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Anthropocene and global warming pose a challenge to fiction. How to write about it? Is it at all possible to render in words the way they transform our perception and emotions? My thesis is that it is science fiction and fantasy that tackle this problem best – especially the kind of science fiction and fantasy that seemingly is not “about” climate change.
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Prose written by Tamara Bakran.
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This is an interview with a Canadian artist who does not like to be called a writer even though he works with words and who moreover does not like to be called a photographer even though he captures images with his camera. What was he doing then, as an artist, before and even now? In his words, he simply worked at re-enchanting his world and daily life.
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This text, which continues the search for Baudelaire / Bolaño‘s „oases of horror“ in which modernity and terror meet, examines the opaque identification of Carl Schmidt with Benito Sereno, the protagonist of Herman Melville‘s novel of the same name, as a key figure in the answers and the defense of the lawyer and jurist Schmidt in the face of interrogations and accusations of collaboration with National Socialism in its most terrorist and vile dimensions. The identification with Don Benito contains the full set of authentic wickedness, unworthiness and opacity that characterizes the Schmidt case, named after a literary hero found in a great New World writer on the threshold of aesthetic modernity. Years before it became public, Benito Sereno‘s defense was formed in Schmidt‘s private correspondence with his brother in arms and baptism, Ernst Junger, but this meaningful epistolary genesis of identification was the subject of subsequent conversation.
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The study examines the enthronement of this specific type of non-authoritatve literary authority in the case of an English writer of Polish origin, the largely renown nowadays Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who starts from the weak position of an emigrant, foreign to the literary circles in the metropolis. Fulfilling the criteria for publishing success at the beginning of his career, at the same time Conrad remained adamant in constructing his fictional worlds, stylistic mastery, and ethical principles. If we take the title of his most successful commercially novel, Chance, the success of the modern author is not a chance of market conjecture, but a sequence of the author’s project.
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A.S. Byatt has expressed deep misgivings regarding the role which the human species has played in mis/shaping the natural world due to the willful blindness which guides human behaviour in this respect. In fact, Byatt has focused on the destruction of the planet caused by greedy and environmentally-unaware human beings in fictional texts such as Ragnarök: The End of the Gods (2011) or “Sea Story” (2013), as well as in critical pieces such as “Thoughts on Myth” (2011). Hence, I am particularly interested in investigating how Byatt’s texts have been shaped by environmental concerns, as expressed in both her fiction and her critical work. My reading of Byatt’s ecopoetics will therefore be set within the theoretical framework of ecocriticism. Finally, I will also examine Byatt’s argument that in a way her early fictional work was “a questioning quarrel” with her former Cambridge teacher F.R. Leavis’s, whose “vision and values” she nevertheless “inherit[s] and share[s]” (Passions of the Mind, 2) in light of Leavis’s discussion of “the organic community” as proto-ecocritical writing.
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In Among Others, Jo Walton's fairy story about a science-fiction fan, science fiction as a genre and archive serves as an adoptive parent for Morwenna Markova as much as the extended family who provide the more conventional parenting in the absence of the father who deserted her as an infant and the presence of the mother whose unacknowledged psychiatric condition prevented appropriate caregiving. Laden with allusions to science fictional texts of the nineteen-seventies and earlier, this epistolary novel defines and redefines both family and community, challenging the groups in which we live through the fairies who taught Mor about magic and the texts which offer speculations on alternative mores. This article argues that Mor’s approach to the magical world she inhabits is productively informed and futuristically oriented by her reading in science fiction. Among Others demonstrates a restorative power of agency in the formation of all social and familial groupings, engaging in what Donna J. Haraway has described as a transformation into a Chthulucene period which supports the continuation of kin-communities through a transformation of the outcast. In Among Others, the free play between fantasy and science fiction makes kin-formation an ordinary process thereby radically transforming the social possibilities for orphans and others.
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In their landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteen Century Literary Imagination (1970), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pose a series of hypotheses concerning women-authored fiction in the nineteenth century, identifying two archetypical female figures in patriarchal literary contexts – the Angel in the House, and the Monstrous (Mad)Woman. Gilbert and Gubar echo a Woolf-ian call to action that women writers must destroy both the angel and the monster in their fiction, and many contemporary women authors have answered that call – examining and complicating Gilbert and Gubar’s original dichotomy to reflect contemporary concerns with female violence and feminism. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and in particular the character of Amy Elliott Dunne, explores modern iterations of the Angel v. Monster dynamic in the guise of the “Cool Girl,” thus revising these stereotypes to fit them in a postmodern socio-historical context. The controversy that surrounds the text, as well as its incredible popularity, indicates that the narrative has struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Both Amy and Nick Dunne represent the Angel and the Monster in their marriage, embodying Flynn’s critical feminist commentary on white, upper-middle class, heterosexual psychopathy.
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It is apodictic that postmodernism gravitates towards fragmented narratives, apparently “real” diegesis and characters in a chaos-ridden frame. The postmodern novel is a “looking glass” that delineates the vertigo instigated by “reality,” which is an artifice that leads to amending interpretations. The paradox of “fictionalizing the reality” creates heterogeneous reverberations among individuals. There is no preconception, but moments of revelation and realization. The theories of language alleviate the transcription of the intense and inevitable relationship between the text and the reader. The theoretical underpinnings, formulated on the basis of the multiple interpretations emanated by readers, foreground the fact that texts are constituents of our linguistic community, and are diversified with individual and cultural experiences. In this way, the consideration of the text extends beyond its stature of being a mere “object.” Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland is a text which abounds in intertextual references in the postmodern context. Oates has taken up the issues of destiny and identity from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as the thematic source. The protagonist, Jesse, does not enter a world of fantasy; rather, she enters a world that is real, absurd and phantasmagorical. The article purports to analyse Wonderland as “hypertext” and accentuate how the fragments of discourses in it, based on Carroll’s work as the hypotext, have acquired a transpositional change of meaning.
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The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause presents a manifesto for women’s emancipation and their imminent embarkment on the avenue of freedom towards the liberation from the male gaze. In a similar vein, Edna O’Brien, a pioneer of the literary treatment of female agency and sexuality in the Irish literary canon, moves past the age when women enjoy visibility. Age liberates O’Brien from her entrapment in the public persona and her anxious relationship with the public opinion. It has the power to enhance the possibility of women’s difference. Nowadays, the commitment to women’s cause, the inherent element of O’Brien’s narratives, continues to mark out the uncompromising discourse of transgression of the standard as well as her vigilant condemnation of violence against women. In time, O’Brien has become both a foremother author and a legend. She has embraced her unrepressed femininity and the personification of a female sage that Irish women writers have long lacked and may thus represent a role model for authors who wish to transgress the discriminatory standards and defend the female voice.
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This essay delivers an analysis of the innovative short fiction of contemporary British writer Sarah Hall. It gives particular consideration to the first two collections of short stories published by the author, The Beautiful Indifference (2011) and Madame Zero (2017), as well as looking into the possibilities offered by her latest collection, Sudden Traveler (2019). Hall focuses attention on such varied contemporary preoccupations as identity, gender, violence and death. My goal is to discuss the way that identities are subverted or transgressed in her short stories and how the topic of identity representation intersects with other themes becoming a fundamental and empowering factor in the narrative structure. Hall’s short story collections present an interesting case study, not only because they display the writer’s quest for a unity of subject matter, but also because they evince the strength and vitality of the short story as a genre.
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Review of: Melida TRAVANČIĆ - Lidija Pavlović-Grgić: Gdje živi bajka?, Tešanj, Planjax, 2019
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