíšová, article paru dans la revue Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, no 1 (2022), vol. 46, pp. 39–48

Author(s): Victor Teboul / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2022

The following article aims to correct an incorrect analysis of Victor Teboul’s work on Québécois author Yves Thériault and on his novel Aaron. In his work and public presentations, Victor Teboul demonstrates clearly that despite certain stereotypes appearing in the novel Aaron, Yves Thériault had denounced antisemitism which prevailed at the time that he produced his work.

Postmodernist Fictions of Girlhood: "Child-Drag” in The Stain and Blood and Guts in High School

Author(s): Oliver J. Hancock / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Whilst scholarship about postmodernist American literature has tended to focus on the entanglements of power, language, identity, and history, few have noted the important role played by children and child culture. Reading Rikki Ducornet’s The Stain and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School through the lens of literary child studies can usefully demonstrate the ways in which postmodernist literature relies on depictions of childhood to interrogate language and culture acquisition, analogised in terms of parental, pedagogical and institutional control. Ducornet and Acker’s novels, in particular, use a young girl’s voice—to borrow a phrase from Acker, a kind of ‘child-drag’—to explore themes of control and female sexuality, and to demonstrate the broader difficulty of achieving some “authentic” identity, when “identity” is so often viewed as violence submitted from without. In conjunction with poststructuralist and feminist theories of identity-making, this essay will explore how both Ducornet and Acker use the form of the bildungsroman to explore how a self-effacing girlhood beset by naïve bad faith can try to transform itself—through a characteristically postmodernist disassembly of language—into a new and more authentic language of the self.

“I am Alone in the Dark, Turning the World Around in my Head” – Space-Time Creation in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

Author(s): Julia Kula / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The primary aim of the article is to examine Paul Auster’s metafictional novel – Man in the Dark – in reference to the represented reality and imaginary spaces which play a crucial role in the development of the action. I will be focusing on the diverse levels of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the novel – the primary story and the embedded one – and their mutual relations and interactions. While discussing Man in the Dark, I shall explore the ways in which particular chronotopes affect individuals immersed in them. I will also prove that the text’s dominant story, recounted by the protagonist, August Brill, transgresses the spatial and temporal borders of the main character’s world, and, consequently, becomes completely separated from what is quotidian, known, and experienceable for him.The created worlds shall be analysed in reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.

W.Y. Evans Wentz the Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) Letters from Evans Wentz to Sophia Morrison (1910-12)

Author(s): Stephen Miller RBV / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2021

Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz (1878-1965), is known for The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries published by Oxford University Press in 1911. Wentz’s personally gathered fairy beliefs in each of the six Celtic lands and the selections that appeared in The Fairy-Faith were introduced by a prominent figure in the Celtic Revival. In the case of the Isle of Man, it was Sophia Morrison (1859-1917), a leading light in the Manx Language Revival. Wentz had visited the Island late in 1909 during December. Discarded by Wentz at some stage were the letters, drafts, and proofs of The Fairy-Faith. That said, ten letters are extant from Wentz to Morrison and they are presented here in full following an introduction to set them in context and with a brief description of their salient content. They show the work that went into Morrison’s introduction, the editorial to-ing and fro-ing involved, and also the progress of The Fairy- Faith itself through Wentz’s own comments to Morrison.

POST-APOCALYPTIC STRESS DISORDER IN THE LEFTOVERS

Author(s): Sonia Front / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

In Tom Perrotta’s novel, The Leftovers (2011), and the TV series (2014–2017) based on the novel, 2% (140 million) of the world’s population vanish into thin air. The event constitutes a temporal rift that divides history into Before and After and inaugurates a new mode of temporality, marked by a break with a clock-time-based economy and a yearning for the ultimate end. This new mode of temporality is accompanied by the shattering of the individual sense of being-in-time. The essay focuses on the altered experience of time both on individual and collective levels, a condition that constitutes a kind of post-apocalyptic stress disorder. The characters’ reactions to the traumatic experience demonstrate that the inexplicability of the apocalyptic event and duration without closure are psychologically intolerable. As closure is impossible, they cannot work through the trauma, remaining trapped in the past event and the present anticipation of the ultimate annihilationwhile the future horizon becomes obliterated.

“HOUSES. CATS. CARS. TREES. ME”: OUTWARD AND INWARD JOURNEYS IN JOE BRAINARD’S COLLAGE TRAVELOGUES

Author(s): Wojciech Drąg / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This article examines two brief travelogues by the American writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942–1994) as formally unique fusions of the travel journal and literary collage, in which the experience of travel becomes a catalyst for introspection. “Wednesday, July 7th, 1971 (A Greyhound Bus Trip)” is a record of a bus journey that Brainard made in the summer of 1971, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City to Montpelier, Vermont, while “Washington D.C. Journal 1972” is a diary of a three-day car trip to the capital, taken with Brainard’s oldest friend (and future biographer), the New York School poet Ron Padgett and his wife and son. In both texts, a description of the particulars of the trip is combined with meditation about the author’s life and career. After introducing the structure of the travelogues, the article demonstrates their formal indebtedness to literary collage, which relies on fragmentation, heterogeneity, parataxis, and the use of appropriated content. What follows is an analysis of the texts’ oscillation between an account of external stimuli and a record of Brainard’s train of thought. It is argued that, gradually, the inward journey becomes more important than the outward, leading the author towards pushing the boundaries of his candour (in “Wednesday”) and towards an artistic self-assessment (in “Washington”). The article interprets those works as a manifestation of twentieth-century travel writing’s turn towards self-reflectiveness and concludes by considering the relationship between fragmentary, collage-like form and introspective content in the texts at hand, as well as in Brainard’s entire artistic output.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЈА КЊИЖЕВНЕ ЈУНАКИЊЕ СИЛИ ОД ЖРТВЕ ДО САМОСВЕСНЕ ИНДИВИДУЕ У РОМАНУ БОЈА ПУРПУРА

Author(s): Milan Todorović,Jelena M. Pavlović Jovanović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 27/2023

In this paper we focused on the transformation of the main character in the novel The Color Purple, Celie, through the letters she writes to God and her sister Nettie. We contrastively analysed the original text and its Serbian translation. In this paper we followed Celie’s path from an insecure and molested girl, to a confident and emancipated individual which can be observed in the development of her language and writing style. There are three types of letters within the novel: (a) letters written to God; (b) letters which introduce her transformation; (c) letters written to Celie’s sister Nettie. The insecurity of the protagonist is mirrored in her language which is a stylised version of African American English. The Serbian translation employed linguistic features that don’t belong to any particular dialect, but rather represent an approximation of the way undereducated people would speak. The beginning of the novel is characterised by short sentences, repetitive lexicon and the use of the prolonged underscore ______. In the second half of the novel the sentences become longer and the vocabulary richer. Going through the transformation from a victim of dire circumstances to a self-aware individual that accepts herself and her language, Celie represents a character of the Afro-American woman in specific historical circumstances. In addition to Celie, the transformation can be seen in other side characters, especially on the level of onomastics.

TSAR, EAST, AND CIVILIZATION: RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN EDNA DEAN PROCTOR’S TRAVELOGUE

Author(s): Elena I. Annenkova,Olena Yufereva / Language(s): English Issue: 178/2022

American writer Edna Dean Proctor (1829-1923), known as a poet and a progressive social activist, published her travelogue back in 1871, hot on the trail of her extensive tour of the countries of Western Europe and the Holy Land, including the Russian Empire. A Russian Journey was reprinted in America several times, and by the 1890 reprint, which has served as the material for this paper. The purpose of the study is to reveal the peculiarities of the image of Russia in the female traveler vision, which was created at the intersection of several discourse fields, Russian and Oriental, European and Eastern. The analysis of the author's creative thinking is based on a culturological perusal, which makes it possible to identify symbolic and mythopoetic codes of construction of a “borderline” mentality, as well as on a gender-adjusted post-colonial approach, exposing the clash of colonial and anti-colonial ideas. The research demonstrates, that European codes do not play a meaning-forming role, as well as the truly Russian ones; instead, the Eastern codes are revealed to the fullest possible extent. The attempts to fit the development of the empire into the Western discourse leads to emergence of semantic shifts and dichotomy of Oriental and European concepts.

“There’s going to be a moon tonight”: Images of Light and Darkness as Symbolic Elements in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time

Author(s): Milica B. Surla,Vladislava Gordić Petković / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

This paper aims at exploring and analysing the presence and significance of images of light and darkness as symbolic elements in the short story collection In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. Many renowned writers incorporate such images into their works, often representing them as distinct polarities or as a unified entity. Given the fact that Hemingway’s often omitted elements of the narrative are prone to analysis due to their significance, the main aim of this paper would be to examine what these symbolic elements might be an indication of. By relying on the theory of conceptual metaphor and Jung’s coniunctio oppositorum, or the union of opposites, abstract oppositions such as emotions surrounding birth and death, fear and consolation, the fundamental misunderstanding between various married or unmarried couples within these short stories will be analysed within the mentioned framework. Thus, the paper provides an exploration of these notions and sheds light on Hemingway’s portrayal of the stereotypical dark/light opposition, as well as the coexistence of these opposing elements within the inner and outer worlds of his characters. Hence, the main conclusions which can be drawn from the analysis include the perspective from which the author creates images of light and darkness in order to draw attention to emotions such as fear or consolation corresponding to the common perception of these images. Nonetheless, depending on the context within different narratives, the author also manipulates the common perception, thus creating the reverse symbolisation. By presenting both of these images, examining their contrast, relatedness, as well as the necessity of their existence, Ernest Hemingway creates a unique short story collection, thus supporting the claim that his narratives can be repeatedly and inexhaustibly reread and reanalysed.