Terra Ignota. Marksizm kosmiczny jako marksizm apofatyczny

Author(s): Agnieszka Urbańczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 41/2021

The article discusses Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, which problematizes the liberal nature of contemporary utopias. The fictional 25th century, in which gender, nation states and the traditional understanding of the family–but not inequalities–have been abolished, is contrasted with the ideals a small percentage of the population. While the fictional reality is treated as a utopia by the majority of characters, the Utopians strive for a radical rupture from the contingency and pledge themselves to the unknown future. Since the states in Palmer’s world lack territory and it is impossible for Utopia to form an enclave on Earth, the Hive dedicates itself to terraforming Mars, with leaving Earth as their one common goal. The tasks the Utopians undertake are not rooted in a coherent homogenous project but seem to be grounded in a protest against the status quo naturalized by the rest of society. The Utopian strategy is treated as an example of China Miéville’s apophatic Marxism. Apophasis remains a powerful tool of critique and an incentive to take action.

Book-review: Lowell Wyse, Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature

Author(s): Marian-Răducu Toderiță / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Poetyka ewokacji (nie)uczciwości w opowiadaniu Człowiek, który zdemoralizował Hadleyburg Marka Twaina

Author(s): Beata Garlej / Language(s): Polish Issue: 35/2021

The article refers to the axiological paradigm of (dis)honesty (the notion taken from Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s analysis) capable of being one of the dedicated devices of the poetics of evocation. The point of reference for these theoretical reflections is Mark Twain’s short story entitled “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”. The writer’s presentation of the still up-to-date and relevant axiological paradigm of (dis)honesty is at the hub of the deliberations, which aim to ascertain what constitutes the origin of its uniqueness and the freshness of its display. Primarily with the help of the concept taken from Roman Ingarden’s “catalogue” of aesthetically valuable qualities (“the ‘novelty’ variant”), and also drawing on the philosopher’s reflections devoted to one of the two ontological dimensions of the construction of a literary work (phaseality), an attempt is made to identify the specificity of the epically visualised phenomenon of (dis)honesty, and determine the methodological character of the poetics of evocation, necessary for this purpose.

Interpreting Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible

Author(s): David Brandenberger / Language(s): English Issue: 34/2021

This critical analysis of Joan Neuberger’s book This Thing of Darkness (Cornell University Press, 2019) hails the monograph for its exhaustive research and thorough analysis. Eisenstein stands out in the pages of This Thing of Darkness as the quintessential non-conformist — an exception to everything we know about Soviet subjectivity. Neuberger argues that the question of whether Eisenstein was pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet is effectively a reductionist dead end. Eisenstein, she suggests, was an exception — someone who defied categorization, whether by his cinematographer contemporaries or by Stalin himself, for that matter. The article contends that Neuberger’s reading of Eisenstein as an imaginative, stubborn, risk-taking and subversive director challenges recent scholarship on the restrictive nature of Stalinist subjectivity. The author also investigates Neuberger’s contention that Stalin banned the second part of Ivan the Terrible in part because of the film’s homoeroticism by reexamining the fragmentary historical record. In so far as there is no reason to think that Stalin would have hesitated to articulate to Zhdanov or to Eisenstein and Cherkasov any specific objections he had to the film’s homoeroticism, the author suspects that the best explanation for the dictator’s banning of the film remains the historical license that Eisenstein took with the official Stalinist line on the terrible tsar.

Семантический аспект понятия дом в готической литературе и его трансформация в прозе Говарда Филлипса Лавкрафта

Author(s): Jelena Tarasawa / Language(s): Russian Issue: 13/2021

The article examines semantic aspects of the concept of a house in Gothic literature and its transformation and comprehension by the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. A house in literature is not just an architectural element, an entourage; it is a living space that determines the emotional state of characters, their spiritual and mental quest. The semantics of the word “house” is very extensive, therefore different writers (H.P. Lovecaft in particular) artfully play with meanings, offering their own original interpretations of a house.

A Review of Antoine Traisnel, "Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of the New Animal Condition." Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 358 pages, ISBN 978-1-5179-0964-2 (pb), hardcover 108 $, paperback 27 $

Author(s): Michael Fuchs / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

‘Higher Laws’ and ‘Divine Madness’. Transnational and Translocal Configurations of Quixotic In/Sanity in the American Renaissance

Author(s): Albena Bakratcheva / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The New England Transcendentalists deliberately chose a position which by definition did not belong to what was to them the common “prosaic mood” (Thoreau) of their time. Their choice was the result of representatively romantic discontent with their contemporary reality and, at the same time, through the vigorous drive of the Puritan spiritual leadership, it was essentially anachronistic. The sophisticated delight of identifying with such a doubly anomalous nonconformist ideal only intensified the need for counterbalancing the prosaic sanity of the real world with a wished-for poetic insanity, or “madness from the gods” (Emerson). Such “madness by romantic identification” whose “features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes” (Foucault), naturally caused “Quixotic confusion” between reality and imagination and the substitution of the true with the fabulous. Though peculiarly intensified in the former Puritan context and in the context of ‘Americanness’ in which the nineteenth century New England intellectuals placed it, the problem was far from being merely a local, New England-centered, phenomenon. This paper argues that in their ‘in/sane’ Quixotic quest for perfection, which caused a series of personal failures, the New England Transcendentalists were remarkably faithful saunterers in a blessed place that, to them, was both America and, at the same time, the all-encompassing perennial—translocal and transnational—world, inviting them to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.”

Self-Destruction of Africans in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

Author(s): Samet Güven,Rana Erdoğan / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2021

Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker is a novel which highlights undeliberate collaboration of African people with the West to destroy not only their own natural sources but also their own community via exploitation and female circumcision. It deals with these themes and shows how Africans prepare their own ends because of their greediness and blind attachment to their primitive traditions. In this respect, the purpose of this article is to shed light on the deformation of African women generation due to enforced circumcision and to reveal how Africans lose their existence when they unconsciously collaborate with the West on the devastation of the natural ecosystem. The findings of the study demonstrate that Africans are too ignorant to understand the negative effects of wilful exploitation of the forest and genital mutilation.

El Señor Presidente ve La Fiesta del Chivo Adlı Romanların Oluşumcu Yapısalcı Analizi

Author(s): Neslihan Kadıköylü / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 108/2021

Miguel Ángel Asturias and Mario Vargas Llosa, both have experienced the dictatorial regime in their own countries in their youth, are among the main novelists who express the destruction caused by dictatorships. The authors’ novels El Señor Presidente (Mr. President) and La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), received great acclaim at the time of their publication, describe the darkness, cruelty, torture and death by revealing the society of fear created by the dictatorship and its consequences. In the axis of these books, this study aims to examine the theme of dictatorship and the figure of the dictator and also to explain the key concepts that constitute the social structures in the novels. In the study, the French sociologist and critic theorist Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralism method was used, who stated that the meaningful structures formed by historical and social values directly affect a novel, and therefore, examining a literary work with a focus on the connection between novel and society will yield more comprehensive results. Also, in the study, the authority-obedience relationships in the novels were tried to be explained in line with Erich Fromm’s thoughts and Norbert Elias’s theories were included in the evaluations on social structure and relations.

THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET: A PARABLE OF DEGENERATION OR A CHICANA REWRITING OF CHARLES KINGSLEY’S THE WATER-BABIES

Author(s): Carme Manuel / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

Reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) makes it possible for Esperanza Cordero to imagine an idyllic site of empowered identity in The House on Mango Street. Yet, I argue that Esperanza’s transformed identity can only reside outside her original community and that her journey from the sad red house of Mango Street to her reconceived clean house at the end of the text is necessarily a trajectory of desired uprootedness that follows the script presented in The Water-Babies. Like Tom, Kingsley’s protagonist, Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis to shed off the traits that categorize her as Chicana in order to embrace a remodeled subjectivity and, consequently, become an ontologically deterritorialized Hispanic.

Toplumcu Gerçekçi Edebiyat Odağında Gazap Üzümleri’nde Toplumsal Cinsiyet Rolleri ve Kadın Gerçekliği

Author(s): Aziz Şeker,Emre Özcan / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 18/2021

Socialist realist literary works focus on the oppressive and discriminatory mechanisms that females are exposed to in the social structure and their struggle against these mechanisms. The Grapes of Wrath novel by John Steinbeck, has a valuable place among the social realist literary works of the era. The novel is about the migration journey of a family that makes a living in Oklahoma and lives off agricultural production to search the new jobs with the dissolution of the feudal production. One of the striking points of the journey is the interpretation of the gender roles that stand out throughout the work with the character of Mother Joad. This study evaluates the novel The Grapes of Wrath through the construction of gender roles and discusses the female reality in the work through the character of Mother Joad.

Hysteria, Madness and Disciplinary Power: The Next Room and Mrs. Packard

Author(s): Sinan GÜL / Language(s): English Issue: 18/2021

Mrs. Packard (2008) by Emily Mann and The Next Room or The Vibrator Play (2009) by Sarah Ruhl explore and deplore the conventions of the 19th century life-style while revealing the difficulties women experienced through the means of medical advances. Protesting the appropriation of scientific methods to oppress women’s body and mind, both plays display examples of alternative methods to resist oppression despite being written in different tones, styles, and for different purposes. Using Foucault’s formation of power and resistance theory to trace the theme of protest in both plays, this paper analyzes their relevance to contemporary audiences by emphasizing their break from the Enlightenment values and modern institutions.

Egzystencjalny wymiar codzienności w twórczości Josifa Brodskiego (esej Полторы комнаты)

Author(s): Joanna Tarkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 170/2020

As it is known, A room and a Half, the Joseph Brodsky’s essay, is the example of a poetic prose in which out of a dense network of philosophical deliberations autobiographical memories of the creator of Watermark emerge. Accordingly, in this article the attempt is made to put together, from the scraps of poetic memories, a comprehensive picture of everyday life in Leningrad as it is perceived by the poetic “I” from the migration distance. The life that is connected with a given historical period, metaphorised in an obvious manner, and intertwined in its essence with an existential credo of an artist. Due to the multitude and complexity of themes and plots present in the works of Leningrad’s poet, in the given text the attention is solely drawn to the three coordinates, i.e. Family, Home, City, inasmuch as they show the path towards comprehension of everyday life from the perspective of the former child of Jewish parents, the poet and the immigrant. As we attempt to prove, the Brodsky’s eponymous essay is the commitment towards parents and this place. Besides, the migration distance sharpens the contours of memories and, thanks to that, the feelings and places previously ordinary and imperceptible become more vivid in the poet’s memory.

Identity Crisis as the Main Motive of Contemporary Native American Literature

Author(s): Sergii Rudenko,Yaroslav Sobolievskyi / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2021

This research offers a linguacultural analysis of the main ideas and goals of institutions for the preservation of the culture and language of the Indigenous peoples of America, through the publication of relevant research in thematic journals and popular books, to determine the relevance of the problem of the identity crisis in the worldview and literature of Native Americans. The authors used the thick description method to analyse the main goals of twenty-five Native American organisations, basing their research on articles published in the past few years in nine scientific journals on various topics (from culture to business) and books written by Indigenous authors. The authors reached their conclusions based on this research material. The results of the study, which focused on institutions that preserve the culture and heritage of the Indigenous peoples of America and their activities, found that one of the main challenges is the preservation of identity. Analysis of the articles of leading journals on literature, culture, politics, business, philosophy, as well as analysis of the content of the books written by Indigenous people, revealed that identity crisis is an urgent problem. Despite the prevailing opinion in American society, it is obvious that a crisis is inevitable. All 25 of the organisations, whose goals were studied in this article, support, preserve, broadcast, and transmit values, heritage, and spiritual culture, and, in one way or another, confront the identity crisis. After analysing more than 550 articles in nine scientific journals devoted to the culture of American Indians, it was found that the vast majority of materials directly or indirectly relate to the problem of the crisis. To count the exact number of articles in which this problem is raised, in our opinion, is impossible due to subjective views, but we argue that this percentage is very significant. Almost all materials in one way or another relate to the problem of an identity crisis.

Dark Matter. An Ecopsychological Approach to the Ontology of Plant Expression in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation and Richard Linklater’s a Scanner Darkly

Author(s): David M. J. Carruthers / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Taking up Michael Marder’s “object of psychoanalysis, wherein we might detect a vegetal approach to the psyche,” and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, which traces the twisted loops of agrilogistics, this article proposes an ecopsychological approach to the expression of plant soul as the very constitution of human subjectivity. Examining Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, which demonstrates the pretty blue Mors ontologica’s insidious plant agency to cleave the somatic human spirit, and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, wherein cinematic plant-thinking demands temporal distortions that render the human uncanny, this article positions the plant as the primary mover, the animating force and manifestation of human desire and its expression.

Growing the Living in the Land. Weird Ecology in Rob Guillory’s Comic Farmhand

Author(s): Dona Pursall / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Weird tales are rooted in gothic, science and speculative fictions but they also engage real science. Rob Guillory’s comics series Farmhand (2018–ongoing) depicts a discordant relationship between science, perception and ideology through themes related to contemporary farming and bioengineering. This article explores how Guillory’s comic utilises weird qualities through realism, creation of atmosphere, and the use of layout and seriality. Further, this analysis considers the ways in which the comics form enables open-ended and multi-perspective storytelling. Weird devices invite a questioning, reflective but unresolved engagement with contemporary issues, which enables Guillory’s comics to imaginatively reconsider normative social structures, ideologies, and the frames which reinforce them.

The Weirdness of Hyperobjects

Author(s): Stefan Jenkins / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Global weirding, a phrase coined by Hunter Lovins and popularised by Thomas Friedman, has garnered a modicum of prominence since its popularisation in the late 2000s. It was coined as a replacement for global warming, with the abnormal effects of climate change foregrounded. When conceiving the concept of the ‘hyperobject’, Timothy Morton uses global warming specifically as one of his key examples. However, as the vernacular for referring to climate change has been updated, it seems prudent to examine the hyperobject again. When writing on the topic of hyperobjects, Morton does describe them as being ‘weird’. This article will determine whether hyperobjects exhibit properties similar to the weird and therefore determine how far hyperobjects can be considered truly weird, in order to evaluate whether it is an apt description or not. The weird originates from Weird Fiction, an early 20th century pulp genre. One of the most renowned authors of weird fiction was H. P. Lovecraft, whose theories of the weird have influenced other authors and academics, such as Mark Fisher, for decades. In recent years a new wave of the weird, called the New Weird, has emerged and updated theories of the weird once again. This article will use Lovecraft’s and Fisher’s theories and definitions of the weird as well as examples from the weird canon, and compare them to the concept of the hyperobject, evaluating how far the properties of the hyperobject can be considered weird.

From Proving Ground to Bumblehive. Touring Utah’s Weird Information Landscape

Author(s): Owen Marshall / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The American state of Utah has emerged as an important infrastructural and experimental hub for large-scale information science and communication technology endeavors: both Meta (formerly Facebook) and the US intelligence community maintain massive data centers just south of Salt Lake City, each of which require over a million gallons of water per day to cool servers housing billions of gigabytes of personal data. Utah-based research services such as FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, both with roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormons) play hugely important roles in the growing online genealogical and genetic research industry, which continues to re-shape how kinship relations are conceptualized and evaluated globally. Many of the state’s municipal agencies were recently forced to cancel contracts with the AI-based software company Banjo (since renamed SafeXai), which promised to consolidate diverse information streams into a “live-time” data surveillance service, following revelations the firm’s CEO was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. This article reads these unfolding projects through John Durham Peters’ concepts of Mormon “media theology” and “celestial bookkeeping,” as well as the fiction of Utah-rooted authors W. H. Pugmire and Orson Scott Card. It sketches a tour of Utah as a weird information landscape, wherein unfathomable quantities of data find material embodiment and the secular-rational promises and practices of Big Data reveal latent cosmic aspects.

Saidiya Hartman i krnąbrne biografie. Co czarne herstorie mogą zrobić dla polskiego „zwrotu ludowego”?

Author(s): Łukasz Kiełpiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 18/2021

This article presents on the method of “critical fabulation”, developed by American academic Saidiya Hartman with a view to reconstructing lost biographies of black women from the period of slavery and shortly thereafter. Hartman’s controversial method finds its ethical and epistemological justification, which the author of the article tries to reconstruct. The study also discusses the possibility of adapting the technique of critical fabulation for the purpose of telling women’s stories as part of the Polish “people’s turn”.

Theatricality of women’s voice: An Embarrassing Position by Kate Chopin

Author(s): Agnieszka KLIŚ / Language(s): English Issue: 03 (34)/2021

The paper offers an analysis of An Embarrassing Position, the only extant and not very well-known theatre play by Kate Chopin. Even though it is only one-act-long, the play does not only contribute to the greatness of the artistry of the author, but it also subtly and wittily raises the question of societal imbalance and women’s right to self-deciding. Hence, the aim of this paper is both to expose the theatricality of women’s voice embedded in the play validating women’s stance and foretelling women’s emancipation, and to bring the play to the broader attention of academics as a unique, still underexamined, work of Chopin. In order to establish this light comedy play within a serious domain of women’s rights struggle, as well as to inscribe this short piece of work into the long list of Chopin’s writings which are profeminist in their overtone, the paper uses hermeneutic analysis with elements of Derrida’s deconstructionist theory of différance, and employs Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity. Derrida’s deconstruction serves to uncover the inner inconsistencies residing within the humorous lines of the play, whereas synchronicity provides the scaffold for the play’s events that bonds the analysis elements into one meaningful whole.