Научнофантастични сюжети и обекти в поезията на Вислава Шимборска

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2016

There are science fiction plots and motifs in the work of Wislawa Szymborska. They can be found in poems such as “Kałuże” (Puddles), “Kilkunastoletnia” (Teenage Girl) and “Ludzie na moście” (The People on the Bridge). Their integration into Szymborska’s poems may be linked to her experimental imagination, non-acceptance of the conventional vision of the world and ability to see the humorous side of the universe and joke about it. In her poetry we can find visions of alternative and possible worlds and attempts to penetrateinto “antiworlds” and “antimatter.” The plots and motifs, which were borrowed from science fiction, partially retain their original structural functions within their new poetic context. At the same time, however, they have undergone significant changes, thus also altering their receiving context.

“Let us, therefore, stimulate one another”: John Fothergill’s Letters and the Notion of Value and Professionalism

Author(s): Marcel Hartwig / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the London Quaker John Fothergill, M.D., established himself as an essential node in a transatlantic epistolary network. Via letter writing, Fothergill closed book deals, forwarded anatomical drawings, and exchanged botanical seeds and investment schemes that eventually culminated in the financial politics of the first North American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He also provided books for the Hospital’s first Medical Library and made suggestions for people to be employed and teaching tools to be used in the first anatomical lectures in Philadelphia. Fothergill’s network sheds much needed light on transatlantic trade and the circulation and commercialization of medical print media in North America’s first regulated medical institutions. The many letters that he wrote provide insights into practices of knowledge production in these institutions. In this article, Fothergill’s epistolary web is represented as a semi-institutionalized network showing colonial medical practice to have been linked to semi-institutionalized spaces that were themselves connected to custodians of knowledge but also functioned as social networks. I argue that such networks were user-based and community-driven, and that they relied on a semi-authoritarian dispersion of knowledge.

An Irishman in America: Irishness and Belonging in Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing

Author(s): Genoveffa Giambona / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The purpose of this article is to analyse Roddy Doyle’s representations of Irishness and Ireland in Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The novel is the second instalment in Doyle’s The Last Roundup Trilogy, a historical fiction describing the making of the Irish nation through the adventures and misadventures of Henry Smart, its protagonist. In the novel, constructions of Irishness are projected onto the outside world through Henry’s picaresque travels in the United States. The article examines how Irishness is construct¬ed in the book and how it becomes intertwined with identity construction in other minority groups.

Cultural Nationalism and Postcolonial Imperatives in Irene Salami-Agunloye’s Emotan: A Benin Heroine and Emmy Idegu’s Ata Igala the Great

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

This article examines the efforts of postcolonial creative writers, particularly dramatists, who attempt to rethink the seeming erosion of African culture in the face of western cultural expansion. The present research adopts the methods of descriptive and content analysis, as it dwells on books, journal articles, and internet materials to examine its subject. Of immediate interest are two Nigerian plays, Ata Igala the Great by Emmy Idegu and Emotan: A Benin Heroine by Irene Salami-Agunloye, which are read as paradigmatic texts for interpreting problematic postcolonial relationships. The article contributes to discussions related to colonialism and the hidden agenda of neo-colonialism, which are often interpreted in terms of western economic interests underlying cultural expansion. The article demonstrates how Af¬rican postcolonial writers have striven to reverse this trend by promoting Africa’s cultural aesthetics as they represent indigenous ways of life and their problematic interaction with western cultural patterns. The discussed works focus on cultural canons related to African life, such as consultation with oracles, ancestor worship, and festivals; and they demonstrate the aesthetic specifics of African dance, music, songs, and their semiotic significance. The article concludes that even though the two plays “speak back” to power, their strength lies in the articulation of certain aesthetic patterns that contribute to African self-location. Thus, the plays not only attempt to assert African culture, but they also strive to rethink the meanings of western cultural imperialism.

Literární adaptace pověstí o hastrmanovi z českého Slezska

Author(s): Andrea Balharová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2021

This study will focus on selected literary adaptations of folk tales. The starting point where the authors of the adaptations come from, or whose verbal tradition they draw from, is the area of the so-called Upper Silesia, respectively its Czech part. At the center of our interest are superstition legends with a Hastrman theme (ie the figure of a waterman appears in them). We strive for a complete overview of those authors who have devoted themselves to the adaptation of this type of legend, and we take into account the fact whether their adaptations are suitable for children's readers. We are specifically interested in the authors František Jura, Jan Petrus, Helena Salichová, Karel Dvořáček, František Lazecký and finally Anna Malchárková. We subject the above-mentioned adaptations to analysis and try to point out the similarities, but also the differences between them, using a comparative method. Our goal is to offer an overview, if possible, of all literary adaptations of the legend of the Hastrman from the area of Czech Silesia.

Dva tituly o slovenské literatuře pro děti a mládež

Author(s): Ivana Gejgušová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2021

Thos paper contains two book reviews: 1. (K)rok za (k)rokom v slovenskej literatúre pre deti a mládež [print] : hodnotové aspekty pôvodnej poézie a prózy v rokoch 1990 – 2020 2. Akcenty literatúry pre deti a mládež Mariana Hrašková-Petra Kaizerová ISBN 978-80-558-1699-9

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.

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.

Bodies in Service: Representations of the Servant’s Body in Two Victorian Novels

Author(s): Maria Dimitrova / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article discusses the representation of the servant‘s body in George Moore‘s 𝐸𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 and the Mayhew brothers‘ 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒: 𝑂𝑟, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝐿𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑆𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝐺𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑆𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑡. It considers the various uses that the servant‘s body is put to, focusing in particular on the figures of the wetnurse (𝐸𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠) and the footman (𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑔𝑢𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒). The article explores the numerous acts of appropriation and commodification of the servant‘s body – including its costing – and its peculiar vulnerability. It also considers instances of the body‘s intransigence: its refusal to abide by class boundaries and its subversion of the purposes it is required to fulfil. By addressing these issues, the article demonstrates the intimate connections which Victorian fiction traced between problems of class and social identity and problems of the body.

Pathos and Comfort of the City Against the “Torrents of Progress”: Ignatius Reilly’s New Orleans in John Kennedy Toole’s 𝐴 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠

Author(s): Petra Sapun Kurtin / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Viewed from the perspective of the trickster-type main character Ignatius Reilly and his engagement with his surroundings and other characters as citizens in a series of picaresque adventures, the city of New Orleans in the novel 𝐴 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠 (1980) becomes a space of pathos and comfort, indicative of Ignatius‘s paralysis and inability to leave it, caused by his innate paranoia of the doctrine of progress in the modern age. At a point in history when the postcolonial and postindustrial city is trying to rebrand itself as a tourist haven, the chronotope of New Orleans functions as a place of suspended modernity, offering comfort in the pathos of its entropy, stagnation and nostalgia against the raging torrents of modernity that reign outside its city limits in the rest of the country.

Trauma and the Irish Experience: The Example of M. J. Hyland’s 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛

Author(s): Dmytro Drozdovskyi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article analyses the philosophical features of M. J. Hyland‘s novel 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 (2006), spotlighting this text in the espistemological paradigm of post-postmodernism. The analysis considers some of the distinctive features of the irish novel in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as anticolonial explications and the smashed type of identity of the characters. 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝐷𝑜𝑤𝑛 reveals the post-postmodern tendency of searching for the truth and explaining the nature of human beings as a combination of the humanitarian and the biophysical. The novel‘s protagonist has a special superpower of detecting lies in the discourses produced by other characters. His inability to accept lies physically may be linked to the post-postmodern tendency of rejecting the hybrid combination of truth and untruth, typical of some kinds of postmodernist writing. The analysis also explores the representation of trauma in Hyland‘s novel.

Variations of Death in Richard K. Morgan’s 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛. From Cybergothic to Candygothic

Author(s): Constantina Raveca Buleu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article presents an analysis of Richard K. Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛 with a focus on postmodern, neo-Gothic perspectives on death. More generally, it explores Gothic thanatology in the postmodern world. Attention is also drawn to the representations of death and technological survival in Morgan‘s novel 𝐴𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑜𝑛.

Cultural Relativism and "Our Way of Life"

Author(s): Robert Lance Snyder / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

Like Meursault in The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus, the 34-year-old protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery (1969) is almost certain of having killed an Arab in self-defence but feels no remorse for the deed except as it is judged by other Americans within his orbit of Western influence. While visiting Tunisia on what is apparently his first trip overseas, novelist Howard Ingham wrestles with the alterity of an Arab culture during the Six-Day War in the Middle East while at the same time criticizing the parochialism of a countryman who broadcasts propaganda about “Our Way of Life.” Ingham soon embraces, albeit equivocally, a perspective of cultural relativism, but his doing so is largely the dodge of a doubly dispossessed stranger in a strange land. Tremor thus figures as one of Highsmith’s “texts of exile,” as Fiona Peters has called it, that ends with Ingham’s anticlimactic return home to renew a relationship with his former wife.

19. gadsimta literāro procesu kontinuitāte populārās kultūras perspektīvā

Author(s): Pauls Daija,Benedikts Kalnačs / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 37/2018

The aim of this article is to provide a reading of 19th century Latvian literature from the perspective of popular culture. This branch of literature has traditionally remained understudied due to the low creative quality and the prevalence of translations. In earlier investigations the attention has mostly been drawn to historical importance, as opposed to aesthetic features. Similarly, literature usually defined as “elitist” and canonized as classical, has rarely been examined in the context of popular literature. On most occasions it has been dealt with in isolation from other literary trends. Although “elitist literature” cannot be regarded an accurate definition, its application is productive due to the fact that the connection between Latvian literature and national awakening with its concept of Lat vians as a nation of culture is emphasized. This article intends to provide a framework that might be applied to the analysis of the aesthetics of “low” literature, and highlights how this approach can be useful for the understanding of interconnections between popular culture and literature included in the canon of literary history. The introduction of the article examines the significance of popular culture in mid-19th century; the rest is dedicated to the appropriation and re-creation of literary characters borrowed from the mid-19th century popular literature and transferred to 19th and 20th century texts. The authors also discuss the disintegration of borders between the elitist and popular culture as a significant impulse for artistic innovations. These tendencies have been contextualized following two different versions of the story of Genoveva, the 1846 novel Countess Genoveva (Grāfa lielmāte Genoveva) by Ansis Leitāns and the unfinished drama Genoveva by Rūdolfs Blaumanis written in 1908.

Space and Sequence: A Topography of Here

Author(s): Luka Bekavac / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

Richard McGuire’s Here, an “artist book disguised as a graphic novel”, follows a single viewpoint over a multimillennial timespan. Pursuing potential storylines on several apparently incompatible levels (gestural, historical, evolutionary, cosmic), this ostensibly simple concept provides a broad template for exploring non-linear narrative capacities of printed media: it could be examined as a non-anthropocentric visualization of a chronotope (Bakhtin), an SF staging of espacement (Derrida), an exemplary ergodic text (Aarseth), an exercise in tactile multimodality or collage fiction (Gibbons). The common ground of these perspectives is the material framework of a codex: the corner of a room depicted in the majority of Here’s pages structurally limits the potentially endless diversity of content, while also metonymically playing upon its own isomorphic relation to the book as a three-dimensional object. This disrupts the temporality of reading and storytelling in a variety of ways, and the article focuses on Here’s ambivalent position regarding the factors of sequence and simultaneity, narrative and spatiality.

Životo(puto)pisi stvari u njemačkoj i svjetskoj književnosti

Author(s): Mirna Zeman / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2022

Throughout the history of literature, and German literature in particular, there are repeatedly accounts of “life cycles” or “life histories” of things: efforts to narrate the trajectories of artefacts in socioeconomic cycles, which in toto elude observation and remain imperceptible. In some cases accounts are written in first person singular simulating an autobiographical perspective of things. The article proposes to call this formation autocyclography of things. Historically, the literary tradition of this autocyclography of things reaches back at least as far as the Antiquity. The paper outlines the theoretical framework and contextualises examples from German literature in a broader framework of wold literature (British it-narratives and Soviet literatura fakta). In the focus of analytic interest stands Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausens autocyclography of a toilet paper. Furthermore, the article presents examples for autocyclography of things from German Literature of the 18th and 19th century, which still wait further scolary attention: autocyclographies of a coin, a wig, a fly, a book, a coach, a toothpick, a joke and a stomach.

Breece D’J Pancake, Peripheral Modernist

Author(s): Sven Cvek / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In this essay I discuss the short stories of the Appalachian and West Virginian writer Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979) in order to reflect on the ways in which the experience of peripherality comes to be registered in literature. Taking a cue from recent articulations of world literature as the literature of the capitalist world system, I argue that Pancake is a peripheral modernist: the formal oscillation between a realism traditionally associated with regionalist writing and “irrealist” elements stands as a mark of his peripherality. Both the class focus of Pancake’s stories and their broad environmental theme may be regarded as symptoms of the region’s structural position within the processes of capital accumulation. I maintain that there is a utopian impulse permeating Pancake’s fiction. It can be located in Pancake’s descriptions of the environment and the temporal disjunctions present in his stories.

НДСВ – нормална партия или партията на вожда?

Author(s): Tosho Toshev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

Божествен разум

Author(s): Georgi Fotev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

Една родова история

Author(s): Jenya Andreeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023