"Bez tytułu i daty". O „szkicowniku myśli” Piotra Szewca

Author(s): Grazyna Maroszczuk / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The subject of the article is notes by Piotr Szewc entitled "Bez tytułu i daty", published in “Kwartalnik Artystyczny” in the column of varia entitled "Z powodu i bez powodu". The sketchbook privacy is marked by writer’s mental state, the sense of an obvious bond with the events of a special personal meaning, discretely including notes into the area of emotion reactions. The author , being aware of the gaps of a memoirist form makes an attempt to order himself and drafts thoughts in his non-fulfillment, as well as fills in intuitions of the events reconstructed after years that are intensively close to him. A reflection on the past, that, according to the author is worth remembering, because otherwise, it would get lost without taking care of a tiny detail memory sticks to. Notes by Piotr Szewc point to a thematic dominance of the last achievements of the author of "Zagłada". The novel works are avoided here in favour of poetic and para-textual searches.

"Czytadło" Tadeusza Konwickiego – interpretacja po latach

Author(s): Anna Szóstak / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The article is an attempt to reconsider and reread the novel by Tadeusz Konwicki from today’s point of view and by means of research tools that has not been applied so far to this type of text. A confrontation of its character with a changed reality of the surrounding world becomes an occasion to reflect on coming to terms with tradition and ideas as well as myths of the Romantic provenience or, in a word, the whole symbolic heritage of the past while for the writer himself, also with existing hierarchies and literary conventions. In such a perspective the novel by Konwicki turns out to be an addition and supplement of "Mała apokalipsa" whereas its convention an ironic and prophetic harbinger of a direction the Polish literature goes in totally different conditions and circumstances than before.

"Mimeza procesa" u romanu Zlatna bilježnica

Author(s): Aida Džiho-Šator / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 10/2015

This paper deals with the literary technique of metafiction in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook and with some of the ways of its realization. The paper attempts to analyze the problem of presenting the truth in novel writing, or the representation of reality in fiction, which is one of the main preoccupations of the novel’s protagonist, Anna Wulf.

"Sanatorium" Rafała Wojaczka. Próba lektury po czterdziestu latach

Author(s): Magdalena Boczkowska / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The article is devoted to "Sanatorium" by Rafał Wojaczek or a prose book of a poet, published for the first time as a whole (although with a removed motto) in 2010. The author, analyzing such, phenomena as (among others): the problem of suicide and split personality, an identity split of the main character, loss of subjectivity that are very typical of the poets defined traditionally as “damned”, shows above all a difficult reception of this prose. Hence, "Sanatorium" can be read today in different ways but it should be underlined that it is first of all a novel about fear, illness, stagnation and battle fought with the world and him/herself.

(Re)wizje naturalizmu w świetle badań nad zwierzętami (animal studies). Rekonesans

Author(s): Dariusz Piechota / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2015

The main question discussed in this article is: Can we re-interpret naturalism’s novels or short stories from a non-human perspective? The researchers of animal studies perceive the world as an ecosystem where humans, animals, and plants live in a symbiosis. They also perceive the human as a part of nature. Moreover, with regard to Charles Darwin’s discoveries, it is worth to mention that the theorists of naturalism called the human being an animal. Naturalists introduce a new protagonist into literature called the animal hero. Thanks to animal studies, he is perceived as a subject, not a thing (as was the case earlier). What is more, we can reconstruct different relations between species. One of the most important problems for naturalism and animal studies is empathy towards other creatures. Naturalists, as well as the researchers of animal studies, use different tools to analyse and interpret novels and short stories. First of all, they introduce different narrators in order to be objective. Furthermore, they indicate parallelisms between the human and animal world, they avoid subjective comments, and sometimes they use the strategy called the stream of consciousness to present other creatures’ thoughts.

(Авто)біографічна фальсифікація як знаряддя десакралізації канонічного автора (“Трагедія Артура” А. Філіпса)

Author(s): Natalia Vysotska / Language(s): Ukrainian / Issue: 91/2015

Due to a number of socio-cultural factors biography (sub)genre “аuthor as character” has become fairly popular in current biographic writings. It is no wonder that William Shakespeare – the central figure in the Western canon according to H. Bloom – is one of its favorite “heroes”. In his novel The Tragedy of Arthur (2011) Arthur Phillips increasingly referred to as one of the most promising American writers of his generation engages his readers in a sophisticated play carried out around Shakespeare as a cult person. The play is centered on Shakespeare’s “unknown” tragedy; its text is incorporated into the novel being a masterful stylization imitating conventions and language of Elizabethan drama. The bulk of the novel has the form of an Introduction to the play relating the latter’s story which is simultaneously the story of the protagonist’s (the writer Arthur Phillips’) personal and professional coming of age. The paper sets out to explore the strategies the novelist deploys to tackle topical issues of present-day humanities. These include institutionalizing of the canon; machinery of literary cult functioning; blending borders between the original and the copy/forgery in the age of electronic technologies; limits of autofiction, etc. The timeliness of these issues guarantees Phillips’ daring experiment no small degree of interest both in its matter and its form.

1914 И КРАЯТ НА БЪЛГАРСКОТО ВЪЗРАЖДАНЕ:

ЯВОРОВ КАТО КОЛЕКТИВНА МЕТАФОРА

Author(s): Plamen Antov / Language(s): English,Bulgarian / Issue: 1/2016

This article, which may conventionally be classified under the genre philosophy of history, develops two metaphors of high symbolic value. The first is the year 1914, as the start of World War I, the third and last in a se-ries of wars at the start of the 20th century in which Bulgaria was involved. It led teleologically to the year 1919 (Neuilly) which marked the symbolic – therefore absolute – end of the Bulgarian National Revival. The second metaphor is the figure of Yavorov in its his mytho-biographical projection – the poet’s suicide in October 1914 can be seen as a collective metaphor, as a metaphor of a collective ontological loss; but also as an attainment of a qualitatively new state; as the loss of the Revival’s monolithic national aspect and the acquiring of the tragic experience of Modernity and its social fragmentariness.

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 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 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 tipográfia válasza

Author(s): Otília Ármeán / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 10/2014

ADAPTATION OF THE EPIC LEGEND OF SIEGFRIED: FROM ARCHETYPAL HERO MYTH TO FILM

Author(s): Tatyana Solomonik-Pankrašova,Viktorija Lobinaite / Language(s): English / Issue: 30(35)/2016

According to the psychic concept of adaptation, the original manifests itself as an archetype in culture. The film producer who employs archetypal hero myth creates yet another version of myth. A medieval narrative – a secularised sacred narrative – is translated into a cinematic narrative by a gallery of images. This kind of translation reveals similar semiotic complexity to that of the original. The film producer imitates the art of the medieval epic singer and remains faithful to the spirit of myth. This paper aims at deciphering the symbolic world of “The Nibelungen: Siegfried” (“Die Nibelungen: Siegfried”), a silent film created by Fritz Lang (1924). The novelty of the research lies in comparing the artistic expression of the film producer with the poetic expression of the medieval epic minstrel. The authors’ argument proceeds as follows: (1) consider the archetypal hero myth – its plot, theme, and motifs – as narratologically embedded in the adaptation of the epic legend of Siegfried; (2) reveal the interaction between the formulaic structure of the intertitles and oral epic poetry; (3) highlight mimesis as the imitative representation of the sacred world from the perspective of the symbolic world created in the film.

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.

AKO NEŠTO PIŠEŠ ZNA SE ŠTA TO TREBA DA BUDE

Author(s): Mihajlo Pantic / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 433/2005

Svaki srpski pisac koji piše romane sanja, dok piše svoje delo, da će za njega dobiti Ninovu nagradu. A oni koji su je već dobili, sanjaju da je dobiju ponovo. Zašto?

Alegorija je putovanje

Author(s): Ružica Pšihistal / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 1/2015

review of: -------------------- Dolores GRMAČA, Nevolje s tijelom. Alegorija putovanja od Bunića do Barakovića, Matica hrvatska, Zagreb, 2015., 479 str.

Aleksandar MIJATOVIĆ, Danijela MAROT KIŠ, Personifik(a)cije

Književni subjekt i politika impersonalnosti

Author(s): Kristina Peternai Andric / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 2/2014

review of: -------------------- Aleksandar MIJATOVIĆ, Danijela MAROT KIŠ, Personifik(a)cije. Književni subjekt i politika impersonalnosti, Facultas, Rijeka, 2013., 261 str.

Alfred Jarry et Jacques Lacan. Lalangue du Docteur Faustroll

Author(s): Jérémie Sallustio / Language(s): French / Issue: 10/2015

This article tackles the issue of alienation in the “Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien”, by Alfred Jarry. To do so, it analyzes a few of the metaphorical islands found in Book III, “De Paris à Paris par mer”. The analysis also posits a link with a lacanian concept: lalangue.

Alienacja, fikcja, narracja – formy (o)powieści bytu społecznego

Author(s): Natalia Juchniewicz / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2014

Tekst podejmuje problem znaczenia literatury, a zwłaszcza powieści, jako symptomu alienacji (Karol Marks), która może się wyrażać w kreacji światów możliwych przez fikcję (Paul Ricoeur), w ideologii (György Lukács) oraz anty-fikcji (Odo Marquard). Analiza tropów literackich w koncepcjach ekonomiczno-społecznych demaskuje nie tylko narracje społeczno-historyczne, ale i naukowo-filozoficzne (Hayden White, Hans Kellner).

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.