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Bleeding Edge of Postmodernism: Metamodern Writing in the Novel by Thomas Pynchon

Author(s): Simon Radchenko / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

Many different models of contemporary novel’s description arose from the search for methods and approaches of post-postmodern texts analysis. One of them is the concept of metamodernism, proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and based on the culture and philosophy changes at the turn of this century. This article argues that the ideas of metamodernism and its main trends can be successfully used for the study of contemporary literature. The basic trends of metamodernism were determined and observed through the prism of literature studies. They were implemented in the analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge (2013). Despite Pynchon being usually considered as postmodern writer, the use of metamodern categories for describing his narrative strategies confirms the idea of the novel’s post-postmodern orientation. The article makes an endeavor to use metamodern categories as a tool for post-postmodern text studies, in order to analyze and interpret Bleeding Edge through those categories.

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Journalism does not fit Everybody. Two Points of View

Author(s): Fănel Teodorașcu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2021

In this article, we aim at comparing two different visions about journalism. The first one belongs to Mark Twain, himself a former journalist, and was extracted from his novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), while the second one is taken from a newspaper article, published in Adevărul [The Truth], more than eight decades ago. We believe that our research is a salutary / opportune one, and that is why it does not need further justifications.

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Apokalyptische Kammermusik – Edgar Allan Poe dichtet den Schiffbruch, Alfred Kubin zeichnet ihn

Author(s): Hans Richard Brittnacher / Language(s): German Issue: 30/2021

Stories about adventures at sea offer an exemplary scheme for modern heroic narratives – they provide the bourgeois world with the longed-for ›metaphors for existence‹ (Blumenberg), which certify its cultural superiority, economic vigor, masculine determination, and technical efficiency. E. A. Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, irritates this indestructible optimism with its poetic profession to the end of the world. In an elegiac suite to apocalyptic experience, failure is varied until it finally succeeds, and is experienced by its participants in a state of almost lustful apathy. In the ink drawings by Alfred Kubin, the diffuse lure of the apocalypse finds its congenial counterpart.

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A Rhetorical Approach to Aspects of Philip Roth’s Narration Technique in the Zuckerman Project

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 17/2014

The Zuckerman project is characterized by a variety of narration techniques. The first book of the project is a first-person narration. A different narration technique (third-person narration) is adopted with the second installment, i.e. Zuckerman Unbound (also maintained through The Anatomy Lesson). Then Roth switches back to first-person narration and the diary style in the “Prague Orgy” and introduces fractures specific to metafiction in The Counterlife. Next, with the American trilogy he draws heavily on the technique called paralepsis. Finally, with Exist Ghost he surprises again. Over the course of the Zuckerman project, Roth submits his authorial audience to a continuous puzzlement, disregarding expectations or better said mocking at their expectations and their urge for the logical linkage with what the previous autonomous books conveyed.

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Rhetorical Choices and Effects in Jean Stafford’s “The End of a Career”

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2015

The present paper focuses on “The End of a Career,” the last short-story in Jean Stafford’s 1969 collection titled Collected Short-Stories, using the rhetorical approach to narrative as an investigative method. The result is an investigation of the purpose behind the artistic communicative act that is “The End of a Career,” starting from the range of rhetorical effects that accompany the progression of this narrative. As a rule, the narrator's choices of narrative technique and manner represent the way in which (s)he seeks to influence the audience’s cognition, emotions and values and reveal the purpose of the communicative act. Therefore, I will show that this realistic inverted-chronology reconstruction of Angelica Early’s life the narrator carries out is meant to bring to the short story the dignity of tragedy and reveal the protagonist as a twentieth-century tragic heroine.

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Problematici în America Latină. Contraste socioculturale și reprezentările lor în literatura contemporană

Author(s): Sorina-Crina Ghiață / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 12/2020

Starting with the independence process of all the territories once colonies and later, overseas territories of the different states of Western Europe, Latin America meant an association of unique paradoxes. Portugal and Spain have dominated in the past, especially from a linguistic and religious perspective, the current space that became a varied cultural environment. In this context, the aim of this study is to capture, in the introductory part, characteristics of the Latin American complex identity(reflected, for example, in the names associated with this space of civilization, in political circumstances and social issues, in particular). In addition, another purpose is to highlight the way in which these aspects are considered in the prose of modern Latin American writers, Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Héctor Abad Faciolince. At the same time, emphasizing the scourge of discrimination or inequality, but especially the perpetual violence, the study concludes with a reference (also found in the literary discourse of the two texts chosen for analysis, Los sordos and El olvido que seremos) to the ethical spirit, but also to the feeling of empathy—subjects approached by both writers—in a world that seems more and more fragmented and depersonalized, as if it has been occupied by a continuous stigma of imbalance.

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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.

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On hate and the typology of the misfit in Dostoevsky’s and Salinger’s Works

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

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Writing Travel as Janus: Cultural Translation as Descriptive Category for Travel Writing

Author(s): Shang Wu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The intersection of the study of travel writing and the study of translation produces two major perspectives: travel writing in translation and translation in travel writing. The first one looks into how the travel narrative is reshaped in a different linguistic and cultural context; the other looks into the translational character of the travel narrative, as the traveller is constantly moving between languages and cultures. Though the conceptual analogy between traveller and translator has been long noted, the linguistic dimension that marks the language difference in travel narrative is rarely underlined. In this essay, in order to explore the possibility of foregrounding both the conceptual link between travel and translation and the linguistic dimension of travel narrative, I propose to integrate an attention to language difference into a reinvention of the contested yet promising term ‘cultural translation’. The American writer Peter Hessler’s travel account Country Driving is cited as a case study.

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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”.

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New Decorums: Whitman’s Olfactory Metaphors in Song of Myself

Author(s): Kiyotaka Sueyoshi / Language(s): English Issue: 23/2022

Whitman’s olfactory metaphors are key tropes in his poems but they have been neglected so far. Furthermore, Emerson’s reaction to them sheds light on the relation between the two men, and shows that we need to expand our research on them through the incorporation of various ‘olfactory perspectives.’ This essay is about olfactory reading of Song of Myself—reframing it through a lens of the sense of smell. It will show that Whitman’s exploration for new poetic diction and the semantic of Whitman’s materialization into a poet—both are correlated—necessitate frequent usages of olfactory metaphors. With the inclusion of various olfactory viewpoints, the essay shows that Whitman’s metaphors of this kind portray his transformation into a mythical poet and smooth out this transition. Through his ‘celebrations’—calling body odor the fragrance and enjoying it, coming into contact with the atmosphere, and calling breath ‘smoke’— Whitman metamorphoses into a mythical poet, while all these celebrations are effected by his verbal fiat through olfactory metaphors, which finally enables him to communicate with ‘a spirit,’ which spreads his ‘barbaric yawp.’ All of these are fruition of Whitman’s ‘new decorums.’

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Semnificația numelui în construirea identității în „Song of Solomon” de Toni Morisson

Author(s): Andreea Smedescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3/2016

The identity of a person assumes a complex phenomenon, inculcating variegated aspects and meanings. The article is centered upon the investing of a person with a denomination. To bestow a name to a subject is to recognize the subject’s existence, and also its spatial and temporal dynamic. The name functions as a social pre-identity. The self interacts with the other, who no longer is an abstract figure, but becomes a recognizable referent. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the name helps to form a character’s identity, investing it symbolically. The main character, Milkman, gets his true name as a result of a set of events, which outlines the idea that man is the result of social actions, and of hereditary factors. The article stresses the careful process employed by the writer in selecting the name of the characters, in order to cast a light upon their personality, and most of all to create an ideological subtext. Each character becomes an idea, a concept. Milkman symbolizes the oedipal complex, ventured in an attempt of escaping the parental figure. Song of Solomon, although considered a novel obsessed with names (Duvall, 90), symbolizes an obelisk aspiring to reach the symbolic existential horizon, because in the end a human life is a symbol of spiritual trials, of returning to myth and origins, but mostly of Icaric flight when human assumes his destiny to conquer his own supremacy.

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Loveći vampira od Jadrana do Karpata: Balkanizam u romanu Povjesničarka Elizabeth Kostove

Author(s): Zvonimir Glavaš / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2016

Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian (2005) was generally recognized by literary critics as a literary more serious work than numerous contemporary trivial vampire sagas. In their appraisals, critics especially emphasized The Historian’s interweaving of elements common in vampire fiction with the historical and travel-writing fragments referring to South-East Europe, the emergence of female narrator, and the unconventional structure of the novel. This paper discusses the links between those critics’ remarks, but in the same time tries to offer different critical perspective of that novel. As opposed to affirmative evaluations which praised The Historian’s originality and progressiveness, we enquire whether its detachment from the conventional vampire fiction is minimal, and whether highly acclaimed acting on South-East European history and space is rather a model example of Balkanistic discourse. Besides that, we question claims of the unconventionality of the novel’s narrative structure and the female narrative perspective. In conclusion of the analysis we find that – despite the opposite intentions and superficial markers – patronizing Balkanism, strict reproduction of vampire fiction stereotypes and the non-existence of any subaltern perspective are results of the same deep discourse elements present in Kostova’s novel.

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White Food Versus Ethnic Food: Contrasting Food Choices and Intergenerational Family Conflicts in David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians are Coming

Author(s): Elif Aydın / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This study explores the dynamics of the identity construction process in David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming (2000) in the light of cultural food theories, focusing specifically on the views of Claude Fischler and Deborah Lupton. The study discusses the contrasting food choices and eating habits of the first and second generation Chinese Americans reporting the intergenerational conflicts born by the adherence to American and/or ethnic dietary regimen and their disruptive effect on the family unit. The article argues that food and foodways of Chinese Americans guard the culturally defined Chinese culinary regime against the workings of white dietary practices, but the interaction with a social variable such as class challenges this reserved attitude towards the white palate. The analysis of the novel demonstrates that once the desire of eating is no more tempered by the natural tendencies of the ethnic culinary culture, the appetite gets personalized through nonconforming food practices based on the changing socio-economic position of the characters.

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MAKING KIN: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY IN ANNE HAVERTY’S ONE DAY AS A TIGER AND KAREN JOY FOWLER’S WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES

Author(s): Paul Mihai Paraschiv / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Making Kin: Posthuman Identity in Anne Haverty’s One Day as A Tiger and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves. Through discussions on anthropomorphism, animal research and posthuman sensibilities, this paper intends to analyse how identity is shaped within the human characters so as to account for practices of kinship and to promote a posthuman model that emancipates from the anthropocentric milieu. In the encounter with narratives that have at their core human-animal interactions, we are generally placed in the position to inquire about the development of identity. Paying closer attention to the emergence of new sensibilities within the human subject in relation to the otherness of the animal, we discover that these narratives can have a tendency to instantiate posthuman becomings and introduce characters that transgress the discriminating “line” that is discussed by Margo DeMello. The “line” itself, although operating through a process of othering, is essentially prejudicial as it aids the creation of species hierarchies. Such is the case with Anne Haverty’s protagonist Marty in One Day as a Tiger and Karen Joy Fowler’s character Rosemary in We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves. The human subjects in these narratives enter relations of kinship with their animals and in doing so, they manage to build patterns for kin-making as a key to eradicate speciesism. Therefore, looking at the differing reactions to animal alterity in the eyes of the human, I hope to capture the plurality of these encounters.

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Herman Melville’in Edebi Yaratıcılığında Gotik ve Barok İmgelem, Hegelci Spekülatif ve Spinozacı İçkinlik Düzlemi

Author(s): Ömer KÜÇÜK / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 110/2022

In this article, I try to relate Herman Melville’s literary creativity to Gothic and baroque art forms to understand the aesthetic vision revealed in his novels more in a more comprehensive manner. Melville’s aesthetic vision challenges the understanding and it can best be understood in relation to northern artistic styles. Another cultural form, Hegel’s dialectics with its speculative sentences, as the counterpart of northern art in philosophy, is another key to understand Melville’s literary vision. However, Melville does not share Hegel’s rational aims. His literary vision can be better understood through Spinoza’s substance, which combines absolute rationality with a sense of meaninglessness. The main subject in Melville’s novels is not limited to human heroes, but rather a whole field of existence that appears on a ship or an island. Deleuze’s concept“plane of immanence”, which is inspired by Spinoza’s substance, can help to understand this holism of Melville’s novel-being.On this plane of immanence, “assemblages” and “becomings” emerge between humans, animals and plants. Behind the novel-being as the plane of immanence, the capitalist mode of production announces itself as the main cause of movement. In the study, structuralism inspired methods such as establishing formal analogies and homologies were used while relating distinct literary, artistic and philosophical forms. Thus, a step was taken to make sense of Melville’s literary creativity and contextualize it in the field of cultural forms.

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“I Smell the Ellero River Already”: Trauma and Exile in Roberto G. Fernández’s Holy Radishes!

Author(s): Hüseyin ALTINDİŞ / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2022

Trauma studies aims to construct an intellectual and ethical response to human suffering and their cultural and artistic representations. Trauma studies have inspired an array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary criticism that offer paradigms for understanding human behavior and coping strategies. Drawing on postcolonial trauma theory, this essay analyzes how Roberto G. Fernández in his novel Holy Radishes!i complicates and challenges existing trauma paradigms suggesting that existing European psychoanalytic origins of the trauma theory are not adequate for depicting Cuban trauma experience. The text focuses on the specificity of trauma that constructs meaning through considering social, historical, and cultural contexts of traumatic experience. In other words, the paper aims to break with Eurocentrism by analyzing the text that bears witness to the suffering caused by exile. Thus the paper aims to discuss the usefulness of trauma theory for understanding colonial trauma caused by forced migration, exile, dispossession, diaspora, and political violence.

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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).

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KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEWS OF THE GREAT GATSBY IN TWO FILM VERSIONS

Author(s): Georgiana-Elena Dilă / Language(s): English Issue: 29/2021

The paper aims at analysing the way in which The Great Gatsby was translated into film (the versions released in 1974 and 2013) focusing on the way it was reinterpreted for the social and cultural context of the decades it was released in cinemas, keeping in mind the need for balance when taken the written word and translating it to another medium of communication, thus creating a kaleidoscopic view of the world, with new bits and pieces meant to offer pleasure to the viewer. This type of intersemiotic translation has been regarded as the defining genre in the American film industry as it has been transformed into a creative phenomenon attracting comments and criticism from people belonging to different backgrounds and influencing the way literature and art were perceived opening new doors for interpretation and enjoyment.

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YEARS OF THE PLAGUE. A REREADING OF PHILIP ROTH’S NEMESIS

Author(s): Gabriela Glăvan / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2021

Philip Roth’s exit from the literary scene occurred in 2010, with the publication of Nemesis, a novel that stands apart in the writer’s oeuvre. This final book explores a dramatic moment in 20th century American history – the poliomyelitis epidemic that claimed the lives of thousands of children in two deadly waves, in 1916 and 1952. Roth recontextualizes this dramatic event by integrating it into the Second World War period, in 1944, and focuses on the tragic destiny of Bucky Cantor, a sports teacher doomed to play a significant role in this unusual context. I shall focus on the metamorphosis of Roth’s central death theme, interpret Cantor’s role as tragic hero and propose a rereading of the novel that integrates the current moment – the COVID19 epidemic.

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