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This section of the Vatra literary review contains fragments from the works of two Hungarian writers, Marton Eveline and Tomory Peter, translated into Romanian by Kocsis Francisko.
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Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel is one of the most preeminent writers of both American and European literature. The author, who is raised in an Orthodox Jewish family living in Romania, struggles against the World War II and the Holocaust in his childhood. His work Night is an autobiographical novel concerning about the writer himself with his family in Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the worst and most catastrophic days of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. Wiesel is intensely affected by genocides and war; he deals with the notion of God and the extinction of humanity. Furthermore, the protagonist survives in such terrible time that he experienced a moment to feel happiness for his father’s death. His point of view of his self and others has agony and confusion. This traumatic incidence creates traumatic personality. Wiesel’s Night encapsulates a Holocaust survivor’s traumatic memory and experience. Also, Wiesel quests the existential questions. In this study, traumatic effects of war and Holocaust in the eyes of a child in Night will be argued.
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James Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners, includes fifteen stories written from 1904 to 1907. The stories, that deal with the life of middle-class and lower middle-class Dubliners, raise the questions of Irish identity and cultural identity crisis. In Dubliners, the characters are represented in such a way as if they are unable to find out their Irish identity since they are affected both by the British empire and the Catholic Church of Ireland. By focusing on the first story of the collection, "The Sisters," this article uses Homi Bhabha's concepts of "hybridity" and "liminality" to depict the boy narrator's newly formed identity. It is argued that the unnamed boy narrator, seized between the two conflicting cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, is neither Irish nor British, and instead a "hybridized" subjugated subject standing in the so-called "third space" that is somewhere between these two clashing cultures. A detailed exploration of the boy narrator’s psyche and his relationship with Father Flynn―the Catholic priest―reveals the boy's identity crisis as well as the paralysis that is part of all the stories in Dubliners.
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U radu je prikazan metodički pristup jeziku romana„ Derviš i smrt“ Meše Selimovića i mogućnosti uočavanja jezičkih vrednosti Selimovićevog jezika i njegove primene u školi. Dali smo zadatak, da se, iz školskog aspekta studiozno pozabavimo romanom i da istražimo neke komponente njegovog tumačenja u današnjoj školi. U radu se razmatraju jezik, stil i kompozicija Derviša. I pritom se, uglavnom ukazuje na filozofiju jezika Meše Selimovića, što je sigurno jedna od njegovih estetičkih dominanti, a analizira se i problem leksike u delu: „Turcizmi u romanu...“, te njihova upotreba i stilogena vrednost. Ovaj vid moguće jezičke-stilske analize romana pokazuje kako forma može i često treba, da bude relevantna u školskom tumačenju književnog dela.
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Growing up, physical and emotional maturing represent one of the most essential motifs of the literature for children. When we speak about children we do speak about girls and boys in general, but their growing up and upbringing go to different directions. Due to that fact we can speak about gender stereotypes in literature about children and for children. Literature, doubtless, contributes to child's perception of its self but it also contributes to the perception of social relations. That is the main reason why gender stereotypes are very important aspect for litereture and sociology as well.
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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.
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This article deals with the relationship between Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. At first, it focuses on historical and biographical facts about both Russians – one litterateur and the other theologian and philosopher. It refers to their mutual interchange of ideas and impact which they had on each other, especially in Dostoyevsky’s Legend of Grand Inquisitor, which was part of Dostoyevsky’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov. The article then analyzes the legend in the context of Solovyov’s ideas presented in his Lectures on Godman- hood and shows a development of Solovyov’s view of the Catholic Church. This provides the background for explaining the Legend – it should not be understood as a critique of Catholicism but as a critique of the abuse of authority.
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This article analyses the main (anti)feminist ideas by Benito Perez Galdos (1843–1920), one of the major writers of Spanish realism and naturalism and the author of the novel Tristana (1892), published in the crucial moment of Spanish social history, when the “female problem” had a growing influence on the Spanish society of that time. In the analysis, the reference is the literary text as a social and symbolic act, the identity owner and the network of textual “cracks” used by the writer to communicate with the readers in the process of textual actualisation. The subject of the analysis is the group of ideological postulates of the writer, who uses the literary text to represent and spread the concrete ideological concept, actualised in the acting of the main characters, relations between genders and the manifestation of power and control in the rigid, traditional and androcentric bourgeois society. The main thematic problems presented by this research are: the detection of the elements of social subversion that prepare the ideological ground for the possible conquest of female freedom, the right to choose and form the concept of the “new woman”; pointing to the process where the female body could be the element of identity and the perception of oneself; and, finally, the critic of this significant novel as a literary work which represents the perfect analysis of the (im)possibilities which a woman of that period has at her disposal if she wants to change the existing order and/or gain personal freedom.
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In this work, the novels Mama and Getting to Happy are read and analysed from the perspective of womanism that emphasises motherhood and matrilineality as the basis of social transformation. Womanism advocates different methods of social transformation that are focused on harmonisation and coordination, bringing into balance and treating society from all negativities expressed through various forms of domination (race over races, gender over gender, classes above classes, nations over nations) and discrimination (of all those who do not fit into default frames). And the most prominent method used by womanism for the purpose of transforming society is motherhood and matrilineality that has roots in African cultural heritage. The idea of womanism is embodied in the works of African-American writer Terry McMillan through the presentation of a specific experience of matrilineality and motherhood, whose transformational effect does not retain solely on the main heroes, but is also transmitted to their surroundings. Through the dynamic picture of African-American motherhood as an exclusive female experience, often instrumented by the community for critical purposes, this writer, in her literary works, monitors changes that are incorporated into the life of an African-American family throughout time.
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Melancholy and inner void faced by the heroes of Migrations and Second book of migrations interpret the tragic loss of freedom in the real world. Miloš Crnjanski treats the phenomenon of evil which converted and left behind a spiritual devastation. Utopian vision, embodied in the Nova Serbia and Rosija, unlike performances of classical utopias, perceive the idea of freedom as a call for a higher life and divine order.
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The paper defnes and thematises the concept of selfhood in the context of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, as one of the cult novels of Gothic literature. First, the focus is on the constant attempt to reduce selfhood – its choking and limitations – despite the fact that selfhood is, in itself, a largely psychobiologically indeconstructible category and anthropological fact. First of all, the paper shows a constant negation, forced denial and tyranny over otherness within selfhood (otherness as oneself) and the consequent suffering of Victor Frankenstein – the tyrant of his own otherness. Оtherness, which is physicalised through Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, is its own otherness or the alterity of Victor's selfood which he increasingly rejects and demonises at the expense of the decomposition of his selfhood. At the same time, relying on Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical insights in the book Oneself as Another, the paper attempts to point both to the impossibility of understanding the man in the context of rigidly deterministic social norms and to the unwholesomeness of his selfhood (ipseity) without the acceptance and recognition of the existence of otherness. In other words, the paper insists on the dialectic relationship between selfhood (ipseity) and otherness (alterity) as the original, archetypal relationship between selfhood and otherness in order to understand the individual as a whole. In fact, the paper proves that selfhood (Victor) and otherness (the creature, the monster) are not aspects of a man which should be looked upon as mutually disjunctive: they are mainly complementary. Therefore, Frankenstein, as an illustrative example of Gothic literature, points to the necessity of their consideration as such, which represents a big challenge on the way to establishing the proper relationship to selfhood. Finally, this classic of Gothic literature sharply criticises the reductionist, split selfhood and points to the need for a constant search for the archetypally indivisible selfhood – selfhood in which both self and Otherness are integral, inalienable parts of the same whole.
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D'Annunzio's first novel, The Pleasure, is the clearest testimony of the poetics of aestheticism, there is a figure of an aesthete and in the centre of the novel, Andrea Sperelli, who is the author's doppelganger, and through whom he represents his crisis and discontent.The character of the aesthete, who is distancing himself from the primitiveness of the former bourgeois society to a diluted and sublime world of pure art, and whose mask d'Annunzio wears both in life and in art, reflects the ideological response about the Italian social relations of the period after the unification. Although it represents a period of crisis and the awareness about the lack of philosophy of aestheticism, The Pleasure does not indicate d'Annunzio's definite disassociation with the figure of the aesthete.immanent nationalism.
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The review of: Mate Sušac, Kuća, Ogranak Matice hrvatske u Čitluku, Čitluk, 2018.
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The review of: Anita Martinac, Od Franje do Franje, Matica hrvatska, Čitluk – Vinkovci, 2017.
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This article endeavors to establish the inner strategy that the text employs to trigger the narrative process by depicting a transdimensional journey between the fictitious Stratford College in Maryland, U.S.A., and Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Through visions and illuminations resulting from banging his head on the very steps of Shakespeare’s birthplace, the apparently homodiegetic narrator finds himself under the spell of his own muse who directs him to access memories and devise the narrative of a lifetime. The whole process is supported by a series of “clunky coincidences,” too many not to suggest a brush with magic realism.
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This article attempts to illustrate what it was like being a woman throughout the nineteenth century by focusing on the novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Emma by Jane Austen.The reality of the nineteenth century was a harsh one, and these two novels illustrate two worlds divided, not by education, but by money and gender segregation. Moreover, women struggled to find their place in society, and were seen as inferior to men. Social class played an important role for women because it determined their course of life. The two heroines of these novels represent two different social classes and illustrate how people’s views and feelings can change and intermingle with each other, and what benefits and consequences can be drawn from this. Governesses have been hired by the upper classes for centuries, and they represented a “status symbol” for the upper classes. Hiring a governess also meant that “the lady of the house was too ‘genteel’ to teach her daughters herself,” and she paid somebody else to take care of and teach her children (Hughes). Throughout this article, I will focus on the different types of women that are present in the novel, especially on the figure of the governess as presented in Emma and Jane Eyre.
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The theme of this article is devoted to the creative works of Stephen King, the living classic of horror literature. Biblical motifs frequently play a significant role in his works and they are included in his novels from the positions of peculiar inversion. This article focuses on the novel “Pet Sematary” published in 1983 that analyses one of the most universal fears of human beings from various points of views: the fear from death. The article examines the deliberate author ’s periphrasis of the biblical motif in this novel, particularly the Gospel of the New Testament, where the central event is the death of Jesus Christ and resurrection or the so-called Easter story. The article analyses the way how S. King, resorting random allusions, other means of language and thematic interconnections, deconstructs several biblical notions in a peculiar way and offers solutions for the theme of the inevitability of the cycle of life and death in a modern context.
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The article examines and compares two critical works by Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot) and Pavel Basinsky (Leo Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise). The former was labeled a novel by the author himself, while the other one was labeled the same by the critics. Based on the comparative research method, the author of this article compares the ways both works reach out to the reader and argues their modernity and contemporary edging. Behind both books' texts stands a solid work performed by the critics as literary artists, as collectors of facts and all kinds of information about the French and the Russian authors. Yet, their books bear no resemblance to literary portraits a la André Maurois or Somerset Maugham. A literary portrait is a description of a man's destiny; it is often a prime example of everyday behavior. Literary and art criticism of Barnes and Basinsky is focused on certain episodes from the life of the writers in which the protagonist — the writer — is de-glorified, as compared to what is considered to be conventional; but their reputation is still solid to the point that it may not be blurred for an intelligent and reflective reader by any extra information obtained by a critic. In the works of the English and the Russian critics, routine comes across ethereal, and quotes of the protagonists may somehow be disreputable. The depth of thinking, completeness of knowledge, mild irony at times, comparison of literary approaches to the works convincingly demonstrate the way to spark the interest to reread the classics and the critics' books, who managed to create a new type of novel, the new novel.
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