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Body, Space, and Sensations in Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Predicament”

Author(s): Justine Shu-Ting Kao / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This paper aims to examine the sensationalism of Blackwood’s Magazine as evident in Poe’s tale “A Predicament” and how Poe disengages from the tradition of Blackwood’s. On the one hand, Poe conflates Psyche Zenobia’s adventure into a Gothic Cathedral with the Blackwood’s sensationalistic experience, which treats vehement sensations as the prime condition for stimulating the mind’s engagement with a spiritual vision of a world beyond the material world. On the other, Poe’s tale disengages itself from the tradition of Blackwood’s Magazine: Zenobia loses her sensations altogether in the quest for final knowledge and there is no return to her real life. This paper will further look at the mutilated/deformed body in Poe’s “A Predicament” as a body in pain, or without pain, through which the mind engages its imagination. It will also discuss how Poe, through Zenobia’s gaze and speculation upon a sublime cathedral, installs an aesthetic appreciation that distances an imaginary space from reality and facilitates self-mesmerism through which Zenobia is grounded in the earthly world, both physically and spiritually.

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The Spectre of Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

Author(s): Lovro Furjanić / Language(s): English,Croatian Issue: 2/2019

This paper offers a basic overview of the transhumanist movement, particularly its approach to ageing. The transhumanist philosophy of ageing strives both towards prolonging the human life and removing the ill effects of ageing. Special emphasis will be put on cryopreservation, which is a currently relevant and functional, albeit controversial, method of suspending death. A group of traditional issues regarding cryonic technology, such as its biological feasibility, will be evaluated. Following the detailed theoretical investigation, Don DeLillo’s Zero K will be analyzed based on the philosophical background of the transhumanist movement, the evaluation of the desirability of cryonic technology, and its rendering of ageing and death. Zero K subtly brings to attention the economic background of this complex technical process, which is often a blind spot in discussions regarding the positive and negative aspects of cryonics. Transhumanism espouses the wide availability of human enhancement methods, but Zero K draws attention to wealth as the demarcation line between those who can choose to enjoy the benefits of technology and those who remain excluded regardless of their choice. In this context, Zero K confronts the potential of cryopreservation with reality and draws attention to points of tension within the transhumanist approach to ageing.

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Multiple Selves and Otherness: Gothic Identity in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride

Author(s): Adina Bandici / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This paper examines how Margaret Atwood’s three female protagonists of the novel ‘The Robber Bride’ (1993) try to overcome the ghosts of their pasts by coping with their troubled childhood and youth and the surprising ‘resurrection’ of their archenemy, Zenia. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the three women deal, both individually and together, with the shadows of their past and gain a life-long friendship in the process of piecing together their fragmented self and accepting their complex identity. The main characters deal with issues of identity in the attempt to heal the deep and painful wounds of the past, to become powerful, more independent, and to get over the bad experiences through which their families, partners, and antagonist have put them.

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Metaphysical or Differential: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby under Derridean Concept of Love

Author(s): Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh,Mohammed Hussein Oroskhan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Jacques Derrida revolutionized Western Philosophy by reconsidering the previous ideas from a new perspective. In his view, human subjectivity is explained within the system of language and the meaning is conveyed through the concept of differánce. As such, he imparts the notion that nothing ever exists outside the text, yet the text is filled with innumerable meanings, not a specific one. The net of his deconstructive thinking cast vast enough to devote close critical attention to any previously regarded metaphysical idea like love. Transcendental or metaphysical love is a shorn of meaning in the Derridean notion of deconstruction. For Derrida, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability which proves the free flow of signifiers. In this regard, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as one of the most critically studied works in America is recruited to examine the Derridean deconstructive notion of love. Gatsby is exclusively focused on seeking Daisy's transcendental love even at the expense of repeating the past. Nonetheless, the evanescent fluidity of the notion of love totally ruins Gatsby's chance of ever achieving Daisy's love. Accordingly, Gatsby's ultimate failure is expected for the reason that an "absolute moment" is never devoid of any trace of past or future time. Thus, The Great Gatsby attends to why the notion of love defies any metaphysical or transcendental status and instead it has differential and deferral meaning.

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PROZA

Author(s): Gabriel García Márquez / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 280-281/1982

Prose written by Gabriel García Márquez: NOĆ VODENBIKA.

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LJUPKE, ZBUNJENE KĆERI NAŠEG STAROG DRUŠTVA

Author(s): John Updike / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 279/1982

Translated prose written by John Updike: LJUPKE, ZBUNJENE KĆERI NAŠEG STAROG DRUŠTVA.

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“Very much alive and very much under threat”: Chasing the Coffee-Flavored American Dream in Dave Eggers’s Monk of Mokha

Author(s): Raluca Andreescu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This essay examines the manner in which Dave Eggers’s recent work of literary nonfiction, The Monk of Mokha (2018), sets out to amplify the voices of the marginalized by chronicling the adventures of a young Yemeni-American in search of the best coffee in the world. This takes the protagonist from the infamous neighborhood of his birth in San Francisco, “a valley of desperation in a city of towering wealth,” to his trials and tribulations in the war-torn homeland of Yemen. I will argue that the narrative, which blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction and combines history, politics, biography and thriller, highlights the American entrepreneurial zeal and contagious exuberance which still feed the immigrant American Dream and proves that social mobility in the United States is still attainable, sometimes as a result of chasing the world’s most dangerous cup of coffee. Moreover, I argue that the protagonist’s endeavor can be read within the larger context of contemporary political consumption as an example of social justice activism and ethics-driven buying.

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CAPITALIST REALISM, FINANCE AND DON DELILLO

Author(s): Stipe Grgas / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2019

The author begins his paper by recalling his qualms about the fact that the Split conference subsumed capitalist realism under the overall conference topic of Words and Images. His first step is to engage with Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism. After a brief overview of what Fisher understands by this notion, the author argues that any discussion of capitalist realism has to take into consideration the changes that have taken place in the nature of money. It is only when these changes are taken into account, changes that have to do with the fact that we recognize money as a system if not the system of representation, that one recognizes how relevant words and images are to discussions of capital. After a discussion of the ascendency of finance during the latest mutation of capitalism, the author proceeds to give a reading of Don DeLillo’s short story “Hammer and Sickle” in which he shows how the text deals with finance, how DeLillo thematizes the difficulty of understanding finance and how all of this has a bearing on the lack of an alternative to capitalism announced in Fisher’s explanation of capitalist realism.

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Bijeli šum u doba korone

Author(s): Minja Arslanagić‑Tutić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 77-78/2020

S obzirom na činjenicu da posljednjih nekoliko mjeseci svijet u kojem živimo funkcionira na bitno drugačiji način nego što je to bilo prije nastanka, ali još važnije, prije proglašenja pandemije korona virusa, važno je uočiti da se taj način prvenstveno ogleda u nesagledivoj količini informacija i slika kojima neprekidno bivamo zatrpani putem televizije i društvenih mreža. I ma koliko si pojedinačno uobražavali da znamo razlučiti “istinu” od senzacionalizma ili od različitih teorija zavjere, također je činjenica da se bez opipljivosti i neposrednosti iskustva kojima je obilovao ustaljeni način života svi na momente osjetimo kao likovi u romanu Bijeli šum Dona DeLilla iz 1985. godine: ne znamo čemu da vjerujemo i shodno tome ne znamo kako da percipiramo stvarnost. Stoga ne bi bilo loše prisjetiti se ovog romana koji u postmodernoj američkoj književnosti već desetljećima uživa status kultnog, i pozabaviti se pitanjem kako se nositi sa svakodnevnicom u kojoj se susrećemo s nemogućnošću spoznaje čak i vlastite, dosljedne “istine”. Uz ovo izrazito postmodernističko pitanje, ovaj roman sadrži i druge teme koje su se našle u fokusu razmišljanja (i prakse) u proteklom periodu, poput konzumerističke kulture, prilike za relativizaciju fašizma, te paničnog straha od smrti.

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Luis Valdez’in Seçilmiş Oyunlarında Chicano Kültürü Yansımaları

Author(s): Özlem Saylan / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 1/2020

Luis Valdez established his theater consisting of farm workers on a trivet, taking Chicano culture as a reference: actos improvised short play with more political content, mitos reflecting Maya and Aztec mythology and legends, and corridos bringing music, song, and dance interpretation in play. Creating a Chicano identity and internalizing their mother culture and present lives is one of the outstanding themes in Valdez’s plays. This paper discusses three of Valdes’s selected plays, Zoot Suit, Bandido!, and I Don’t Have To Show You No Stinking Badges!. The reason why these plays are analyzed is that each of them helps to shape the Chicano identity, while satirizing the Chicano bias in society. For this purpose, in almost all of Valdez’s plays, the process of transforming the “idea” of being Chicano, which is indicated at least as much as the protagonist’s presence on the stage, into “action” of becoming Chicano is scrutinized. In the case of introducing the already-existing Chicano identity and community to those who deny its existence, “being” turns from being a phenomenon into an “action”. In this regard, it is observed that it is tried to exhibit Chicano Theater’s place in the American Theater especially with sociocultural and political messages.

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Liberal Failure: Possible Worlds in John Updike's Rabbit, Run

Author(s): Hossein Pirnajmuddin,Sara Saei Dibavar / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

John Updike’s Rabbit, Run addresses the human condition under the reign of capital in the context of a society in transition toward a neoliberal state. By depicting a protagonist preoccupied with desire and consciousness through recounting his immediate experiences, the narrative delineates the confusion inherent in the capitalistic state for the protagonist in search of a way out toward self-actualization. Through the application of possible world theory, it is argued that the imbalance between Rabbit’s counterfactual possible worlds and his actual world accounts for the failure he experiences in his quest. As such, the possible worlds’ disequilibrium, we argue, ultimately leads to Rabbit’s bitter failure in his search; too many possible worlds in their counterfactual state produce a kind of counter-reality where there are too many fantasy/wish worlds, but few obligation worlds, a situation that leads to all the inevitable consequences we witness at the end of Book One of the Rabbit tetralogy.

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A Conspicuous Absence: Combat Veterans and America’s Memory of WWII

Author(s): Robert Blaskiewicz / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2019

For almost thirty years following the end of the Second World War, very few first-person narratives of the war by combat veterans were published in America, and, as a result, those veterans’ traumatic experiences failed to inform the national memory of the conflict. A number of cultural influences contributed to these veterans’ silence, including wartime propaganda, Hollywood’s participation in crafting an image of the war that justified America’s large Cold War military, and postwar perceptions of trauma and manhood. Not until Vietnam veterans returned and told their stories did WWII veterans address their experiences publicly in memoir and challenge the national narrative of the conflict.

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From Outcasts in the Streets to Movers on the Hill: Narrating the Dark Side of Washington, D.C. in D.C. Noir

Author(s): Raluca Andreescu / Language(s): English Issue: 34/2020

This article examines the manner in which the recent collection D.C. Noir sets out to illuminate the dark urban corners of the so-called “Capital of the World.” I will look at how the neighborhood-based short stories in this collection reveal the urban underbelly of the American nation’s capital, its seedy underworld, the dark side of domestic life and murkiness of family ties, the racialized practices and institutionalized corruption plaguing the great American city. I argue that, through the collective voices of its residents, these stories offer precious insights into life as lived in the various corners of Washington, D.C., and bring to the fore a world populated not only by outcasts and the disenfranchised, but also by law enforcement officers, politicians, and high-profile representatives, similarly acting under the constraints of a dysfunctional city.

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Po końcu światów? Dystopijna podróż w czasie w opowiadaniu Shermana Alexie Odległości

Author(s): Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2019

Literackie czy filmowe obrazy tego, jak mógłby wyglądać świat, kiedy by go już nie było, czyli po swoim końcu, tworzono wielokrotnie. Ich twórców kusiły różne wyzwania: relacja z inwazji kosmitów, szaleńcze możliwości rozhulanej makabry, dydaktyczna przestroga (zarówno ekologiczna, jak i teologiczna), przeprowadzka do innej galaktyki, genialne technologie otwierające nowe światy lub makieta czegoś w rodzaju feniksa z popiołów, obdarzonego sztuczną inteligencją etc. Otóż Shermana Alexie nie kusił żaden z takich pomysłów.

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Simboluri ale profanării în opera lui William Faulkner

Author(s): Calin Birleanu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2019

In his imaginary worlds, always so appealing for countless categories of readers, Fualkner acted like a researcher who causes situations in order to observe effects or, other times, just by placing human typologies in the same area to observe later how differences and, sometimes, even the similarities are causing movements, reactions and conflicts. Including through this intuitive capacity must be seen his most famous novel, The sound and the fury, whose protagonist made history in world literature and, mostly, in critical, analytical reception of artwork. In the world of the South, where, as particularly subtle the writer inoculates, the absence of tradition and spirituality that generates balance, leads to disintegration and distortion, families dominate through the unwritten law of land and of the those who work, serving, namely the color population

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მითოპოეტიკური ქრონოტოპი ჯონ დოს პასოსის რომანში მანჰეტენ ტრანსფერი

Author(s): Irakli Tskhvediani / Language(s): Georgian Issue: 21/2020

The purpose of the present paper is to apply the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to the structure of John Dos Passos’s city novel Manhattan Transfer. The paper discusses the forms of fictional representation of New York in the novel and complex time-space interrelations shaping its polycronotopical structure. It also analyzes Dos Passos’ fragmented urban imagery and poetics, innovative writing techniques and devices the writer uses in order to create imaginary urban vision of New York City within the confines of his experimental narrative; it explores the ways in which the novel represents the consciousness of its fictional characters in relation to modern city. Within the context of the twentieth-century, modernist perspective, the city is at once sordid, corrupt, ruinous, terrible, contaminating, and still a place of wonders, magic, marvels, and “reality” in all its most startling and surprising manifestations. The city with its “treelessness”, and its “unnatural, too-human deadness”, with its dangerous “lack of the human in the too-human” became humanity’s new nature, and the conscious substance of modernist novelistic discourse. The reading of the city in local as well as universal terms may be regarded as prototypical and paradigmatic for literary modernism. Being the conscious substance of modernist discourse, the city was understood as real and ‘unreal’, historical and transhistorical at the same time. One finds variant representations of this vision in the Dublin of James Joyce, in the New York of John Dos Passos, and, appropriately modified, in the work of T. S. Eliot etc. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, an experimental narrative that takes as its subject the quintessential material city of modernism, New York, is paradigmatic example of modernist urban aesthetic philosophy and critical ideology.

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Racism as Child’s Play: The Half-Cast Nanny in Kay Boyle’s “White as Snow” (1933)

Author(s): Amy D. Wells / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Kay Boyle (1902-1992) was a socially engaged, highly prolific writer of short stories. A member of the Modernist movement, her short story "White as Snow" combines style, childhood perspectives, and landscape to impress the pain of racist segregation upon readers for the few pages they live in her half-cast character's skin. A child narrator tells the tale of Adamic's long-awaited invitation to the cinema for herself, her sister, and their nanny Carrie who is "[c]olored sweet and even like sarsaparilla." However, the outing is ruined by Jim Crow laws, as Carrie is not allowed to enter the cinema with the other three white characters. This analysis will demonstrate how Kay Boyle employs childhood narration and landscapes as a Modernist narrative strategy to denounce racism. The locations of childhood landscapes used as settings in the story will be specifically studied from a geocritical perspective. Then, three different layers of childhood juxtaposed by Boyle will be analyzed, causing pause for reflection regarding the racist experience in her story. Kay Boyle draws attention to this inequality, over thirty years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, by telling the story from a child narrator's perspective and depicting it through the child's play of vacation.

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Between Poetic Voice and Silence: Hart Crane, Yvor Winters, Metapoetics and Emily Dickinson’s Legacy

Author(s): Alicja Piechucka / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The article is a comparative study of the ways in which two American modernist poets bound by a literary and human connection, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, dealt with Emily Dickinson’s legacy in their own works. My study is an attempt to place Crane within the legacy of the American Renaissance as represented not by Walt Whitman, with whom he is customarily associated, but by Dickinson, and to examine the special place she holds in Crane’s poetry and in his thinking about poetry and the world at large. Crane’s poetic take on the Amherst poet is set against and complemented by his friend Yvor Winters’s ambiguous relationship with Dickinson’s heritage: troubled by an anxiety of influence, Winters, the poet-critic, vacillates between his reverence for the female poet and his skepticism about certain aspects of her œuvre. In the close readings of the poems in question undertaken in my study, the focus is on their metapoetic dimension. Particular emphasis is laid on the dialectics of silence, which plays a key role in both Crane’s and Winters’s works under discussion, as well as on the related themes of blankness and absence, poetic plenitude and perfection. Attention is also given to the problematics of death, time and timelessness. While Winters concentrates mostly on metapoetics in his exploration of the Dickinsonian tradition, Crane goes further, considering the fate of female artists and gender issues, thereby transcending poetic self-reflexiveness and addressing farther-reaching community concerns, with particular emphasis on anti-patriarchal and feminist ones.

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“Our Eyes Adjust to the Dark”: The Cosmic Sublime in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars

Author(s): Paulina Ambroży / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The cosmic sublime, as the most spectacular manifestation of the natural sublime, offers rich stimuli for the literary imagination, as well as for various interactions between science, culture and art. In her book of poetry Life on Mars (2011), Tracy K. Smith uses tropes of cosmic perspective, scientific gaze and interplanetary travel to problematize the relationship between human finitude and the boundless unknown of the universe. Written after the death of her father, who was one of the engineers of the Hubble telescope, the volume links personal elegy and the work of mourning with philosophical questions about the relationship between the self and scientifically framed visions of the cosmos. The primary intention of my study is to examine the strategies and implications of the poet’s revisionary engagement with the aesthetics, rhetoric, popular mythology and mysticism of the spatial infinite. Smith employs the cosmic sublime not only as a spatial mode of perception but also as a metaphor of the emotional response to death. Her adaptation of the category expands the frame of reference for the purposes of an existential inquiry into the nature of humanity and transcendence. The celebration of imaginative freedom and modern science’s command of nature is further linked to constant apprehension about the human abuse of power and to anxieties triggered by the sublime mythology of transcendence, informed by a desire for dominating the other to the point of possession.

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Psychoanalytical Criticism of Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville.

Author(s): Milan Damjanoski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Herman Melville is a writer who is famous for his profound and in-depth explorations of the human psyche, thus his works have always been a very attractive subject for literary criticism. His Bartleby the Scrivener as one of the seminal short stories in world literature has elicited numerous and varied analyses of its mystifying story and main character. In our paper, we shall attempt to look at its main characters and narrative strategies through the perspective of psychoanalytical criticism, thus highlighting Melville as a precursor of psychoanalysis and its formative ideas. We will use the insights of Freud about the uncanny, Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic Order, and the link between language and the construction of the psyche in the analysis of the underlying psychological make-up of the character of Bartleby and the Notary Public. Finally, we shall utilize Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas to highlight the story as an example of the early criticism of capitalism and its dehumanizing effects.

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