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.

Colonizing the Mind: A Dialectic Approach to Education and Language in Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories

Author(s): Adisa Ahmetspahić / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

Mind colonization has been a burning issue in the last few decades in the fields of science and humanities. It is argued that mind colonization of the indigenous populations has been conducted via education and language in the mission of ‘civilizing’ since education and language carry culture specific sets of meaning, including knowledge and truth which condition our perception of the world. Zitkala-Ša is one of the earliest Native American authors and activists who sought to subvert the epistemological hierarchy imposed through mind colonization. Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical collection of short stories titled American Indian Stories (1921) documents her boarding school experience and the acquisition of the colonizer’s education and language. The present paper seeks to address mind colonization through language and education on the example of Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories relying on a number of theories and approaches. The paper also reflects on the importance of Zitkala-Ša mastery of the colonizer’s language.

Creatively retelling a catholic legend in Hisaye Yamamoto’s The Eskimo Connection

Author(s): TAKUMA FURUKAWA / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

The delineation of interethnic relations between Japanese Americans and other ethnic minorities in the work of a Japanese American author, Hisaye Yamamoto (1921–2011), has been a major research focus in the field of Asian American literature. The Eskimo Connection (1983) presents such an interaction between a female Japanese American and a male Alaskan Native American character in a unique setting: by letters of correspondence between California and a prison in the Midwest. It is well known that Yamamoto was deeply fascinated by the Catholic faith, although the religious aspect of her work has not been much explored. The current paper analyzes the Christian motifs and implications in The Eskimo Connection with a view to presenting a new interpretation: namely that the story can be read as Yamamoto’s creative re-narration of a Catholic legend, the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. By reconstructing the legend within the story of an interethnic relationship, Yamamoto seems to challenge Euro-American-centric Christianity. This article will clarify Yamamoto’s perspective on interethnic solidarity as a survivor of the internment camp and a religious person whose faith is heavily inspired by Catholicism.

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

-

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

This is a review of a foreign book.

Dimensions of Noise and Silence in the Novel ˮBeautiful Ruinsˮ by Jess Walter

Author(s): Dana Sala / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

The novel Beautiful Ruins (2012) by Jess Walter combines a satirical vision on Hollywood industry, with haunting nostalgia of sixties. The reign of visibility goes along, in contemporary film culture, with the increase of noise. Too much visibility appears as an alternative to stuff the noise of the world, to make it inaudible. The industry of film, as presented in the novel Beautiful Ruins, tends to have more and more in common with voyeurism, responsiveness to curious gaze superseding the barrier of intimacy and the overall desire of the public to see something 'unseen'. The influence of a new lifestyle made in Hollywood, the paparazzi style that permeated more strata of society has got into our daily life. Silence belongs to other ages. Silence could show man the forgotten path to himself. Silence does not find any roots now. Silence cannot have any longer the function of reconnection. People tend to disconnect more easily from themselves and from their fellow beings; they are used to different stimuli. The noise of the world is also a stimulus. Without it, everything seems life-less. Inflation of visibility and noise are intrinsically related.

Dlaczego Tajemnica Brokeback Mountain nie jest tragedią?

Author(s): Dominika Ferens / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The philosophical underpinnings and existential implications of Annie Proulx’s fiction situate it in the tradition of literary naturalism. The writer portrays characters from the lower social classes, people who are unable to overcome the impasse in which they have found themselves. Far from idyllic sentiments, Proulx’s approach to the experience of place connects her to the writers associated with so-called new regionalism. She shows the degrading influence of the life amidst beautiful natural surroundings on individual human psyche. Proulx looks closely at the processes of the commodification of regional culture and interprets them as symptoms of a dangerous global tendency.

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.

Drwale, czyli o antropocenie (prawie) bez patosu

Author(s): Justyna Włodarczyk / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The philosophical underpinnings and existential implications of Annie Proulx’s fiction situate it in the tradition of literary naturalism. The writer portrays characters from the lower social classes, people who are unable to overcome the impasse in which they have found themselves. Far from idyllic sentiments, Proulx’s approach to the experience of place connects her to the writers associated with so-called new regionalism. She shows the degrading influence of the life amidst beautiful natural surroundings on individual human psyche. Proulx looks closely at the processes of the commodification of regional culture and interprets them as symptoms of a dangerous global tendency.

E.A. Poe i F. M. Dostojevski: Nastanak i preispitivanje kriminalističkog žanra

Author(s): Fahrudin Kujundžić / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 14/2021

Crime fiction originated in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of great positivistic confidence in the potential of human knowledge. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are considered as the beginning of the genre, and his character Auguste Dupin is the first modern literary detective. F. M. Dostoevsky did not write crime novels because the elements of the genre present in his novels participate in the construction of a different kind. However, this paper will try to look in more detail at the key differences between Dostoevsky and the classical rules of crime fiction, on the example of the novel “Crime and Punishment”.A deeper understanding of these differences reveals the limits of the genre, while in Dostoevsky one can recognize one of the early critiques of the fundamental principles and world picture that the genre represents.

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.

Ecotopia rising: the quest for the future in two novels by Ernest Callenbach

Author(s): Mihai A. Stroe / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia emerging (1981) (the latter a prequel to the initial novel) are relevant for both the ecological paradigm and the birth of a neo-Utopian cast of mind in our age. The novels are together almost an anticipatory treatise of sorts on the question of the ongoing emergence of an ecological conscience of man forging a way towards a viable future, wherein harmony between Ecotopians and Nature is a foundation of all man-cosmos relationships. The solutions found in the version of the ecotopian project as proposed by Callenbach in 1975 and 1981 are consciously echoing every step of the way old types of native-American wisdom. The Ecotopian civilizational model imagined by Callenbach is not a perfect world, but one tarred by crass contradictions, and yet decisively based on a strong opposition against the national philosophy of America, which is fatefully grounded in the notion of perpetual technological progress – the latter itself an echo of: 1) the Romantic Revolution with its science positing the possibility of scientific “Titanism,” understood as man’s capacity to perpetually accumulate knowledge ad infinitum; 2) the First Industrial Revolution that generated the concept that “bigger is better.” Through Ecotopia’s ecosophy, which we hereby propose to explore as reflected in the two novels mentioned above, Callenbach attacks the technopolitan tendencies deriving from the so-called Second Scientific Revolution of the 20th century, with roots in the 19th century (ca. 1800 and earlier), and associated with the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, which essentially paid no attention to a quest for harmony between man and the universe, and which had as a purpose basically the attainment at all price of increasingly more and more comfort for man, but especially for the rich, by putting in the hands of the latter more and more power with which to enslave Nature, Man and finally Time itself.

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.

Ekofeministički pristup iskorištavanju kitova u Melvilleovu Mobyju Dicku

"Čovjek osjeća neko zadovoljstvo kad čita o kitovima kroz njihove vlastite naočari"

Author(s): Sanja Kajinić / Language(s): Croatian / Publication Year: 0

In this paper, I will approach the celebrated masterpiece of nineteenth century American literature — Melville’s Moby Dick using the critical concepts developed by feminist and vegetarian critics within ecofeminist theory. Thus, we will first look at the cultural production of the texts of meat, which are developed by emptying out of animal subjectivity and treating animals as referents absent from the sphere of human morality. Next, we will look at the background of the Nantucket society and whale fishing industry, and its role in strengthening the texts of meat embodied in whaling. Also, the romanticizing of violence and myth making connecting the whale men with the hunters and pioneers venerated in the myth of the American frontier are then examined. The factory function of the whale ship is analyzed in terms of industrialization encroaching upon the world of nature, and of treatment of animals as consumable commodities. Lastly, the concept of »Manifest Destiny« is read through the spectacles of extinction of whales and other species.

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.

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Teacher's Perceptions and Use of Mobile Devices and Applications

Author(s): Elias Bensalem / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

This paper reports on a study of how a group of tertiary level EFL teachers perceived and used mobile devices in their teaching and personal learning. One hundred and fifty teachers (66 female, 84 male) from public universities in Saudi Arabia completed an online questionnaire. Results showed that the majority of participants used mobile devices and applications in their teaching and learning. Survey data showed that the vast majority of teachers had positively perceived and frequently used mobile technologies in their teaching and personal learning. In addition, there was a correlation between teachers’ use of mobile technologies in their teaching and their use in learning. There was also a correlation between how teachers perceived the value of mobile technologies in learning, and how they use them in their teaching.

Fabuły Thomasa Pynchona

Author(s): Tadeusz Pióro / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

Thomas Pynchon is an acclaimed American writer associated with postmodernism. His fiction offers complex insights into the social, cultural and political dimensions of American life, describing a variety of important phenomena, such as the invasion of entertainment industry, the expansion of new technologies, the strengthening of regimes within apparently democratic establishments. Pynchon dissects the linguistic mechanisms of communication and of shaping human consciousness.