Powieść historyczna pod czujnym okiem cenzora – analiza tekstów

Author(s): Thibault Deleixhe / Language(s): Polish Issue: 06/2015

This article focuses on the relation that Jacek Bochenski’s historical novel entitled The poet Naso published in 1969 presents towards the concept of censorship. In the article the author aims at proving that the understanding of censorship by Bochenski is similar to the observations of the Hungarian essayist Mikos Haraszti. Tracking the allegoric references scattered through the novel, the author of the article reconstructs Bochenski’s reflection about this internalized censorship and checks its convergence with Haraszti’s remarks. From this exercise emerges a definition of the role of the artist that seems to be inherited from the romantic period: an artist as a person that subordinates himself unconditionally to art, and not to the temporal power. The author of the article then interrogates the respect which Bochenski has been showing to his definition in his literary work. It appears that the writer has been prone to make bigger concessions in order to soften the reception of his book by the censors than he advises his writing colleagues. However, the literary strategies deployed by Bochenski operate on two levels: creating an overall ambiguity about the guilt of its main protagonist, they tend to soften its reception by the censorship; while at the same time, rendering this overall atmosphere of ambiguity, they give a literary form to the spectral character of the guilt of the artist, who – as in Ovidius’ case – is permanently accountable for what he has not yet done in the building of communism.

Wina bez prawa. Struktura nowej iluzji

Author(s): Andrzej Leder / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (7)/2015

Basing his argumentation on Freud’s essay “Civilisation and Its Discontents”, the author poses a question about the essence of suffering which appears when the Law of the Father is suspended and no longer protects against the death drive. The author formulates a thesis that in the contemporary social space, abandoned by the Law of the Father, it is disciplinary practices that play a key regulative role, pretending to form the relations based on the law. These practices transform the drive energy of Thanatos, which then finds its embodiment in the everyday lifelessness of bureaucracy, the coolness of rules and the excess hidden beneath them. The answer to this situation is Eros, which drives people to community – yet not so much in the form of a family as of an infinite and noneconomic continuum of local games of love and death.

Ojciec po śmierci ojca – (post)lacanowski ateizm w spojrzeniu z Odradka

Author(s): Przemysław Tacik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (7)/2015

The paper calls into question the status of (post)Lacanian atheism as can be inferred from writings of Lacan himself (mainly seminaries XI, XVIII, XX and XXIII) and Slavoj Žižek. Such atheism is based on the inexistence of “the Other of the Other”, which, however, cannot be merely stated, but must take the form of an injunction. In this postlacanian logic, true atheists are not those who deny the existence of God – even in its symbolic functions – but those who – actively relying on the absence of “the Other of the Other” – are able to carry out fundamental shifts within the symbolic structure of the Other. Yet, this atheism, which might be viewed as one of the strongest forms of denying the divine, is based itself on the monotheistic grid. Drawing upon some remarks from the late writings of Freud, the paper aims to reveal the inner, self-referential logic of the Father, whose position is preserved and strengthened after the actual death of the Father. Postlacanian atheism might be conceived of as the latest form of fatherly self-grounding, in which divine position perpetuates itself under the cover of injunctions to radical atheism. Finally, the paper propounds an interpretation of Kafka’s short story “The Cares of a Family Man” (“Die Sorge des Hausvaters”), in which the enigmatic figure of “Odradek” – a deathless half-object, half-creature – stands for the final material embodiment of the futile injunction to renounce the divine. Thus Odradek epitomises the Law, which is nothing but an insoluble rattle, emptied from the tension of desire, in front of which Kafka’s characters are forced to wait.

Porażka Ojca

Author(s): Maciej A. Sosnowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (7)/2015

The father is a dialectical figure. Taking C. Schmitt’s “state of exception” as a point of departure and drawing from G. Agamben’s and W. Hamacher’s analyses, I would like to present in my article the sense of this figure in the context of Hegelian speculation. Although “father’s” tendency appears to be a tendency towards the fullness of identity and pleroma, yet, it hides in itself negativity which cannot be eradicated and which condemns it to unresolvable ambiguity; whereas this ambiguity must lead to the sublation of “metaphysically” understood “fatherhood” for the sake of love.

Czy normalnie znaczy inaczej? O literaturze dziecięcej przełamującej stereotypy

Author(s): Karolina Kwak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 24/2015

In her article, the authoress proposes that — because of changes in both the contemporary society and the family model — contemporary children’s literature should be de-stereotyped. She refers to the Swedish and Norwegian experience: literary texts for children (available in Polish translation) by F. Nilsson and M. Nilsson Thore, R. Lagercrant, E. Eriksson, in which the authors address the problem of fear of “otherness”, describe students from the perspective of a child and life from the perspective of the so-called misfits. Schools should not — according to the authoress — resign from the books that depict models of, e.g. gender, in a way that is different than the ones desired in the contemporary society. Moreover, the image of a mother should also be de-stereotyped, as in Dorota Masłowska’s book titled “Jak zostałam wiedźmą. Opowieść autobiograficzna dla dorosłych i dzieci” („How I became a witch. An Autobiographical Tale for Adults and Children”). Children’s literature is to teach young readers how to accept themselves and others, and to educate the young generation how to be open to “Otherness.”

Leaving Gaia behind: The ethics of space migration in Cixin Liu’s and Neal Stephenson’s science fiction

Author(s): Johannes D. Kaminski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

In Cixin Liu’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2008–2010) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), the surface of planet Earth becomes uninhabitable amid global states of emergency, and central governments devise radical plans to ensure the survival of the human species. In contrast to the Old Testament, where human emancipation from nature is punished, Chinese antiquity’s narratives of large-scale engineering projects are surprisingly compatible with the modern mindset which regards nature in utilitarian terms. Contemporary science fiction does not simply inherit this techno-optimistic stance, but fleshes out possible futures that are shaped by biopolitical decisions. In Stephenson’s and Liu’s prose, the proposed escape plans only benefit small segments of the population. While such procedure is incompatible with human rights, which emphasize the value of the individual over the collective, contemporary pragmatic ethics interprets such behavior as rational. Applied to more tangible scenarios, such as our increasingly depleted livelihoods on Earth, both texts document our somewhat diminished expectations regarding the future. In a world where eating human protein is “reasonable” and its rejection merely “respectable”, the preservation of humankind in space sets in motion a return to Hobbes’s “natural state of man”.

National internationalism in late 19th-century utopias by Mór Jókai, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris

Author(s): Sándor Hites / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The paper looks at two major representatives of fin-de-siècle utopian fiction, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward 2000–1887, William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere, and an earlier work by the Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, The Novel of the Century to Come (A jövőszázad regénye, 1872–1874). I examine their various strategies regarding the spatial and historical aspects of utopian transformation as well as their respective positions toward the relationof commerce and community. On the whole, I suggest that the pattern of nationally informed or biased internationalism that seems to underlie all three novels might be traced back to the enlightened concept of patriotic cosmopolitanism.

Ágnes Györke – Imola Bülgözdi (eds.): Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture: Central Europe and the West

Author(s): Rana Yürüker / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

THE SPECIFIC OF SYNESTHESIA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AND ENGLISH POETRY AND ITS IMPACT ON THE READER

Author(s): Myhailo Poplavskyi,Yulia Anatoliyivna Rybinska,Taisiia Ponochovna-Rysak / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2020

The actuality of this article is to consider synesthetic constructions from the standpoint of linguistically oriented theories, in the study of their ability to be represented in the meanings of linguistic units. The purpose of this work is to investigate the linguistic features of the representation of synesthesia in contemporary English and American poetry. The methodology of the survey is based on such methods as semantic analysis, component analysis, comparative analysis, methods of comparative and contrastive linguistics. The study examines various points of view in the nature of synesthesia. Despite the fact that there are practically no statistics for this phenomenon, scientists tend to believe that this phenomenon of perception is quite common. The article explains the content of the term "synesthesia" as a linguistic-psychological phenomenon, and determines its place in the system of stylistic means and metaphor (synsethetic metaphor) as a fundamental language of poetry. The research dwells on factual material – synesthetic combinations, metaphors taken from the works of art of contemporary English and American poetry which help to reveal some patterns, similarities and differences in the representation of synesthesia and explore the use of synesthetic metaphors in poetry of English and American poets. This study shows the implicit relationship between synesthesia and poetry.

A FUZZY READING OF SARACEN-CHRISTIAN INTERACTION IN BOEVE DE HAUMTONE, GUI DE WAREWIC AND ROMAN DE HORN

Author(s): Sümeyye Öztürk / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2020

Multiple works have been written on the topic of Saracen-Christian interaction in Medieval romances, while combining and commenting on the similarity between Said’s theory and the hostility between two ethnic groups. For a more expanded analysis and further research on this field, current article will explore friendly occasions, shared experiences, tolerant and accepting attitude while at the same time focusing on the hostile side of the relationship as well. Because both ways will be examined, the approach of this paper is seeking a broad framework within which the descriptions of Saracens/Christians, friendships and familial affiliations will be analyzed. Three Anglo-Norman romances have been selected for this purpose, namely Boeve de Haumtone, Gui de Warewic and Roman de Horn. This paper will particularly focus on Said’s Orientalism and subsequently combine his notion with the romances. However, rather than merely emphasizing the inimical tone, the aim is to communicate the fuzziness that seems to surround the romances by means of both positive and negative portrayals. The paper at hand will discuss examples from medieval texts that point to a Saracen-Christian interaction of a more complicated kind rather than entirely conflictual matters as has often been stated.

The image of Persian women in Lomnitsky’s travelogue Persia and Persians

Author(s): Elaheh Karimi Riabi / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2024

The article analyzes the portrayal of Persian women in the 19th-century literary travelogues using an imagological approach. The study aims to critically examine the colonial discourse employed by Stanislav Yulyevic Lomnitsky (1854–1916) in his 1901 travelogue, Persia and Persians, which establishes Persia and the Persians as the “other” in contrast to the Russian “self ”. Moreover, it delves into how Lomnitsky’s work frames the East from the perspective of the West. By shedding light on these perspectives, the research provides a critical examination of Lomnitsky’ s colonial discourse within the context of Persia, offering insights into the interplay between cultures.

Central European perspectives of the global campus: Slavic academic fiction after 1989

Author(s): Oksana Blashkiv / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

The article discusses non-Anglophone campus fiction based on contemporary Slavic academic fiction. The author maintains that for the study of Slavic campus fiction in the context of world literature, the methodology of area studies and comparative literature is productive since it presents necessary tools for interdisciplinary research. This idea is illustrated by campus fiction written in the countries of Central Europe. The article discussed generic peculiarities of Slavic campus fiction, which primarily is constituted by the socio-cultural context of the area’s university history and the themes, therefore, dealt with by the novels. As the themes common for Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Ukrainian campus fiction the author specifies the problem of identity, cultural memory, and the university’s contemporary challenges. Among the specific features identified in these national literatures, campus metafiction by Slovak and Polish writers is mentioned. The author concludes that Slavic campus fiction offers a unique lens on multilingualism and hybrid identities, shaped by Europe’s intricate history and opens up new possibilities for further research.

Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s

Author(s): Anna Gaidash / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

A comparative reading of Volodymyr Prat͡s’ovytyǐ ’s Ostanni͡a polemika profesora Dobrenka (The final polemic of professor Dobrenko, 1991) and Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories (1996) contributes to the understanding of the Ukrainian and US-American academic play of the 1990s. The chosen plays address the vulnerability of late adulthood, the close correlation of academia’s decline with the physical and emotional deterioration of older professors, references to the past, the complexities of memory, and power dynamics. If Prat͡s’ovytyǐ ’s drama engages with the essential theme of national identity within Ukrainian academia in the transitional period, Margulies’s text for the stage captures the intricate layers of personal memories and a problem of cultural appropriation. Both plays illuminate generational conflicts between younger and older scholars, emphasizing health struggles, emotional wounds, growing disillusionment, and the heavy responsibility the latter bear. The medical humanities framework is instrumental in reading aging professors’ unsettled relationships and the medicalization of narrative.

The academic murder mystery as a popular subgenre from the Polish perspective

Author(s): Elżbieta Perkowska-Gawlik / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

In his chapter devoted to academic mystery fiction included in Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction (2008), Joseph Rosenblum notices that the substantial collection of academic mystery novels gathered by John E. Kramer in his annotated bibliography Academe in Mystery and Detective Fiction (2000) illustrates the prophetic nature of John Donne’s observation regarding universities as an ideal setting for crime stories. Murder mysteries set in academia constitute a thriving subgenre of academic novels, with many works written by authors connected in some way to British and American tertiary education institutions. While universities in other countries also offer compelling material for novelists, there appears to be a certain kind of reluctance among, for instance, Polish scholars to divulge academic matters to the general public, or to satirize their colleagues for fear of becoming subjects of ridicule themselves, or, even worse, to become depicted as either a victim or a perpetrator of a hideous crime committed within university walls. Nevertheless, there are authors who have chosen to explore the landscape of Polish universities, considering it a fertile ground for constructing captivating mystery plots, albeit, hopefully, without any real-life homicides to serve as inspiration.

The campus novel and university satire in recent Czech literature

Author(s): Petr Hrtánek / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

This article attempts to identify works of fiction in recent Czech literature that can be considered campus novels, more or less corresponding to the genre pattern that has taken shape in Anglophone literature since the middle of the last century. Aware that, in the Czech context, it is a genre that is relatively unproductive and marginal, the article introduces Czech fiction with university themes, considering the contribution of the comic and satirical modality as one of the defining features of the campus novel and pointing out possible inspirational influences, genetic and typological connections, or possible differences from the Anglophone tradition. It also attempts to highlight the thematic background of Czech campus novels and point out their possible thematic specificity.

Magical realism and the othering of the academic in three Romanian postcommunist novels

Author(s): Corina Selejan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

This article discusses three academic novels by the Romanian authors Anton Marin, Alexandru Mușina, and Codrin Liviu Cuțitaru. Their novels pertain to the third and most recent “magical realist” stage in the development of the Romanian postcommunist academic novel, coming after what I have elsewhere identified as the “realist” and “metafictional” phases. In this phase, the Romanian academic novel evinces extreme instances of othering, as academics variously morph into grotesque creatures, ranging from Kafkaesque cockroaches to mythical vampires, from stand-alone eyes to gorillas. The article explores these practices of othering with an eye to the ways they were shaped by postcommunist experience. In the process, it considers the links between postcommunism, postcolonialism, and magical realism.

“The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls

Author(s): Petr Anténe / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

Loosely inspired by the author’s stay at Oxford, Javier Marías’s All Souls (1989) seems a typical campus novel. Yet, narrated retrospectively by a Spanish visiting professor after the death of two other characters, All Souls defies the conventions of the comic and satirical campus novel while anticipating the later inclusion of more serious themes in the subgenre. This article also interprets All Souls in the frame of Marías’s later text Dark Back of Time (1998), a response to the widespread misreading of All Souls as a roman à clef, especially around the publication of its English translation.

The phenomenon of the “Professorenroman” in Bulgarian literature

Author(s): Milena Kirova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

This article, based on the author’s previous research in Bulgarian, presents a phenomenon that until now has not been the subject of systematic study: the Bulgarian Professorenroman (literally “professor’s novel”). Tracing the development of Bulgarian academic fiction over the last three decades, it brings out the presence of a relatively homogeneous group of works that share common literary characteristics and ways of communicating with readers. The present analysis defines several common features shared by approximately a dozen novels by contemporary Bulgarian writers, all of them university professors. The phenomenon of the Professorenroman is examined briefly in the historical context of its emergence in the 19th century, and in more detail as an effect and consequence of the development of postmodernism in Bulgaria since the late 20th century. It is complemented by a more detailed reading of four recent novels.

Картина, икона, сонет и текст: сравнительный анализ сонета Пушкина «Мадона» и эпизода романа Достоевского «Братья Карамазовы»

Author(s): Valentina Vasilievna Borisova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 4/2024

The article offers a comparative examination of A. S. Pushkin’s sonnet “Madona” and the description of the cell of elder Zosima in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” as vivid examples of visual representation of the idea of “universal responsiveness” in the works of both authors. They are united by verbal and figurative images that visually embody it. In this case, it is Pushkin’s ekphrastic image of the “Russian Madonna,” which bears the mark of ethno-confessional cultural synthesis. Pushkin’s sonnet contains an intermedial contamination of two artistic traditions — poetic and pictorial. The former is associated with sonnets by Dante and Petrarch, as well as Orthodox prayers; the latter – with Raphael’s painting “The Bridgewater Madonna” and the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan. In Dostoevsky, a similar example of a visual embodiment of the idea of “universal responsiveness” is the description of Zosima’s cell, in which the Orthodox image of the Mother of God neighbors the Catholic image of Mater Dolorosa. From an axiological point of view, the attribute of Catholic iconography purposefully introduced by the writer into the interior of the cell is fundamentally significant. It is absent in the cell of the Optina elder Amvrosy, reproduced by Dostoevsky with great, but not literal, accuracy in order to portray the elder Zosima as the embodiment of the image of the “Russian all-man” who understands everything and everyone and accommodates everything. His iconostasis represents the entire history of Christian culture: the period before the schism in Russia (the image of the Mother of God), ancient Orthodoxy (icons of saints and martyrs), Catholicism (Catholic ivory cross and engravings) and modernity (portraits of bishops). The religious and cultural syncretism of Zosima’s religious feeling, which in cultural terms was in many ways close to Dostoevsky himself, is apparent.

Телемахия: съвременният дебат върху „Митът за Одисей“

Author(s): Kamelia Spassova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2025

How does the most Odyssean Greek hero become a figure of the native in the Bulgarian version? Through the metaphor of Telemachia, the paper examines how post-1989 intellectuals have redefined the interplay between domestic and cosmopolitan tendencies in our national project. Their reflections on Toncho Zhechev’s The Myth of Odysseus are an attempt to deconstruct the ideological implications behind the returning Odysseus and thereby rethink the history of Bulgarian criticism since the time of late socialism. Boyan Manchev interprets Zhechev in terms of national exoticism, particular universality and idyllic discourse. Miglena Nikolchina adds a new conceptual framework, indicating the role of the post-structuralists of the 1980s and their turn to Antiquity. Boyko Penchev dwells on Zhechev’s autochthonous conservatism, where the genus, the ahistorical, and the organic are privileged at the expense of nation and history—an approach designed to undermine the official ideology during the 1970s. What captures my attention is the genealogy of cosmopolitan attitudes that these intellectuals propose as an alternative to Zhechev’s conservative utopia.