Historické balady Rajmunda Habřiny

Author(s): Ester Nováková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2016

The present study analyses the collection of three historical ballads by Rajmund Habřina, Věnec z klokočí (The Garland of Bladdernut, 1941), in the context of his prosaic work. It follows the ballads’ thematic plans, the dominant motifs (notably the motif of victim and man’s fight against evil), language expressivity, and the depiction of fictional characters. The study also compares period reviews, points out the lyrical and dynamic dimensions of the texts as well as the fitting atmosphere of the narration. The baroquising style points to Jaroslav Durych or František Křelina as sources of inspiration; however, Habřina achieves neither their poetic qualities nor thoughtfulness. Nevertheless, this work of fiction deserves critical and readerly attention as an example of historical fiction written in the period of the Second World War and of lyrical-psychological prose as well.

Люди четырех измерений: социально художественно-эстетическая рефлексия медиареальности в ранних рассказах Aркадия Aверченко

Author(s): Eleonora Shestakova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2022

Since the 20th century, journalism, more broadly – media communications and related phenomena, have gradually become one of the leading factors in the existence of the social and everyday spheres of culture. Averchenko, a professional journalist and satirical writer, was one of the first to feel the approach and comprehend those phenomena that during the twentieth century, and then in the 21st century, would turn out to be the usual habitat and socio-cultural language of an ordinary person. It is not so much about the peculiarities of the mass person and his/her type of consciousness, which has long been the subject of study, as about the foundations, principles and mechanisms of PR-communication, media effects, and the specific conventionality of media reality, which Averchenko, taking into account the first decades of the 20th century, outlined and described clearly. Using a double coordinate system (the relationship between the view of a journalist and the position of a traditional realist writer entrenched in the Russian socio literary process), updating it with comic aesthetics, Averchenko managed – in the stories of the 1910s – to discover and show those main threats, traps and problems that implicitly contain media reality.

A bamba bomba

Author(s): István Árkossy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 851/2022

Short story by Árkossy István.

Ptáček, dreamtime a nostalgie

Author(s): Martin Šorm / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2022

„Сос ми грачиш, гарванчу…“

Author(s): Todoir Koruev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

За щастието : Какво представлява щастието, какви степени има то, както и за това, че е вечно

Author(s): Marsilio Ficino / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

Из „Дневникът на един журналист без дневник“

Author(s): Ion D. Sîrbu / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

Пътеписите на Вазов

Author(s): Tsvetan Rakyovski / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

The article is the first attempt to examine Vazov's travelogues from the point of view of literary theory. For this purpose, the territory of the scientific object is expanded – the analysis covers a large number of works from nearly 70travelogues left by Vazov. The study has three main points: 1) the characteristics of the genre “travelogue”; 2) the relationship between fictional – credible; 3) the narrator in the structure of the travelogue. The first problem is commented from the position of the claim that travel writing is a hybrid, even borderline genre. It is this role – to be on the border between literary and non-literary types of language – that also causes the mixing of the veridical and the conventional. By this we mean to say that the author's imagination is displaced, suppressed by the desire to tell factual stories.

Nad kasabom srmali ćuprija

Author(s): Avdija Avdić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 91-92/2023

Short story by Avdija Avdić: “Nad kasabom srmali ćuprija”.

RECEIVING THE LITERARY PROSE OF GABRIELA ADAMEȘTEANU IN THE CRITICAL PRE-DECEMBER DISCOURSE

Author(s): Mariana Mogoș / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 19/2019

Facing the critical act Gabriela Adameșteanu is aware of the inevitability of a relationship, thus receiving throughout her career various remarks and appreciations. The voice of a literary critic is the one that is heard and which by professional authority dedicates the value of a writer and his work. Therefore, the present paper presents the critical reception of Gabriela Adameșteanu's work from the perspective of renowned critics such as Nicolae Manolescu, who is interested in identifying a Romanian formula that the author cultivates, Constantin Stănescu, who analyzes the theme of the novel, the literary formulas it approaches, the acts and the behavior of the characters, interacting with others or immersing themselves, style and language, Laurențiu Ulici, who presents a more organized and didactic vision on the work of the writer, Lucian Raicu, Cornel Moraru, Al. Piru, Mircea Iorgulescu, Nicolae Ciobanu, Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu or Eugen Simion, who investigate the narrative, varied and ingenious forms interwoven in Gabriela Adameșteanu's work.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TIME

Author(s): Oana-Larisa Oanea / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 19/2019

The present research, made from a literary, psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective, brings to the foreground the case of the post-communist writer Gabriela Adameșteanu and the universe of her characters, created through the dialectics of language and the particular manner in which every fictional world is built, her genesis being in the constraints imposed by the traumatic experience to which the writers of the communist totalitarian regime have been subjected, especially at ideological and identitary level. In all of the epic discourses over which I have leaned on in this research, it can be seen the transformations of fictionalization manners after visiting the geography of memory - as I called the return to the remembrance of the painful past. The Confrontation has literally materialized through metamorphoses of the discourse, the fiction taking on the attributes of the explored topos, while the author frees itself, thus producing the metamorphoses of the past: of time, of running away, of body identity, of migration or of trauma.

Szemelvények a Mikes Kelemen Magyar Nyelv és Irodalom Tantárgyverseny országos szakaszának díjazott dolgozataiból

Author(s): Viola Zsuzsánna Papp,Abigél Elekes,Dóra Csabai,Tímea Sárkány,Ágota Borsos,Orsolya Kis,Hunor Kovács,Lilla Rus,Anita Harai,Erzsébet Réka Bartók,Nóra Péter,Melinda Filep,Máté-Sámuel Szilágyi,Emese Kósa,Bernadett Lukács,Hanna Imola Balázs,Anna Bajcsi,Eszter Nagy,Attila Botond Rázmán,Alexandra Orosz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 865/2023

Fragments From the Papers Written on the Olympics of Hungarian Language and Literature.

“WE SHOULD ALL BE ANGRY”: WOMEN'S RESPONSES TO TRAUMA IN THE SHORT STORIES OF CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Author(s): Roxana Elena Doncu / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2021

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer of Nigerian origin, now living in the United States. Her short stories and fiction deal with the negative effects of the colonial legacy and how it affects men and women differently. The political instability of the rapidly succeeding postcolonial, often 'necropolitical' regimes imprisons both men and women into clear-cut gender roles. Women, affected by the traumatic loss of children or relatives in the numerous ethnic-religious riots are plagued by feelings of guilt and inadequacy. While identifications with either the pre-modern structures of the tribal society or the deeply split (post)colonial discourse regimes seem to be destructive to the formation of female identity, women who find creative outlets for their anger manage to put up resistance and carve out a small space of independence.

PROZA SADOVENIANĂ ÎNTRE MODEL ȘI ATIPIE

Author(s): Constantin Dram / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 26/2021

In the extensive work of what is considered "the greatest Romanian storyteller" there are some texts so unusual, as a style, as an ideology, as a narrative model, that they seem to be part of the work of another writer. Starting from some major elements that imposed the "tyranny" of the model in Sadoveanu's prose, we will send to other significant prose from this point of view, which falls into a modern aesthetic, different from the traditionalistic perspective that is specific to the author.

TO THE INSECT AND BACK: FROM FRANZ KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS” TO TWO REVERSAL REPLICAS: HARUKI MURAKAMI’S “SAMSA IN LOVE” AND IAN MCEWAN’S THE COCKROACH

Author(s): Dimitrie Andrei Borcan / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

This study tries to connect two replicas of Joseph Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Haruki Murakami’s “Samsa in Love” and Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach to their complex inspirational source through a number of features, insisting on the significance of the Samsa name as a possible derivative of the Hinduist Samsara, viewed as sufferance, death, rebirth as reincarnation. In this respect, the two contemporary stories may be reversal sequels to Kafka’s novella. The study analyses the sources of surrealist parodic humour and tragic nonsense in these pieces of fiction, their use of names and interpersonal relationships between the characters, the dialogues.

MALE GAZE AND FEMALE OBJECTIFICATION IN DORIS LESSING’S A WOMAN ON A ROOF

Author(s): Corina MITRULESCU / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2007. Her works are known for her enthusiastic support of modern feminism and she is acknowledged not only for her novels, that promote the idea of equality between men and women, but she is also known as one of the best short-story writers. Although many of the female characters in Lessing’s short stories “seem unable to be”, as Orphia Allen puts it in her essay, “Structure and motif in Doris Lessing’s A Man and Two Women”, because they are “grooming themselves as objects to snare men” (Allen, 1980), it is not the case of the female protagonist in “A Woman on a Roof”. Unlike other women portrayed by Lessing, who end up being captive either in oblivious motherhood or in some kind of plaintive romantic love, the unnamed protagonist in the story discussed does not resolve to let herself become an easy prey to men and their gaze. The male gaze, a phrase suggested by Laura Mulvey, refers to the way women are taken as objects used to produce male pleasure. Lessing’s female protagonist becomes objectified in the sense that she serves as the “locus of the male’s desire to savor [her] visually.” (Noell Carroll) The imagery Lessing uses in her short story is structured in such a way as to offer an understanding of the context of male dominance. This means that men have not only the political and economic power to control women, who become objects, but also the control of those institutions that produce culture and ideologies.

ROALD DAHL- “DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY”: CINEMATIC PERSPECTIVE IN LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER

Author(s): Corina MITRULESCU / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

Critics have talked about terms such as “novelistic cinema” and “cinematic novel” (Saeed, 2009) to suggest the close relation between narration in both film and literature. Robert Scholes and Seymour Chatman have theorized the differences and resemblances between the two modes. This paper examines the cinematic perspective used as a literary device in Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter.” The research focuses both on the construction of the story and characters and on how the author manages to create a surprising plot by employing the cinematic point of view as a literary device. The story was written in 1953, a year that saw the release of movies such as Roman Holiday and From Here to Eternity, and that also documented the first use of the CinemaScope lens. The findings of this research show that, the literary device employed by Dahl in the short story discussed is meant to “show” rather than to “say” in order to create the atmosphere and to portray the characters while providing the readers with a camera-like view of the protagonists’ movements and actions. It is worth mentioning that Dahls’ story was later made into a short movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The conclusion is that even though this narrative has not been in the least influenced by cinema, it is closely related to it, by means of giving the action and the characters objective descriptions and detached accounts of their acts.

NARRATING THE UNDEFINED: A MATH MELODRAMA (THOUGHT) EXPERIMENT

Author(s): Dragoș Avădanei / Language(s): English Issue: 29/2022

In this carefully structured short story (1, 2,…..9; 1a, 2a…….9a; 1b, 2b…..9b), Ted Chiang—a computer scientist—combines a story of mathematics (division by zero), a “math melodrama” (prodigy beyond her prime, “undefined” marriage, ambition, frustration, disappointment, depression, attempted suicides), a Biblical exemplum (“believe and do not doubt”), and a thought experiment (“what if arithmetic proved to be inconsistent?” and “empathy was only a masked attempt to heal oneself of one’s past?”); all in all, a narrative that attempts to contain more than it really does and ask more questions than any such scenario could answer.

THE PROBLEM OF AESTHETICISM IN THOMAS MANN’S ”DEATH IN VENICE”

Author(s): Ingrid Cezarina-Elena Ciochină / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 31/2022

Thomas Mann's short stories from the beginning of the 20th century bring into discussion the problem of aestheticism, as was also emphasized by literary criticism, but also a certain perspective on a neoclassical ideal. The epic of small dimensions (the sketch, the story, the short story) characterizes the beginning of the 20th century, being focused on social observation, psychological analysis, symbolism and the fantastic. "No one remains unchanged after going through a process of self-knowledge", says Thomas Mann. Thus, in his writings he attempts a deepening, a highlighting of everything that self-knowledge means and produces.

AESTHETIC VALUES IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF FUNCTIONAL DEPICTIONS AT DUILIU ZAMFIRESCU

Author(s): Sonia Hozan / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 31/2022

Current semiotic explorations, related to the meanings of communication and the specific framework of texts, and also to the behaviour of the receiver, have imposed today, almost unanimously, the principle of approaching the literary text as an open work. Reread today from this perspective, Duiliu Zamfirescu's short stories and novels gain unexpected qualities and dimensions. First of all his novels do not refuse an analytical, psychological, social, affective, artistic approach as they build a system of significant links for the atmosphere and mentalities of the time. In Duiliu Zamfirescu's aesthetic conception, the analytical is subordinated to creation, this being the reason why he opted for a classical realism, in the Balzacian manner, in which the analytical integrates with the harmonic beauty, with the aim of creating living and possible types. Duliu Zamfirescu's contacts, both with the large-scale works of the 19th century novelists and also with the new aesthetic ways, made him notice that literature cannot develop fruitfully within strictly local limits and predict its orientation towards that essence later called the end of an age.