Male Representations in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Author(s): Çelen Dimililer,Nurdan Atamtürk / Language(s): English Issue: 97-1/2019

A Room of One's Own can be categorized as a 'feminist manifesto' because it discusses the role of women in the history of literature. Woolf argues that women are oppressed and explains why women are prevented from writing fiction. Further, A Room of One's Own raises many critical issues that are still significant for women of our contemporary world and hence suggests some of the materialist reasons for the oppression of women from Antigone to the present. To Woolf, educating women is the major momentum in their liberation because that is the only way for them to be treated 'equally'. Through female representations in the book, Woolf presents the conditions of men and the mindset of the society. This qualitative study aimed to determine male representations as perceived by undergraduate English Language and Literature students. Male chauvinism, male domination and male freedom were found to be the dominant themes.

The Narrative of Transition in Caryl Phillips’s ‘A Distant Shore’: Mainstream, Subaltern and Subjective Narratives

Author(s): Zoltán Mogyorósi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

In recent years Anglophone authors of post-colonial heritage have been attempting to challenge the mainstream Western narratives of modernism in their literary works. Postcolonialism as a literary discourse is highly related to Neo-Marxism, as the relationship dynamics are based on the distinctive binary opposition of the hegemonic and the subaltern, so the fate of the individual is determined by a broader sense of power struggle in these narratives. Moreover, the narratives generally have fixed sides, positions contrasted to each other; men–women, black–white, upper class–working class. In some cases, the contrast between the subaltern and the hegemonic is emphasised by setting combinations of subaltern values against the combinations of hegemonic values; a white upper-class man against a black lower-class woman. However, according to some contemporary scholars of post-colonialism, approaches of this type are outdated. One of these authors is Caryl Phillips, who offers a different approach to narratives as he applies a more dynamic and relativistic one in his novel, A Distant Shore (2001). Due to the juxtaposition of different characters, there is no mere hegemonic power apparent in the text and every single character can be read as subaltern; thus Phillips extends the concept of subalternity to all the characters in the novel. In my paper, I examine the various mainstream and subaltern narratives, and then I present how the described mainstream narratives are alien to the individual, and some typical subaltern narratives are invisible or too fragmented to the society by their nature. Despite all the critical or empirical anticipations about the novel, Phillips gives a very critical attitude towards the narratives of globalism, and he fundamentally questions Western multiculturalism. I argue that Phillips’s strikingly different method of problematizing individual and social narratives does raise new questions concerning subaltern narratives, and I will support it with the theoretical background provided by scholars like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Bridging Two Worlds: Transculturality in Shaping Women’s Hybrid Identity in Ahdaf Soueif’s 'The Map of Love'

Author(s): Nawel Meriem Ouhiba / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

Arab British literature is a literature of exiles and ethnics, travellers and homemakers. The Arab British texts that have emerged over the last century testify to the experience of Arab immigrants and their descendants as they negotiate displacement, engage with intersections of geographies, nationalities, languages, cultures, politics and identities and claim or assert the creation of a ground space as Arab, British and Arab-British too. Confronted with diaspora, immigrant Arab intellectuals have expressed being torn between their commitment to universal-human values, their commitment to their new land, and their attachment to their homeland. In fact, their experience as emigrants profound changes in their conceptual social orientation as they move from the state of being a “majority” at home to that of being a “minority” or “diaspora” in another country, giving rise to feelings of dislocation, alienation and in-betweens which they have to cope with. It is in this sense that the present paper will examine how the Arab British novelist Ahdaf Soueif celebrates hybridity as fusion of different cultural background that allows the self to coexist with the other in her novel The Map of Love. My focus while exploring the text will be on the way the writer instigates dialogue with her Arab, British and American characters resulting in a full recognition of the one’s culture and that of the other, which gave birth to a self identity that flows from the fusion of values and ways of life and styles from both cultures through an act of transculturality.

Polish Kafka? O pewnym stereotypie anglojęzycznej recepcji Schulza

Author(s): Zofia Ziemann / Language(s): Polish Issue: 15/2020

The paper revisits a popular trope of the anglophone reception of the work and figure ofBruno Schulz, offering an overview of its history based on examples from literary criticismand paratextual framing since the first edition of Celina Wieniewska’s translation in 1963to the present. It is argued that although in the beginning the mentions of Kafka naturallyhad a marketing potential, helping to introduce a then unknown author to Englishspeakingreaders, the analogy was not used in a cynical or superficial way, nor was Schulzever presented as Kafka’s poor relative. Its early proponents (Isaac Bashevis Singer, CynthaOzick, and Philip Roth) genuinely believed in Schulz’s affinity with Kafka and the CentralEuropean Jewish tradition at large. At least since the early 1990s, Schulz has been listedon a par with Kafka, other high modernists, and other eminent authors from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, often becoming a point of reference for reviewers of translated fiction.If the phrase “Polish Kafka” still sometimes appears in this shorthand form, it is usuallypresented as a cliché and/or critically elaborated. In contrast to the contemporary understandingof “Polish Kafka” in Poland as almost an evocation of an inferiority complex,in the anglophone realm the comparison to Kafka has been an expression of bona fideadmiration for Schulz.

„Nie ptak, nie samolot, a dziewczyna”. Wizje kobiecej dorosłości w Lekkiej księżniczce George’a MacDonalda i jej adaptacji na musical Tori Amos i Samuela Adamsona

Author(s): Natalia Kuc / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The aim of the paper is to analyse The Light Princess (1864), a fairy tale by George MacDonald, and its musical adaptation from 2013 staged in the Royal National Theatre in London. The authors of the lyrics are Samuel Adamson, a playwright, and Tori Amos, a singer, who is also responsible for the music in the show. The fairy tale tells the story of a young princess cursed to be devoid of weight and the ability to feel sadness, as well as of her process of maturing into an adult woman. The author of the paper presents similarities and differences between the original tale dating to the late 19th century and its 21st century adaptation, along with their ties to folktale tropes. The analysis aims not only to set forth the vision of adulthood as described by MacDonald, but also to propound how the definitions of adulthood and womanhood could have changed over the course of a century of dynamic emancipation of women. According to the author, while MacDonald consciously subverts multiple fairy tale tropes, Adamson and Amos introduce modern elements to the text without integrating them into the fairy tale adaptation and with little regard for its folk inspirations. Driven by the desire to rewrite a modern, feminist version of the 19th century fairy tale, Adamson and Amos often achieve opposite results.

Jak przerobić baśnie na zaangażowane utopie? Twórczość prozatorska Angeli Carter

Author(s): Anna Pekaniec / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

The aim of the article is to conduct an analysis of two novels by Angela Carter, The Magical Toyshop (1967) and Wise Children (1991), as well as of some of her fairy tales/short stories, notably The Bloody Chamber (1979) and The Company of Wolves (1977). The author of the paper shows how modifying fairy-tale motifs and novel plots (including genres like coming-of-age novel, novel of manners, novel on male and female artists) transforms them into utopias characterised by a strong feminist component. Carter’s choices are often enriched with utopian or dystopian elements, and not only do they aim to question the phallogocentric rules, but also to lead us to wonder whether their questioning is actually possible.

САВРЕМЕНИ ПОГЛЕД НА ИМАГИНАТИВНИ ПОТЕНЦИЈАЛ ЛИТЕРАРНИХ ПРОСТОРÂ MИЛТОНОВОГ "ИЗГУБЉЕНОГ РАЈА"

Author(s): Sara Simić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 69/2019

РОМАНЕСКНА ПОНИРАЊА РОБЕРТА ГРЕЈВСА У ИСТОРИЈУ И МИТ

Author(s): Milomir M. Gavrilović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 69/2019

БЕКЕТОВ ЕКСПЕРИМЕНТАЛНИ ИСКОРАК

Author(s): Ana M. Sitarica / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 70/2019

Čitanje Sotonskih stihova

Author(s): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 25/2020

U postkolonijalnosti, sve metropolitanske definicije su izmještene. Opći oblik za postkolonijalno je citiranje, novo upisivanje, preusmjeravanje povijesnog. Sotonski stihovi ne mogu se postaviti u europski avangardu, ali u tom su romanu vidljivi uspjesi i neuspjesi europske avangarde. Peter Burger istaknuoje prije određenog vremena Jurgenu Habermasu da svi promišljeni pokušaji integriranja estetičke sfere u Lebenswelt moraju uzeti u obzir njihovu dubinsku i trajnu razdvojenost. Ali, u postkolonijalnosti, svi metropolitanski opisi su iskošeni. Primjer Sotonskih stihova primjerje globalnog Lebenswelta - prakse i politike života - koji presreće estetički objekt te je puko čitanje tog romana pos talo nemoguće.

The Parallels and Differences between the Urban and Country Ways of Socializing in the Worlds of Jane Austen and Helen Fielding

Author(s): Katarína Brziaková / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2020

This paper focused on several aspects of life in Great Britain. I wanted to concentrate chiefly on two important points. Firstly, I tried to find and compare the differences in lifestyle and related entertainment in the country villages, towns and cities in the early years of the nineteenth century which I perceived as largely dominated by deeply rooted traditions and strict social norms. As the basic source for my research I selected some of Jane Austen’s novels as they serve as real social chronicles of her times. Secondly, I did a similar analysis and comparison of the same aspects at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as they were reflected in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’ Diary. I thoroughly analysed and compared the aspects of life, the habits, norms, rules and views, class affiliations, the snobbery, vanity and conceit of middle and upper classes in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The findings, based mostly on the strictly observed and applied rules of socializing showed that no matter what century we live in now, nothing much has changed between Austen’s and present times when speaking of social rules, norms, class distinctions and equally importantly – position of women.

The Indian Social Novel in English: A Neo-Victorian Encounter

Author(s): Carmen Escobedo de Tapia / Language(s): English Issue: 25/2020

The influence of the Victorian on postcolonial Indian narratives in English dates to the 1930s with the Founding Fathers: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. There is a clear development of the Indian social novel that emerges in the Gandhian era to the connexions with the Victorian, underlying the relationship between neo-Victorianism and globalization. It is the aim of this article to highlight a Dickensian pervasive presence in the first stages of Indian narratives in English, specifically the Indian social novel. I will establish a comparative approach between Dickens’ celebrated novel Great Expectations (1860-61) and Coolie (1936) by Mulk Raj Anand, the social Indian writer par excellence. I suggest a neo-Victorian encounter framed within a colonial/postcolonial encounter, making explicit how different historical processes – late eighteenth-century England and the Gandhian era in India – cause a similar social impact on so different contexts. Mulk Raj Anand adapts and appropriates the Victorian in Coolie, showing deep social concern and claiming against social evils, injustice and hypocrisy in India. This analysis stands as a transcultural exercise that shows Dickens’ universal scope regardless of time and space.

At the Crossroads of Time, Science and History

Author(s): Maria-Ana Tupan / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2020

Our paper is searching for historical and discursive contexts which might explain the sudden flare-up of the idea of parallel worlds in the science, history and literature of the mid-20th-century. We are having in mind Hugh Everett’s universal wave function – known later as the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum entanglement –, the forking trajectories from a single choice situation in time (Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths) or in space (Andre Norton’s The Crossroads of Time), and alternative histories, such as J. C. Squire’s 1932 collection of counterfactual essays, If It Happened Otherwise. The origins of this mental representation are identified in the break-up of the continuity with classical, identity logic and the rise of polyvalent logic ushered in by the theory of the superposition of contrary states, and the traumatic effect of the sudden onset of barbarism in totalitarian regimes in a modern Europe which had evolved towards democracy in the backdrop of the luminaries’ discourses, the political agenda of the Republic of Fraternity and Reason, or the parliamentary reforms in Victorian England.

The ‘Imaginary’ World of the Afterlife: Parallel World in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Debjan

Author(s): Ayusman Chakraborty / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2020

This article focuses on the presentation of parallel worlds in the early twentieth century Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s (1894-1950) novel Debjan (1946) [literally, ‘the path of the Gods’]. Bandyopadhyay is known abroad mainly for his novels Song of the Road (in Bengali Pather Panchali, 1929) and Mountain of the Moon (Bengali Chander Pahar, 1937), both of which have been translated into English. But the majority of his works still remain untranslated, including the novel Debjan. Due to the popularity of the film version of Song of the Road, adapted for the screen by the veteran Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the author is usually viewed as a realist who meticulously depicted the sad plight of the rural poor in colonial Bengal. But Bibhutibhushan also had a prodigious power of imagination, as manifested in Debjan. The novel depicts the afterlife, where the dead protagonists embark on a cosmic odyssey discovering several parallel worlds along the way. Inspired by religious beliefs, literary works have been depicting parallel worlds of the dead ever since the dawn of civilizations. Following Umberto Eco, one may classify such worlds as “utopias” where the parallel world exists somewhere outside the real world and is normally inaccessible to its inhabitants. From the point of view of researchers in history and cultural studies, such tales interest mainly because they provide us with insight into the religious beliefs and culture of a particular people of a particular age. The distinctiveness of Debjan lies in the fact that its presentation of the afterlife is not entirely based on orthodox Hindu beliefs, even when its author was a Hindu Brahmin by faith. Rather, Bibhutibhushan borrowed much from the tenets of Theosophy to construct his peculiar version of the afterlife in this novel. Though claiming to have its roots in Oriental religions, Theosophy was in reality an Occidental construct which aimed to amalgamate Eastern mysticism with Western occultism. This novel’s mingling of the tenets of Theosophy with those of orthodox Hinduism converts it into a site of encounter between Eastern and Western spiritualism. This paper highlights this aspect of the work, something which has escaped the critics’ attention so far. In the process, it pays particular attention to the concepts of “thought form” and “tulpa” which were popularized in the Anglo-American world by Theosophy and which continue to remain much popular. The basic idea is that the mind or imagination is capable of bringing mental constructs into actual existence through spiritual training and meditation. Bibhutibhushan makes an innovative use of this idea in Debjan. He shows that spirits are capable of producing literally parallel ‘imaginary’ worlds or worlds built with the power of imagination. This is a unique way of imagining parallel worlds in literature, a fact that the article draws attention to. Finally, the article tries to account for the influence of Theosophy on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and his generation by taking into consideration both the author’s biography as well as the historical developments in that age.

Diskurs islamofobije u književnosti: tri tematska pristupa

Author(s): Ahmed Isanović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 85/86/2019

Literature, as an ideologically very potent field, often serves as an instrument which validates the status quo, empowers existing relations of power, and shapes the sociopolitical awareness. On the other hand, literature is also a powerful platform for examining, understanding, and deconstructing the ideological mechanisms that offer a distorted picture of reality created by the centres of power. On such a premise, this paper attempts to denaturalize the ideologically constructed notion of Islam and Muslims which occurs in the form of a new grand narrative of the West. Analysing the following three novels: Saturday written by Ian McEwan, Submission by Michel Houellebecq, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, the paper deals with the thematization of Islamophobia within the literary discourse, where three literary approaches to the topic (Islamophobia) are evident: manifest, latent and problem approach.

From Euphemisms to Vulgarisms

Author(s): Grzegorz Cebrat / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The paper investigates the issue how Polish translators of William Shakespeare’s King Lear dealt with rendering Lear’s monologue (Act IV, Scene 6, ll. 107-132), being a misogynistic tirade of the mad king against adultery, sexuality, and women in general. The play was translated into Polish at least fifteen times in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning with the oldest published rendition by Ignacy Hołowiński (1841) and concluding with the most recent one by Jerzy S. Sito (2001). The paper analyses seven selected fragments taking into consideration lexical and stylistic choices made by the translators of the monologue in order to show how changing attitudes to sexual taboo and Shakespearean obscenities affected the translations in question. The analysis reveals the evolution of translators’ attitudes to those issues (also affected by contemporary Shakespearean research): from euphemistic treatment of the topic in the 19th century, through philological translations of Tarnawski and Chwalewik, to unrestricted modern renditions of Słomczyński and Barańczak, and the extreme case of straightforward obscene translation of Jerzy S. Sito. Artykuł jest próbą analizy technik i metod zastosowanych przez tłumaczy w trakcie przekładu wyrazów i wyrażeń obscenicznych występujących w tragedii Williama Shakespeare’a Król Lear na język polski. Analiza skupia się na tłumaczeniach monologu szalonego króla (Akt IV, scena 6, wersy 107-132), który jawi się jako mizoginistyczny atak na kobiety, seksualność, oraz cudzołóstwo. Materiał tekstowy stanowi 15 przekładów sztuki, począwszy od najstarszego tłumaczenia, dokonanego przez Ignacego Hołowińskiego i opublikowanego w 1841 roku, a skończywszy na wersji Jerzego S. Sity z roku 2001. Artykuł analizuje wybrane zdania i jednostki leksykalne, pochodzące z siedmiu fragmentów monologu, pod kątem technik i strategii tłumaczeniowych zastosowanych przez poszczególnych tłumaczy przy przekładaniu pojęć uważanych za nieprzyzwoite, a dotyczących kobiecego ciała, seksu, rozpusty, cudzołóstwa, itp. Przeprowadzona analiza wykazuje ewolucję sposobów przekładu, związanych z epoką w której polski tekst powstał i jej uwarunkowaniami kulturowo-społecznymi, a także z rozwojem badań nad twórczością i językiem Shakespeare’a, i pozwala śledzić zmiany, począwszy od eufemistycznego stylu tłumaczeń powstałych w XIX. wieku, poprzez filologiczne tłumaczenia Tarnawskiego i Chwalewika, a skończywszy na współczesnych, miejscami ‘niecenzuralnych,’ tekstach Słomczyńskigo, Barańczaka, a zwłaszcza Sity, który nie zawahał się użyć wulgaryzmów.

Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

Author(s): Andrei-Bogdan Popa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith's There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/ narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.

An Analysis of Paratexts in the (Re)translations of Oliver Twist into Croatian

Author(s): Edin Badić / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2020

The aim of the present study is to analyse paratextual elements in Croatian (re)translations of Charles Dickens’ classic social novel Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837–1839). We will explore the level of paratextual (in)visibility of translators in the (re)translations of Oliver Twist and observe how their (in)visibility might affect the reading and interpretation of the novel. The fact that Oliver Twist has been on the reading lists for Croatian primary schoolers ever since the early 1950s may account for the intense interest in the novel on the part of Croatian publishers. The first edition of Oliver Twist into Croatian appeared in 1901 and, since then, three (re)translations have been published, as well as a large number of reprints. The findings aim to contribute to a better understanding of Croatian translation history, shedding light on different approaches to translating children’s literature and the effects such translation practices may have had on the expectations of the target readership.

Tłumaczenie antroponimów sztucznych na przykładzie francuskiego i angielskiego przekładu powieści „Pod Mocnym Aniołem” Jerzego Pilcha

Author(s): Kinga Strzelecka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2020

The aim of this work is to present the problem of translation of fictive anthroponyms on the example of French and English version of „Pod Mocnym Aniołem” by Jerzy Pilch by answering the questions: how those fictive anthroponyms are translated and which techniques are used the most often. For this purpose, we analyze translation techniques of anthroponyms in French and English and the connection between the form of an anthroponym and the translator’s choice. In this category, literal translation has the highest frequency (18 French and 19 English names of the total 30), the other techniques are literal translation with borrowing, borrowing, functional equivalent, reduction, and addition. The names of all characters created by the writer are difficult to translate because those elements do not have any equivalents known by the culture of the target language.

(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Author(s): Sardar M. Anwaruddin / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2013

Literary critics admire George Eliot’s touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie’s character as a reworking of Eliot’s own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tess is a ‘low-born’ country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess’ social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families’ expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group—masculine.