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): Codruta – 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 Dragulanescu / 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): Slawomir Maslon / 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 Keseru / 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 Intercultural Dialogue in the Age of Romanticism

Author(s): Dana Sala / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2015

Cepraga`s book on the experiments of Italianism within the Romanian literature of the 19th century is a thorough and useful study on a niche research, with a subtle alternation of perspectives and a consistent documentation. Written in Italian, Cepraga`s study also picks up the forgotten gems of the 19th century Romanian language. The creation of the Romantic poetical language is retrieved through a complex fusion of methods imported from stylistics, music, history of language, poetics and linguistics, combined with cultural studies

Analele Universității ”Dunărea de Jos din Galați, Lexic comun / Lexic specializat

Frequency: 2 issues / Country: Romania

Annals of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, Fascicle XXIV General Lexicon / Specialized Lexicon is a refereed academic journal of humanities, focused on linguistics, language history, vocabulary and culture, language studies, philology, translation studies, communication studies, cultural history, cultural anthropology, terminology and didactics. The first issue of the journal was published in 2008 by the Faculty of Letters, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati. The journal also publishes the scientific papers which are communicated at the international conference Lexic comun / lexic specializat. General Lexicon / Specialized Lexicon. Lexique commun / Lexique spécialisé which has been hosted by the Faculty of Letters, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati ever since 2008. Even if we are a Romanian journal of linguistics, the editorial board has a wide perspective towards the lexical level of any language, the interest in the movement of ideas in the field of lexicology and lexicography, as well the in the international promotion of the Romanian contributions. For this purpose the paper publication languages should mainly be Romanian, English, French, but contributions in Spanish, German or Italian are also accepted.

ANALIZË GJUHËSORE KRAHASUESE E NJË PËRRALLE ARBËRESHE NË DY VARIANTE DIALEKTORE

Author(s): Gianni Belluscio,Emilia Conforti / Language(s): Albanian / Issue: 36/2017

The authors propose a comparative analysis of the Italo-Albanian tale "Jugalla and orku" recorded at San Benedetto Ullano in 1967 (original version), with a new variant of the same tale recorded in San Basile in 2017 using the same text. This article aims to emphasize the differences between the two tales and the two linguistic variations by different points of view (phonetic, morphology, syntax and lexicon).

Anarchism, Antirepresentationalism and the Translation Paradigm

Author(s): Adrian Tataran / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

The paper aims at discussing translation as a political and ethical paradigm, as proposed by Bogdan Ghiu and Lawrence Venuti, in the broader context of comparative literature’s contrarian turn with the Bernheimer and the Saussy reports, as well as in conjunction with anarchism’s minor literary tradition (in the deleuzian sense). I argue that the translation paradigm and the non-vanguardist anarchist aesthetic are stemming from the same legacy of freedom, both formulating their basic ethical, political and aesthetical assumptions in the context of the crisis of representation, and both encountering the same practical and theoretical difficulties.The analysis will have two main focuses: one will examine the link between translation and the contrarian turn of comparative literature; and the second one will read the minoritizing model of translation through the anarchist antirepresentationalist ethic and aesthetic, in order to illustrate their convergence as alternative, radical lines of thought.

Andrada FĂTU-TUTOVEANU, Personal Narratives of Romanian Women during the Cold War (1945 – 1989): Varieties of the autobiographical genre

Author(s): Eliza Pop / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

ANDREAS OKOPENKO, DIE ÖSTERREICHISCHE NACHKRIEGSLITERATUR UND DAS POLITISCHE

Author(s): Arno Herberth,Laura Tezarek / Language(s): German / Issue: 18/1/2017

Art and literature have always played a subordinated function in autocratic types of government, fostering the doctrines laid down by a central power. In the literary era of enlightenment, romanticism and modernity, strong eruptive forces appeared that oppose traditional literary genres of the classical representative system. Surrealistic plays on words took those counter movements to extremes by claiming equal status for linguistic signs, regardless of their semantic content. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, Austrian writers adopted these radical concepts of classical modernity. However, Andreas Okopenko’s (1930–2010) position is not easy to define and does not fall into a particular literary trend or school of thought. He does not affiliate with a more radical avant-garde, such as the “Wiener Gruppe”, but also distances himself from conservative and unprogressive trends in Austrian literature in the 1950s and 60s. Although his work is provocative with regard to formal aspects it does reflect socio-critical and political awareness.

ANDRIĆ I LUBARDA – POJEDINI ELEMENTI STVARALAČKE POETIKE

Author(s): Sofija Kalezic-Ðurickovic / Language(s): Bosnian,Croatian,Serbian / Issue: 23/2018

As philosophers and art critics, Ivo Andric (1892-1975) and Petar Lubarda (1907-1974) have expressed interest in the deepest secrets of the human personality and a deep attachment to the artistic creations of real life and reality. Andric expressed general creative thought after the First World War on the dependence of the literary works of art direct experience of the world, while also opening up the topic about the essence of artistic experience, theoretically elaborated in 1935 in the essay Conversations with Goja. Already in his first major work of this period is felt critical support realistic approach to reality.

Animist realism. Współczesne mitoznawstwo a komparatystyka literacka

Author(s): Elzbieta Binczycka / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 7/2016

Animist realism, introduced by Harry Garuba in his article Ben Okri: Animist Realism and the Famished Genre is a relatively new term. Garuba links it to African literature, while others (Ato Quayson, Graham Harvey) use it in association with a broader spectrum of fiction. The main objective of this article is to redefine the category of animist realism as a subgenre of magical realism with its own connecting characteristics and its formal difference. Author of the article argues that animist realism is applicable especially to postcolonial and indigenous literature permeated with myths and other elements derived from traditional belief systems.