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Towards a Post-Traveller’s Travelogue: Aspects of an Ethical Turn in Contemporary European Travelogues on America

Author(s): Peggy Karpouzou / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

This article investigates the forms that contemporary travel writing may assume, especially those shaped by a more critical outlook and an ethical stance towards alterity. The investigation is based on the following selection of contemporary travelogues on America, written by French theorists and Greek intellectuals: America by Jean Baudrillard (1988), American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville by Henri- Bernard Lévy (2006), A Villager in New York by Yannis Kiourtsakis (2009) and Manhattan-Bangkok by George Veis (2011). The themes under scrutiny are space, identity and alterity. The article is primarily concerned with the imperialist perspectives that can be detected in the genre as well as with the subsequent management of European stereotypes about “Americanness” and the current “Americanization” of the planet. Particular emphasis is laid on the critical response to globalization through the elaboration of political, philosophical, but also aesthetic concerns in the travelogues under discussion. Finally, the writing modes in these travelogues are examined as a means of building self-reflexive and unstable narrative identities – defined here as “posttravellers.” The latter are located in an attempt to go beyond postmodern attitudes, embracing a more ethically concerned critical thinking about Self, space and an interactively defined Other.

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Зловещото в разказа на Джералд Даръл „Входът“

Author(s): Pavel Petkov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The article explores the relation of Gerald Durrell’s 1979 short story “The Entrance”, published in a collection titled “The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium”, to the concept of the uncanny, as it appears in Sigmund Freud’s work “The Uncanny” (1919). I first discuss Freud’s account of the concept, highlighting the main points in his theory, and then I subject certain points of the narrative in “The Entrance” to an analysis in an attempt to show that the story provides numerous illustrations of the Freudian concept of the uncanny.

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Жените като вещици: трансформацията на стереотипа в „Хари Потър“ на Дж. К. Роулинг и „Посестрими в занаята“ на Тери Пратчет

Author(s): Tsvetelin Lisaev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This article explores some of the aspects of the ‘women-as-witches’ stereotype in the literary works of J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett, while focusing on both the subversion of the stereotype and its reinforcement. The focus of my work is on the depiction of this type of gender profiling in a fantastic setting and imagined societies, while drawing a parallel with the real world. I first focus on a brief outline of the historical and cultural significance of the stereotype, followed by a discussion of its literary aspects in J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series and Terry Pratchett’s “Wyrd Sisters” novel.

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Portrayal of Alternative Masculinities and Depiction of Male Anxiety in Gissing’s Novel: New Grub Street

Author(s): Özlem Yılmaz / Language(s): English Issue: Sp. Issue/2022

This study aims to contribute to the development of literary masculinity studies by investigating the construction of alternative masculinities in George Gissing’s New Grub Street, which was written in Victorian fin de siècle, during which British society witnessed great transformations in its social structure and gender order. In fin de siècle Britain, because of the societal pressures, men who found it difficult to fit into pre-determined hegemonic masculine roles either suffered from male anxiety, or they created their alternative masculine identities themselves. Tracing the reflection of these two occasions by applying the tenets of masculinist theory to the novel, and focusing on male protagonist Edwin Reardon, the study demonstrates that the novel can be classified as an early example of masculinist texts, in its portrayal of alternative masculinities and exhibition of the devastating effects of hegemonic gender idealizations on male individuals which resulted in the formation of male-specific anxiety.

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One Hundred Shades of White Romanında Baharatlarla Zenginleştirilmiş Kadın Yaşamları

Author(s): Meryem Ayan,Fatma Yalvaç / Language(s): Turkish Issue: Sp. Issue/2022

One Hundred Shades of White (2003) written by Preethi Nair presents the story narrated by Nalini and Maya from their own perspectives. The novel, which tells the events occurring before and after their immigration from India to England, frequently includes food-related representations that play crucial roles in the development of the story. As a female author, Preethi Nair reveals the transmission process of knowledge about the Indian food culture enriched with spices from grandmother to mother and from mother to daughter. In contrast to the traditional considerations regarding the role of culinary deeds in the lives of females, Ammu, the grandmother character in the novel, guides Nalini and Maya in the processes of attaining and sustaining personal, social, financial, and emotional progress by means of foods, spices, and cooking. This study aims to investigate Preethi Nair’s novel with a gynocritical perspective focusing on the role and importance of foods and cooking in the lives of female characters.

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A Lovely Sleep: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Cement Garden Through the Theoretical Lens of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva

Author(s): Mahinur Akşehır / Language(s): English Issue: Sp. Issue/2022

Ian McEwan is the writer of the most controversial texts of the contemporary British fiction. One of the outstanding examples of his literature of shock, McEwan’s The Cement Garden, is a challenging narrative in the sense that it depicts the disturbing experiences of a family, ranging from incest to death. The fact that these experiences are narrated through an adolescent boy’s point of view makes these even more controversial in the sense that the depiction of events through this narrator’s view is focalized. Through this focalization, the horrifying events experienced by children are narrated as if they were just ordinary experiences which creates a somehow disturbing effect on the reader. However, this disturbance also leads the reader to think that the actions of these children and their relationship to their parents and each other also refer to an underlying symbolism pertaining to their psychic conditions. This article aims to reveal and interpret the novel focusing on this underlying symbolism through the lens of Lacan’s concepts of ‘lack’ and the Symbolic order and Kristeva’s concept of ‘semiotic chora’.

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Nazlı Eray’ın Kayıp Gölgeler Kenti ile Philip Kerr’in Ölümcül Prag Eserlerindeki Prag Görünümleri

Author(s): Fulya Çelik Özkan / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 112/2022

Based on all fictional texts, space takes place in different dimensions. When it comes to novels containing fantastical elements, they tend to put the perception of time and real life places into the background or completely change them. In fantastic narrative universe where dreams and reality are intertwined, the reader embarks on an unlimited journey between (real-unreal) spaces and (realunrealistic) times. Space also influences time by taking on different identities in every stage of the text. In novels with no fantastic elements, the author mostly prefers a direct narrative instead of giving the reader a surreal sense of time and place. Although these two approaches are different, space is indispensable for associating the novel’s characters with the place where the plot takes place. When space, which is a fundamental element in revealing meaning as a series of relations, is considered together with time, a variable and magical perception emerges in fantasy novels; however, in novels where reality is at the forefront, and there is an emphasis on event transfer, one does not go beyond a straight perception of time and space. In this context, the appearance of Prague in Nazlı Eray’s The City of Lost Shadows, who fictionalizes her works with fantastic elements in our literature, and the city’s identity in Philip Kerr’s detective novel Prague Fatale have been comparatively examined in terms of space. The themes of death and captivity arising from the gloomy history of the city, seen in both works, have been discussed in the context of temporal and spatial relations. Although the novels considered differ in perception and handling of the space, it has been observed that they meet in the themes of death and captivity in the axis of Prague.

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Harold Pinter’ın Oda Oyununda İç / Dış Düalizmi ve Hakikat

Author(s): Elif Derya Şenduran / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 112/2022

The aim of this article is to explore the inside and outside dichotomies associated with the Lacanian topological figure’s trajectory, torus, in Harold Pinter’s play, The Room. The intrusion of uninvited visitors problematizes Rose’s logocentric speech that hides her deficiencies behind her continuous movements around the stage prop of the kitchen sink with this drama repeating itself throughout the play. The intertextuality in the play reveals the truth about Rose’s original identity within mythopoeic thought, blurring the boundaries between inside and out. Torus’s trajectory elucidates energy that situates outside to the centre of the subject and the room, which is examined in Badiou’s notion of truth, hidden in black, blind Riley’s message to Rose. The study also draws on the notions of subaltern and the hegemony to expand the framework of analysis, concluding that the murderous cold of the outside is right at the centre of Rose’s room like a black hole that reflects the deficient, widening the hole by repetitive acts and speeches, caused by the chaotic movements and speech that the characters experience in the play. Rose’s sudden blindness, after Riley’s murder by Bert, erases the room’s feature of being a safe space. Thus, the hierarchy for all the characters in the play, which relies on the structure placing Man at the centre of the universe, is destroyed both epistemologically and ontologically. Rose becomes blind because of the light of the truth, constituted by the menace of the characters.

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

Author(s): Nurdan Atamtürk,Çelen Dimililer / Language(s): English Issue: 112/2022

Due to the increasing popularity of digital reading, e-readers have been the focus of a number of research over the last few years. Reading is a multifaceted cognitive activity comprising reader-text interaction, derivation of meaning and relating the inferred meaning to life experiences. Sometimes the reader has to put extra effort to a text and read between the lines to get the implied meaning. As in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women’s representations are not directly stated but implied through the portrayal of the British patriarchal society. Woolf explores how material aspects affect women rendering them dependent and turning them into the victims of material circumstances. It is posed that women’s oppression is not universal or natural but culture specific. Different societies interpret the ‘sex’ of women differently to fit the discourse of gender that suits men. Drawing on this, this qualitative study was designed to determine the perceptions of fifteen graduate students from different cultural backgrounds of female representations in A Room of One’s Own. The data were elicited through group chatting on Messenger and thematically analyzed to reveal the themes, namely dependent wives, worthless human beings and vulnerable creatures.

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Introduction: ‘Make It New’ Once Again: Experimental Trends in 21st-Century Poetry in English

Author(s): Laurent Milesi,Radu Vancu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and, for fiction, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Franz Kafka’s composition of The Castle, to nam but these), in which the poet articulated his response to post-WW1 disillusionment.

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‘A Certain Noise’: Approaching the ‘Music of Poetry’

Author(s): Jed Rasula / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This article considers T. S. Eliot’s preoccupation with ‘the music of poetry’, a subject he addressed throughout his career. It was a certain ‘music’ to which the first readers of The Waste Land responded in the poem. This music, I argue, is not a matter of melodious sounds or acoustic mimicry. Rather, it is to be discerned in ‘a certain noise’ (Joseph Brodsky’s phrase), an underlying pulse. In order to examine this rhythmic prompt, I look at the graphic manifestations of another poet, Henri Michaux, who wrote lines of poetry and, in equal abundance, drew and painted maelstroms of lines that often share the page with the poems. These graffiti-like emanations provide us with a visual rendering of the ‘music of poetry’.

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Condeiul feminin şi romanul istoric

Author(s): Mihaela Mudure / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 30/2022

Starting from a very summative discussion about the metadiscourse of the historical novel, Joan Kelly’s and Joan Scott’s contribution to the appearance and the evolution of women’s history, this article’s author constructs a comparison among three women who authored historical novels: Sarah Dunant, Rodica Ojog-Braşoveanu, and Ileana Vulpescu. The problem is whether the Romanian and the international historical novel presents some markers typical of feminine authorship. The answer is negative, even if the lesson offered to the female writers by women’s history, as a research area, is not deprived of consequences. The existence of some feminine authorial markers would presume the existence of a feminine essence which is still, eternally recognizable, and impossible to grasp by those of other genders. Rather, there is a certain positionality, a taste for female characters with a strong personality, some preferences, tendencies towards a presentation of history as women’s history, as well. Sarah Dunant tends to reconstruct the past according to the present taste for political correctness, for the marginalized groups, be they prostitutes or individuals with disabilities. On the other hand, Ojog-Braşoveanu and Ileana Vulpescu combine women’s history with the tropes of the nationalist discourse.

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Pięć wersji tekstu „Ulissesa”. Lukullusowa uczta dla filologów

Author(s): Jerzy Paszek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (20)/2022

The article discusses, both polemically and critically, a few instances in which Maciej Świerkocki, in his new translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, renders the novel’s puns into Polish. In order to indicate other possible translations in this regard, the author of the article quotes from previous Polish version by Maciej Słomczyński and the Czech translation by Aloys Skoumal.

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Space, Dwelling, and (Be)longingness: Virginia Woolf’s Art of Narration

Author(s): Małgorzata Hołda / Language(s): English Issue: 65/2022

The supple and ever-present search for the possibilities offered by the narrative form in fictional writing corresponds to the use of the narrative as a mode of understanding and explaining our being-in-the-world in philosophy. The intimate liaison between the realm of fictional imagination and that of human everydayness inspires writers to seek ways to tackle issues of temporality, the conflicting character of human drives, and the ultimately unresolvable tension between finitude and infinitude. As a literary and philosophical category, the narrative remains an inexhaustible space for the exploration of the way we understand our lives. I propose a hermeneutic investigation of the interactions between the art of narration and the categories of space, presence/absence, and (be)- longingness as evoked in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This article engages Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, and, more specifically, his notions of homelessness and homecoming, to shed light on the inimitable character of Woolf’s artistic representations of the spatial dimension of human existence, reality viewed as both tremulous and solid, as well as of human embodiment and the disparity/closeness between the corporeal and the spiritual.

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New Chapters in the Evolution of Taste: How Eighteenth-Century English Salonnières Shaped the Culture of Sociability

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New Chapters in the Evolution of Taste: How Eighteenth-Century English Salonnières Shaped the Culture of Sociability

Author(s): Elena Butoescu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In eighteenth-century Britain the term taste was a new vehicle for discerning subtle qualities of an individual mind’s experience of practically anything in the polite world and the world of letters. The term entailed the response of the mind to beauty, and it became popular in each and every genre of writing. The notion of taste acquired a distinctive dimension which effectively disentangles it from the notion of aesthetics emerging early in the nineteenth century as a new area of philosophical enquiry. The eighteenth-century discourses on and ongoing debates over taste and beauty focused on the dominant classicist prototypes of universality, awareness of proportion, harmony and the sense of form and symmetry, principles which were specifically articulated by such Men of Taste as the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume and Joshua Reynolds, who had a monopoly on taste. However, the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for an alternative notion of taste, which included women in the realm of theorizing in the taste mode. This article aims to look into the category of exotic taste, and more precisely into the fashionable literary coterie of eighteenth-century England, often presided by women writers such as the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, Catherine Macaulay, and Hannah More, with the purpose of connecting this type of literary promotion, which was effective in shaping contemporary literary taste, to the theories of taste that anticipated aesthetic judgment in the nineteenth century. Besides, the new social milieu accommodating literary meetings shaped a new discourse which, though ridiculed, facilitated and revitalized conversation in what Hume called “the conversable world” and Samuel Johnson defined as the “clubbable” age. Accordingly, the article will explore the extent to which the discourse employed in such conversations transformed women’s literary taste into an accepted critical category and contributed to the formation of literary reputations.

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ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION AND THE UNITED STATES. The Case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Paul Meier (2010, 2012)

Author(s): Emiliana Russo / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In 2004, Romeo and Juliet in Original Pronunciation (OP) was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, inaugurating what Crystal would later define the OP movement (2016), which aimed to restore the original sound of both the literary and non-literary works of the past. While academic literature suggests an irregular theatrical interest in the Shakespearean OP in the UK, it also demonstrates that such restoration projects have proven increasingly appealing to US audiences. The reasons why North American theatergoers are attracted to the Shakespearean OP remain unclear. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with Paul Meier, the director of the theatrical and radio production A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010, 2012) and two of his cast members, and complementing the findings with the study of promotional and non-promotional articles concerning the productions, this paper sheds light on the rationale behind the North American fascination with the Shakespearean OP. As Meier’s reflections gravitate towards the identity of the US as a former British colony, this study, relying extensively on literature review, is carried out both through the lens of literary/cultural history and of historical linguistics. Finally, though limited in its scope, this paper paves the way for further studies on the relationship between the allure of the OP and American culture, and thereby to enrich the area of investigation concerning Shakespeare’s reception in the US and his role in American culture.

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Время в художественных текстах и комментариях к ним

Author(s): Alexander Dolinin / Language(s): Russian Issue: 9/2022

Discussing anachronisms in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Umberto Eco concluded that most of them remain unnoticed by the Model Reader of the text as they are never located “in very strategic places” and can’t be identified without specialized knowledge that the Model Reader does not have. The article develops upon Eco’s observations, arguing that such “invisible” anachronisms are intrinsic to those genres of the novel that set the task of portraying a distinctive epoch, from Walter Scott’s and Leo Tolstoy’s historical fiction to Sergei Gandlevsky’s representation of the 1970s. If a plot and characters of the text are somehow related to particular historical incidents and persons, the scholarly commentary ought to pinpoint and explain anachronistic discrepancies, but the attempts of annotators to ascribe temporal exactitude to ahistorical narratives (e.g., Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin) are seen as futile and even harmful.

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Two Sides of Egalitarianism: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley

Author(s): Seçil Varal / Language(s): English Issue: 113/2023

Egalitarianism is a social and political philosophy propounding that all mankind should have equal rights and treatment on the premise that everyone is born equal. Although the philosophy dates back to Stoicism in Ancient Greece, it reached its apogee with the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). Impelled by the egalitarian concepts of equality, fraternity, and liberty as well as the revolutionary ideas of English intellectuals such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, English romantic poets expressed a deep concern for injustice and inequality in English society. Although their starting point is the same, the romantic poets’ notion of egalitarianism diverges from each other due to socio-political conditions of their era. This paper outlines two sides of egalitarianism in specific works from two different generations romantic poets, Wordsworth and Shelley, to show that Wordsworth’s egalitarian concern is based on luck egalitarianism that attributes inequality to an individual’s either natural endowments or responsibility; whereas, Shelley adopts political egalitarianism regarding “equality of rights” as a prerequisite to building an egalitarian system. Thus, the paper aims to reveal that Wordsworth primarily detects the problem of inequality by attributing it to ‘luck’, whereas, Shelley due to the heat of current politics offers political solutions to this problem twenty years later.

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Renaissance theatres of the world: staging authority in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia

Author(s): Petruţa Năiduţ / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Drawing on notions of authority as described by Stephen Greenblatt with reference to Renaissance drama and travel writing, of love and obedience explored by William Shakespeare in The Tempest and Thomas Harriot in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, this paper argues that playwrights and travellers to the New World find themselves discoursively connected in imagining, describing and colonising America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the idea of theatre that moves beyond the scope of drama and permeates other fields of writing, the paper discusses rhetorical tropes and commonplaces by means of which literary traditions and overseas ventures address encounters in the New World.

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Colonial Discourse and Tradition in John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour

Author(s): Jack Love / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2022

This paper will focus on texts like Dryden’s that nationalized colonization and thus justified it. Nationalistic works on the conversation about the ‘New World’ left out one key group: indigenous Americans. The transposition of European ideas about the Americas is evident in Dryden’s work because of his interest in supporting or justifying the colonial ventures of the western hemisphere. The Indian Emperour itself connects to the European discourse on colonization through the dichotomy Dryden creates between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ world and the nobility of certain indigenous characters like Montezuma. The Indian Emperour most notably connects to later colonial discourse through Dryden’s placement of the English people in the play. While the English are not physically present in Mexico, Dryden refers to his own collective nationality as a necessary replacement or superior successor to the lands of the ‘New World.’ In this paper, I argue that Dryden’s idea of the necessary replacement, or the worthy colonizer, speaks heavily to later colonial themes and myths in North American literature, where various heroic figures act as intermediaries between the European ‘civilized’ world and the western frontier.

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