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This paper analyses the role given to the marginal characters in Carlos Fuentes’s short stories “The Two Shores” and “Apollo and the Whores”. The narrator of the first story, Jerónimo de Aguilar, is a historical figure to whom Fuentes, in order to give a voice to the figures that have disappeared from the official historical record, gives the power to tell his own story. Aguilar has spent eight years as a captive among the Mayas. After captivity he became a translator of Hernán Cortés, and thus he was situated between two cultures, Spanish and Indian. The narrator of the second story, Vicente Valera, is a B-movie actor that comes to Latin America with the intention of escaping from his own decadent situation. Valera is a North American of Irish decent who comes to Latin America searching for his own identity. Therefore, Valera, as well as the Agular, is situated between cultures. Due to the above, this paper examines their personalities as examples of the hybrid identity, which is defined in a place that Homy Bhabha calls Third space. The Third space is a liminal, borderline place of chaotic reality inhabited by the figures that are situated on the border between (two) cultures and thus two or more identities. Therefore they are forced to legitimise themselves in the middle or in-between various cultures, borders or shores.
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The article aims to interpret the poems of Małorzata Lebda using the “travelling concept” of the space in-between. Desiring to stay close to the poetic text, the author focuses on the various ways in which the soma and the space interact. She does not understand the function of soma/spatio/graphy as merely identifying themes of the body and space in the poem but as illustrating how the two are related. This illuminates the problems and possibilities of contemporary cultural humanities.
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The article concentrates on the motif of fungi which reoccurs in Olga Tokarczuk’s novels. The author proves that mycelium functions as epistemological metaphor. It represents the vision of the world based on the interconnectedness, defying dichotomies in this sense. In this Tokarczuk’s works represent new humanities – the anthropocentric perspective gives way to a non-anthropocentric one. The author also emphasizes the fact that Tokarczuk’s use of mycelium pre-dates the same category introduced by A.L. Tising, who in turn extended the category of rhizome by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari.
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The article interprets Ślepnąc od świateł [Blind from the Lights] as a postmodern environmental novel which shows the life of residents in a large metropolis, entangled in constant consumption. The author reads the story as a continuation of the nineteenth century novel about a social decay. He proves that the depicted society, delighted with consumer culture, is wasting its opportunities for development. As a result of the breakdown of social ties and constant work, urbanites suffer from permanent loneliness. The disillusionment is alsointensified by the disappearance of spirituality. The crisis of authority and social antagonisms further undermine the integrity and the sense of coherence in the self. But Żulczyk’s characters fail to reflect on life, which the author of the article sees as the sign of immaturity.
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The article contains a comparative analysis of two female protagonists in Łuk by Juliusz Kaden Bandrowski and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by David Herbert Lawrence. The comparison draws from the fact that both writers were considered as scandalizing by their contemporaries. The two discussed novels present transformations of the heroines, socially liberatedas a result of the Great War. The article analyses the female discovery of sensuality as a common motif of the two novels. It shows the literary images of feminine sensuality in the context of interwar vitality, aesthetic experience of human body and sexuality perceived as visual and tactile sensations.
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The author of this article analyzes the play The Siege by Evgeny Grishkovets, a renowned contemporary Russian writer. She places it against a background of the rest of his works, exposing essential features that characterize his entire dramaturgy, such as the presence of metatheatrical devices, recognition of the importance of contact with the audience, and emphasis on stage performance. The analysis also draws attention to such elements of the play as non-homogeneous spatio-temoral framework, hybrid composition of characters, and parallel development of plot threads. Special attention is paid to the “imprisoning” of characters in discourses and the ambivalent nature of cultural symbols. As the author points out, the Siege stands out in the Grishkovets’s oeuvre, both by departing from the dominant monodrama form and by juxtaposing key themes recurring in his works: the human experience of war, the reflection on the nature of time, the collapse of language referential abilities, and the impossibility of authentic communication
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