We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
In the pastoral romance ‘Daphne Transformed into a Laurel Tree’ by the seventeenthcentury Polish poet, diarist, and essayist Samuel Twardowski, the only genre of legitimate status is the bucolic (in itself already a hybrid?); the romance and the grotesque have a lower status, and an even lower status falls to the anti-bucolic, the anti-romance, and the ‘tamed grotesque’. To put it differently: Twardowski takes up and at the same time subverts, in various ways, the conventions of the bucolic, of the romance and of the grotesque, so that his ‘Daphne’ can be read as a text that is ‘open’ to ‘games’ with those conventions, which in turn allows us to read it as a contribution to ‘the annihilation of genres’.
More...
Karol Irzykowski (1873-1944) was one of Poland’s most important twentieth-century writers. His Pałuba (1903) is not only the earliest metafictional novel in Polish, but it can also be seen as the most radical prose experiment in European literature. As a literary, theatre and film critic, Irzykowski was respected for his originality, modern approach and principled stance. He set a benchmark for analytical thoroughness and fairness for decades to come. In recent years, however, interest in Irzykowski’s work seems to have experienced a rapid decline in both literature and criticism. Bolecki suggests that today’s literary culture and the mechanisms of the market have displaced the values on which the humanism of Irzykowski’s era had been founded – values such as independent judgement, the quest for truth, respect for science, disinterestedness and an uncompromising attitude.
More...
In-yer-face theatre, which emerged in Britain in the 1990s, became extremely popular on the stages of Istanbul in the new millennium. Some critics considered this new outburst as another phase of imitation. This phase, however, gave way to a new wave of playwrights that wrote about Turkey’s own controversial problems. Many topics, such as LGBT issues, found voice for the first time in the history of Turkish theatre. This study examines why in-yer-face theatre became so popular in this specific period and how it affected young Turkish playwrights in the light of Turkey’s political atmosphere.
More...
This paper examines whether certain computer games, most notably RPGs, can be thought of as examples of the postmodern epic. Drawing on more recent critical frameworks of the epic, such as the ones proposed by Northrop Frye, Adeline Johns-Putra, Catherine Bates or John Miles Foley, the demonstration disembeds the most significant diachronic features of the epic from its two main media of reproduction, that of text and oral transmission, in order to test their fusion with the virtual environment of digital games. More specifically, I employ the concept of “epic mode” in order to explain the relevance of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the history of the epic typology, which must now be understood as transmedial. I illustrate the manner in which this representative title assimilates the experience and performance of the epic, as well as several meaningful shifts in terms of genre theory, the most notable of which is an intrinsic posthuman quality. The experience of play inherent to Skyrim does not only validate the latter as an authentic digital epic of contemporary culture, but it also enhances the content, role and impact of the typology itself, which is yet far from falling into disuse.
More...
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) manifest an environmentalist awareness of the increasingly destructive power of human technologies while challenging the prevalent models we employ to think about the planet as well as its human and non-human inhabitants. Both novels probe what it means to be human in a universe plagued by entropy in the era of the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this essay, I will concentrate particularly on Dick’s and Winterson’s portrayals of the dystopian city as a site of interconnections and transformations against a backdrop of encroaching entropy and impending doom. Drawing on the work of several (critical) posthumanists who are primarily interested in dissolving oppositions such as between nature/culture, biology/technology, I show how the displacement of the centrality of human agency due to the intrusive nature of advanced technology is happening in the broader context of the Anthropocene. I also argue that the dystopian cityscapes envisioned in both novels become places that allow for the possibility of new forms of subjectivity to emerge.
More...
This essay addresses J.M. Coetzee‟s Disgrace, a Booker Prize winner in 1999. The novel captures South African political and cultural turmoil attending the post-apartheid transitional period. Far from overlooking the political allegory, I propose instead to expand on a topic only cursorily developed elsewhere, namely liberty and license. The two terms foreground the textual dynamics of the novel as they compete and/or negotiate meaning and ascendency. I argue that Disgrace is energized by Coetzee‟s belief in a total liberty of artistic production. Sex is philosophically problematized in the text and advocated as a serious issue that deserves artistic investigation without restriction or censorship. This essay looks into the subtle libertinism in Coetzee‟s text, which displays pornographic overtones without exhibiting a flamboyant libertinage. Disgrace acquires its libertine gesture from its dialogue with several literary works steeped in libertinism. The troubled relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical yields an ambiguous text that invites a responsible act of reading.
More...
Two books in C.S. Lewis‟s young adult fantasy series Chronicles of Narnia – The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle – paint an uncomfortable portrait of the Calormen, the traditional foil for the Narnians. Throughout the text, the Calormen are clearly marked both culturally and racially as Middle Eastern, perhaps specifically as Turkish or Arab in their socio-political power structure with harems, arranged marriages, and facial hair designating status. Even Tashbaan, the capital city of Calormen, reads somewhat like a description of Istanbul. Throughout these two books, the Calormen are portrayed as a sinister and conquest-driven culture threatening the freedom enjoyed by Narnia. This textual indictment is fairly consistent. In demonizing this group, Lewis took part in a literary tradition extending back hundreds of years, a tradition that has enjoyed renewed resonance with increased fears over the growth of Islam. From Sir John Mandeville to post-9/11 concerns over terrorism, western depictions of Islam have often revolved around fear and distrust. The Last Battle is particularly problematic in its allegorical depictions of Islam, as Lewis seems to suggest that salvation is only reserved for those who follow the lion Aslan, clearly marked throughout the series as a stand-in for Jesus Christ.
More...
Nağīb Maḥfūẓ remains most often identified with literary prose creativity, which clearly dominated his artistic output. We rarely reminisce about his dramatic works, and we occasionally return to the films that came out of his scripts. However, as we read in the memoirs of the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, film was his first great passion. Maḥfūẓ, adoring the cinema, never wanted to become part of the world of the tenth muse and, incidentally, met in 1947 with the director Ṣalāḥ Abū Sayf, who offered him a collaboration. The romance of the famous Cairo Trilogy’s writer with the world of cinema lasted until 1959, bringing fruit in nearly thirty scenarios. Most of them brought popularity not so much to Maḥfūẓ himself as to the directors and actors who were cast in the main roles. Films such as Al-Fitiwwa, Ğa’alūnī muğriman, Al-Muḏnibūn or Rayā wa-Sakīna are considered to be the most important achievements of the Egyptian cinematography. This paper attempts to look critically at Nağīb Maḥfūẓ’s film output by placing scripts of the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner in the context of his literary prose.
More...
The article analyzes Witold Gombrowicz’s pre-war novel Opętani (Possessed). The novel was published under a pseudonym and Gombrowicz had professed to be its actual author just before he died. This long-term concealment provoked an argument about the novel’s artistic value. According to Maria Janion, the novel is a legitimate and important part of Gombrowicz’s writings, whereas Jerzy Jarzębski, the second major participant of the dispute, pointed out the flamboyant schematism of the text. The author of the article espouses Jarzębski’s viewpoint, although he believes Opętani to be a mediocre good book rather than a good bad book. The novelty of this interpretation lies in discovering an important inspiration of Gombrowicz’s text: Julian Ochorowicz’s writings on mediumship. The author proves that Hińcz, one of the novel’s characters, was undoubtedly modeled on Ochorowicz. The author also states that Gombrowicz composed the plot of the novel under the influence of some accounts of Ochorowicz’s mediumistic experiments. The article suggests that the poetics of popular fiction and gothic novel might hide some more sophisticated psychological meanings, but they are revoked by the schematism of Opętani to eventually come to the fore in Ślub (The Marriage) and Pornografia.
More...
The article is a review of Agnieszka Gajewska’s book Zagłada i gwiazdy. Przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema [Holocaust and the stars. The past in the prose of Stanisław Lem]. The author discusses Lem’s autobiographical prose, realistic fiction and science fiction as a memory text in disguise, in terms of such categories as trauma and testimony.
More...
In the article the author attempts to characterize the work of Yury Klavdiev in the context of trauma studies. For the analysis the author has used four pieces of work of the playwright showing the relation of a boundary situation with experiencing of boundaries of one’s own humanity: Let’s go, the Car is Waiting, Rain Outside the Wall, Anna and The Ruins. Confronted with fear, helplessness and direct sense of danger to life, Klavdiev’s heroines have to answer the question, who they are in this harsh reality. Masha and Juliya from Let’s go, the Car is Waiting reach the extremes of psychical and physical endurance, and then they see that violence is neither poetic, nor does it lead to internal independence. The shocking events at the family home of the heroine of the play Rain Outside the Wall forced her to use aggression as a means of drawing attention to unsaid tragedies of thousands of victims of sexual violence. The titular Anna takes a gun to her hand in order to overcome oppressive and masculinized world in which she lives. Mariya Razvalina (The Ruins) goes up against the social trauma of war, against harsh simplicity, without a place for reflection on human condition.
More...
This is a segment of a novel signed by Daniel Vighi
More...
This is a fragment of a prose signed by Virgil Ratiu
More...
This is a short prose fragment signed by Cornel Dimovici from „Crucile de fier”
More...
Lia Brahms, docentja e seminarit, u fut në klasë me hapa të qetë, të sigurt. Ishte shtatgjatë, me flokë të bardhë. Buzën e epërme, majtas, e kishte të shtyrë anësh si me një majë gjilpëre, që dukej sikur i buzëqeshte një subjekti të panjohur në hapësirë. Përshëndeti kursistët dhe filloi të fliste për Echnatonin.
More...
The text represents a fragment from a novel in work, written by Nichita Danilov.
More...
This entry of Vatra Literary Review is dedicated to promoting Romanian novel, thus in almost every issue we publish fragments of novels in work, belonging to different Romanian novelists.
More...
The present text is a fragment from Alexandru Vlad's work that was not published before his death.
More...