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ABSTRACTS |
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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 |
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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 |
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Olga Roebuck (University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic) Rejecting Limits and Opening Possibilities in the Works of Iain Banks |
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Gabriela Boldizsárová (Institute of Continuing Education, University of Žilina, Slovakia) The Grotesque Body and Ageing in A.S.Byatt’s Short Fiction |
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Saša Simović, Marija Mijušković (University of Montenegro, Nikšić, Montenegro) American Romanticism, Poe and “The Rationale of Verse” |
65 |
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Lidia Bilonozhko (National Dragomanov Pedagogical University, Kiev, Ukraine) Phonic Musicality as a Means of Recoding in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime |
75 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Rosa Ghaelizad, Hossein Pirnajmuddin (University of Isfahan, Iran) Oleanna: A Cognitive Poetic Reading |
118 |
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Jiří Měsíc (Department of English and American Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic) Leonard Cohen: The Modern Troubadour |
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STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS |
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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 |
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BOOK REVIEWS |
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Karolína Vančurová Certain Good of Words (Review of Irish Poetry Under the Union,1801 – 1924 by Matthew Campbell) |
165 |
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Jiří Měsíc Another Take on Leonard Cohen (Review of Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows by Harvey Kubernik) |
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| NEWS, CALLS, ANNOUNCEMENTS | 173 | |
ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS
Author
Petr Chalupský
Title of the Article
The Living Presence of Invisible Agencies and Unseen Powers – The Dramatised and Reinvented History of Peter Ackroyd’s Novels
Abstract
The voluminous body of work of Peter Ackroyd, one of the most versatile contemporary British writers, comprises chiefly of non-fiction and fiction. The first is dominated by his books on English history, English literature, the history and development of London, and a series of biographies of outstanding personalities he labels “Cockney Visionaries”, the latter by his novels. Taking some of the recent tendencies in historical fiction as a frame of reference and focusing on Ackroyd’s novels set solely in the past and both in the past and the present, this article examines how the various sides of his professional self – an historian, literary historian, biographer and writer – combine and intersect in his rendering and re-enacting history as a lively material and inheritance that can still be palpable in and illuminating for our present experience.
Keywords
Peter Ackroyd, heterogeneity, historiographic metafiction, pastiche, palimpsest, alternate history
Contact
Petr Chalupský
Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Education
Charles University
Celetná 13
Prague,110 00
Czech Republic
E-mail: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz
Author
Krystian Piotrowski
Title of the Article
Conflicted Memory, Irreversible Loss: Dissociative Projection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain
Abstract
WThe task of identifying main hallmarks of Ishiguro’s and Kawabata’s oeuvres is but of double-edged nature – one may be unconsciously driven to seemingly obvious and unequivocal categorisations, naming attempts at selfunderstanding and self-interpretation as the core of their narratives. Both writers are associated with highly poeticised, sensual, and atmospheric explorations of the past long gone. They thoroughly investigate and comment upon one’s personal loss, alienation, displacement, or falling into obsolescence. They depict the worlds that perished once and for all, simultaneously making them a mythologised locus of ultimate contentment, plenitude, and fulfilment. In this sense, the past is superimposable onto the present – it develops into a safe haven formed out of one’s innermost feelings and memories, a place where one takes refuge in one’s reminiscences. This paper surveys the role of memory, nostalgia, and loss in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, and Kawabata’s work from his mature period, The Sound of the Mountain. The former, a veritable attempt at recreating and re-orientalising the Orient, is subjected to a comparative analysis with the publication often assessed as the pinnacle of post-war Japanese literature. Characterial disintegration, dissociative symptoms, and affectivity that are present in both novels are analysed as determinants of their fragmentary narrative structure.
Keywords
memory studies, trauma studies, narrative identity, intertextuality, aesthetics, neo-sensualism, British literature, Japanese literature
Contact
Krystian Piotrowski
Anglistisches Seminar/Department of English
Faculty of Modern Languages
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Kettengasse 12
Heidelberg, 69117
Germany
E-mail: krystian.piotrowski@student.uj.edu.pl
Author
Olga Roebuck
Title of the Article
Rejecting Limits and Opening Possibilities in the Works of Iain Banks
Abstract
This text deals with the question of Scottish self-definition and also the escape from it. Scottish identity debate in 1980s and 1990s took on different forms and searched for other inspirations: outside Scotland or in dealing with identities traditionally overlooked due to the overall focus on national identity. This paper thus analyses the question of Scottishness through the subversive voice addressing the identities traditionally problematic in Scotland or even through individual self-definition as presented in Iain Banks’s novels The Wasp Factory (1984) and The Crow Road (1992).
Keywords
Scotland, cultural subversion, Scottishness, Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road
Contact
Olga Roebuck
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
University of Pardubice
Studentská 84
Pardubice, 532 10
Czech Republic
E-mail: olga.roebuck@upce.cz
Author
Gabriela Boldizsárová
Title of the Article
The Grotesque Body and Ageing in A.S.Byatt’s Short Fiction
Abstract
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.
Keywords
ageing, A.S.Byatt, body, grotesque, body transformation, identity disintegration
Contact
Gabriela Boldizsárová
Institute of Continuing Education
University of Žilina
Ulica 1. mája 32
Žilina, 010 26
Slovakia
E-mail: gabriela.boldizsarova@uniza.sk
Authors
Saša Simović & Marija Mijušković
Title of the Article
American Romanticism, Poe and “The Rationale of Verse”
Abstract
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.
Keywords
“Philosophy of Composition,” “Rationale of Verse”, Edgar Allan Poe, line, poem, syllable, versification
Contact
Saša Simović
Marija Mijušković
University of Montenegro
Faculty of Philology
Danila Bojovića bb
Nikšić, 81400
Montenegro
E-mail: sasasimovic@t-com.me
Author
Lidia Bilonozhko
Title of the Article
Phonic Musicality as a Means of Recoding in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime
Abstract
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.
Keywords
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, intermediality, recoding, ragtime music, word music, verbal music, paratextuality
Contact
Lidia Bilonozhko
Department of English Philology
National Dragomanov Pedagogical University
Pirogova str 9
Kiev, 01601
Ukraine
E-mail: bilonozhko@yahoo.com
Author
Ivana Takáčová
Title of the Article
Re-Presentation of African American Womanhood in Three Works of the New Negro Visual Arts Movement
Abstract
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.
Keywords
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.
Contact
Ivana Takáčová
Department of British and American Studies
Presov University
Ul. 17. novembra 1
Prešov, 080 01
Slovakia
E-mail: ivana.takacova@unipo.sk
Author
Roman Trušník
Title of the Article
The Rural South as a Gay Men’s Haven in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Jim Grimsley’s Boulevard
Abstract
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.
Keywords
American literature; gay literature; southern literature; Andrew Holleran; Jim Grimsley; New York in literature; New Orleans in literature; rural South in literature
Contact
Roman Trušník
Tomas Bata University in Zlín
Faculty of Humanities
Mostní 5139
Zlín, 760 01
Czech Republic
E-mail: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz
Author
Petr Anténe
Title of the Article
Ana Castillo’s Appropriation of the Family Saga in So Far From God
Abstract
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.
Keywords
family saga, appropriation, Chicana literature, Ana Castillo, So Far From God
Contact
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
Authors
Rosa Ghaelizad, Hossein Pirnajmuddin
Title of the Article
Oleanna: A Cognitive Poetic Reading
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cognitive poetics, metaphor, conceptual metaphor, David Mamet, Oleanna
Contact
Rosa Ghaelizad
Hosein Pirnajmuddin
Faculty of Foreign Languages
University of Isfahan
Azadi Square
Isfahan
Iran
E-mails: rosa.ghaelizad@yahoo.com & pirnajmuddin@fgn.ui.ac.ir
Author
Jiří Měsíc
Title of the Article
Leonard Cohen: The Modern Troubadour
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Leonard Cohen, song, Troubadours, poetry, medieval, woman, feminine, music, musician, religion
Contact
Jiří Měsíc
Department of English and American Studies
Palacký University Olomouc
Třída Svobody 26
Olomouc, 771 80
Czech Republic
E-mail: jirimesic@remove-this.gmail.com
Author
Jana Šklíbová
Title of the Article
Newtonianism: How Thomas Paine Devalued the British Monarchy by Transforming John Locke’s Empiricism and Social Contract Theory
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Thomas Paine, republic, society, government, Newtonianism, John Locke
Contact
Jana Šklíbová
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
University of Pardubice
Studentská 84
Pardubice, 532 10
Czech Republic
E-mail: jana.sklibova@student.upce.cz
