Varia: The Intermundium of S. T. Coleridge’s Genius in Biographia Literaria

Author(s): Lubomir Terziev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The focus of this article is on the peculiar space that S.T. Coleridge constructs for his own genius in Chapter II and Chapter IX of Biographia Literaria. Specific attention is devoted to some rhetorical ploys that Coleridge uses to accommodate his own figure among paragons like William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth. The text then explores Coleridge’s attachment to and detachment from the figures of Friedrich Schelling and Jacob Böhme. In the conclusion, a statement is made on the intermundium between enthusiasm and metaphysical reasoning in which Coleridge’s genius is located.

Vitana Kostadinova. Jane Austen Translated: Cultural Transformations Across Space and Time. Plovdiv University Press, 2018. 288. ISBN 978-619-202-383-6

Author(s): Petya Tsoneva / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

Varia: Морално несъгласие онлайн. Противоречието или премахването на съдържание в случаи на онлайн омраза е по-ефективно? Систематично литературно ревю

Author(s): Bogomil Kalinov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

The terms and conditions for using social platforms and the Internet grow more complex as governments struggle to provide instruments that avoid employing censorship techniques to revoke free speech, but at the same time provide online users with a safe environment and shelter from experiencing abuse or aggressive behavior. This ethical dilemma has apparently split Europe into two contradicting schools of thought. In July 2017 a search to identify relevant publications on the topic of online moral disagreement was conducted on the “Communication and Mass Media Complete” electronic database. The objective of the search was to find articles related to the topic, published in English between 2015 and 2018 with access to the full text. This systematic literature review is the final product of the materials found.

Апозитивните словосъчетания като средство за създаване на фалшиви новини

Author(s): Anton Getsov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

The paper analyses the manipulative potential of one insufficiently-explored sentence part in Bulgarian syntax – the appositive, and also the appositive phrases, which are composed of a complement (object or subject complement) and the noun it describes. The paper also stresses the appositive word groups (constructions) that follow the ‘common noun+common noun’ model. The fact that word order in this type of appositive word groups has a role in changing the intention of communication and in creating – deliberately or not – fake news in media discourse is well supported and richly illustrated.

Book Review: Inna droga. Romantycy a kolej by Wojciech Tomasik

Author(s): Tomasz Pudłocki / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Towards a Post-Traveller’s Travelogue: Aspects of an Ethical Turn in Contemporary European Travelogues on America

Author(s): Peggy Karpouzou / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

This article investigates the forms that contemporary travel writing may assume, especially those shaped by a more critical outlook and an ethical stance towards alterity. The investigation is based on the following selection of contemporary travelogues on America, written by French theorists and Greek intellectuals: America by Jean Baudrillard (1988), American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville by Henri- Bernard Lévy (2006), A Villager in New York by Yannis Kiourtsakis (2009) and Manhattan-Bangkok by George Veis (2011). The themes under scrutiny are space, identity and alterity. The article is primarily concerned with the imperialist perspectives that can be detected in the genre as well as with the subsequent management of European stereotypes about “Americanness” and the current “Americanization” of the planet. Particular emphasis is laid on the critical response to globalization through the elaboration of political, philosophical, but also aesthetic concerns in the travelogues under discussion. Finally, the writing modes in these travelogues are examined as a means of building self-reflexive and unstable narrative identities – defined here as “posttravellers.” The latter are located in an attempt to go beyond postmodern attitudes, embracing a more ethically concerned critical thinking about Self, space and an interactively defined Other.

The West from a Byzantine Perspective During the Early Crusades

Author(s): Dimitar Yordanov Dimitrov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The article explores changing attitudes to western Europeans in the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh century until the Fourth Crusade and for some time after it. Special attention is paid to the development of old stereotypes and the emergence of new ones. More active contacts between the two halves of Christendom from the eleventh century onwards did not result in an expected rapprochement, but rather led to hatred and resentment. The article focuses on a number of texts by Byzantine authors, such as Michael Psellos, Anna Komnena, John Kinnamos, Eustathios of Thessaloniki, and Niketas Choniates. In my view, the changes in Byzantine perceptions of the west could be represented in terms of the following metaphorically named stages: Calm, Menace, and Bitterness and Despair.

Travelling to Grikkland and Mikligarðr: The Byzantine Empire and the Byzantines in Two Scandinavian Sagas

Author(s): Ivelin A. Ivanov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The article focuses on representations of the Byzantine Empire and the Greeks in two sagas from Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: The Saga of Harald Sigurtharson (Hardruler) and The Saga of Sigurth the Crusader and His Brothers, which provide examples of contacts between the Scandinavian and Byzantine worlds in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The author employs a quantitative analysis, exploring names, such as Grikkland (Greece), Mikligarðr (Constantinople), Grikkjakonungr (Emperor), Grikk(j)ar (Greek), and Grikklandshaf (Greek archipelago, Greek sea). Separating objective from legendary information, he seeks to answer the question: to what extent are the representations of the Byzantine Empire, its Emperor, and its capital in the two sagas reliable from a historical point of view?

Varia:Beauty and/(n)or Truth: A (Hermeneutic) Rhetoric of the Aesthetic

Author(s): Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.

Varia:Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800): The Horrors of Alienation, War, Slavery and Social Segregation

Author(s): Rayna Rosenova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The article discusses a selection of poems from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800), offering a close reading to show how Robinson engaged with pertinent historical issues, such as slavery, war and power relations, that marked the last decade of the eighteenth century. It explores Robinson’s use of Gothic and sublime aesthetics to communicate the ruptures found in society and to represent various states of otherness. In the poems under discussion, the Gothic is used to externalize both psychological and social collapse, communicating the sense of instability, vulnerability, alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation. Robinson’s use of Gothic conventions creates a gloomy atmosphere which seeks to accentuate the ills of eighteenth-century British politics and society and to engage the reader sympathetically.

Citizenship, Gender, and Democracy Building, edited by Euromed Feminist Initiative

Author(s): Pavel Petkov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

“Walking on the Wall”: Postmemory and Hiberno-English in Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People

Author(s): Helen Penet / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This article explores how Hugo Hamilton’s childhood memoir The Speckled People works through the postmemory of the narrator’s paternal grandfather’s enlistment in the Royal Navy. The narrator’s father has concealed the photograph of the “sailor in the wardrobe” from his children, and in parallel has built a linguistic wall around his family, denying them access to the English language. In his memoir, Hamilton manages to “walk on the wall” by poetically merging the two languages, and writing in Hiberno-English, which circumvents his father’s binary view of the Irish and English languages.

By Way of Old Petersburg: Desmond O’Grady and Russian Poetry

Author(s): Alla Kononova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The article takes on a direction which has great potential for further studies of contemporary Irish poetry: studying the work of Irish poets through their relation to Russian literature. It focuses on the reception and reimagining of Russian poetry in the work of Desmond O’Grady, one of the leading figures in Irish poetry, who started writing in mid-1950s. The article studies three poems by O’Grady which are ad¬dressed to his Russian counterparts: “Missing Andrei Voznesensky,” “Joseph Brodsky Visits Kinsale,” and “My City,” a translation from Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero.” None of these poems has yet been subject of thorough critical analysis. Each of the poems has become a signpost on O’Grady’s poetic map and an important element of his own “private mythology.” When analysed in the wider context of Irish poetry, they help form a clearer picture of the influence Russian literature has had on contemporary Irish poets.

Swiftian Inspirations: The Legacy of Jonathan Swift from the Enlightenment to the Age of Post-Truth, edited by Jonathan McCreedy, Vesselin M. Budakov, and Alexandra K. Glavanakova

Author(s): Hristo Boev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Technological Encroachment and Social Changes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Writing

Author(s): Ksenija M. Kondali,Adna Oković / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article explores instances of American literary production that illustrate the massive changes caused by unbridled industrial development and its social ramifications in the late nineteenth century. Expounding first on the differences between modernity and Modernism, it focuses on several narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, that present the circumstances of transition from Victorianism to a new era characterized by industrial innovations, heightened mechanization, social implications, and cultural reflections. The article discusses texts by late nineteenth-century American writers and tries to demonstrate how they revise earlier concepts of nature and sense of purpose and belonging under the impact of forceful modernization and industrialization. While the industrial revolution and the emergent capitalist system inflicted irreparable damage on nature, they also affected social and moral norms and practices. Most strikingly, the explosive urbanization and changed economic order in the United States led to alarming social differences and transformed visions of nature and the self, calling for new ways of representation in literature at the end of the nineteenth century.

Pathos and Comfort of the City Against the “Torrents of Progress”: Ignatius Reilly’s New Orleans in John Kennedy Toole’s 𝐴 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠

Author(s): Petra Sapun Kurtin / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Viewed from the perspective of the trickster-type main character Ignatius Reilly and his engagement with his surroundings and other characters as citizens in a series of picaresque adventures, the city of New Orleans in the novel 𝐴 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 (1980) becomes a space of pathos and comfort, indicative of Ignatius‘s paralysis and inability to leave it, caused by his innate paranoia of the doctrine of progress in the modern age. At a point in history when the postcolonial and postindustrial city is trying to rebrand itself as a tourist haven, the chronotope of New Orleans functions as a place of suspended modernity, offering comfort in the pathos of its entropy, stagnation and nostalgia against the raging torrents of modernity that reign outside its city limits in the rest of the country.

Boxers, Cue Balls, and Comedians: E. E. Cummings’ Polytexts

Author(s): Vakrilen Kilyovski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Poetry and painting were “the twin obsessions” of the American modernist E. E. Cummings. His engagement with more than one artistic practice makes his work suitable for a case study of polytextuality, which is the purpose of the present article. First, a brief theoretical introduction to polytextuality is offered. Then, four of Cummings’ poems are read against the background of their visual counterparts. Since the poem-picture pairs are treated as polytexts, the discussion focuses on the “intersemiotic transposition” involved in the process of transferring thematic and material data from one sign system to another.

Trauma and the Irish Experience: The Example of M. J. Hyland’s 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛

Author(s): Dmytro Drozdovskyi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article analyses the philosophical features of M. J. Hyland‘s novel 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 (2006), spotlighting this text in the espistemological paradigm of post-postmodernism. The analysis considers some of the distinctive features of the irish novel in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as anticolonial explications and the smashed type of identity of the characters. 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 reveals the post-postmodern tendency of searching for the truth and explaining the nature of human beings as a combination of the humanitarian and the biophysical. The novel‘s protagonist has a special superpower of detecting lies in the discourses produced by other characters. His inability to accept lies physically may be linked to the post-postmodern tendency of rejecting the hybrid combination of truth and untruth, typical of some kinds of postmodernist writing. The analysis also explores the representation of trauma in Hyland‘s novel.

Variations of Death in Richard K. Morgan’s 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛. From Cybergothic to Candygothic

Author(s): Constantina Raveca Buleu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article presents an analysis of Richard K. Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛 with a focus on postmodern, neo-Gothic perspectives on death. More generally, it explores Gothic thanatology in the postmodern world. Attention is also drawn to the representations of death and technological survival in Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛.

Milena Katsarska. 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠: 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝐵𝑢𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 1948–1998

Author(s): Vakrilen Kilyovski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

𝐸𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠