CONTENTS VOLUME 4 (2011)

 

 

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Mihaela Culea (Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău, Romania) Images of the Moral Order: (Im)Morality and Redemption in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders	9	►
Michaela Fojtíková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) George MacDonald’s Fairy Tale Characters: Variations of the Fairy Tale Conventions	22	►
Karolina Kolenda (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Bridging Gulfs in Life and Literature: Henry Green and the Process of “Going Over”	33	►
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) Of Stories and Men: Discursive Self-fashioning and the Confessional Narrative of Love and Self-hatred in Louis de Bernières’ A Partisan’s Daughter	45	►
Mária Kiššová (Constantine the Philosopher University, Slovakia) Subversive and Disturbing Concepts in What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy	57	►
Olga Roebuck (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) The Scenology of Landscape in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds	67	►
Michaela Weiß (Silesian University, Czech Republic) Will Eisner’s Contract with Comics	74	►
Miloš Blahút (University of Prešov, Slovakia) Subversion of Literary Conventions in John Irving’s Novels The World According To Garp and Last Night in Twisted River	84	►
Vladimíra Fonfárová (Tomáš Baťa University, Czech Republic) Becoming a Trickster and Gaining Vision as Parts of the Survival Process in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing	94	►
Karla Kovalová (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) “A scared little girl, all alone with a scared woman:” Clover’s (Not)Telling Secrets	104	►
Šárka Bubíková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) The Literary Image of Man in the Process of Becoming: Variations of the Bildungsroman Genre in English and American Literature	116	►
Daniel Sampey (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Chicago, Greenwich Village and Provincetown: American theatre becomes little	131	►
Jan Suk (University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic) Seeing the Seeing the Seeing: Understanding the Spectatorship of Forced Entertainment	146	►
Hana Waisserová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Gendered Representations in Eastern Cultural Production: Construct of the Indigenous Woman Gauri in Lagaan and the Impacts of Nationalism and Cultural Globalization on South Asian Womanhood	158	►
Libuše Hornová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Description, Action, or Attitude? A Translator’s Remark on Two Novels by Romesh Gunesekera and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni	171	►
Student Contribution
Jana Brandová (University of Pardubice) Race Relations in Two Episodes of South Park and The Simpsons	185	►
Book Reviews
Ladislav Vít The Rhyme and the Marble: Recent Multilingual and Multimedia Translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Review of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the First Time Globally Reprinted. A Quatercenteneary Anthology 1609-2009 edited by Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch)	199
Šárka Bubíková Writing Trauma (Review of Reflections of Trauma in Selected Works of Postwar American and British Literature by Stanislav Kolář, Zuzana Buráková and Katarína Šanderová)	202
Olga Roebuck A Jew, an American, and a Writer (Review of Jewishness as Humanism in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction by Michaela Náhliková)	205
Bohuslav Mánek From Piers Plowman to A.L. Kennedy: A History of British Satire (Review of British Literary Satire in Historical Perspective by Ema Jelínková)	206
Michaela Fojtíková The Book that Changed Children’s Literature (Review of Fenomén Harry Potter v Recepčných Súradniciach by Michal Vančo)	207

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ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

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Mihaela Culea

 

Images of the Moral Order: (Im)Morality and Redemption in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

 

The article starts from investigating the human preoccupation with the role and importance of divine providence through the centuries, with special emphasis on eighteenth-century English images of providence and divine authority, while observing the way in which the old tradition of magic and providential action was, during the same century, gradually overcome by the influence of Christian precepts and beliefs. Eighteenth-century England does not appear, at first sight, as a particularly religious age. Yet, religious themes pervade almost all the novels of the period, focusing on issues of morality or immorality. The recurrent invocation of, and belief in, God’s guidance of humans was also related to human sinful practices under such forms as theft, adultery, or prostitution. The article analyses the way in which images of providence and human practices related to morality or immorality played an important role on the cultural scene of the eighteenth-century England, particularly in Daniel Defoe’s novel The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders and Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Special attention is paid to some key social and cultural agents such as the priest or, at the opposite pole, the prostitute seeking redemption. Investigating these characters’ relation to the divine order and its injunctions, the article intends to reveal their moral and spiritual accomplishment or failure.

 

Earthly order, Divine order, Providence, redemption, fate, fortune, (im)morality, penitence, Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones.

 

Mihaela Culea

Faculty of Letters

Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău

600115 – Bacău

România

E-mail: mcl.ub.80@gmail.com

 

Michaela Fojtíková

 

George MacDonald’s Fairy Tale Characters: Variations of the Fairy Tale Conventions

 

Despite the fact that George MacDonald wrote more than 90 different books during his life, only a small number seem to have caught the attention of scholars. The only comprehensive study is the psychological interpretation by Robert Lee Wolff The Golden Key. The major shortcoming of Wolff’s analysis is its subjectivity, in that Wolff includes only a psychological interpretation of the eleven fairy tales. The present paper provides an analysis of characters in George MacDonald’s stories. MacDonald has been referred to as an “unconventional traditionalist”. He proves how well he is acquainted with the genre conventions of the traditional fairy tale, then comments on and toys with these conventions, which include parody, irony, and puns. In order to discuss the characters in George MacDonald’s fairy tales, we will divide them into two large groups: human and supernatural characters.

 

Fairy tale conventions, the supernatural, characters, innovations, fantasy, George MacDonald

 

Michaela Fojtíková

Department of Foreign Languages

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: michaela.fojtíková@upce.cz

Karolina Kolenda

 

Bridging Gulfs in Life and Literature: Henry Green and the Process of “Going Over”

 

Henry Green, a writer whose works were published between 1926 and 1952, has been traditionally regarded as standing between the two traditions that dominated in the literary landscape of the 1930s and 1940s in Britain, namely modernism and (new) realism. The debate on Green as either an experimental modernist or socially-engaged leftist realist has led to the production of an image of an artist (writer) whose position in the canon of British literature of this period is fascinating, yet highly problematic. Focusing on selected prose of Henry Green, namely Living (1929), Party Going (1939) and Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940), this paper discusses the ways the subject of an a writer is negotiated through on the one hand the subversion of established literary traditions, and on the other through the active engagement in the social problems performed in the act of “going over”.

 

Henry Green, Living, Party Going, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait, modernism, realism, “going over,” artistic identity

 

Karolina Kolenda

Institute of English Philology

Jagiellonian University

ul. prof. S.Łojasiewicza 4 (Kampus UJ)

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: karolina.kolenda@uj.edu.pl

Petr Chalupský

 

Of Stories and Men: Discursive Self-fashioning and the Confessional Narrative of Love and Self-hatred in Louis de Bernières’ A Partisan’s Daughter

 

Louis de Bernières is known especially for his international bestseller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and the historical saga Birds Without Wings (2004). His most recent novel, A Partisan’s Daughter (2008), represents a strikingly different kind of writing, much more subtle and intimate and therefore less ambitious in terms of its plot construction and thematic structure. Through the use of diverse narrative and stylistic techniques, particularly that of the male mock-testimonial, de Bernières manages to explore many of the thematic concerns of his previous works as well as several new ones.

 

Narration, male testimonial, mid-life crisis, identity self-fashioning, storytelling, personal and official history

 

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

E-mail: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz

Mária Kiššová

 

Subversive and Disturbing Concepts in What Becomes by A. L. Kennedy

 

Scottish author A.L. Kennedy is one of the key representatives of the modern short-story in English. Several of her collections – including Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990), Now That You’re Back (1994), Original Bliss (1997) and Indelible Acts (2002) – have won prestigious British literary prizes. This paper closely examines her fifth collection What Becomes (2009), in which the twelve stories deal with isolation, loneliness, depression, and a complete lack of love. Kennedy’s unique poetics reflects her interest in formal innovations; she shows passion toward and sympathy with the weird, awkward, ugly and shocking. Her short-stories disturb the reader through the particular formal devices (the special use of typography) and thematic concepts (showing the disturbances of everyday life).

 

Short story, A.L. Kennedy, What Becomes, formal innovations, typography

 

Mária Kiššová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra

Štefánikova 67

949 74 Nitra

Slovakia

E-mail: mkissova@ukf.sk

Olga Roebuck

 

The Scenology of Landscape in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

 

This text presents various possibilities of looking at landscape from a literary perspective, allowing the possibilities of interpreting it as a literary text or a theatrical scene. Such theoretical claims are tested in the analysis of several characters from Adam Foulds’s novel The Quickening Maze.

 

Landscape as a cultural artefact, scenology of landscape, literary landscape, John Clare, Matthew Allen, Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

 

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: olga.roebuck@upce.cz

Michaela Weiß

 

Will Eisner’s Contract with Comics

 

The paper deals with formal innovations in A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner, one of the forefathers of modern American comics. Eisner realized that comics had much greater potential and started experimenting with its form and content. He wanted to free comics of the superhero label and create artistically more complex works. When he published A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, it was advertised as “a graphic novel”. Since then the term has been widely used by publishers, critics and writers, even though not all of them agree on its definition. Moreover, as the title suggests Eisner’s book is not a novel but a collection of short stories written in the form of American Jewish immigration narrative, combining autobiography, memoirs and fiction. In this graphic novel Eisner not only revived the immigration narratives in a new medium, but also crossed the boundaries of American comics by presenting a vital and original form that influenced following generations of artists.

 

Will Eisner, graphic novel, American Jewish comics, immigration narrative

 

Michaela Weiss

Department of Foreign Languages

Silesian University in Opava

Masarykova třída 343/37

746 01 Opava

Czech Republic

E-mail: michaela.weiss@fpf.slu.cz

Miloš Blahút

 

Subversion of Literary Conventions in John Irving’s Novels The World According To Garp and Last Night in Twisted River

 

John Irving is a prominent American storyteller whose plot-driven novels are full of memorable characters. Despite his influences from Victorian novelists, his narratives are unconventional and complex, with various discourses intertwined. Irving’s novels, The World According to Garp and Last Night in Twisted River contain absurd "flat" characters and grotesque incidents. Violence, death and humour are dominant in The World According to Garp. Powerful depictions of the main character, Danny, and the way his imaginative world works parallels the "real" story (Irving’s fictional story). By incorporating into his stories various popular genres such as detective story Irving transgresses the boundary between high and low art, and through metafictional techniques he, as Patricia Waugh would put it, “lays bare the conventions of realistic techniques.” 

 

Metafiction, framing devices, violence, death, postmodern, John Irving, The World According to Garp, Last Night in Twisted River http://www.unipo.sk/en/

 

Department of British and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Prešov

17. Novembera 15

080 01 Prešov

Slovakia

E-mail: milos.blahut@unipo.sk

Vladimíra Fonfárová

 

Becoming a Trickster and Gaining Vision as Parts of the Survival Process in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

 

This article focuses on survival as a key pattern in Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972) and explores the process the nameless narrator of the novel undergoes in order to reject her role of a victim and to fight for her survival as a complete, full-value human being. The first step in this process is becoming a trickster creature, as identified by Paul Radin in his monograph Trickster (1956) and the second is gaining vision, as described by Sharon R. Wilson in her essay “Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels”.

                                                          

Canadian literature, Trickster, Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, gaining vision, survival, visual imagery, victimization

 

Tomas Bata University in Zlín

Faculty of Humanities

Mostní 5139

760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

E-mail: fonfarova@fhs.utb.cz

Karla Kovalová

 

“A scared little girl, all alone with a scared woman:” Clover’s (Not)Telling Secrets

 

This paper uses Leslie W. Lewis’ concept of secret telling and Alicia Otano’s theory of child perspective to discuss Dori Sanders’ novel, Clover (1990). In choosing a black child protagonist to narrate her story of having to live with a white stepmother, Sanders successfully negotiates cultural differences to foster cross-racial understanding. This paper demonstrates how the child serves as a mediator between cultures, bridging the gaps that separate them by choosing to tell or withhold family secrets.  

 

African American fiction, child perspective, Clover, cultural differences, Dori Sanders, racial differences, secret (telling), the South

 

Karla Kovalová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: karla.kovalová@osu.cz

Šárka Bubíková

 

The Literary Image of Man in the Process of Becoming: Variations of the Bildungsroman Genre in English and American Literature

 

This article briefly outlines a history of Bildungsroman and provides an overview of theories of the genre and a critical assessment of them. It argues that the genre, notwithstanding some critical opinions to the contrary, is still a very potent literary form despite the fact that it came into existence in a particular historical and literary situation of eighteenth-century Germany. The genre’s flexibility allowed for variations and modifications that ensured its contemporary viability in Anglo-American literatures. While the concern with the individual’s emergence from an immature state of childhood to adult maturity, and with individual’s socialization remaining the core focus of the Bildungsroman, studies of the form have lately become involved in the discussions of ethnic and racial identification, of biculturality, of the situation of an individual in a liminal position. This makes Bildungsroman a genre especially important in contemporary American literature

 

Literary genre; Bildungsroman; Bildungsroman in English; female Bildungsroman; ethnic Bildungsroman

 

Šárka Bubíková

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: sarka.bubikova@upce.cz

Daniel Sampey

 

Chicago, Greenwich Village and Provincetown: American theatre becomes little

 

At the outset of the 20^th century, dozens of small theatre companies sprang up across the United States. Towards the end of the 1910s, divisions began to emerge in many of these organizations. These splits may be categorized generally as between a politically radical or artistically experimental faction against a more traditional contingent seeking the larger audiences which would be attracted by higher production values. By the 1980s the Provincetown Players had become little more than a footnote in canonical American theatre history as the group that produced Eugene O’Neill’s first plays. Since then, however, another account has come forth that suggests a larger significance for the group. This narrative centers on George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell’s dissatisfaction with the commercial ambitions the Washington Square Players and their decision to split from them. This story of the Provincetown group also features the fundamental contributions of women, particularly that of established novelist Glaspell, in all aspects of production during the early years of the Provincetown Players. The formative roles of women in other early 20^th century American companies will be touched upon in this paper as well.

 

American drama, little theatre movement, Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Eugene O’Neill

 

Daniel Paul Sampey

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: danielpaul.sampey@upce.cz

Jan Suk

 

Seeing the Seeing the Seeing: Understanding the Spectatorship of Forced Entertainment

 

The present paper aims to explore the crucial role of the audience in the artistic strategies of Forced Entertainment, a leading contemporary British experimental theatre troupe.  The paper attempts to highlight the shift of the role of audience towards the spectator as a witness, raising thus further ethical issues. Furthermore, the company´s insistence on the presence, realness and “failure” framed by the tools of postdramatic theory and the umbrella of Live Art create a new reading of the endless interplay between the theatre and its audiences, which is illustrated on two recent performances of Forced Entertainment, Showtime (1996) and Spectacular (2008).

 

Forced Entertainment, Live Art, postdramatic theatre, contemporary British experimental theatre, ethics of spectatorship, Spectacular, Showtime.

 

Jan Suk

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

University of Hradec Králové

Rokitanského 62
500 03 Hradec Králové
Czech Republic

E-mail: jan.suk@uhk.cz

Hana Waisserová

 

Gendered Representations in Eastern Cultural Production: Construct of the Indigenous Woman Gauri in Lagaan and the Impacts of Nationalism and Cultural Globalization on South Asian Womanhood

 

Feminine subjectivity in Bollywood films is constructed by film-makers and by the demand of audience fantasies as a miraculous mixture of contradictions. Is this traditional or transnational? Female constructs such as Gauri (the protagonist of Lagaan) expose traditional dichotomies deeply embedded in Indian culture. Women aspire to be powerless victimized women and powerful goddesses at the same time. Naturally, when a nationalist discourse shapes the images the feminist critic cannot but protest that such iconography degrades women by presenting them in simplistic oppositions. Yet, the feminist Amrita Basu observes that local women of power speak from positions of moral superiority conditioned by their chastity, and they represent no challenge to patriarchal values (Basu 1988). The image of Gauri in Lagaan seems to be the product of a similar schizophrenia, and gendered constructs of Indian vision (like Gauri) tend to be perceived as schematic creations of anticolonial nationalism, yet echoing transnational gender policies. Moreover, the film operates in a Neo-Victorian setting, examining the heritage of colonial pressures in post-colonial times. This setting allows for specific cultural, historical and political conditions to be delineated in the present, including a possible re-evaluation of gender roles in the third world.  The cultural production of Bollywood emphasises the notion of reclaiming Indian women, who are constructed to resemble Sita or Radha in Indian mythology (Mishra 2002). Finally, Bollywood imagery supposedly becomes transnational (Thomas 1985). Lagaan shows the problematic accounts of official colonial history, and it allows the rediscovery of suppressed personal histories via constructs of memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.

 

Gendered representations, Lagaan, South Asian womanhood, Indian film, cultural globalization, Amrita Basu, Rosie Thomas

 

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Masaryk University

Poříčí 7

603 00 Brno

Czech Republic

E-mail: hwaisserova@gmail.com

Libuše Hornová

 

Description, Action, or Attitude? A Translator’s Remark on Two Novels by Romesh Gunesekera and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

 

Combining translation and linguistic studies, the article introduces two less-known immigrant writers Romesh Gunesekera and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and their novels Reef and The Mistress of Spices, which were both translated by the author. The novels reflect the social and political problems in Sri Lanka and India which make their citizens flee abroad. The stories are well narrated by poetic language and brought their authors international recognition. Especially the descriptive passages in both novels are very impressive and are considered here as specific language structures. A partial analysis of typical sentence elements of such passages in comparison with their Czech equivalents is the main aim of this article. Apart from that, a general comment on the main characters of the two stories and implications of different cultures are supplemented.

 

Romesh Gunesekera, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices, Reef, translation studies, sentence structures, descriptive passage

 

Libuše Hornová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: libuse.hornova@upce.cz

Jana Brandová

 

Race Relations in Two Episodes of South Park and The Simpsons

 

This article focuses on the popular and controversial adult-oriented American cartoons, South Park and The Simpsons, and the manner in which these cartoons comment on the issue of race and ethnicity; specifically, the issue of  the relationship between whites and blacks.

 

Race, African-Americans, cartoons, South Park, The Simpsons

 

Jana Brandová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: brandova@gyasos-prelouc.cz

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