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Motivated by the preface of a literary anthology, the aim of this paper was to frame a phenomenological approach of the 80 ist Literary Movement for the Hungarian reader. The main focus was the emphasis the importance of this Romanian literary movement for the contemporary fiction.
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The first lecture of the route tells about one curious story from 1966, which relates to the arrival of the Bulgarian prototype of the popular character of Ian Fleming - James Bond (007). Bulgarian writer and author of spy books from the early era of social realism Andrei Guliashki published a novel titled “Against 007”, to which British publishers of Fleming show interest for film adaptation of the novel. The procedure had started, but... for a number of reasons the idea remained unfulfilled and Bulgarian Bond couldn’t had a chance to experience the epochal clash with his English colleague. The second lecture focuses on the establishment of the genre of criminal and spy books by the writer Bogomil Raynov, who in series of novels created perhaps the most popular Bulgarian character of a spy from the Eastern Bloc - agent Emil Boev. The cult character enjoys a great popularity, almost all novels of B. Raynov from the series were filmed, and the most successful realization turned to be the novel “There is nothing better than the bad weather“.
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The article begins with addressing alleged similarities between Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and James Joyce’s works to suggest that they cannot be systematically sustained. Her much praised, experimental style relies on the opposite of Joycean richness. Limited vocabulary, jumbled word order, and lexical and phrasal repetitions are one of the most salient features of her style. McBride applies rhetorical variants of conduplicatio to create an emotionally powerful idiom to narrate an anti-Bildungsroman about a loving sister and her dying brother, her sexual abuse by an uncle and final suicide. So despite some thematic parallels, and linguistic experimentation, A Girl bears only superficial resemblance to the modernist master, which is additionally evidenced by stylometric findings.
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In Michèle Roberts’s Mud (2010); writing emerges as an act of creative recycling, allowing preexisting texts to be moulded into new forms and infused with new meanings. In the opening, title story, the idea is expressed through the image of mud, whose curly brown flakes falling off shoe-soles are seen as “bits of writing” − fragments of letters, commas and full stops − to be pieced together into “something new”. This process of literary replenishment is repeatedly witnessed by the readers of Mud as they come across characters, scenes and motifs borrowed from such well-known literary texts as Beowulf, Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary and Nana or encounter a host of actual historical figures, including George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Claude Monet, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Colette, in stories that set out to retell incidents from their biographies. Offering new versions of these literary and historical texts, Roberts engages in an act of feminist revision as outlined in Adrienne Rich’s seminal 1979 essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. Rich describes the practice of feminist rewriting as “an act of survival”, whose essence is “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us”. Indeed, in story after story in the collection, this is precisely what Roberts seems determined to do.
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The paper concerns a vision of relationship between the philosophy and literature according to Izabela Szyroka and her latest book. Szyroka shows them in a close connection, in the context of the evolution of the genre from Montaigne and Rousseau as well as philosophical, anthropological enquires. The development of philosophical views on literature was characterized by empowerment of two ideas – the specific autobiographical subject and historicity of a human life. The paper argues that the supposed progress of these ideas was essential for the Western modernity but was majorly challenged. The great part of that process took place during the postmodern era, but the crisis of the autobiographical subject can be traced much earlier – in the modern literature itself.
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Enciklopédikus természetű művek bírálatánál mindegy, hogy hol kezdjük, az értelmezés úgyis kikerülhetetlenül körbe-körbe jár, hosszú kűröket kell lejteni, mielőtt értelmes véleményt fogalmazhatna meg az ember. Aki kedvét leli ebben, az már feltehetőleg Ecot is élvezte, s remélem, nem unja az alábbi eszmefuttatásokat sem. Kezdem tehát azzal, amivel Umberto Eco, az utóbbi évtizedek esztétikai-szemiotikái irányzatainak divatos sztárja bámulatba ejtette a világot, és megbotránkoztatta tudós kollégáit, vagyis A rózsa nevével, amelyben irodalom- és kultúrelméleti szakértelmét először kamatoztatta. A második regény, A Foucault-inga e bírálat tulajdonképpeni tárgya is jobban értelmezhető, ha megvizsgáltuk az első sikerét.
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The study analyses the state-novel that was written by György Bessenyei (1746?–1811) in the last section of his life, and remained unpublished then. It chiefly explores the picture the novel draws about ideal government, and the way it imagines the working of parliament in the world of idealized kingship. This work, a late Hungarian adaptation of a genre that had been representative throughout the 18th century, uses its utopia-like structure to present political questions that were on the agenda in contemporary Hungary: the key motif is the state that creates harmony in both the agrarian world and among the various religious confessions. In the novel this ideal monarchy also proves its strength on the battlefield: it defeats the aggressive country in its neighborhood, governed tyrannically, and exports its own form of government into the political vacuum that evolves after the fall of tyranny. The novel ends in a rather mysterious way: the ideal state, governed by a beautiful and wise queen, proves inable to integrate the novel’s hero, a visitor coming as a guest from outside. Married in the meantime, this protagonist, instead of settling there, decides to return with his bride to the provincial house of his parents. Thus, the ideal state, while embodying the common good, cannot serve as the worthy framework of individual happiness even in a fictional novel.
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The article focuses on Czesław Miłosz's connections with Russia. The poet spend a few years in Russia where he experienced I-st World War and Russian Revolution. He kept going back to those memories over and over. Spending his early years in Russia he learned not only language but what's more he acquired something we could call "eastern features". In his essays he did studied Russian issues a lot. He also interpreted Russian literature masterpieces and explained the key moments of Russian culture and history. Miłosz was inspired by Russian literature and his Russian experience has a strong impact on his outlook and creation. In my research I am trying to find the way to understand this impact and if it is still existing or even if it is more actual nowadays.
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The purpose of the article is to analyze autobiographical story of Bulat Okudzhava Girl of my dreams (1985). The work is based on the writer’s mother’s memories who came back from the concentration camp in 1974. The main role in the story is the motive of the lack of acknowledgement, alienation of victimized (mother) and those who stayed free (son). The story of a woman, who was changed by the state to such extent that she was not recognized by her closest person, works as a mean to reveal and arraign the transformative power of the state. The lack of acknowledgement becomes a parable about the traumatic experience of terror, pervasive allegory of the subjective experience of repression.
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The aim of this study is to address the issue of the collective fate of the Jewish diaspora in the significant traumatic moments for the minority inhabiting Odessa since the founding of the city. Therefore, references will be made to the pogroms of the Jews, the “final solution” of the Jewish problem during World War II, the mass westward migration (mostly to the United States) gaining momentum since the late 1970s. All these elements will be considered in the light of Russian-speaking Jews’ contribution made in the areas of social, economic, and cultural life of the city. Tragic events areportrayed based on selected texts of the two leading representatives of the “Odessan galaxy” (i.e. Isaac Babel and Valentin Kataev), while the notions of annihilation and painful migration are exposed briefly in relation to the Liev Schreiber’s movie Everything is illuminated.
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In this article, author analyses postcolonial trauma in Vasiliy Golovanov’s novel Island, or an Excuse for Pointless Travelling (also known under the second English title: Island or A Justification for Meaningless Travel). The analyzed novel reveals many examples how the Russian/soviet colonialism methods worked by decades as well as the results of colonial pressure on native Kolguyev Island inhabitants. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, situation of Nenets people was very similar to situation of other nations after Western colonial empires fall: Nenets as Africans or Asians also suffer postcolonial trauma. Franz Fanon described French colonialism in Algeria, Golovanov described soviet colonialism on Kolguyev.
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In my article, I focus on the different trajectories of cultural memory in the novels of Native American Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum (2005) and Cuban-American Cristina García’s The Agüero Sisters. Their protagonists not only have to face the individual trauma of the past, but also the collective trauma of their people. Both Faye Travers and Old Shaawano in Erdrich’s novel live on in the memories of their beloved deceased, although they sometimes may not realize this, and this is what they have in common with the protagonists of García’s novel, Constancia and Reina Agüero and their father Ignacio. All these characters try to cope with their grief in different ways, but in order to face the ghosts of their past, they need to excavate the buried histories of America, which are connected to some extent with the European conquest and colonization. Thus they travel in time and space to find out that the texture of their memories is grafted onto religious syncretism (the animistic tradition of Ojibwe in the case of Erdrich and the rites of santería in the case of García). The narratives include both feminine and masculine memories which are contrasted, but not according to the division lines typical for radical feminism.
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This article starts from the understanding that the unfinished autobiographical text of G. S. Rakovski Nepovinnyj bolgarin [The Innocent Bulgarian], in the so-called second version, was deliberately built by his author according to the models known from martyrology. The papers discusses the links between Rakovskiʼs work and the biblical text, in so far as the hagiographic writing is presumably referred to the Holy Scripture as a model. Several types of reminiscences and references to the biblical text in the work of Rakovski are analyzed. The high frequency of biblical references is interpreted as an attempt to sacralize the (auto)biographical characters, which adds additional features to them as compared to the characters of the pure ‘secular’ type autobiographies.
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The motive of space (Bosnia / borough), as the forms of his literary transposition in this work, we have identified and interpreted on concrete examples from the texts of Andrić’s narratives. The motive, as we have been convinced, is processed in several different and complex variants, among which there are common characteristics. We can talk about two types of space - a real toponymic space, and a space of dream in which characters equally ‘live and act’. The real space we focused on, regardless of whether it is a mountain, a village, a borough, a town, and so on, is presented mainly as a place of boredom, overall unhappiness, loneliness, suffering and dark, stuffiness, backwardness, cruelty, back facing each form of progress. All the properties of space are directly reflected and metonymically represent the characters / physiognomy of people (both spiritual and physical). Andrić suggests deep, rooted, bound and conditioned space and domicile people. All those characteristics will be even clearer in direct contact with different worlds and cultures. Mainly, the processing of the motive of space with Andrić is aesthetically credible, but that, especially in the context of the poststructuralist openness of literary interpretations, does not prevent us from discussing the ideological pretexts, the injustices and causes of “the misfortune of this region”.
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Oscar Wilde’s The Harlot's House presents the author’s own images of love and lust with the help of puppetry imagery; he refers to prostitutes as “mechanical grotesques”, “automatons”, “skeletons”, “puppet[s]”, “marionette[s]” and ultimately “the dead”. He could hardly find more synonyms for ‘manipulated, lifeless dolls’. Women are misogynistically viewed as objects of desire and subjected to the male glance. All these images represent in fact Wilde’s attempt to create “art for art’s sake” by illustrating decay and depravity through a disrespectful depiction of harlots, dehumanizing them and stealing them the gender identity. The women, described as phantomatic, slim and inert, controlled by a puppeteer, are in fact the representation of the true love’s decay and the lust’s increasing attraction. The female puppets/dolls try to imitate real feelings but cannot do this because of their wires pulled mechanically.
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The literary career of Elizabeth Gaskell is roughly defined by two different areas on which she focused – she was the author of the ‘industrial novels’ such as Mary Barton or North and South on the one hand, while on the other, she was strongly attracted to the countryside and its people which were closest to her heart, and where the changes the society was undergoing had the strongest impact as it was reflected in Cranford or Wives and Daughters. Apart from the social changes, however, in Wives and Daughters Gaskell’s interest focused predominantly on the relationships among the individual characters as they are the main driving force of the plot. The topics she tackled resonate strongly with those we are confronted with even today. Though unfinished, Wives and Daughters is an important novel offering the brilliantly realistic portrayal of life in Victorian England. At the same time it helps us see the differences and similarities between then and now. These were the main points we concentrated on while trying to analyse or compare the characters among which Molly Gibson functions as a unifying element on the one hand while on the other she helps to bridge over the widening gap between the old and outdated and the new and unknown.
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Julian Barnes’ novel England, England, published in 1998 is an invitation to solving a puzzle. This perspective through which we are invited to read the novel is overlapped to the idea of memory and the manner in which the past is reconstructed via a subjective, flawed memory. When this is backgrounded against the context of the millennial consumerism, corporative profit-making and egomaniacal figures, the result is a farcical and satirical account of some aspects connected to one’s personal history and a nation’s history whose main paradigms are completeness and fitting, as this article seeks to uncover.
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The status of cats has changed in both society and literature. In human society and literature. Cats have fought their way to human homes, hearts, and to the centre of interest of various fields of science. In the time of buoyantly developing field of animal studies and Athrozoology, cats have been given a chance to be appreciated and understood. Their transition in both real world and virtual reality has been a multi-layered and complex process yet to be completed.
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