A Contemporary Reading of Coriolanus

Author(s): Alen Avdic,Damir Arsenijevic / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2014

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus projects a psychological account of a nation that is crushed under an economic crisis and stricken with both internal and external conflict. The masses of Rome are fighting the Senate internally while the external conflict between Rome and the Volscian army. Viewed from the perspective of a 21st century setting, one cannot escape the haunting feeling that Coriolanus symptomatically displays on page, on stage and on film. This paper will attempt to shed light on the manner political psychology operates within Coriolanus. This paper will focus on the issue of how situating Coriolanus in our contemporary time and age can be a fitting context for observing the unease tied to the revolt of the people. This is best seen when set against a cultural materialist analysis of the 2011 Ralph Fiennes adaptation. His portrayal of Coriolanus, a vicious Roman general, ironically finds its rightful place in our contemporary world – a world that is as plagued by war and death as it was in Coriolanus’ time. Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut with Coriolanus (2011) situates its main character in the contemporary world and gives an astonishingly accurate account of a modern political strife. Furthermore, this paper will examine Fiennes’ focus on the issue of ‘body politics’ by examining Coriolanus as a part of ruling society of the ‘body’ of Rome. As a representative of the patrician class of Rome, Coriolanus’ prowess in battle would seem to make him an ideal hero for the masses.

A Contrapuntal Reading of American Studies in the ‘Axis of Evil’

Author(s): Seyed Mohammad Marandi / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2008

Although interaction as well as conflict with the United States is definitely not new to Iranian politics and society, the idea of American Studies as a university degree program is surprisingly rather new in the country. The idea is only six years old and the North American Studies department itself was established at the University of Tehran in 2005.For those closely involved with the program, the last few years have been eventful to say the least. Many American and European colleagues are often surprised that there actually is an American Studies program in the country and they often assume that our main problem with the program would be with Iranian government officials or, alternatively, that the students in the program are fed with anti-American rhetoric, perhaps in accordance with the constructions of Iran predominant in the Western media. It should be noted that despite its financial restrictions, the University of Tehran has been particularly supportive towards the Institute for North American and European Studies and its North American studies program in particular. In reality the easiest part of our journey was the establishment of the department within the Institute.

A Crack in the Shell: Reading a Few Lines from King Lear

Author(s): Tadeusz Slawek / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2016

The article takes up the theme of Agamben’s violence without a form of justice and reads Shakespeare’s tragedy as spanned between Cordelia’s “nothing” at the start of the play and Lear’s “never” at its end. It also approaches a question of the relationship between, in Rousseau’s word, “l’homme naturel” and “citoyen.” Lear’s push towards a position of being “unaccommodated” suggests a move away from the organization of life previously holding its rule over men towards a marginal, peripheral zone with uncertain rules where man has to risk his own decisions rather than merely follow the custom.

A crimean tatar variant of the Čora Batir epic

Author(s): István Seres / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2010

Apart from the Edige epic, the story of Čora Batir is the best-known and most popular Nogay epic of Kipchak origin. Since the first publication of a version by the Russian Turcologist, I. Berezin (1862), a large number of variants, among them Nogay, Crimean and Dobrudjan Tatar, Kazak, Karakalpak, Kazan Tatar, Bashkir and Karachay-Balkar versions, have cropped up and been brought to light. An early variant of the epic was recorded by the Hungarian Turcologist, Ignác Kúnos, but it has remained in manuscript. He collected his material from Crimean Tatar informants in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp near Esztergom (Hungary) in 1915. The present work, published for the first time in print, contains the original Crimean Tatar text and its translation, supplied with an introductory study and annotations. The main value of the epic variant recorded by Kúnos lies in that its content and plot show close relationship with the earliest recorded Nogay texts.

A Dutch Prayer Book with the Hours of Geert Grote from the University Library of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (BU KUL, Lublin, Ms. 2626)

Author(s): Marcin Polkowski / Language(s): English / Issue: 5/2018

This article presents new research on a Dutch prayer book from the collections of the University Library of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (BU KUL, Lublin, Ms. 2626). This codex, which transmits devotional texts in a translation by Geert Grote, a pioneer of the Modern Devotion movement, especially the Small Office of the Virgin Mary and the Middle Dutch adaptation of Heinrich Suso’s Hundert Betrachtungen und Begehrungen, offers valuable evidence of literary and religious culture in the late-medieval Netherlands. The article begins with a codicological description, followed by a preliminary analysis of the artistic program of the manuscript, a description of the structure of the codex and the identification of the most important texts. Textual evidence indicates that the codex most probably originated from the diocese of Utrecht.

A Few Notes on Hannibal in Silius Italicus’s “Punica”

Author(s): Patrycja Matusiak / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2015

The article is an attempt at studying the image of Hannibal as presented in “Punica”. The aim of the paper is to sketch a portrait of the Carthaginian in “Punica” (with the image preserved both in historiography and in poetic epithets in mind), which would be a literary realisation of historiographic matter, with variatio typical for poetry, which was extended, shortened and mixed by Silius. The following review also looks at the topic of cruelty, which was a feature attributed to Hannibal himself as well as to Carthaginians in general, and that of death – demonstrated by such actions as (not) burying the bodies of Roman consuls or utilising bodies of the dead to build a bridge.

A Floating Homeland: (De)Constructing Canadianness from the Insider‑Outsider Perspective of Japanese‑Canadians

Author(s): Rafal Madeja / Language(s): English / Issue: 10/2015

On the basis of Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan”, the main objective of this paper is to take under the scrutinizing eye how the central protagonist retrieves a selective portion of her childhood memories during the Second World War in an effort to reshape her fragmented identity as a Japanese-Canadian and to deal with the feeling of displacement. Analyzing essential memories, conversations, and stories within the plotline, the aim is to demonstrate that Naomi, in order to fight her identity crisis and feeling of displacement — due to the Japanese community’s sense of belonging in Canada being shuttered by the Canadian government — recasts her personal experiences to her own needs for the identity refashioning in-between cultures, therefore, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, giving life to a sort of “Third Space.” This paper will therefore demonstrate numerous ways in terms of which the protagonist intrudes upon iconic wilderness and rural landscapes in Canada — hitherto emptied of the indigenous and minorities and thus functioning as a sort of privileged sites of national identity — so as to transform them into heterogeneous and more inclusive spaces, breaking the binary opposition between away and home, a newcomer and native. Significantly, the protagonist’s storytelling may be distinguished by great attention to nature, botanical imagery, and landscapes shaped by experiences of displacement, and it may be argued that the novel is targeted at re-visiting traditional sites of identity construction as well as bringing into tensions historicizing and idealizing visions of the natural environment to challenge the myths of Japanese-Canadians’ identity that these sites were hitherto created to support. It brings into life a “Third Space” in the form of a personal island which will neither float to the Japanese Archipelago nor towards Canada, but it will be a separate entity including both. Hence, the dialogic relation between identity and rural and wilderness landscapes provides alternative forms of meaningful emplacement for the self — a personal “floating homeland” anchored in-between the two cultures.

A further fragment of Old Uigur annals

Author(s): Zhang Tieshan,Peter Zieme / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2013

Here we edit a second leaf of an Old Uigur manuscript preserved in the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage. While the leaf published in 2011 is an account of the history of the West Uigur Kingdom of Qočo, the present text refers to the early years of Buddhism as well as to the relationship between religion and state, the inner and outer sphere in Old Uigur historiography. We consider the possibility that the manuscript was a kind of World History.

A HISTORICAL VIEW ON THE EXPORT OF AMERICAN LAWS

Author(s): Yuan Renhui / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2013

In addition to its political clout, economic strength, military reach, cultural pervasiveness, and scientific and technological advancement, American Law Export is also an important component of what constitutes America as a superpower.American Law Export (ALE) can be defined as all the systematic and/or non-systematic arrangements made and actions conducted by governmental and non-governmental American legal bodies to protect or to maximize US legal subjects’ benefits abroad in a predictable way by consciously helping or forcing the target subjects to know, to learn, to accept, to transplant, and to import from the US ideas, systems, practices, education, research, and culture in the field of law. In summary, ALE is the expansion or globalization of American law.

A Lifetime Memory Quest: Identity, Places and Characters in John McGahern's Memoir

Author(s): Dana Radler / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

Childhood and youth emerge and re-emerge, time and again, as durable concerns and difficult intervals to reach adulthood, as John McGahern describes his experience in novels and short stories. In Memoir (2005), the writer adopts a more detached vision than in his earlier writings, yet he does not admit it to be a typical autobiography. How are conflicts shaped and reconverted by the passage of time? Where does imagination start and where do facts determine the narrative? Is Memoir a piece of fiction, a well-documented and rather neutrally-written volume, or something in between? This article aims at exploring the way in which the narrator’s identity is infused with difficult, tormenting memories of a distant past, while the writer undergoes a difficult process. To understand the process, the analysis relies on major cultural concepts: collective memory (Halbwachs), communicative memory (Assmann), remembering as remediation (Erll) and memory seen as migration (Glynn and Kleist).

A minor apocalypse? The apocalyptic in Charles Williams’s Shadows of Ecstasy

Author(s): Andrzej Slawomir Kowalczyk / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2015

The study examines Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), the earliest novel of Charles Williams (1886-1945)—British poet, playwright, theological writer, literary critic, bibliographer, and author of seven works of fiction—in the context of the apocalyptic as discussed by Barry Brummett (1991), Douglas Robinson (1998), and other scholars. Based on the characteristics presented by Brummet, Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk traces apocalyptic motifs in the novel, drawing attention to both its socio-political and religious/spiritual aspects. Kowalczyk comes to the conclusion that despite some evident allusions to the biblical apocalyptic, Williams’s text is more ambiguous than its biblical hypotext in terms of its ideological/moral significance, raising a number of open-ended questions. This, in turn, extends its apocalyptic “revelation” onto the reader, who is invited to rethink her/his perception of Western culture/civilization, making room for some spiritual/metaphysical elements in the materialistic outlook predominant in the 20th century.

A Mogul India költészetéből: Bihárí párversei

Author(s): Imre Bangha / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2018

A Pharsalia Trója-jelenetének forrásairól és értelmezéséről

Author(s): Gergo Gellérfi / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2013

A Photomontage of Memory: The Role of the Visual in Angharad Price’s “The Life of Rebecca Jones”

Author(s): Aleksander Bednarski / Language(s): English / Issue: 11/2018

The article examines the visual aspect of the novel The Life of Rebecca Jones by the contemporary Welsh writer Angharad Price. The book is an imaginary autobiography of the eponymous Rebecca Jones, Price’s distant relative, who died of diphtheria in 1916, aged 11. Apart from Rebecca’s family photographs reproduced in the text, ekphrastic descriptions of a photograph, a painting (by a blind artist) and the video recording of a television programme, the novel problematizes the dichotomy between seeing and blindness. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how these elements in Price’s novel contribute to the production of meaning by generating tension between two different modes of discourse: verbal and visual. Price’s novel is read as an ‘imagetext’ which, by adopting photographic/visual features, creates an illusion of ‘photographic’ verisimilitude (described as a trompe-l’œil effect). This mechanism is interpreted as the manifestation of the narrator’s struggle to assert her authority as a perceiving subject and the text itself as a site where the memory of place and family history can be preserved.

A POETIC MIRROR REFLECTING 20th CENTURY MULTI-CULTURAL SALONIKA

Author(s): Renée Levine Melammed / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2018

Bouena Sarfatty was born in Salonika in 1916 to a Sephardi family. After World War II, she memorialized her birthplace by composing hundreds of Ladino verses (coplas) about Jewish life in the twentieth century. Her phenomenal memory and personal insights provide a poetic mirror that reflects the multi-cultural environment which she experienced personally. The poems appearing below reflect her thoughts about the process of modernization, whether of language, education, dress or mentalité. European influences created a cosmopolitan city that clearly affected Jewish life. The changes that transpired following the devastating fire of 1917 often harmed the development of this community that had been so vibrant and essential for centuries. Be that as it may, the poems written by this native Salonikan present a unique glimpse into the mindset and experiences of multilingual Jews attempting to adapt to the twentieth century and life in a multi-cultural city.

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Deception, Truth and Modernism

Author(s): Roland Boer / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

This article deals with the widespread assumption that a significant collection of texts known as the Bible is inherently ‘deceptive’. That is, the Bible does not – it is assumed – say what was ‘really’ going on in the ancient world. The truth, therefore, must be found by going behind or beneath the text (the spatial metaphors should be noted). Here the real story may found, through archaeology or reading the text against itself. This approach may be described as a modernist ‘depth model’, in which the surface attempts to conceal the truth, while the truth itself must be found by going around the surface text. This remains a dominant approach in biblical criticism. However, it cannot be understood without earlier and indeed, in some quarters, current assumptions concerning the realist nature of the text. In this case, the text reflects in a reasonably trustworthy fashion the context of the text, if not the ideological assumptions and positions of the putative authors. Modernist ‘depth models’ may then be seen as attempts to respond to realist assumptions. A third moment is what could be called postmodern: in this case, the distance between surface and depth is challenged, so that the various possibilities become equal contestants for the dominant position. This entails a shift away from the assumption of a singular truth of the text, characteristic of both realist and modernist assumptions, to the understanding of multiple truth claims – not as relative but as absolutes that permit other absolutes. The argument emphasises that these approaches should be seen as dialectically related to one another, rather that mutually exclusive approaches.

A Rim with a View: Modernist Studies and the Pacific Rim

Author(s): Stephen Yao / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2010

This essay outlines an agenda for the study of modernist cultural production that focuses on the dynamics of movement and transformation within the context of a particular geographical formation, namely the ‘Pacific Rim.’ In such an approach, I argue, the rigors and opportunities of an expressly transnational comparative methodology take center stage. The conscientious development of a ‘view from the Rim’ entails more than simply acknowledging the fact of geography. Rather, it involves a dedicated attention to tracing the manifold historical and material relations among groups within the area and beyond along a number of different vectors, as well as attending to how these relations at once occasion and condition cultural production. For literary concerns in particular, such vectors include, but are by no means limited to, the particularities of language and various dimensions of power such as asymmetrical economic arrangements underwritten by military and political domination expressed through a variety of channels. In advancing this set of concerns, I also suggest that Modernist Studies in general can enrich its approach to both the decidedly international cultural scope and subsequent global spread of Modernism by entering into an engagement not only with Area Studies, but also with more recently emergent (as well as non-historically defined) fields such as Ethnic Studies.

A síkságról nézve

Author(s): Helga Imola Biró / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 04/2019

Csillagokkal táncoló Kojot. Észak-amerikai indián mesék. Vál. Cseh Tamás. Méry Ratio Kiadó, Somorja, 2006.

A Sociosemiotic Analysis of Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

Author(s): Timothy J. Viator / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

This essay presents a sociosemiotic analysis of My Children! My Africa! (1989) by Athol Fugard. By considering the characters’ views about self, community, education, and time, it points to the Fugard’s anxious attempt to offer liberalism as the solution to apartheid in South Africa instead of oppositional politics, especially blacks’ calls for activism and communalism. Sociosemiotics is suitable to plays overtly political; it holds that political writers are troubled by political changes that do not correspond to a firmly held ideology—a tension between what a playwright believes is absolute and what s/he senses and perhaps fears is happening. Keys to the analysis are contemporary texts, including essays from leading Black writers and journalists and from studies and essays from attendees of a 1986 conference on liberal solutions to the unrest in South Africa.

A Steep and Rocky Path to Brexit: Creative Metaphors in British Political Discourse on Brexit

Author(s): Lejla Aljukic / Language(s): English / Issue: 8/2019

This paper examines the emergence of metaphorical creativity from the creative elaboration of the single walking journey metaphor, which is used in British political discourse for the conceptualisation of Brexit. Using the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphor, three instances of creative metaphors are analysed at the level of conceptual domains and metaphor scenarios, as well as metaphorical stories activated by those metaphors, which, according to Ritchie (2017), seem to be crucial for the complete comprehension of creative metaphors. Special attention is given to contextual factors that motivate the emergence of creative instances of the walking journey metaphor, as well as the rhetorical force with which they shape political reality.