Aesop for Schoolchildren (1804)

Author(s): Matija Antun Relković / Language(s): English,Croatian / Issue: 01/2017

Matija Antun Relković (1732–1798) was a Croatian writer in the period of Enlightenment. This issue of Dusty Covers presents all the woodcuts and vignettes from Relković’s book which are reprinted in their respective textual contexts. The book Esopove fabule za slavonsku u skullu hodechju dicu sastavljene [Aesop’s Fables, Composed for Slavonic School-going Children] was published in Osijek, six years after Relković’s death. It covers 144 octavo pages which contain one hundred fables, the cover illustration, 22 woodcuts, and ten vignettes.

African Woman Rises from the Ashes: Alice Walker’s Mimicry of Classic Ethnography in Possessing the Secret of Joy

Author(s): Zohreh Ramin,Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

Before the advent of deconstructive schools of thought in the second half of the twentieth century, anthropology and ethnography were hailed as scientific disciplines whose major consideration was to provide an objective analysis of other cultures. However, the launch of such critical approaches as postcolonialism, feminism, and postmodernism has nullified the two disciplines’ claim to scientificity and objectivity by laying bare their sexist, racist backdrop. In the postist zeitgeist, new ethnographies have been promoted in an attempt to disrupt the hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the studied subject of classic ethnography through including first-hand marginalized voices. Moreover, they blur the long-held generic boundaries between science and fiction via establishing the “ethnographic novel” as a medium that committedly voices the subalterns. Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is one of these new ethnographic novels which has as its protagonist an oppressed African woman. What makes Walker’s work distinct and notable is that the feminist writer subversively employs the conventional mode of ethnographic writing to stand up to African patriarchy and its horrific ritual of female circumcision.

Afryka Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego i Piera Paola Pasoliniego

Author(s): Andrea Fernando de Carlo / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 6/2015

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) are two intellectuals who in different times and places, each with his own cultural background, decided to push their artistic and intellectual research beyond the borders of pure literary expression in order to understand an increasingly indecipherable and threatening present. Two intellectuals in many ways very different from each other, but with a common passion – Africa. The Black Continent, the privileged object of their reflections, represents an original world, untouched by the capitalist and neo-imperialistic aspirations of poisoned Western society, thus becoming a mixture of romantic fantasies and dreams of unteachable regenerations.

Ako dobrovoľne „pozastaviť nedôveru“ vo vedeckú metodológiu. Radosť z (meta)spektáklu

Author(s): Danka LEŠKOVÁ / Language(s): Slovak / Issue: 2/2019

V jednej zo svojich štúdií uvažuje Miroslav Marcelli o jave označenom termínom autoreferencia a obracia sa i na práce Rolanda Barthesa (Barthes 1964, podľa Marcelli 2003). Ten pripomína, že metajazyk literatúru udržuje pri živote práve vtedy, keď už nie je schopná vypovedať o svete, o posolstvách z vonkajšieho sveta, keď si je silno vedomá toho, že je náhle zbavená referentov a poslaní. Metareferencia sa nemusí týkať len literatúry ako takej, antiiluzívne prostriedky môžu (meta)reflektovať hoci aj metodológiu samotnej (literárnej) vedy. A tak (meta)reflektovať poznanie, že určitým spôsobom položená otázka dovolí vzniknúť len istej odpovedi.

Akwarium i luneta. Metaforyka okulocentryczna w twórczości Brunona Schulza

Author(s): Katarzyna Szalewska / Language(s): English,Polish / Issue: 11/2018

The paper is an analysis of the motif of glass in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. The writer’s fascination with this particular material is related to the experience of modernity, sinceglass served as the substance of permanent and repetitive phantasms. In this respect, Schulz’s writing can be read as an artistically processed testimony of fascination with one of the material dimensions of modernity, which was glass architecture. The author interprets the modernist oculocentrism in Schulz’s stories, focusing on transparency in the spatial figures of the author of Cinnamon Shops (including panoramas, glass balls,telescopes, etc.).

ALAADDİN SABİT BOSNALI“KÜLLİYATI”NIN YAZMA NUSHALARININ KARŞILAŞTIRILMALI İNCELENMESİ

Author(s): Şehla Halilli / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 41/2019

The information about the life and creative activity of Alaeddin Sabit Bosnavi, well-known representative of Turkish literature is found in translations, encyclopedias, textbooks and scientific literature. He was born in Hijrah 1060 (Chr. 1650) in Uzice settlement of Bosnia. The poet received his primary education from one of outstanding scholars of Bosnia, Khalil Afandi. Afterwards, he came to Istanbul to continue his education. Later Sabit had worked in provinces of Edirne, Crimea, Tekirdağ, Sarajevo, Konya, Diyarbakır as a confessor, mevlevi and mudarris in different years. Sabit died on Shaban 3, 1124 (September, 1712). Sabit has “Divan”, “Derename”, “Barbarname”, “Adham and Huma” masnavis, “Zafarnama” written for Crimean khan, Salim Garay, large poem “Amrulleys”, play like “Hadisi- arbain translation and interpretation” half prose and verse. Sabit wanted to create “Khamsa” with his plays, but failed as he passed away. Despite the wide spread of the manuscripts of Sabit’s “Kulliyyat”, they have not been comparatively studied in the Azerbaijani literature. AlaeddinSabitBosnavi’s "Kulliyat" was compared with other manuscript copies obtained and analyzed either historically and textual, or philologically by us. While copying the copies, upon trying to discover the differences, mistakes and distortions between the texts, we have found each text’s containing of a number of errors. There are cases of accidental or deliberate diminution of words, as well as missing or addition of words. Some copies have corrections of these errors in the edges of the pages, while, some do not. We believe that, the corrected mistakes or distortions caused by the secretary's negligence or low level of knowledge. The secretary copied to his own wish, but needed to show the words or phrases that he believed to be wrong inside the copy he transcribed on the edge of the page. There are sufficient purposeful or aimless errors and omissions in the copies of Sabit’s “Kulliyyat”. Taking into account the requirements of the text studies, these copies have been comparatively analyzed.

Alageyik Efsanesi ile Kocacaş Destanında Ortak Unsurlar

Author(s): Şule Gezer / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 89/2017

Literature from the past up to the present day from the value judgments of the society, the perception of life and their beliefs in their world hosts the content. In this regard, literature is a tool that enables the transfer of Culture. That belong to the past period, a belief, a way of life, sometimes when it is transferred to the current social environment is repeated. In this case, literary narratives, as a literary production have been associated with the old content, and carry traces of them. These texts provides the transition between the collective consciousness of a nation that is under the transfer of intellectual values caused by an organic bond. This bond that exists in modern culture as renewed in the past through a narrative similar occurs again. In addition, has a common background and the same culture at different times in different regions from each other, brothers who are members of communities of faith bearing the same motifs and similar elements of narratives can reveal. In this study, a common history and culture, Turkish culture, with the two brothers belonging to the community two of the common motif of narrative texts. will be evaluated in terms of. One dimension of this narrative that carries the legend of a folk literary narrative of Yaşar Kemal entitled The fallow deer, and the other that belongs to the Kyrgyz Turks and Kococas that are present in the oral environment is epic. Beliefs that the Turks belong to the period of hunting and gathering, which is located in the center of this narrative, this period featured in the deer/is centered around the cult of the loser. In this context, narratives and motifs that are common to both episodes have been identified. This partnership in which both of Turkish tribes in the cultural sense, born from the same source, the same culture in different geographies of the phenomena that they are.

Aleksandar Hemon i Etgar Keret: komparativna analiza autobiografske proze obilježene ratom

Author(s): Karolina Zelenika / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 71-72/2018

Raznolikost dugotrajnog čitateljskog iskustva, kao i različitost akademskih interesa na književnom polju nerijetko izrode neobične predmete proučavanja. Pri upoznavanju svjetske književnosti mnogi se autori i motivi njihovih djela mogu dovesti u komparativnu vezu, čime se znanost o književnosti nesumnjivo obogaćuje. Takvi su se pisci, premda potpuno različitog porijekla i različitih stilova, našli i u našem fokusu. Naime, bosanskohercegovački odnosno američki pisac Aleksandar Hemon (1964) i izraelski pisac Etgar Keret (1967), osim po pisanju kratkih priča i romana, dijele sličnosti i u stvarnom životu.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN - MEMORIALIST AND NOVELIST FROM RUSSIAN POST-WAR LITERATURE

Author(s): Codruţa – Flavia Tulvan / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

We have shown in this article that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, like his illustrious precursors, has genuine trust in divinity and brings into his life aspects that have removed him from God. The theme of detention accompanies here the one of destiny, faith, spiritual freedom, and is woven from symbols and reasons such as hunger, cold, dehumanized sergeant, death, fear, soul, consciousness. The barbed wire, the cascade appearance, the wrinkled coat, the tinette / the map are symbols of detention on the one hand, and on the other hand are elements that make up the path of initiation, ascension, discovery of the new deeper meanings of life and death. Then we found similarities and distinctions between the concentrating world of the Gulag Archipelago and the way it was illustrated by other great writers of the world.

ALICE VOINESCU – TERITORIUL JURNALULUI INTIM

Author(s): Amalia Drăgulănescu / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 10/2017

As Tolstoy was preaching a kind of theory of everything in his own diary, the writer Alice Voinescu dedicates hundreds of pages to her autobiographical writing which are overwhelming for the reader, in fact there are only a few fragments of a life subjected to fate. Comprising brief or panoramic sociological considerations or notations somewhat sentimental about couple relationships, or most often designed considerations of the self, the Diary becomes a three-dimensional perspective on that period of time. Although extremely like a mosaic, as any autobiographical volume, however it decants some coordinates that relate to their own character and personality traits, to the complicated relationship with her husband, or others, or to the embracing idea of divinity. It seems that Alice Voinescu’s diary conveys little emotion to the readers; however, the calculated appearance does not fully cancel the thrilling experiences, showing the strength of the reader’s transposition in the inter-war period. Not only through memories has the writer indulged a sort of addiction to the past, although she has a subtle representation of the times, and especially a fantastic intuition of the following periods of distress. However, the writer tries to follow a self-discipline, too complex for the society in which she lives, and the pages of the journal prove this. Egocentrism is another defining feature for the diaristic portrait, sketched by others, but also as a self-portrait, referring to the positive assertion of individualism and a variety of hidden misanthropy, under different masks of sociability. Within the diary, the memoirist indulges herself in philosophical reflections, illustrating an unprecedented spiritual wealth. History also remains an implacable frame exceeding the spiritual contours of the journal and, at a certain point, it draws a specific direction (the reclusion of Costeşti). The vast diary of Alice Voinescu is such a huge territory on the border between fictional and non-fictional, with stronger intrusions in the later one, but also keeping oases of literature.

Aliens in Love: Testing Bloom’s Theory of the Anxiety of Influence

Author(s): Tõnis Parksepp / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

The article aims to test the universality of Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. Underneath Bloom’s favourite tropes (Kabbalistic, psychoanalytic, Shakespearean, Miltonian, Blakean etc.) lies a diachronic system of misreading, which can be useful in analysing texts without any direct connections between them. By comparing two culturally distant but rhetorically similar prose texts, Friedebert Tuglas’s short story At the End of the World (1915) and Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), this article suggests that it is possible to overcome the accustomed boundaries of national literary histories. Both of these stories depict a communication error when humans are confronted with the unknown other. The texts have alternative figures describing the alien and similar tropes presenting the human. To explore the potentiality of figurative kinship between the two authors who are strangers to each other is not an ill-fated quest, but a search, which would eventually allow us to see some hidden patterns that literary studies usually miss.

All Eyes in Swinging London: Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” and the Maze of Violence

Author(s): Sławomir Masłoń / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”, released in late 1966, is usually taken, on the one hand, to represent (celebratingly and scandalously) the youth culture of Swinging London and, on the other, the problems of (tenuous) relation between reality and its representation (the main protagonist thinks he discovers a murder by analysing photographs he has taken). Although most critics have attempted to link these two levels by means of some existential metaphor (most often: the main protagonist who represents the image-crazed youth of Swinging London encounters its biggest taboo, death, which is unrepresentable to boot), the paper proposes a more literal and political interpretation arguing that the abstraction of blurry grain of silver halide into which the image of the corpse finally dissolves in a series of photographic blow-ups is a way of representing something which also cannot have a proper image: the all-pervasive but no longer perceptible lowkey everyday violence which constitutes the propelling force of the supposedly emancipated “swinging” lifestyle.

ALTERITY IN HOMER: A RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF FEMALE MARGINALIZATION

Author(s): Bárbara Álvarez Rodríguez / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

This article explores female alterity in the Iliad and the Odyssey in an attempt to show how women’s marginalization is already present in these early works, which have had such a lasting influence on Western literature and thought. First, I analyze how men treat aristocratic women, who are systematically excluded from war and speech despite their idealization as heroines. Then, I focus on women who fall into the category of slaves or concubines to illustrate women’s absolute objectification and to demonstrate how the violence of this exclusion structures women’s experiences. Through an interdisciplinary framework, I study Greek antiquity through combining contemporary alterity studies with literary analysis. I argue that Western society has been structured in a patriarchal and androcentric way since its beginning. Thus, my objective is to suggest, through the lens of the philosophy of alterity, how we might reach a more ethical consideration of the Other in the study of classic literature.

Alternative Canons in Popular Literature

Reading David Gemmell and Dan Simmons

Author(s): Péter H. Nagy,József Keserű / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2018

The starting point of the study is the conflict between classical (academic) and alternative canon. Some prominent texts of speculative fiction can notably stage this conflict (as a possible textual strategy) by confronting us with the experience that mainstream literature and popular registers are inseparable. The reading of these texts can prove that the aesthetical canon is not equivalent to cultural elitism. In contemporary literature, some works of speculative fiction – works of science fiction and fantasy in particular – support this idea. The study – by reading of David Gemmell’s Troy Series and Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos – exemplifies that the principle of innovation does not necessarily destruct the existing canon, but it integrates itself into the canon while rearranging it. The works of Gemmell and Simmons employ such poetical and rhetorical techniques that are able to modify the system of expectations created by the evoked genres (mythological fantasy and new space opera) and also lead us to reconsider the classical literary canon. They both indicate that the artificially created cultural hierarchy can be set in motion by rereading the works of popular literature.

Amidst the Wonders of the City: Countenances of Moscow in Barbara Włodarczyk’s “Wide Tracks”

Author(s): Monika Kowalczyk-Piaseczna / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

The article analyses the various countenances of Moscow which have been presented by Barbara Włodarczyk in the cycle of television reportages “Wide Tracks”. The text focuses on illustrating the specific features of a film report that allow its author to present the wondrous picture of the Russian capital emerging from the particular fragments of the discussed reportages. Moreover, as a result of juxtaposition of the reports from that part of the city, which overwhelms one with its richness and splendour, with the accounts from these corners of Moscow in which the continuous struggle for survival takes place, the article examines the internal contradictions which may be observed within the depicted urban space. The analysed cycle also exposes the series of political conflicts which undermine the immaculate image of Moscow as a wondrous city, presented by some of the characters of the discussed film pictures, and simultaneously, it allows one to discover some new, less known countenances of the metropolis.

An Agential Realist Approach to Posthumanist Relational Subjectivity in Jeanette Winterson’s THE STONE GODS

Author(s): Alina Preda / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

This paper examines, through the lenses of agential realism, the uncanny sense of posthumanist relational subjectivity that Winterson’s utopia evokes through the twofold romantic encounter between female scientist Billie Crusoe and humanized she-robot Spike. This same-sex cross-species futuristic love affair that develops across two different space-times succeeds in blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, thus prompting readers to overcome their anthropocentric worldview and to abandon the deep yet narrow concern for the moral and cognitive implications of the humans’ fate at the end of the de-centring process brought about by the posthuman turn, urging them to consider, instead, more significant and wider issues such as accountability and responsibility. Thus, it can be viewed as a fictional narrative embodiment of Karen Barad’s theoretical reconfiguration of materiality as discursive and of performativity as a dynamic process of constraining iterative intra-actions rather than of determining interactions.

AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH A BILDUNGSROMAN DEVELOPMENT HISTORY: NURTURING THE RISE OF A SUBGENRE FROM ANCIENT BEGINNINGS TO ROMANTICISM

Author(s): Petru Golban / Language(s): English / Issue: 10/2017

In English literature, the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, emerged as one of the most popular literary types of fiction among Victorian realists and many of the most important works of realism are Bildungsromane. But the Bildungsroman did not emerge suddenly on literary scene in the Victorian Age. The present study relies on the assumption, supported by Bakhtin, that the Bildungsroman has its own history of development as a distinct category, form, type, or subgenre of the novelistic genre, which is in itself a long, complex, and interesting process of rise and consolidation of a literary pattern, tradition, and literary system. This process can be summarized as follows: from the ancient epic and novel to medieval romances to Renaissance picaresque fiction (continued in the seventeenth century) to (in English literature) the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel with its strong picaresque substratum and through romanticism and Goethe (accredited with having introduced in fiction the element of Bildung) to the Victorian flourishing of the novel of formation following Carlyle’s moment of a threefold literary reception of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. These are the main conventions which nurture the rise of the Bildungsroman as a subgenre from ancient beginnings to romanticism. Among the primary influences on the rise of the Bildungsroman, some belong, like romantic writings and Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, to the level of “allusion”. Others, like picaresque tradition and certain eighteenth-century English novels, belong to the level of “intertextuality”. The present article aims to disclose by its comparative and thematological perspectives of approach a number of experiences and aspects of literary practice whose diachronic unfolding should be considered in a study on the development history of the Bildungsroman.

An Attempt to Survive from Paralysis: Epiphanies in Dubliners

Author(s): Petru Golban,Goksel Ozturk / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

Amid the complexity of concern of the modernist literary discourse in Britain, the thematic nucleus of James Joyce’s writings is formed by certain basic aspects of life, such as individuality, art, religion, nation, language, and his work shows the two hypostases of the author himself as accomplished artist and Irish citizen. In a troubled period in the history of Europe and of his own country, Joyce grasped the sense and the atmosphere of frustration, alienation, futility, chaos, and confusion. The concerns of Dubliners, his first important book, published in 1914, consist in rendering the political and social life of Dublin, the misery of human condition, the theme of exile, the problems of the individual’s existence in an urban background which Joyce saw as paralyzed and, like Eliot, as an expression of a period of crisis in the history of humanity. Joyce intended “to write a chapter of the moral history” of his country, and he chose Dublin as it seemed to him “the centre of paralysis” on different levels which he presented under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. All the fifteen stories of the book express life experiences of the characters that are of unpretentious standing, incapable to fulfil inner potentialities and to establish communication with others. At moments they experience relevant epiphanic realisations, seemingly due to some trivial incidents – by which they receive an apparent perspective of accomplishment – and though they attempt to escape the bonds of everyday life and of their trapping circle of existence, all they get is an acute sense of frustration, alienation, and entrapment. To reveal and compare the thematic status of the epiphany in the short stories with regard to various issues of individual existence and to the use of motifs and symbols that create an increasing complexity of ideas and subjective human reactions represents the main purpose and the essence of the content of the present study.

An Ideal Husband, or an Ideal Wife? That is the question

Author(s): Mahsa Zayani,Farideh Pourgiv / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

To the modern reader, the Nineteenth Century England has always been the reminiscent of unrelenting ideals regarding social codes of conduct. Although such ideals have been widely criticized, they were passed off as unquestionably natural and necessary to be carried out during the Victorian era. Yet Oscar Wilde, the renowned dramatist of the time, was one of the authors who dared to put to challenge the accepted prescribed gender roles exposing their constructed essence using his insurmountable wit. The current article aims at analysing the apparently transgressive gender roles in Oscar Wilde’s play; An Ideal Husband, with the aid of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, a theory which disavows the concept of an inherent gender identity in favour of the idea that gendered behaviours are the consequence of performing certain discursively assigned acts.

An Insight into the Inhumanity of Humanity with Thomas Keneally

Author(s): Melisa-Ginela Porge / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

This paper discusses one of the most troubling and abominable subjects in the history of the world – The Holocaust, and its representation in fiction, examining Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, a novel seen as an artistic response to the atrocities of the genocide, to the inhumanity of humanity. Keneally’s work reflects the origins of this almost unaccountable, unbearable and unimaginable phenomenon, as well as the entire program of severe measures and murderous actions took by the Third Reich against the European Jew, the racially inferior, the Other.