CONTENTS VOLUME 6 (2013)

 

 

 

 

 

The article examines a book of poems, The Right Madness on Skye (1980), by American poet Richard Hugo (1923–1982), a major representative of the confessional and landscape mode in postwar Anglophone literature. In this book, inspired by a sabbatical year spent on the Scottish island of Skye, Hugo explores themes of dispossession, home-seeking, and sympathy for the underprivileged, yet there is an element of humor in the Skye poems that his earlier work does not show. The blend of nostalgia, melancholy, and tragicomedy is what makes the topographical poetry of Hugo a memorable exercise in poetic appropriation of a remote region that shares, despite the considerable cultural and geographic differences, a great deal with his native country of the Pacific Northwest and his adopted home in the state of Montana.

 

Richard Hugo, American poetry, 20th century, travel, Scotland, Isle of Skye, confessional poetry, topography, place, landscape, tragicomedy

 

 

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This article analyzes Thane Rosenbaum’s short-story cycle / novel-in-stories Elijah Visible in which the fragmented postmodern protagonist Adam Posner is profoundly affected by the traumatic legacy of his parents. Although with each story his identity is modified, the experience of this American Adam is framed by the feeling of being relocated in space and time. It is shaped by postmemory, to use Marianne Hirsch’s concept characterizing the vicarious witnessing of the traumatic past. Being immersed in the Holocaust, Rosenbaum is at the same time aware of its unspeakability; he knows that words may fail to transport the reader to the scene of the crime. Despite his obsession with the Holocaust, Rosenbaum stresses his conviction that the Holocaust should not be the sole formative element of Jewish identity for his generation. The present article attempts to illuminate the mediation of traumatic experience between two generations and to show that the intergenerational transmission of trauma complicates relationships between survivors and their children, who have often felt burdened by the survivors’ silence about the Holocaust, resulting in the alienation of the post-Holocaust generation from their parents.

 

Thane Rosenbaum, Elijah Visible, short stories, Jewish American fiction, the Holocaust, survivors, children of survivors, transmission of trauma

 

 

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Tracey Scott Wilson’s theater play Buzzer premiered in February 2012, well into the final year of Barack Obama’s first term as President of the United States. The play deals with one fragile concept that stood at the beginning of Obama’s victory in 2008, the notion of a “post-racial” America, that is, an America whose citizens have gone beyond the frames of thought defined by race. A significant part of Obama’s campaign was based on the idea that race could be transcended not only in politics, but also in people’s everyday lives. This paper attempts to examine how Tracey Scott Wilson’s play tackles the intersection of political slogans, policies and strategies with the world of emotions, personal and familial history, and racial identity. My analysis will focus on racial and post-racial theories, the frailty of race transcendence, and the far-reaching consequences of social schemes, such as neighborhood gentrification and revitalization, or class and race segregation. Underneath the structures that constrain them, Wilson’s characters desire to engage in a post-racial utopia, but are unable to transcend their racially and socially ingrained identities.

 

Post-racial; Tracey Scott Wilson; gentrification; race; politics; Barack Obama; racial identity

 

 

 

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The present article analyzes same-sex relationships as portrayed in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novels The Heritage of Hastur (1975) and Sharra’s Exile (1981). Both novels belong to the genre of science fantasy (a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy) and are set in the alternative world of Darkover. Yet, despite the opportunities offered by the fantastic genre, the coming out of the novels’ protagonists, Regis Hastur and Danilo Syrtis, is only a thinly veiled version of a coming out in contemporary Western society, bringing together commonplace themes such as the various levels of social acceptance of homosexuality, the strong repression of past experience, child abuse, together with the associated corruption of adults trying to cover it up, and social pressure to marry and preserve an impeccable public image. Even though the author does not offer any radical views on homosexuality in these two novels, from the perspective of gay literature scholarship the novels do expand the ways coming out is treated in literature and may serve as a bridge between readers of realistic fiction and the fantastic genres.

 

American literature, gay literature, coming out, science fiction, fantasy, Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Heritage of Hastur, Sharra’s Exile, Darkover

 

 

 

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Autobiographies, memoirs and confessions are widely read genres of non-fiction which have captured the attention of a wide readership for centuries. In recent decades such texts have become more open and intimate, resulting in many controversies, mainly over their fidelity to actual events. Based on an analysis of two texts dealing with the image of a father - the comics memoir The Impostor’s Daughter (2009) by contemporary artist Laurie Sandell and the confessional poem “Daddy” (written 1962, published in 1965) by Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) – this paper explores the nature of memoir, confessional writing and the main features thereof including objectivity and distancing and the emphasis on factual fidelity. Both writers developed an Electra complex and in their works they capture the changing relationships with their fathers from childhood to adulthood, their failing relationships with other men, suicide attempts, and depressions. Even though the comics memoir and confessional poetry differ on the level of genre and form, Plath and Sandell’s attitude and the depiction of their fathers follows similar patterns, as both texts cover a certain limited period of time and closely follows the influence of their fathers on the authors’ mental development.

 

comics memoir, confessional poetry, memoir controversy, Laurie Sandell, Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

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The British historiographic novel of the last decades of the 20th century challenges the conventional distinction made between the factual and the fictional, showing instead how the two heterogeneous substances – the land of history and the water of stories – merge together. Proceeding from the notion of memory plasticity, i.e. a constantly updated reconstruction of the past, the article discusses the process of readjustment of memories and reshaping of the past in Graham Swift’s novels. It briefly refers to the oxymoronic world of Waterland and then examines at length the way how the narrator’s personal memories merge into history in Ever After. The article also discusses the specific character of historical representation, the rejection of the notion of history as a sum of purposeful events unfolding around the great personalities, the ambiguous function of Shakespearean and fairy-tale allusions and some metaphorical implications such as bridges linking the past with the present in Ever After. It particularly emphasises the mingling of facts and surmises in the representation of both fictional and real historical events. This article is intended as a case study of the novel in the context of Swift’s general style and the postmodern conceptualization of history and fiction.

 

historiographic novel, history, stories, memory, the past, the fictional, the factual, Graham

Swift, Waterland, Ever After.

 

 

 

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Together with intertextuality, criminality, occultism and psychogeography, theatre culture and urban theatricality represent a cornerstone of Peter Ackroyd’s conception of London. The motif or theme of theatricality appears in all his London novels, most notably in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), as well as in his major theoretical works on London history and the development of the English literary sensibility. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how his novel The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), through its multiple plots and a miscellaneous cast of characters in the best Chaucerian tradition, portrays and vivifies various theatrical aspects of medieval London and its life.

 

London, theatre, theatricality, Clerkenwell, conspiracy, the carnivalesque

 

 

 

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The attitude of modernists to myths, remembering and their understanding of the role of memory in art were by no means unequivocal. On the one hand, many central works of modernism engage in the critical rewriting of myths and this is also the time when an awareness of the existence of cultural myths in the broader sense emerged; on the other, however, the pursuit of newness, central for the modernist aesthetics, made the relationship to remembering problematic. Katherine Mansfield’s critical works serve as a brilliant illustration of these tensions and among the most interesting are her reviews of the contemporary literature dealing with World War I and the cultural myths attached to it. Mansfield uncovers and analyses a whole range of approaches from the mythical presentation of war as “a cleansing fire” to the use of the fashionable topic of war trauma by authors who have not undergone the “change of heart” that Mansfield deemed necessary after the war experience. This paper discusses Katherine Mansfield’s critique of post-war literature, identifying her understanding of memory and how it should be used by writers. Her views on how literature should deal with war and reflect post-war reality will be analyzed, as will be how Mansfield approaches common war myths in her critical works.

 

Katherine Mansfield, The Athenaeum, World War I, The Great War, myth, memory

 

 

 

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In the chapter on new comic voices in modern British drama, Christopher Innes noted that Patrick Marber’s play Dealer’s Choice (1995) “follows Mamet’s American Buffalo or Glen Garry Glen Ross in focusing on an all-male society where dealings, whether in business or cards, become a vicious test of manhood.” In Dealer’s Choice, the border between reality and game is blurred; poker dominates the lives and everyday discourse of Marber’s protagonists. Perhaps not accidentally, the play begins and ends with the toss of a coin. Despite the presence of comic elements, the play conveys a pessimistic view of society, dominated by self-deception and fraudulent schemes. This article aims to examine the production of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice by the Dejvice Theatre at the International Festival Theatre in Pilsen in 2011. The play explores a parallel between life and poker in terms of expectation, experience, and memory embedded in a given space and projected onto people and events. It is argued in this article that a particular social space gives rise to various types of identity through interrelationships and social patterns. Moreover, this paper focuses on the personalities of particular protagonists, their motivation to play, and how their relationships are developed and destroyed by poker, or rather, by their poker addiction.

 

Patrick Marber, Dealer’s Choice, space, time, relocation, poker, identity, self-deception

 

 

 

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The present article focuses on the position and perception of Edwardian actresses and women who wrote plays. Reasons are highlighted as to why in that era female dramatic production surged and became immensely important for promoting the vote for women. The core of the paper introduces some of the most prominent women playwrights of the period, such as Elizabeth Robins, Elizabeth Baker and Githa Sowerby. The dramas selected for analysis feature common themes such as questions of marriage and motherhood versus career. Through the re-examination of Ibsen’s female characters and of the melodramatic fallen woman these plays attempt to provide a more credible representation of the ‘other’ sex.

 

Ibsenite actresses, women playwrights in the suffrage era, the New Woman, Elizabeth Robins, Elizabeth Baker, Githa Sowerby

 

 

 

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The article focuses on concepts of space in Thomas Hardy‘s Wessex novels, The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders. The theoretical approach used here is centred on two general categories of defining space. One is aesthetic expression of space, i.e. how space is perceived by the narrator or the characters themselves; this notion in some ways corresponds with smooth space as Deleuze and Guattari use this term to focus on the dynamics of forces in their Treatise on Nomadology in A Thousand Plateaus. The other category concerns mimetic aesthetics and space representation, i.e. how space is constructed with regard to a specific “reality,” a mediation which in some ways corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari’s category of space striation. Examples of both approaches will be shown in the essential conflict of the novels’ characters with respect to the environments they occupy. Attention will be devoted to the process of the characters’ assimilation into the environment, including their possible absorption by space.

 

space, vertical/ horizontal/ spiral movement, Deleuze, smooth space, striated space, Nietzsche, will to power/ nothingness, active/ reactive characters

 

 

 

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In recent decades beginning with the 1980s, Britain has witnessed a rise in inequality accompanied by a decline in social mobility. In the course of this process the historical North-South division and its aspects have become more prominent. While the South in general has grown more affluent, the North has suffered the consequences of the closure of traditional industries in the 1980s and struggled with mass unemployment and lower living standards. The purpose of the paper is to analyse the coverage of the North-South divide by the British press, namely four major national dailies (The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Mail) as well as BBC News. The analysis is based on five indicators of the quality of life (life expectancy, poverty, education and skills, employment, housing) as postulated by social geographer Danny Dorling. The paper aims to demonstrate whether and how the portrayal of the divide is influenced by the political leanings of the individual media outlets.

 

North-South divide, deindustrialization, inequality, recession, unemployment, public sector

 

 

 

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This paper examines the phenomenon of Quick Response codes (QR) and Augmented Reality markers (AR) in the context of contemporary literature. QR codes and AR markers, both traditionally represented as squares containing smaller black-and-white squares, require that the user firstly scans or photographs these images through his or her smartphones, computers, tablets or other digital devices, after which the content can be read, e.g. within websites. Several literary pieces have been based either on the concept of QR codes and markers or have implemented them for a particular reason (ranging from inviting the reader to discovery, hinting towards unveiling the content, referring to the tendencies of using QR codes in contemporary message-delivering or even marketing). This paper will concentrate primarily on two works of Quick Response Literature or Augmented Reality Literature, one Slovak (Joseph Juhász’s Urban Memoire) and one American (Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen). These projects will be examined not only from the perspective of their formal attributes, but the poetics the works represent will also be analyzed in order to reveal their “real” “spirit/sprite.”

 

augmented reality, QR codes, codes, AR books, electronic literature, digital media

 

 

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Over the course of a literary career spanning over four decades, J.G. Ballard established himself as an important British contemporary writer. In his final novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard again expresses his disdain for the contemporary world, spinning a bleak story detailing the consumer society of a London suburb through the eyes of an unemployed account executive. Ballard provides a mystery embedded within the personal plot of the narrator who, faced with the murder of an estranged father, searches to find his killer and shed light upon his father’s obscure life. Nevertheless the novel proves to be more than a race towards these revelations. Using the protagonist’s entry and eventual settling into a London suburb to provide the reader with what often seems to be a sadistically self-conscious awareness of consumer society, Ballard explores the extremes of a consumerist culture through the lens of simulation theory. This article attempts to examine these extremes using Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and consumer society to propose that the heights of consumerist craze reached in Kingdom Come are a result of the dominance of hyperreality over reality.

 

Consumer Society, Hyperreality, Simulation, J.G. Ballard , Kingdom Come, Baudrillard

 

 

 

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This paper deals with trauma as transmitted from Vladek Spiegelman to his son Artie in Art Spigelman’s graphic novel Maus. The trauma experienced by Vladek, who lived in Nazi-occupied territory during the Second World War and who experienced the Holocaust personally, has not been forgotten, although its victim has been relocated both in time and place. The trauma remained and had an impact on Vladek’s son Artie, who was born after World War II. This transferred trauma is explored in both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, in which Vladek Spiegelman’s life is presented both in the past, showing the difficult period of the Second World War in Europe, and in the present – in the postwar United States between the 1950s and the 1980s. The problematic relationship between Artie and Vladek, who never becomes fully integrated into American society, is shown. In this paper I will focus on this particular level of the narrative, especially on the signs of trauma transmitted from Vladek to his son Artie.

 

Trauma, Transmission of Trauma, Art Spiegelman, Maus, Holocaust Survivor, Second Generation, Postmemory, Guilt

 

 

 

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This paper focuses on the analysis of the concept of fear in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Certain crucial, interconnected issues are dealt with which show the similarities and differences between the two authors‘ works: sources of fright, lunacy and the role of setting. This essay engages only with the horror stories written by Poe and Lovecraft, not with their short stories associated with other genres (satire, fantasy, etc.).

 

Poe, Lovecraft, horror, sci-fi, gothic, fear, lunacy, setting

 

 

 

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This paper deals with the novel by Rebecca Goldstein Mazel, the main focus of which rests on four generations of Jewish women and their relationship with Orthodox Judaism. Two worlds are put in contrast: that of a shtetl in prewar Eastern Europe and that of a modern Orthodox Jewish community in North America. Sasha Saunders, who was born in the shtetl and has relocated to New York, has abandoned her religion and cannot understand that her granddaughter has decided to settle down in a Modern Orthodox community in New Jersey and thus to go back to the “old ways.”

 

Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel, Orthodox Judaism, Jews, women characters

 

 

 

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