CAN THE NON-HUMAN SUBALTERN SPEAK? ADDRESSING INJUSTICE THROUGH PARAKEETS, PENGUINS AND BLUE MACAWS

Author(s): Sutirtho Roy / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Can the Non-Human Subaltern Speak? Addressing Injustice through Parakeets, Penguins and Blue Macaws. Anthropomorphic animals have formed a staple part of the human imagination across space and time, creating a liminal space that offers scope for eco-critical narratives in which anthropomorphic animals offer a counter-gaze to human activities and environmental injustice. The purpose of this study is to look at the characters of Rio, Happy Feet, and Delhi Safari to highlight how talking animals in each of the three animated films voice environmental concerns, and to delineate linguistic factors which regulate the dynamics of power, agency, and care. The article looks at Delhi Safari, which centres on the non-humans’ use of the human tongue to voice their woes before human authority. At the same time, it aims to delineate human attempts to talk to birds in Rio and delve into the very idea of endangered animals being companion species. It seeks to shift from linguistic modes of communication to analyse the narrative and meta-narrative messages conveyed through the dancing penguins of Happy Feet. Finally, the article hopes to address the use and misuse of care by both humans and non-humans, look at the implicit anthropocentrism in such a depiction, and consider the possibility of a truly post-human form of environmental ethics.

Cartea străină

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Author(s): Rodica Grigore / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 10-11/2019

Review by Rodica Grigore.

Characters as Animals in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Author(s): Arda Arikan / Language(s): English Issue: XVIII/2017

Theodore Dreiser’s treatment of his characters as animals in society has been studied from various vantage points. In this study, I offer an impressionistic look at how Dreiser treats his characters in close association with animals. I argue that while characters are treated as animals in line with a deterministic view of the socio-biological world, such representation brings the metaphor of the city substituting the natural habitat of such (hum)animals. Hence, Dreiser’s technique in characterization jumps over his philosophical attachment with social determinism as the energy created in his treatment of his characters as animals moves readers to a unique space in which understanding his characters fully may only be possible when their identities as animals are explored.

Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum

Frequency: 1 issues / Country: Bulgaria

<p>Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum is published by Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and edited by the literary scholars of the Balkan Studies Masters and Doctoral Studies Program (Department of General, Indo-European, and Balkan Linguistics with the Faculty of Slavic Studies). This journal aims to encourage the study of Comparative Literature. The similarities and overlaps between less popular literatures and the well-researched canonical phenomena remain rather unexplored. Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum wants to give priority to such issues; to reconsider the clich&eacute;d notions of centres and peripheries, of one-way influences, temporary delays and topic deficiencies. It makes sense to seek the meaning of common affinities and trends, in other words &ndash; to look at what is positive, stimulating, and creative about the communication between literary and cultural phenomena. In fact, the Balkans are home to just a small share of the less researched literatures in the field of Comparative Literature. In Europe, we often know too little about our neighbours, unless they happen to be the French, German or British literatures.</p> <p>Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum expresses itself in three languages: Bulgarian, French and English. It provides new opportunities for communication between scholars of Comparative Literature with the aim of a complete, conceptual and terminological understanding of new ideas within our field of research.</p>

Colonial/Imperial Discourses in a First-Contact Narrative: Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made of Meat” (1991)

Author(s): Adam Briedik / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This article explores the intersection of colonial/imperial discourse inherent in the genre of science fiction using the example of a first-contact narrative – Terry Bisson’s short story, “They’re Made of Meat” (1991). As a first-contact narrative, the story is analysed in the context of Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) theory on transculturation: contact zone, anti-conquest narrative and autoethnography. First, the paper considers the historical development of the first-contact trope, then the narrative is interpreted as establishing and reproducing several functions of colonialism/imperialism. The distinctively colonial character of the hegemonic discourse informs the dynamics of the contact. However, what sets Bisson’s story apart is not only the subversive nature of the narration, but its seemingly philosophical implications presented in the figure of an alien. The ethnographic framework of the contact zone emulates cognitive appropriation as a function of colonial/imperial discourse; simultaneously, it legitimises the dominant culture while being permeated by discourses such as primitivism and racism. Yet, the narration itself functions as a projection that does not offer space for the marginalised other to actively construct their own identities.

Continuity of Womanist Ethos: Intertextuality in Select Novels of Alice Walker

Author(s): Jesmin U. H. Ruhina / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersectionality, and womanism to explore the continuity of womanist ethos in select novels of the African-American novelist Alice Walker. It attempts to explore Walker’s use of womanism as an intertextual trope in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); Walker’s portrayal of Celie-Shug as a perfect womanist couple in Color Purple and their reappearance in Temple as mother trees; foremothers as role models in Third Life and Temple; Walker’s telling and retelling of Tashi’s life-long suffering from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Color Purple, Temple, and Possessing - the subject of this paper.

Contribuţia noului istorism în cercetarea operei lui Danilo Kiš

Author(s): Lidija Čolević / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3/2013

The present paper delineates the works of Danilo Kiš from the perspective of the alliance between the cultural codes and the position of power within the context of the new historicism based upon the conception of the anthropological literature. It is offered by the talented researcher of Shakespeare’s works, Stephen Greenblatt. The works of Danilo Kiš becomes a complex system of diverse discourses that oppose each other. They are not only part of the culture but an active dynamic part of historical processes and not their echo or picture. At first sight, the barely visible link between Stephen Greenblatt and Danilo Kiš realizes itself in the manner they are writing, in their social ethics and creative aesthetics, taking into consideration the fact that art is indicative of ethics and not only an aesthetic orientation in which we can see the position of the artist in the continuous process of oscillation between homo-politicus and homo-poeticus. The aim of this article is to explain how the manner of narration from Shakespeare’s works could be recognized 400 years later in the works of Danilo Kiš. Viewed from this perspective, the common features of the two characters Eduard Sam - Danilо Kiš and Hamlet – W. Shakespeare opens a series of thematic tendencies: the problem of history, of the state, of the role of the individual within the state, of politics, revenge, crime, morality, insanity, human body, of the unconscious.

Critica totalitarismului şi critica Occidentului la Czesław Miłosz

Author(s): Florin-Ciprian Mitrea / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2011

From the outset, this article tries to describe the philosophical critique of totalitarianism developed on the basis of a critique of Western civilization (in its certain features), as an important category of modern political thought. In this perspective, thinkers as Eric Voegelin, Alexandr Zinoviev and Alexandr Soljenitsyn can be considered highly representatives. That’s why, one of the main endeavours of this article, entitled ”The critique of totalitarianism and the critique of West to Czeslaw Milosz”, is to demonstrate the legitimacy of comprising polish writer’s thought in such a philosophical category. In order to attain this aim, the author highlights two essential sizes of miloszian analytic model on totalitarianism. First of all, he is dealing with the ideology as a central element of the XX-th century’s political pathologies. In this context, the article proposes a comparison between the literary investigation from Milosz’s ”Captive Mind” and the philosophical approach formulated by Alain Besançon on the intellectuals grounds of leninism. Secondly, the author stands out the Eastern sensibility and outlook (based on the collective, although individual in the same time, experience of suffering) that Milosz considers to be the key component part of a certain spiritual superiority of the intellectuals from the countries which were crushed by the Elephant of History after 1945. Starting from this point, the article identifies some philosophical resemblances between Czeslaw Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski and Constantin Noica in the way of defining the concept of liberty (having as a ground the core dichotomy: spiritual values vs. material values).

Culture Clash in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

Author(s): Sorin Cazacu / Language(s): English Issue: XVIII/2017

Tar Baby has always been considered different from other Toni Morrison’s novels even though her thematic preoccupations remain similar. Strong visions of detachment,physical and psychological exile, and a certain state of cultural conflict are experienced throughout the novel. The result of these adverse conditions is that characters remain disconnected from identity and place, from culture and traditions and are held separate by dreams and dream visions from community and memory, even from their own past. This paper aims to investigate how conflict is reflected in these fixed and complex images of lack,expressing the difficulty and impossibility of preserving continuity and collective consciousness within an increasingly fragmented culture.

De/Con x Struction = 0.3 (By Inference, Literature so Boyish, The Leaf Is Death)

Author(s): Dina Lipjankić / Language(s): English Issue: 14/2016

The aim of this paper is to apply the deconstructive method when analysing the poems by Alan Davies. The analysis should also cover the host theme, that is the parasite-host theme as introduced by Hillis Miller. The deconstructive readings of both Derrida and Paul de Man are blended together with the parasite theme in this article, resulting in findings relating both to the content and the structure of the poems. What is more, the analysis also focuses on the unity and the impossibility of the unity of the three poems. Results show that the Poem, as a whole, and the poems taken separately are parasitic, both in terms of structure and meaning. The structure is revealed to be parasitic when considering the titles and the verses, whereas the meaning is revealed as parasitic through Derridian play and supplementarity.

Despre scris și alți demoni

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Author(s): Rodica Grigore / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 01-02/2018

This is a review of a foreign book.

Despre ură și tipologia inadaptatului la Dostoievski și Salinger

Author(s): Călin-Horia Bârleanu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 13/2021

As part of the death drive, hate, so prevalent in world literature as the natural state of so many characters, has led the creative spirits, preoccupied invariably with metamorphosis and ascension, to produce genuine masterpieces. Whether malignant or benign (socially justified), hate, along with its many shapes and forms, generates attitudes which characterize a fundamental concept in Dostoevsky’s fiction, namely the antihero. Displaying typical features that are traceable throughout literature from the great Russian author on, the character dominated by hate withdraws from the world, thus fueling his alienation.

Domesticity and Immigrant Women’s Labor in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Author(s): Brygida Gasztold / Language(s): English Issue: 04/2018

Tracing the stories of Japanese picture brides, a generation of Japanese women who arrived in San Francisco in the early 1900’s for arranged marriages, and their American lives, Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) combines a literary and historical focus. The experiences of dislocation, otherness, assimilation, and exclusion mark the protagonists’ lives, illustrating the dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and gender. Otsuka articulates the problems oscillating between national consciousness and ethnic particularity, providing a critique of U.S. structures of domination and oppression that regulate the immigrant labor market. My paper offers a discussion about Japanese American women protagonists who must constantly reinvent themselves in the play of difference. The female lens, which the author employs, allows her to demonstrate how they are subjected to the forces guided by discourse of culture, ethnicity, and gender. The subaltern woman’s perspective on the domestic politics of U.S. is rendered through a collective narrator, and the absence of an identifiable individual voice stresses the characters’ fragmentation. America as home is transvalued, revealing itself as the site of unhomeliness, insecurity, and violence.

Du discours à l’archétype dans l’œuvre de Mircea Eliade

Author(s): Nicolae Şera / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2022

The exegesis of Mircea Eliade’s work highlights the fact that the author integrated concepts that belong to several sciences into his hermeneutical analysis of religion. Thus, our study analyses both Eliade’s view of discourse and the tight connection with the idea of myth, which is a fundamental religious concept for his work. We are focusing on the concept of myth as fundamental, archaic story, which establishes the connection between human and transcendental by resorting to symbol as a key concept for semiotics. Eliade takes the theories of symbol further into Jungian psychoanalysis, while highlighting its connections with the imaginary and the human subconsciousness, thus getting to a fundamental anthropological concept, that of the archetype. The circle discourse–myth–symbol– archetype that we aim to analyze is thus closed, as it shows the continuity of “divine manifestation”.

Echoes of the Infernal Machine: 1940s French and English Literature of Resistance and Collaboration as a Revolution in the Mythic Imagination

Author(s): Tadd Graham Fernée / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This article comparatively examines French and English literature based on two novels published in 1947, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Jean-Louis Curtis’ The Forests of Night. Both novels employ the mythic device to construct narratives on the twilight of the British Empire and the German occupied French Vichy regime, respectively, depicting experiences of resistance and collaboration on the eve of and during the Second World War. Both invent a system of symbolic imagery modelled on the Surrealist template in Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, that turns the classical mythic device still prevalent in the early 20th century (i.e. in Joyce or Eliot) upside down. The revolution in Mythic Imagination follows the Structuralist Revolution initiated by Durkheim, Saussure and Bachelard, evacuating fixed ontological architecture to portray relational interdependency without essence. These novels pursue overlapping ethical investigations, on “non-interventionism” in Lowry and “fraternity” in Curtis. The novels raise questions about the relation between colonialism and fascism and the impact of non-Western mythic universes (i.e. Hinduism) upon the Mythic Imagination. They have implications for our understanding of gender relations, as well as the value of political activism and progress.

EDNA PONTELLIER’S DIGRESSIVE QUEST FOR THE MATERNAL IN KATE CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING

Author(s): Nilsen Gökçen / Language(s): English Issue: 24/2018

The quest that Kate Chopin’s heroine Edna Pontellier undertakes in The Awakening begins in the summer she spends in Grand Isle in the sensuous atmosphere of the Creole society and her newly found self with Madame Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun. The former, whom Chopin calls mother-woman, embodies all the qualities of womanly beauty, virtue and motherly attachment. With her, Edna, an orphan who lost her mother at a very young age, awakens to an emptiness left by her mother’s loss, which she had formerly tried to repress. Although the novel has often been read from the perspective of sexual awakening, her awakening involves a deeper and archaic need for mother. Edna tries to satisfy her maternal yearnings first with Madame Ratignolle and then with Robert, who has to compete with her for priority in Edna’s life. Next to these flesh and blood substitutes for mother, there is the sea, a stronger maternal force that murmurs to Edna in sonorous tones at the key points of her gradual awakening. In the end, Edna answers the entreaty of the sea leaving behind not only her husband and children but also the two characters that had substituted for her mother. At the end Edna’s need for mother is seen to be a need for transcendence rather than a physical embodiment that can be found in the immanent world, and despite their competitive representations, both Madame Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun prove in the end to be digressions on her journey to her final destination, the sea.

EDWARD ALBEE’S THESANDBOXIN THE LIGHT OF NEW HISTORICISM

Author(s): Elmira Bazregarzadeh / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

History is an important part of human being’s life in that it plays an important role in shaping our private, public, and political viewpoints. It serves as a mirror to life because it connects past events with present ones and may at times affect the future as well. Likewise, history enables us to ponder about the reason behind some past events and their influence on the individuals’ present lives. The wide range of history and its broad coverage of different causes and effects of life events are the two focal issues that open the readers’ eyes to the inherent features of the New Historicists’ examinations of various works of literature. With this critical standpoint in mind, the present paper intends to study Edward Albee’s play The Sandbox to reveal the existing factors that link the play with the previous historical events present in the American history of the time. By choosing New Historicism as the main model, the paper will shed light on such issues as power, resistance, and subversion put forward by such leading figures of this critical approach as Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt.

EFFICIENT STRATEGIES OF A POPULAR MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE: THE CASE OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY COURSE ("MODPO")

Author(s): Irina-Ana Drobot / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2020

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the reasons for the success of the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry Course held by Professor Al Filreis from the University of Pennsylvania, held on Coursera platform. Among the success factors, based on participants' feedback, we find the interaction with the instructor and teaching assistants, as well as with other students, which is found to a larger extent than in other MOOCs. Reasons for the use of the strategies will also be explored. We know from Hofstede's cultural dimensions that the USA score low on the power distance index, meaning that the relationships with authority are friendly and on equal terms. The interaction teacher - student is done in the same way in the offline as in the online media, with the same type of communication, low-context since the US relies on explicit communication. Otherwise, we notice how creativity of the students is encouraged, as they are given the freedom to express their opinions on the poems studied, another feature of low power distance cultures in the field of education. The benefit of such a course is that it encourages students to see poetry as accessible and as a means to express themselves freely and become more aware of how they feel when they react to understanding poetry. Students of all ages can share their experiences in the interpretation of the poems. The way the course is taught is in tune with the way contemporary poetry claims to be anti-elitist and thus accessible to everyone.

EKSPERIMENTALNI AMERIČKI PESNICI I SRPSKA KULTURA (DŽEROM ROTENBERG „BEOGRADSKA APOKALIPSA“ I BOB PERELMAN „DA LI SI GA ČUO“)

Author(s): Dubravka Đurić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 9/2014

Starting from the fact that Serbian poets, especially from the late 1970s, established direct connections with American poets, I focussed my attention to their relationship with poets of New American Poetry as well as language poetry. I map the first translation of Beat poets and poets of San Fransisco Rennaisanse. Then I discuss Jerome Rothenberg's work and explain his notion of ethnopoetics. At the end I pay attention to the language poets, with a particular focus on Bob Perelman's work.

Englesko govorno područje 2018.

Author(s): Ulvija Tanović,Una Tanović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1-2/2019

Preko trnja do zvijezda ili žedne preko vode: Književni prevodi na engleskom govornom području u 2018.