"Only in Dying Life": Ursula K. Le Guin's Dry Land and Its Cultural Contestations

Author(s): Gabriela Debita / Language(s): English / Issue: 10/2020

In his seminal essay theorizing the concept of heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault insists that his focus is on external spaces. However, given the ability of certain spaces, especially those associated with trauma and torment, to simultaneously be inhabited and inhabit the psyches of their denizens, it stands to reason that some heterotopic spaces are internal as well. One such example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land, an inner hellscape which appears throughout her Earthsea series. The Dry Land serves to mirror, invert, and contest not only the world of Earthsea, but also the pervasiveness of Western literary and cultural influences on the genre of fantasy itself. Inspired by classical and Renaissance sources (Homer and Dante) and modernist ones (Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot), the Dry Land, a jarring spatial and literary aberration in the context of Earthsea’s Taoist framework, serves to confront both the resistance to the finality of death and the supremacy of the Western literary canon. In doing so, it demonstrates Le Guin’s desire to distance herself from Western canonical influences, while nevertheless highlighting the fact that, given the cyclicity of literary rebellion, she is, in fact, walking in Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s shoes.

(DOMOVINA TU JE, DOMOVINA GDE JE?)

Author(s): Attila Balasz / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 442/2006

Da sam jedna mala ruža ja… Ili ne: da sam nekakav pantomimičar, zatražio bih minimum pola sata ćutanja, mada prvi ja nisam siguran da bih izdržao. Znam, međutim, i to, da nisam u stanju da dam zadovoljavajući odgovor, lišen svakog opsenarstva, na pitanje domovina gde je? Radije ću se praviti da mi – kao i većini sapatnika – kakvu-takvu, prenosivu i preseljivu, domovinu predstavlja moj manjkavi jezik, pa ću i dometnuti koju. Pokušaću, dakle, da napabirčim nekoliko rastočenih reči, raspolućenih rečenica, u točak zapletenih, zakukuljenih misli. Svojevrsni naramak ugaraka. Ali, da nisam već prekardašio?

(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Author(s): Sardar M. Anwaruddin / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2013

Literary critics admire George Eliot’s touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie’s character as a reworking of Eliot’s own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tess is a ‘low-born’ country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess’ social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families’ expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group—masculine.

2084. Kraj svijeta

Author(s): Boualem Sansal / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 20/2015

Neka čitatelj ne misli da je ova priča istinita i da se služi nekom poznatom stvarnošću. Ne, stvarno, sve je izmišljeno, osobe, činjenice i ostalo, a dokaz je taj što se priča odvija u dalekoj budućnosti, u daleku svemiru koji ni po čemu ne sliči našem.

22 MILJE DO NADE: ALEKSIJEV PRIKAZ ŽIVOTA U REZERVATU I VAN NJEGA

Author(s): Fahreta Fijuljanin,Adnan Hasanović,Aldin Rastic / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 14/2015

The concept and structure of the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian greatly echoes the basic division of life-existence of good and evil, of white and black, thus framing a feeling of geographical division also. Alexie draws the maps using chronological access to certain events by sequencing them from bad to good, from the negative to the positive. Through the characters he has created in different environments, Alexie potrays a community, identity and people and deals with issues of racism, poverty and the need to preserve the tradition of the oppressed people for the purpose of personal and collective progress.

60/40

Author(s): Julian Barnes / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 453/2008

Bila je to ona nedelja kada se Hilari Klinton konačno povukla. Hrpa boca i čaša prekrivala je sto; i premda je glad bila utoljena, neka blaga društvena zavisnost i dalje je terala ruke da posegnu i zgrabe još jedan grozd, pokrenu odron sa litice od sira ili uzmu čokoladicu iz kutije. Razgovarali smo o Obaminim izgledima protiv Mekejna i da li je Hilari poslednjih nedelja pokazala da ima petlju ili je to bila puka samoobmana. Raspravljali smo, takođe, o tome da li se laburisti još uvek razlikuju od konzervativaca, da li su ulice Londona pogodne za autobuse sa harmonikom, kolika je verovatnoća da Alkaida izvrši napad za vreme Olimpijskih igara 2012, kao i o posledicama globalnog zagrevanja na englesko vinogradarstvo. Džoana, koja se nije oglašavala povodom poslednje dve teme, tada sa uzdahom reče: „Znate, baš bi mi prijala cigareta.“

A book judged by its cover

Author(s): Maxim Rust / Language(s): English / Issue: 03 (46)/2021

The review of: Revolution. By: Victor Martinovich. Published in Belarus by Knihazbor, Minsk 2020.

A clean, well-lighted writing

Author(s): Irina Simanschi / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2017

Interpreting Hemingway’s works is mostly focused on the intermingling of the recurring themes, on the (in)explicable achievements of the troubled (fe)male characters, and yet it is the shaping of the discourse which stands for Hemingway’s hallmark. Reverting to the carefully planned withdrawal of strategic elements of the writing contributes to the complexity of the text, which to a great extent depends on the reader so as to be given hermeneutical value. The display of the clear language is nothing but a straightforward wrapping of internal progressive actions beneath the text, which both vertically and horizontally challenges the reader and the entire narrative act.

A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Author(s): Katarzyna Bazarnik / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

The article begins with addressing alleged similarities between Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and James Joyce’s works to suggest that they cannot be systematically sustained. Her much praised, experimental style relies on the opposite of Joycean richness. Limited vocabulary, jumbled word order, and lexical and phrasal repetitions are one of the most salient features of her style. McBride applies rhetorical variants of conduplicatio to create an emotionally powerful idiom to narrate an anti-Bildungsroman about a loving sister and her dying brother, her sexual abuse by an uncle and final suicide. So despite some thematic parallels, and linguistic experimentation, A Girl bears only superficial resemblance to the modernist master, which is additionally evidenced by stylometric findings.

A hóember unokája

Author(s): Imre Goldstein / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2017

A Interview with Marcin Dolecki

Author(s): Joanna Roś,Marcin Dolecki / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

One of the Polish readers of Marcin Dolecki's quantitatively modest, but intellectually rich literary output, recognized that the story presented in his debut book Jeden z możliwych światów is like a philosophy lesson during extreme kayaking or jumping down a waterfall. The American version of the novel, Philosopher's Crystal: The Treacherous Terrain of Tassatarius, repeats this feat - when the whole world seems to flash before our eyes, our guide leads us through important considerations about the existence of the world and man.

A közjó Bessenyei György Tariménes útazása című regényében (1804)

Author(s): Márton Szilágyi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 04/2016

The study analyses the state-novel that was written by György Bessenyei (1746?–1811) in the last section of his life, and remained unpublished then. It chiefly explores the picture the novel draws about ideal government, and the way it imagines the working of parliament in the world of idealized kingship. This work, a late Hungarian adaptation of a genre that had been representative throughout the 18th century, uses its utopia-like structure to present political questions that were on the agenda in contemporary Hungary: the key motif is the state that creates harmony in both the agrarian world and among the various religious confessions. In the novel this ideal monarchy also proves its strength on the battlefield: it defeats the aggressive country in its neighborhood, governed tyrannically, and exports its own form of government into the political vacuum that evolves after the fall of tyranny. The novel ends in a rather mysterious way: the ideal state, governed by a beautiful and wise queen, proves inable to integrate the novel’s hero, a visitor coming as a guest from outside. Married in the meantime, this protagonist, instead of settling there, decides to return with his bride to the provincial house of his parents. Thus, the ideal state, while embodying the common good, cannot serve as the worthy framework of individual happiness even in a fictional novel.

A Lifetime Memory Quest: Identity, Places and Characters in John McGahern's Memoir

Author(s): Dana Radler / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

Childhood and youth emerge and re-emerge, time and again, as durable concerns and difficult intervals to reach adulthood, as John McGahern describes his experience in novels and short stories. In Memoir (2005), the writer adopts a more detached vision than in his earlier writings, yet he does not admit it to be a typical autobiography. How are conflicts shaped and reconverted by the passage of time? Where does imagination start and where do facts determine the narrative? Is Memoir a piece of fiction, a well-documented and rather neutrally-written volume, or something in between? This article aims at exploring the way in which the narrator’s identity is infused with difficult, tormenting memories of a distant past, while the writer undergoes a difficult process. To understand the process, the analysis relies on major cultural concepts: collective memory (Halbwachs), communicative memory (Assmann), remembering as remediation (Erll) and memory seen as migration (Glynn and Kleist).

A Literary approach to Gglobal Terrorism – Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Author(s): Valentina Stînga / Language(s): English / Issue: 20/2013

In the intellectual climate of our time, “terrorism” represents one of the most frequently used and, probably, one of the most contested keywords at the same time. Beyond the immediate and purely physical effects of terrorist violence, what matters in the European cultural paradigm is the effect that terrorism produces on imagination. In this context, the present paper sets out to depart from the ‘conventional’ instruments of deciphering terrorist violence (for example, political and mediatic discourses) and to resort to literature as a meaningful way of representing and understanding the mechanisms of this complex phenomenon. Our endeavour will focus mainly on a new hypostasis of terrorist violence, i.e. global terrorism, and on its representation in the British literature produced at the beginning of the third millennium – in 2005, the British novelist Ian McEwan published “Saturday”, a novel which analyses global terrorism from the viewpoint of its potentiality.

A New Historicist Approach to Orhan Pamuk's White Castle

Author(s): Gökçen Kara / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2021

New Historicism is a modern critical approach focused on the interpretation of literary and non-literary texts which belong to same historical period. Unlike previous historical criticism which limits itself to basically showing how a literary work reflects its time, New Historicism takes into consideration how the work is affected by the time it was produced. Set in İstanbul in the seventeenth century The White Castle is a historical novel which tells the story of an Ottoman scientist and a Venetian slave. At first glance, the novel seems to describe the relationship between these two people, but a careful examination shows that the novel offers an alternative history. This alternative history is quite different from the usual history, for example, the Sultan is not a powerful person, but rather a person with weaknesses. For example, pashas and Sultan depend on the pseudoscience and illogical dream analysis. In addition, the protagonist in the novel is not a Sultan or a person from the palace. In this context, it seems that the characters of the novel are very different from the characters we are used to reading in traditional historical novels. The novel is quite different from the traditional historical novels in terms of both narrative techniques and the characters.

A Portrait of the Failed Artist. The Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses”

Author(s): Jelena Ž. Mandić / Language(s): English / Issue: 7/2013

This paper centres on the character of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Joyce presents the late nineteenth-century Irish society and its complex sense of historical, political and religious forces which influence or reinforce an individual’s perception and behaviour. Through the character of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce struggles to break free of Irish stereotypes, and thus, challenges the stereotypical relationships between church and state, religion and parishioner, family and tradition. Also, the paper focuses upon the shift in the sensibility and development of Stephen Dedalus. This shift enables him to expand psychologically and transcend beyond the fixity of the traditional ideas and values. The paper suggests that Stephen Dedalus is a modernist character – he seeks his own identity in the complexity of modern experience, choosing the hermetic life of an artist rather than accepting the role given to him by society and culture. However, his strong sense of identity later turns out to be no more than a delusion. He remains a brooding, apathetic young man whose creative muse seems to have let him down; he is a poet that barely rises above the level of mediocrity.

A POSEBNO, MAČKE

Author(s): Doris Lesing / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 448/2007

Kuća se nalazila na brdu, pa bi sokolovi, orlovi, svakakve grabljivice koje su se spiralno kretale iznad šipražja koristeći vazdušne struje, često lebdele u nivou očiju, ponekad i ispod njega. Gledao bi odozgo u crna i braon krila koja su se presijavala na suncu, dva metra raširenih krila, nagnutih u stranu dok se ptica uspinje krivolinijskom putanjom. Dole, u poljima, mogao si nepomično da ležiš u brazdi, najbolje tamo gde je plug prodro duboko, pri zaokretu, pod slojem trave i lišća.

A Powerful Russian Novel: Laur, Evgheni Vodolaskin

Evgheni Vodolaskin, Laur, Roman neistoric, / Laur, A nonhistorical novel, translation from Russian and notes by Adriana Liciu, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, Bucharest, 2014, 328 pages.

Author(s): Paula-Andreea Onofrei / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

A representação trágica da luta armada em Palavras cruzadas de Guiomar de Grammont

Author(s): Zuzana Burianová / Language(s): Portuguese / Issue: 2/2020

This paper deals with the role of the tragic in the novel Palavras cruzadas (2015) by the Brazilian writer and historian Guiomar de Grammont. The goal is to analyse how Grammont’s novel portrays the Araguaia Guerrilla War, as well as the whole armed struggle against the military dictatorship in Brazil. Starting from the argument that the tragic, though no longer associated only with dramatic representation, remains present in modern literature, the paper first analyses the inspiration Grammont’s novel draws from ancient tragedy. The tragic dimension of the narrative is then discussed in relation to the debate over the significance of the armed resistance and to the issue of forced disappearances during the Brazilian dictatorship. Though criticized for presenting a conciliatory view of the dictatorial past, the novel expresses a clear denunciation of the military regime. However, at the same time it points to the contradictions of the armed struggle, as it unveils the tragic trajectory of a couple of young militants who participated in the Araguaia Guerrilla War. Grammont‘s representation of the armed struggle is based mainly on the experiences of the families of the victims of political repression. It demonstrates that they must deal not only with a traumatic loss, but also with a prolonged silence about the past on the part of the Brazilian authorities. The novel seeks, through its protagonist who tries to resist this silence, a way to overcome the trauma, if only on a personal level.

A Study of Joyce’s Novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman” in the Light of Modernistic Theory

Author(s): Wahid Pervez / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

The present study focuses on the aspects of modernism found in the novel. The most findable aspects of modernism are individualism, stream of consciousness, exile, and loss of faith. This paper highlights the role of modernism in changing thoughts and ways of living. Furthermore it describes modernism as the opener of new door for the people determined to get rid out of the boundaries of family, religion and country. Individualism is the centre of modernistic novel around which all aspects revolve. How modern novel gives preference the inner self of an individual to society’s nets and obstacle? This paper discusses in detail the quest of the protagonist of the novel Dedalus who is in search of new ways to see men’s role in the world.