CONTENTS VOLUME 9 (2016)

 

 

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) The Living Presence of Invisible Agencies and Unseen Powers – The Dramatised and Reinvented History of Peter Ackroyd’s Novels	11	►
Krystian Piotrowski () Conflicted Memory, Irreversible Loss: Dissociative Projection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain	26	►
Olga Roebuck (University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic) Rejecting Limits and Opening Possibilities in the Works of Iain Banks	44	►
Gabriela Boldizsárová (Institute of Continuing Education, University of Žilina, Slovakia) The Grotesque Body and Ageing in A.S.Byatt’s Short Fiction	55	►
Saša Simović, Marija Mijušković (University of Montenegro, Nikšić, Montenegro) American Romanticism, Poe and “The Rationale of Verse”	65	►
Lidia Bilonozhko (National Dragomanov Pedagogical University, Kiev, Ukraine) Phonic Musicality as a Means of Recoding in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime	75	►
Ivana Takáčová (Department of British and American Studies, Prešov University, Prešov, Slovakia) Re-Presentation of African American Womanhood in Three Works of the New Negro Visual Arts Movement	85	►
Roman Trušník (Tomáš Baťa University, Zlín, Czech Republic) The Rural South as a Gay Men’s Haven in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Jim Grimsley’s Boulevard	99	►
Petr Anténe (Institute of Foreign Languages, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic) Ana Castillo’s Appropriation of the Family Saga in So Far From God	108	►
Rosa Ghaelizad, Hossein Pirnajmuddin (University of Isfahan, Iran) Oleanna: A Cognitive Poetic Reading	118	►
Jiří Měsíc (Department of English and American Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic) Leonard Cohen: The Modern Troubadour	134	►
STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS
Jana Šklíbová (University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic) Newtonianism: How Thomas Paine Devalued the British Monarchy by Transforming John Locke’s Empiricism and Social Contract Theory	149	►
BOOK REVIEWS
Karolína Vančurová Certain Good of Words (Review of Irish Poetry Under the Union,1801 – 1924 by Matthew Campbell)	165
Jiří Měsíc Another Take on Leonard Cohen (Review of Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows by Harvey Kubernik)	170
NEWS, CALLS, ANNOUNCEMENTS	173

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Conflicted Memory, Irreversible Loss: Dissociative Projection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain

 

 

memory studies, trauma studies, narrative identity, intertextuality, aesthetics, neo-sensualism, British literature, Japanese literature

 

 

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Gabriela Boldizsárová

 

The Grotesque Body and Ageing in A.S.Byatt’s Short Fiction

 

The paper deals with the work of the novelist Antonia Susan Byatt who became attracted to the short story genre which she often uses to express her fantastic ideas concerning the human body and its transformations, including ageing and death. Byatt often presents the human body as grotesque – it is deformed, hybrid, and/or monstrous. In her stories, the human bodies changed by circumstances or other factors usually signify the characters’ crisis in which they create new autonomies, new forms of existence. The paper discusses Byatt’s way of using the grotesque in depicting ageing and illness of her protagonists. The analysis is focused on two short stories from Little Black Book of Stories (2003) and explores the protagonists’ identity disintegration and body transformation as a result of inevitable life processes and the perception of human life as fragile and unstable.

 

ageing, A.S.Byatt, body, grotesque, body transformation, identity disintegration

 

 

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American Romanticism, Poe and “The Rationale of Verse”

 

Although “The Philosophy of Composition” is usually referred to as Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known critical essay,“The Rationale of Verse” can certainly be seen as his most elaborate. “Rationale” presents a consideration of the poem as a unit with elements that function together as a unique achievement of a single effect. In this essay Poe developed his “mathematical approach” to a poem in minute detail, emphasizing his proposition that verse is based on time as it is in music, not on accent. This paper will highlight Poe’s most significant ideas on versification and poetry as expressed in “The Rationale of Verse” as well as reveal the basic shortcomings of the essay, a text which can be said to represent the first significant American attempt at laying out the foundations for a modern science of English language verse.

 

“Philosophy of Composition,” “Rationale of Verse”, Edgar Allan Poe, line, poem, syllable, versification

 

 

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Lidia Bilonozhko

 

Phonic Musicality as a Means of Recoding in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

 

The article examines art interactions, one of the most topical problems in literary criticism, in the form of literary-musical intermedial aspects in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Principles of intermedial analyses have been introduced into the study with the aim of identifying artistic forms, namely specific piano phonic implications, of the musical genre of ragtime within the eponymous novel. These phonic aspects of recoding correspond to the term “word music” as defined in the typology of S. P. Scher. In addition, imitations of sound can be represented by both explicit and implicit poetological techniques defined as references in W. Wolf ’s conception of “musicalized fiction.” E. Doctorow recodes figures of ragtime as complex literary forms based on organic interactions between different intermedial techniques – verbal music, word music, musical structures and techniques. In this respect, correspondences of word music to music as defined by A.Gier have also been considered in this study. The article also attempts to interpret the artistic sense of the analyzed literary-musical intermedial forms. To this end, two main lines have been defined which are connected to eternal human values as well as the writer’s intentions to
reveal controversial problems of American society.

 

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, intermediality, recoding, ragtime music, word music, verbal music, paratextuality

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Ivana Takáčová

 

Re-Presentation of African American Womanhood in Three Works of the New Negro Visual Arts Movement

 

This article analyzes three works of the New Negro Visual Arts Movement in the 1920s-30s United States, in particular how each artist worked towards reinventing the visual representation of the African American womanhood. The analysis is grounded in, among other sources, the writings of Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois as leading African American intellectuals of the period considered. The paper focuses on one painting each by Winold Reiss and Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and a sculpture by Richmond Barthé. It examines how renditions of African American womanhood by these artists complicate the reductive, denigrating stereotypical imagery of the black woman as either the asexual Mammy, or the wanton Jezebel morally unfit to be a mother. Analyzing Motley’s rendition of the black female nude, the article argues that the work restores the black female body to its purity and aesthetic integrity even as it complexly interrogates the issue of the split African American identity in the racially divided world of the period.

 

New Negro, Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, double consciousness, the Jezebel, the Mammy, African American, womanhood, Winold Reiss, Richmond Barthé, Archibald J. Motley, Jr.

 

 

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Roman Trušník

 

The Rural South as a Gay Men’s Haven in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Jim Grimsley’s Boulevard

 

Freed by the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and free of the fears brought by the arrival of AIDS in the early 1980s, the 1970s is a period often celebrated as the golden period of American gay urban areas. At the same time, some writers (writing both in the 1970s and later) point out the gilded rather than golden nature of the milieux, with many characters attempting to leave the urban areas. In this context, novels as diverse as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Jim Grimsley’s Boulevard (2002) offer a surprising image of the rural South as a haven for these gay men running away from urban areas. The present essay analyzes the development of this idea in the two novels.

 

American literature; gay literature; southern literature; Andrew Holleran; Jim Grimsley; New York in literature; New Orleans in literature; rural South in literature

 

 

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Petr Anténe

 

Ana Castillo’s Appropriation of the Family Saga in So Far From God

 

Ana Castillo’s most critically acclaimed novel So Far From God (1993) can be considered a recent example of the family saga genre, as it reports the life story of Sofi and her four daughters. However, rather than concentrating on an upper-middle-class white family in a patriarchal setting, Castillo has appropriated the established genre to write a text of Chicana resistance, portraying working-class women as the bearers of spiritual values and social progress. Thus, the focus shifts from male to female characters, who are seen as powerful and independent rather than dominated by men; in fact, Sofi’s husband is absent for the most of his daughters’ lives. In turn, while all the traditional themes of family sagas, such as the history of a family depicted through several generations as well as romance and marriage, are present in the text, they are depicted in a new context. Finally, instead of portraying the family as striving to use money and property as a means of social advancement, Castillo shows the majority of her characters as caring about their wider community. Thus, this paper seeks to examine more closely which particular changes the author has made within the set of the genre’s conventions.

 

family saga, appropriation, Chicana literature, Ana Castillo, So Far From God

 

Petr Anténe

Institute of Foreign Languages

Faculty of Education

Palacky University Olomouc

Žižkovo nám. 5
Olomouc, 771 40

Czech Republic
E-mail: petr.antene@upol.cz

 

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Rosa Ghaelizad, Hossein Pirnajmuddin

 

Oleanna: A Cognitive Poetic Reading

 

A relatively new discipline, Cognitive Poetics is concerned with the process through which meaning is shaped and analyzed. What is known as the American model of Cognitive Poetics makes use of the theories of Cognitive Linguistics to provide a fresh outlook for reading literary texts. One of the concerns of this model is with studying metaphor as an important means of meaning-making. In proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that metaphor is not just a matter of words, rather it is inherently conceptual. They claim that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped and the conceptual metaphors which shape our understanding affect not only our language but also our behavior as well as how we make sense of the world around us. Lakoff and Johnson define conceptual metaphors as our means of understanding one concept in terms of another. They argue that conceptual metaphors help us comprehend abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones. Using CMT, this article attempts to read David Mamet’s Oleanna in terms of two of the most common conceptual metaphors, namely LIFE IS A PLAY and ARGUMENT IS WAR. It intends to explain how these conceptual metaphors become the underlying structure of the characters’ interaction throughout the play; a play which takes place in an academic setting. The article demonstrates how words become weapons in the hand of characters to obtain power over one another. They are entrapped in a language which does not allow them to behave beyond the confines of a performance or a verbal battle.

 

Cognitive poetics, metaphor, conceptual metaphor, David Mamet, Oleanna

 

 

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Jiří Měsíc

 

Leonard Cohen: The Modern Troubadour

 

The following essay portrays parallels between the work of a contemporary singer-songwriter and author Leonard Cohen and the medieval Occitan troubadours. The main focus is put on the importance of the feminine character in their works. This character is often discouraging to any close intimacies – as far as the world of literature is concerned – but the singers are subjected / subject themselves to persistence in its worship. The paper does not want to prove any direct relatedness, but to highlight the importance of the tradition of the troubadour song and its echoes in the popular culture as we know it.

 

Leonard Cohen, song, Troubadours, poetry, medieval, woman, feminine, music, musician, religion

 

 

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Jana Šklíbová

 

Newtonianism: How Thomas Paine Devalued the British Monarchy by Transforming John Locke’s Empiricism and Social Contract Theory

 

The following student contribution concerns Thomas Paine’s Newtonian concepts of society and government in the context of the Age of Enlightenment. Its aim is to demonstrate how Thomas Paine reinterpreted Enlightenment political thought as proposed by the empiricist theorist, John Locke, by using the principles of Newtonianism. Paine’s Newtonian politics is closely connected with his deistic faith. His political theory is devoted to the vision of a free society as a manifestation of the benevolent The Watchmaker. With this mission in mind, Paine attempted to devalue the contemporary models of the state of nature and social contract theory as interpreted by John Locke and to offer a more democratic version of these concepts. Paine’s key ideas in this respect are expressed in his most famous works Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason.

 

Thomas Paine, republic, society, government, Newtonianism, John Locke