9/11. FACT, CONCEPT & FICTION

Author(s): Ioana Cistelecan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The present paper intends to focus on the impact 9/11 tragic events had on and respectively got displayed into the very recent contemporary narrative, the way these episodes generated a freshly new literary pattern: the so-called 9/11 novel, its inner features and most of all its own dealing with trauma. The paper will also focus on J. S. Foer’s book 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close', in an attempt to reveal the frail balance between trauma, guilt and personal healing as far as the novel’s characters are concerned, displaying a special interest in the protagonist’s personal recipe of coping with trauma.

FAITH WITHOUT REASON IN CHUCK PALAHNIUK AND KURT VONNEGUT

Author(s): Ioana Beteg / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Bokononism ("Cat's Cradle" by Vonnegut) admits to being built on fabricated lies in order to comfort and soothe the individuals. The Creedish Church (Palahniuk's "Survivor") teaches about the irregularities of a world where self-awareness is dangerous, and where there is no self-sufficiency, encapsulating the idea that life is meaningless. Tender Branson's 'religion' sees the body as an object of consumption whose flaws can be rebooted through prayer. Victor Mancini ("Choke" by Palahniuk) used lying as an egoistic, callous way of earning money. Can these fictional religions deconstruct Christianity? In his book "The Visible and the Revealed" Jean-Luc Marion argues that faith and reason come from two different logics of understanding the reality – both objective and subjective, but with fluidity and coherence in their interweavement. Based on his argument, we analyze the lack of reason in the mentioned 'fabricated religions': it is impossible for them to stand the test of time due to their foundation on delusions and lies. It is exactly the lack of reason in fabricated divine fathers, in manmade father-figures, in manmade 'religions' that render them so ephemeral and superficial. 'Fabricated religions' are sold and are used as mechanisms of consumerism, their beliefs and ideologies are objects of consumption for the numerous delusional aliens of the Postmodern era. Destabilizing the core of Christian belief and restructuring and 'reorganizing' Christianity in the process of denying one’s reality and identity can only lead to the destruction of the self. Moreover, recreating God speaks for the frightening limits of human imagination and its savagery and violence.

THE PORTRAIT OF THE AMERICAN “ANTI-HERO” IN PHILIP ROTH‟S NOVELS

Author(s): Parvin Ghasemi / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2018

Roth‘s world, as presented in his novels, is portrayed through the relationship between opposite sexes and a complicated gender relations. On the surface, his world seems to be overwhelmingly masculine. The relationships seem to be determined by the man, but in closer observation, the woman‘s dominance is very clear. This dominance begins in the family by the dominance of the woman over the man. The man, who as a child has been protected and overpowered by the mother, is unable to act in other situations, by himself. He leaves weak women and strives to find the strong ones. When he finds one, he resumes his role as a son, not an autonomous man. Thus, Roth‘s protagonist fails to commit himself to the realities of the world outside, to other people, and to the relationships he establishes. This failure of commitment is the result of an intensive lack of self-knowledge. This lack of awareness and recognition of self is a consequence of the female‘s dominance over the male in Roth‘s work, for though Roth‘s is an overwhelmingly masculine world, women control it.

INVOKING NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS IN INTERPRETING PHILIP ROTH’S ZUCKERMAN PROJECT

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2018

The present paper is meant to offer an overview of Philip Roth’s nine-text long project informally known as the Zuckerman books in light of the four sets of narrative rules as described by Peter J. Rabinowitz in his Before Reading book. Based on the idea that readers approach a literary work with these conventions about literature in mind, this brief study attempts to show how this knowledge can be used during the reading and after the reading of the lengthy rothian project in order to perform appropriate authorial reading.

Naming and Taming the Truth: Dana Gioia’s Transformative Poetry

Author(s): Roxana Doncu / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

This essay attempts to trace the ways in which Dana Gioiaʼs use of form relates to, and simultaneously differs from Romanticism, Modernism and postmodernism. His particular brand of formalism takes up the notion of a connection between truth and beauty, without presuming to identify one with the other, and, at the same time, resisting both the Modernist obsession with dissolution and fragmentariness and postmodernism's skepticism towards grand narratives. Form becomes a coalescing agent, uniting different aspects and levels of reality, and narratives are instrumental in shaping both the individual and the social body. The power to name (point to and describe) and to tame (to translate dark or incomprehensible aspects of reality), inherent in language, is the means by which poetry shapes our social and cultural world

THE POWER OF THE DISABLED: FLANNERY O'CONNOR’S “THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST”

Author(s): F. Gül Koçsoy / Language(s): English Issue: 88/2021

Flannery O'Connor’s (1925-1964) "The Lame Shall Enter First" (1962) deals with three characters: Sheppard, a widower, his son Norton, a ten years old boy and Rufus, a miscreant teenager, whom Norton dislikes. Rufus has a clubfoot, is very intelligent and fond of violence. Sheppard is a philanthropist and likes to help Rufus inviting him to live with them, contrary to Norton’s wishes. In fact, Rufus despises Sheppard, resists help and is aware of his own evil nature. He makes Sheppard embarrassed and causes Norton’s death deliberately, leaving both of them as victims. O’Connor in this context, de/reconstructs the prejudice against the disabled people; in the American South the disabled are regarded as evil characters. On the other hand, although it is generally accepted that the disabled people are good, she shows them as ordinary people having both good and wicked sides. Moreover, they may refuse help and prove personality despite the fact that non-disabled people are inclined or regard it duty to help them. She problematizes the disabled body as ‘the other/marginalized’ being pitiful and pitied. Thus, it becomes clear that O’Connor acknowledges the disabled people as normal as the non-disabled, or powerful, not physically but spiritually and intellectually. The tenets of ‘Disability Studies’ are insightful to discuss the work.

Negating Agents in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon and their Counterparts in Picasso’s Arlequin à la Guitar

Author(s): Seyedeh Sara Foroozani,Bahee Hadaegh / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

Postmodern art emerged as a critical compulsion in response to the domineering institutions of modern era which were suffering from conceptual absolutism and hesitant aesthetic outlooks. Being ascribed to chaotic qualities, the approach stood as the social and aesthetic antithesis of its qualitative unity, so as to reach an authentic understanding of the intrinsic reality. Hence, postmodern art embarked on negation, as its determinative trait in reception of modern aesthetic debates. Correspondingly, the current study ponders on lives of the margin in works of two prominently modern autobiographical artists, Pablo Picasso’s Cubist painting Arlequin à la guitar accompanied by Eugene O’Neill’s modern American drama, Beyond the Horizon, further to approach the interconnectedness of the masked with the concept of determinate self-negation in marginal existentialities. The discussion further concentrates on the role of society on modern individual’s imprisonment and spiritual remoteness. Regarding this, the paper has concerned itself with presenting modern artists’ intended application of metanarratives adjacent to dialogue scarcities in artworks. In addition, postmodern negation of aesthetic ideals provide readers with a more unifying and authentic perception of subjective truth content while dealing with hesitant yet overlapping representations of multilayered reality.

Subversive Power of the Supernatural: Elements of Magic Realism in A. Carter’s Nights at the Circus and G. E. Ansaldúa’s Borderlands la Frontera: the New Mestiza

Author(s): Mirna Ćurić / Language(s): English Issue: 36/2021

This paper focuses on elements of magic realism in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Though these two novels belong to different literary canons and its storylines refer to different time frames, the writers use mythical and supernatural elements for similar purposes—to undermine the impositions of dominant British and American societies. Both writers incorporate elements of magic into reality to challenge mainstream patriarchal and Western views of women, as well as justify and validate identities based on hybridity and difference.

Postmodern Plague Narrative: The Representation of the Polio Epidemic in Philip Roth's Nemesis

Author(s): Michał Palmowski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The article discusses Roth’s use of the theme of the polio epidemic in his novel Nemesis (2010). Initially, Nemesis seems to comply with the tradition of plague writing, in which the material reality of the disease is largely ignored and the disease itself becomes “a figurative way of speaking of other things” (Gilman 2009, 4). The epidemic exposes a hidden weakness in the main pro- tagonist, which is his inability to accept the imperfect world. One of the cen- tral themes in the novel becomes the problem of theodicy: the main protagonist is obsessed with the question of why God kills innocent children. The mythical and allegorical aspect of the narrative is reinforced by allusions to Oedipus and Job. However, a closer examination of the narrative mode employed by Roth reveals that the main concern of the text is typically postmodern: the story illus- trates the impossibility of arriving at the objective truth. That is why eventually Nemesis will not yield a coherent allegorical meaning.

SIMULACRA OF THE HYPERREAL FANTASY WORLD IN THE NOVEL BY CLIFFORD SIMAK “OUT OF THEIR MINDS”

Author(s): Dan Paranyuk,Alyona Tychinina / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

В статье осуществляется интертекстуальный анализ малоисследованного романа американского фантаста Клиффорда Саймака (1904–1988) “Out of Their Minds” (1970), в котором эклектично сочетаются элементы волшебной сказки, сновидения и фантасмагорического повествования, трансгрессируя в квазиреальность с помощью функционирования интертекстуальных, транзитивных образов Дон Кихота и Санчо Пансы. Актуальность статьи обусловлена усилением интереса украинских переводчиков и литературоведов к творчеству К. Саймака, а также отсутствием интертекстуального анализа его классических текстов. Целью работы стает определение специфики моделирования гиперреального фантастического мира в романе К. Саймака “Out of Their Minds” с участием интертекстуальных симулятивных форм, которые на практике осуществляются как “реверсии воображаемого” (Ж. Бодрийяр). Методология: анализ текста К. Саймака сквозь призму постнеклассической философии и методологии интертекстуальности. Выводы. Проанализированный текст К. Саймака показывает, что фантастическое может сочетаться с мистическими, онирическими, фантасмагорическими, гротескными и даже карнавальными компонентами. Их смысловую нагрузку усугубляет интертекстуальная природа сконструированных автором образцов персоносферы. Показательной в сюжетной канве текста “Out of Their Minds” выступает реминисцентная природа транзитивной персонопары Дон Кихот–Санчо Панса. К.Саймак предлагает специфическую аналогию-идеологему между фигурой главного персонажа Хортона Смита и Дон Кихотом-симулякром, функционирующего только в имагинативном измерении его воображения и следах детской памяти. Такой метажанровый аспект фэнтези обозначает присутствие специфического палимпсеста, насыщенного многочисленными интерпретантами и симулякрами гиперреальнго мира.

(DE)MARGINALISATION IN JULIA ALVAREZ’S HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS: IMAGES OF GARCÍA GIRLSʼ ETHNIC AND GENDER OPPRESSION

Author(s): Mirna Ćurić / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

Ethnic marginalisation minorities is a recurring theme in ethnic writers’ works, such as Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which highlights the marginalisation of Dominican family García in American culture. This paper, which draws on postcolonial and Latina feminist theory, focuses on the societal practices and familial dynamics that decenter the García sisters’ status both in their family and Dominican and American sociocultural environments. The close reading analysis conveys various forms of discrimination and oppression against the García sisters based on gender and ethnicity. Contrary to the novel’s title, which implies that the sisters eventually lose their accents or connection to Dominican culture, the paper argues that the sisters, in their effort to transcend the margins, manage to situate themselves between two cultural fames, developing specific bicultural consciousness, which aids them in overcoming feelings of marginalisation, cultural and social alienation.Ethnic marginalisation is a recurring theme in ethnic writers’ works, such as Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which highlights the marginalisation of Dominican family García in American culture. This paper, which draws on postcolonial and Latina feminist theory, focuses on the societal practices and familial dynamics that decenter the García sisters’ status both in their family and Dominican and American sociocultural environments. The close reading analysis conveys various forms of discrimination and oppression against the García sisters based on gender and ethnicity. Contrary to the novel’s title, which implies that the sisters eventually lose their accents or connection to Dominican culture, the paper argues that the sisters, in their effort to transcend the margins, manage to situate themselves between two cultural frames, developing specific bicultural consciousness, which aids them in overcoming feelings of marginalisation, cultural and social alienation.

ПОВРАТАК НА ПОЧЕТАК СТИВА ТЕШИЋА: АМЕРИКА И ПОСТОРВЕЛОВСКИ ДРУШТВЕНИ ПОРЕДАК

Author(s): Radoje Šoškić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2021

Bearing witness to social, cultural, moral, and environmental metamorphoses that occurred in America in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, American–Serbian playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich observed that these momentous changes, either by force of inertia or the power of habit, resulted in a moral and spiritual crisis, extending to three dimensions of the existence of modern man: personal, social and political. In this context, the paper analyzes the play Square One, which dramatizes Tesich’s vision of America as an anti–utopia predominated by a totalitarian atmosphere of tyrannical ultimatums about conversion, absolute faith in progress and collectivism, with art and culture being used by the regime as a tool intended for controlling people. The ideas of philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Bela Hamvas provide the theoretical framework for our criticism.

ФУНКЦИИ МЕТАТЕКСТА В ХРОНОТОПЕ ПЕРВОЙ ЧАСТИ РОМАНА «ОНО» СТИВЕНА КИНГА

Author(s): Olga Dmitrievna Kapustkina,Yuriy Leonidovich Tsvetkov / Language(s): Russian Issue: 3/2022

The article is aimed at identifying the prognostic role of the first part of Stephen King’s pentalogy It. The research objective was to investigate, step by step, the space and time coordinates, chronotope, narrative characteristics, and the role of metatext in the first part of the novel. The novelty of the research is determined by the pentalogy’s popularity in Russia and insufficient knowledge about the listed aspects. The article gives the first-of-its-kind detailed analysis of the space and time paradigm of the novel’s first part. It further proves that the artistic space focuses on the life of a fictional American town Derry. It is depicted in a realistic way thorugh the specific examples of urban structure and animated town life. However, the town has its own mystical history related to the atrocities committed by a monster named “It”, which assumes the form of a middle-aged man dressed in a clown costume to trap and hawk children. This indicates from the very beginning that the author starts developing a horror novel. The author’s projections to the past of seven preteens, who survived the clash with It and forgot about it, suddenly come back after twenty-eight years in the extensive biographies of the adult characters. Space and time symbiosis of the first part of the novel It can be defined as the chronotope of lost and returned childhood trauma resulting from the encounter with It. The change of the narrative point of view from the all-knowing narrator to one of the characters, Michael, in the final interlude “Derry” enables King to start a game with the reader, extensively using metatext for showing the author’s assessment of the events described in the novel. The author’s digressions and signs of inner states (italicized in the text) build reader’s receptive strategy in the future struggle between good and evil. King aims the reader’s eff ort at restoring peace in the town and solving the mystery of the ferocities that have no rational explanations. All the prerequisites for the grown main characters’ victory over It are created in the first part of the pentalogy.

“Listening” to the Rhetoric of the “Mccarthy Era” in I Married a Communist

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2014

I Married a Communist is a long novel and the seventh book in the Zuckerman series to feature the character Nathan Zuckerman, a character-narrator who for the second time chooses to step aside and focus on the life story of a different character. The novel comprises the narrator’s apparent reporter-like reconstruction of Ira Ringold’s life experiences by locating them within a political, social and autobiographical context. The audience soon realizes the unreliability of the narrator who in an effort to render coherence to the man’s destiny fills in the gaps of information with his own imagined explanations. The novel also offers an explanation to Zuckerman’s choice of a writing career.

Mediálitás David Foster Wallace Végtelen tréfa című regényében

Author(s): Bálint Molnár / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2022

This paper examines the medialized and cinematographic storytelling techniques in David Foster Wallace´s Infinite Jest. The study focuses on the special language of the novel, the textual transpositions of acoustic and visual elements, different tools affecting narration, and the body as the dilemma of the medium. The analysis points out that the characters of the novel become determinative through different devices of mediation: cameras, projection screens, film cartridges, paratextual and metatextual elements, etc. It also highlights the meticulousness, thoroughness, and visuality of narrations. Thanks to Wallace´s prominent technical solutions, the text is constantly in touch with other media, and it creates their copies (reproductions, duplications) in its syntax, many times imperceptibly so that it becomes inseparable from the narration of the novel.

Филм Анђели у Америци и филмска читања Т. С. Елиотових песничких слика у Пустој земљи и Четири квартета

Author(s): Milena Vladić Jovanov / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 174/2021

Tehnologija i rad u Vonegatovoj distopiji Mehanički pijanino

Author(s): Gordana Stojić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 19/2022

Concern for human existence in a world shaped by technology is a subject of reflection in art, philosophy, and science. Unlike techno-optimism expressed in most utopias, dystopia is most often based on the idea that technological development can endanger freedom, values , and the current way of human life. The themes of dystopia are different - from the use of technology to control the population to the rule of the machine over its creator. In the novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut develops a dystopian image of a society organized around automated production. The paper addresses the potential consequences of production automation on society and individuals presented in the novel - unemployment and fear of losing a job, social inequality, social position, and identity of the individual in the conditions of widespread use of machines. In the second part of the paper, these problems will be analyzed in the context of ideas developed by Marx, Anders, and other theorists who deal with the problems of labor and the social consequences of technology.

The Perception of Time in Edith Wharton’s "The Age of Innocence" (1920) in the Context of Her War-Related Nonfiction

Author(s): Ágnes Zsófia Kovács / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Edith Wharton published her 'The Age of Innocence" just after the Great War, but the focus on the past and on social change in the text has usually not been connected to concerns in the novel’s immediate war context for a long time. However, as part of the general critical interest in the literature of war, the issue of the war context for "The Age of Innocence" was examined by Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War in 2004. Hermione Lee’s subsequent biography of Wharton in 2008 also claimed that The Age was not only motivated by escapism but by Wharton’s experience of war as well. This paper looks into how the perception of time is represented in Wharton’s nonfiction war text Fighting France (1915) and The Age of Innocence (1920) by comparing their representations of the contrast between the past and the present. Both Fighting France and The Age of Innocence contain spatial descriptions that employ Wharton’s rhetoric of what the article proposes to call the presence of the past, in which past moments reappear in the present, problematizing what is seen as real and unreal by the characters. The rhetoric of the presence of the past links the war text to the novel in that both share a basic interest in problematic processes of cultural continuity.

The Poet as Activist: Chronotopes of San Francisco in the Poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Author(s): Andreea Cosma / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The impact of one’s economic, cultural and political contributions is vital to a city’s welfare. Activism, however, is a crucial component of community life, which has determined the real meaning of individual freedom through the efforts of the social actors of the last century. In this respect, the literary texts of the Beat Generation thoroughly portray the relation between time and space and the way in which it is connected to social action. From a geocritical approach, the chronotopes found in the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, offer the reader an authentic taste of San Francisco, during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the Beats’ perspective on one’s emergence and evolution in the metropolis during the post-war era. Space and time foster the evolution of group identity and in the same time, they shape the development of social and political endeavors. This research focuses on the intersections between time, people and creative places and seeks to portray the city, as a sociocultural construct from the point of view of a poet and an activist.

The Struggle with Irreverent Time in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Author(s): Florentina Roșca / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Jamaica Kincaid’s lacunary pseudo-autobiography presents the protagonist’s first year in exile and dissects its stages to such an extent that the story takes the form of a photographic slideshow. The unnamed city (presumably New York) appears as a palimpsest locale, almost obliterated by Lucy’s invasive and strikingly detailed memories. This incursion of “space past” and “time past” in the narrative present forecloses an accurate reading of the space and time of her exile. In the end, Lucy becomes well aware of this existential dilemma that suspends her between the past—an unhealed wound—and the present—an unknown territory. Almost the entire book depicts the narrator’s struggle to reconcile the dichotomous cyclical and linear temporalities, each with their corresponding spatial referent: the native island and the city. The present paper analyzes Lucy’s first year in exile as a time loop which closes with a creative reconciliation with the past and appropriation of the linear present.