| Univerzita Pardubice

Author

Stanislav Kolář

Title of the Article

Relocated from an Elevator to a Cattle Car: Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Stanislav Kolář

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: stanislav.kolar@osu.cz

Author

Ivan Lacko

Title of the Article

Tracey Scott Wilson’s Buzzer and the Myth of Post-racial America

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Ivan Lacko

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

Comenius University in Bratislava

Gondova 2

P.O.BOX 32
814 99 Bratislava

Slovakia

E-mail: ivan.lacko@uniba.sk

Author

Roman Trušník

Title of the Article

Coming Out in an Alternative World in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Heritage of Hastur and Sharra’s Exile

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Roman Trušník

Tomas Bata University in Zlín
Faculty of Humanities
Mostní 5139
760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

E-mail: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz

Author

Michaela Weiss

Title of the Article

“Daddies” in Controversial Memoirs and Confessions: Laurie Sandell and Sylvia Plath

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Olga Boinitska

Title of the Article

A Bridge over the Waterland: Linking the Past with the Present in Graham Swift‘s Ever After

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Swift, Waterland, Ever After.

Contact

Olga Boinitska

Dept. of Foreign Literature

Institute of Philology

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev

Taras Shevchenko Boulevard14

Kiev

Ukraine

E-mail: boinitska@gmail.com

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

The might and glory of the city celebrated – London’s theatricality in Peter Ackroyd’s The Clerkenwell Tales

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Janka Kaščáková

Title of the Article

“The greatest of all garden parties:” the Great War, Memory and Cultural Myths in Katherine Mansfield’s Critical Writing

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Janka Kaščáková

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Arts and Letters

The Catholic University in Ružomberok

Hrabovská cesta 1

034 01 Ružomberok

Slovakia

E-mail: janka.kascakova@ku.sk

Author

Ivona Mišterová

Title of the Article

Bluffing, Deception, and Self-Deception as Key Elements in Marber’s Dealer’s Choice

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Ivona Mišterová

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Philosophy and Arts

University of West Bohemia

Sedláčkova 15
30614 Pilsen

Czech Republic

E-mail: yvonne@kaj.zcu.cz

Author

Petra Smažilová

Title of the Article

Women Playwrights in the Suffrage Era: Writing from the Perspective of the New Woman

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Petra Smažilová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: petra.smazilova@upce.cz

Author

Alice Sukdolová

Title of the Article

Crossing the Boundary: The Space of Hardy‘s Wessex Novels

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Alice Sukdolová

Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: sukdolova@pf.jcu.cz

Author

Alice Tihelková

Title of the Article

The Portrayal of the North-South Divide in the British Press

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Alice Tihelková

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Philosophy and Arts

University of West Bohemia

Sedláčkova 15
30614 Pilsen

Czech Republic

E-mail: atihelko@kaj.zcu.cz

Authors

Zuzana Husárová, Bogumiła Suwara

Title of the Article

Literature Coded for Marked Quick Response

Abstract

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.”

Keywords

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

Contact

Zuzana Husárová

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education
Comenius University
Šoltésovej 4
811 08 Bratislava
Slovakia
E-mail: zuz.husarova@gmail.com

Bogumiła Suwara
Institute of World Literature

Slovak Academy of Sciences

Konventná 13

811 03 Bratislava

Slovakia

E-mail: bsuwara@wp.pl

Author

Ewelina Chiu

Title of the Article

Hyperreality and Consumer Society: J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Ewelina Chiu

Charles University in Prague

Faculty of Philosophy & Arts

Dept. of Anglophone Literatures & Cultures

nám. Jana Palacha 2,

116 38 Prague 1

Czech Republic

E-mail: ewelina.aifen@gmail.com

Author

Kristýna Pípalová

Title of the Article

“Father, You’re Driving Me Mad”: Transmission of Trauma from Father to Son in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Kristýna Pípalová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava

Czech Republic

E-mail: kristyna.pipalova@seznam.cz

Author

Šárka Svitáková

Title of the Article

In the Cobweb of Horror: Poe’s and Lovecraft’s Characters Bound with the Fibers of Dread

Abstract

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.).

Keywords

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

Contact

Šárka Svitáková

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail:sarka.svitakova@student.upce.cz

Author

Monika Tekielová

Title of the Article

Orthodox Judaism through the Eyes of Women Characters in Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel

Abstract

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.”

Keywords

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

Contact

Monika Tekielová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: m.tekielova@gmail.com

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Malgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys (Warsaw University, Poland) The Discourse of Infatuation in John Keats’s Letters and Poems to Fanny Brawne	9	►
Pavlína Flajšarová (Palacky University, Czech Republic) No Matter How Long the Night, the Day is Sure to Come: Differences, Diversity and Identities in Caribbean-British Poetry since 1945	18	►
Richard Stock (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic) Strategies in Ulysses: Reading and Re-reading the Novel	37	►
Bożena Kucała (Jagiellonian University, Poland) The Demise of Rural Life in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here	49	►
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) "Reality is the invention of unimaginative people” – the Counterfeiting and Imaginative London of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton	56	►
Tomáš Jajtner (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic, and Metropolitan University) Rage, Delusion and Abolitionism: Contemporary British Society in the Eyes of Peter Hitchens	69	►
Tomáš Bubík (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Robert Bellah’s Concept of Civil Religion in America and the Idea of New Religion in Czech Thinking of the Twentieth Century	83	►
Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová (Charles University, Czech Republic) Interpreter, interlocutor, intermediary, traitress: An exemplary figure in chicana literature and culture	95	►
Barbora Rumbinas (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Reverberations of Native American Oratory in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers	112	►
Petr Kopecký (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Not Man Apart: Ecocentric Personification in the Works of Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck	124	►

STUDENT CONTRIBUTION
Michaela Jirsová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) “Red Rage” in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer	139	►

BOOK REVIEW
Šárka Bubíková Faces of the American Gay Novel after 1945 (Review of Podoby amerického homosexuální románu po roce 1945 by Roman Trušník)	151

ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

Author

Malgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys

Title of the Article

The Discourse of Infatuation in John Keats’s Letters and Poems to Fanny Brawne

Abstract

Seen from the vantage point of the Victorian sensibility, John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne transgress the norms of respectability, being too personal, too passionate and too direct. Moreover, they define Keats as a sensuous, therefore effeminate poet who allows himself to be flooded by emotions and passion. After the publication of the letters in 1878, the perception of Keats as “feminine” became standard during the Victorian era. This paper proposes to look at chosen letters and poems which Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne in order to see how the problematic discourse of infatuation can account for the charges of effeminacy brought against the poet. Strikingly, although Keats expresses love and devotion in his letters and love poetry, at the same time he articulates much more ambivalent attitudes to femininity in general. Therefore, it can be suggested that the problematic relations between male and female characters in Keats’s verse (where the woman is frequently figured as either the threatening femme fatale or the indifferent muse) can be better understood in the context of his conflicted views on gender matters. Finally, my interpretation facilitates the understanding of the “camelion Poet” concept, one of the chief ideas concerning Keats’s poetic theory.

Keywords

John Keats, Fanny Brawne, women, letters, infatuation, fear

Contact

Malgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys

Department of British Literature

Institute of English Studies

Warsaw University

ul. Hoża 69

00-681 Warszawa

Poland

E-mail: m.holdys@uw.edu.pl

Author

Pavlína Flajšarová

Title of the Article

No Matter How Long the Night, the Day is Sure to Come: Differences, Diversity and Identities in Caribbean-British Poetry since 1945

Abstract

English poets of ethnic origin have traditionally responded to their social condition with greater immediacy than the politicians of their time. This article focuses on the process of exclusion and inclusion of English poets with an ethnic background into the canon of English literature. It demonstrates the ways poets search and fight for their ethnic and/or English identity. Special attention is paid to Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, James Berry, John Agard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Levi Tafari, Grace Nichols, and Jean Binta Breeze, whose works are examined in order to explore the notion of "otherness." The concepts discussed also include social prejudice, conflicting identities, social hierarchy, multicultural diversity of Englishness, and mainstream attitudes and images in contrast with ethnic imagery. The poetry of these poets is analysed in relation to the Empire Windrush generation of Caribbean-British poets, the post-war immigration policy of the UK, and in the context of diasporic literature.

Keywords

ethnic poetry, Empire Windrush, British literature, British-Caribbean, postcolonial, multicultural, Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, James Berry, John Agard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Levi Tafari, Grace Nichols, Jean Binta Breeze

Contact

Pavlína Flajšarová

Department of English and American Studies

Palacký University

Křížkovského 10

771 80 Olomouc

Czech Republic

E-mail: pavlina.flajsarova@upol.cz

Author

Richard Stock

Title of the Article

Strategies in Ulysses: Reading and Re-reading the Novel

Abstract

Taking Leo Bersani’s proposal for a “ruseful naïveté” in reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, this study considers how a theoretical “naïve reader” would read and re-read Ulysses. Such a reader would journey through a first stage of identifying the core story of the novel, which requires resolving narrative complications, and also a second stage of constructing the life stories of the main characters, which requires integrating the huge amount of information not needed to tell the core story. Ulysses is a good example of a novel that demands to be re-read, and as such this study turns to the early novel theorists György Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin to consider how the reading experience of Ulysses compares with the theory of the novel. Within this structure, and from today’s perspective, Ulysses can be seen to be relatively coherent in that the naïve reader can eventually gain mastery over the preponderance of the text. However, Ulysses certainly changed our concept of reading and re-reading a novel.

Keywords

James Joyce, Ulysses, naïve reader, Leo Bersani, re-reading, narrative strategy

Contact

Richard Stock

Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: stockr@gmail.com

Author

Bożena Kucała

Title of the Article

The Demise of Rural Life in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here

Abstract

This article argues that Graham Swift’s recent novel Wish You Were Here, which depicts the erosion of rural life in contemporary England, may be treated as a post-rural novel; it both overtly alludes to the tradition of rural fiction and the pastoral convention in literature as well as suggests that the lifestyle that sustained this type of literature is currently disintegrating. Although focused on the limited experience of a particular family, the novel forges connections between a series of recent personal disasters and national and international events whose impact may be felt even in rural Devon. The narrative is overshadowed by the protagonist’s traumatic memories, and above all by his current mission to bury his brother, a soldier killed in Iraq. The burial that ends the story is a bitterly ironic return to the family farm, which, however, will never again serve the function for which it was once built.

Keywords

Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here, rural fiction, pastoral tradition, retrospection

Contact

Bożena Kucała

Institute of English Philology

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: bkucala@o2.pl

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

"Reality is the invention of unimaginative people” – the Counterfeiting and Imaginative London of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton

Abstract

Peter Ackroyd’s most ambitious literary-historical project is to compose a biography of London, to reconstruct the city through the texts it has created, allowed to be created, incited or inspired. His fictional London, though always diverse and heterogeneous, has several idiosyncratic features such as intertextuality, metafiction, irrationality, supra-temporality and a focus on the unofficial or marginal aspects of its history. This article tries to explore the various roles of the city within the narrative and meaning structure of Chatterton (1987), arguably the author’s most metafictional novel to date. The article is especially interested in how the city is used to develop the novel’s arguments concerning the theme of the authenticity, originality, and ethical limits of artistic creation.

Keywords

London, the city, metafiction, intertextuality, forgery, imitation, imagination

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Tomáš Jajtner

Title of the Article

Rage, Delusion and Abolitionism: Contemporary British Society in the Eyes of Peter Hitchens

Abstract

The present article focuses on the work of contemporary British journalist and public intellectual, Peter Hitchens (b. 1951). Hitchens represents one of the most vocal voices of modern British conservatism, his works included into syllabi of British Studies at several universities. The paper starts with a discussion of his specific “anti-conversion” in the context of his generation from a Trotskyite to a Tory, then concentrates on the major issues of his critique: the slow decline of traditional British values since the 1960s, failure of British politics, problematic developments in relation to law and order, cultural revolution and, finally, his views on new atheism, so aptly represented by his recently deceased brother Christopher (1949-2011). The article concludes with a short discussion of the significance of the use of his ideas in teaching courses on British society since the 1960s.

Keywords

Peter Hitchens, British society since the 1960s, conservatism, contemporary British politics, new atheism

Contact

Tomáš Jajtner

Department of English Studies

University of South Bohemia

Branišovská 31a

370 05 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: tjajtner@ff.jcu.cz

Author

Tomáš Bubík

Title of the Article

Robert Bellah’s Concept of Civil Religion in America and the Idea of New Religion in Czech Thinking of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

At the end of the 1960s sociologist Robert Bellah formulated his concept of American civil religion, a concept which has since then provoked considerable reaction among scholars and intellectuals. It identified specific religious features in American public life and traditions, rejected by some, enthusiastically accepted by others. Bellah claims that since the seventeenth century the idea of the promised land, of a new age and a new nation with a mission in the world closely connected with Biblical symbolism has been emphasized by, among others, the Puritans. Since that time this first American Republic was gradually abandoned during the twentieth century, America having according to Bellah betrayed its original ideals. In this paper, features of Bellah are The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (1975, 1992) are paralleled with similar tendencies in Czech culture in connection with the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The first Czechoslovak President Tomáš G. Masaryk as well as other intellectuals of the time propagated the idea of a new religion, one for a new era. Certain parallels can be drawn between an American civil religion and the Czech idea of the new religion, despite the fact that unlike the American puritans, the Czech interwar situation was formed by the spirit of Enlightenment, romanticism, and anti-clericalism. Both versions of civil religion embrace the principle that the stability of a democratic, republican nation state and its politics requires more than just external norms and rules. The idea of a non-ecclesiastical, secularly understood religiosity in democratic society can therefore be seen as their shared vision.

Keywords

American civil religion, Robert Bellah, American culture, Czech philosophy, new religion, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

Contact

Tomáš Bubík

Dept. of Religious Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 97

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: tomas.bubik@upce.cz

Author

Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

Title of the Article

Interpreter, interlocutor, intermediary, traitress: An exemplary figure in chicana literature and culture

Abstract

La Malinche, Cortés’ interpreter and both real and symbolic mother of the mestizo race, is a paradigmatic figure in Mexican and Chicano/a cultures, in which she comes to represent an embodiment of national and linguistic betrayal. By employing postcolonial and gender studies perspectives, this article analyzes La Malinche’s liminal position within discourses of silence and speaking. It further shows how La Malinche’s hybrid identity undermines hierarchical binary oppositions implied by the process of colonization. On the other hand the article also argues that her victimization is already present in the language she speaks and is spoken about.

Keywords

hybrid identity, Chicano/a culture, conquest of Mexico, La Malinche, liminality, mestizo race.

Contact

Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

Department of Gender Studies

School of Humanities

Charles University

José Martího 31

162 52 Prague 6

Czech Republic

E-mail: terezka@gebbeth.cz

Author

Barbora Rumbinas

Title of the Article

Reverberations of Native American Oratory in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers

Abstract

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) is the first of five novels known as The Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper began writing in an effort to meet mounting financial obligations created after poor business decisions made by his brothers, unresolved legal claims against the estate of his father Judge William Cooper and the radical devaluation in land values brought on by the War of 1812. All of this left Cooper wholly financially dependent upon his pen to support himself, his wife and their four young children. Storytelling was an integral link in the spreading of news, the triumphs, and terrors of living on the frontier. Cooper casts his tale against the backdrop of the French and Indian Wars during which Native Peoples experienced repeated land dispossessions as the French and English fought their war. The story of Chingachgook/John Mohegan is one of resistance to intruders, a narrative which involves bloody conflict in the region where the town Templeton was established.

Keywords

Native Americans, Indians, French and Indian War, Land Dispossession, Oratory, Canassatego, Little Turtle, Logan, Pontiac, Red Jacket, James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy, The Pioneers.

Contact

Barbora Rumbinas

Institute of English Philology

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: barbara.rumbinas@uj.edu.pl

Author

Petr Kopecký

Title of the Article

Not Man Apart: Ecocentric Personification in the Works of Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck

Abstract

This essay probes the ecocentric dimension of the works of two quintessential California writers, Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck. While the representation of the Californian landscape in their writing has received much attention from critics, the non-anthropocentric vision often expressed in their works remained unnoticed for a long time. The primary objective of this essay is to examine the ways in which the authors use ecocentric personification to express their unconventional and sometimes even subversive views on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world. The essay discusses different metaphors whose purpose is to affirm the unity and equality of all life forms. The representation of the earth as woman and woman as the earth is explored in particular depth, together with the (eco)philosophical implications of this strategy. It is also argued that ecocentric personification as a literary trope is used more competently by these two authors than by many other writers with Romantic leanings. It is the authors’ erudition in biology and ecology that enables them to imaginatively express ideas that are deeply grounded in holistic science. Jeffers and Steinbeck can thus be legitimately described as literary precursors of the influential Gaia theory that was postulated by James Lovelock as late as the 1970s.

Keywords

Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, ecology, environmentalism, ecocentrism, ecofeminism, ecocentric personification.

Contact

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: petr.kopecky@osu.cz

Author

Michaela Jirsová

Title of the Article

“Red Rage” in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer

Abstract

This article provides a brief analysis of Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer (1996). This work is unique in the way it reflects Native Americans. They are not portrayed as merely the victims of horrific crimes that remain unanswered. On the contrary, the decades of hardships that Indians suffered have resulted in a “red rage” – a bloodthirsty response by Native Americans to racism, violence and oppression. To highlight Alexie’s Indian Killer as a groundbreaking piece of literary work, this article also presents a brief history of Native American literature.

Keywords

Native American literature, Native Americans, red rage, racism, violence, assimilation, Indian Killer, Sherman Alexie, identity

Contact

Michaela Jirsová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: michaela.jirsova@student.upce.cz

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

ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

Author

Mihaela Culea

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Mihaela Culea

Faculty of Letters

Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacău

600115 – Bacău

România

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

Author

Michaela Fojtíková

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Michaela Fojtíková

Department of Foreign Languages

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: michaela.fojtíková@upce.cz

Author

Karolina Kolenda

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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”.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Mária Kiššová

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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).

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Olga Roebuck

Title of the Article

The Scenology of Landscape in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Michaela Weiß

Title of the Article

Will Eisner’s Contract with Comics

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Miloš Blahút

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.”

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Vladimíra Fonfárová

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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”.

Keywords

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

Contact

Tomas Bata University in Zlín

Faculty of Humanities

Mostní 5139

760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

E-mail: fonfarova@fhs.utb.cz

Author

Karla Kovalová

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Šárka Bubíková

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Daniel Sampey

Title of the Article

Chicago, Greenwich Village and Provincetown: American theatre becomes little

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Jan Suk

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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).

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Hana Waisserová

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Masaryk University

Poříčí 7

603 00 Brno

Czech Republic

E-mail: hwaisserova@gmail.com

Author

Libuše Hornová

Title of the Article

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

Author

Jana Brandová

Title of the Article

Race Relations in Two Episodes of South Park and The Simpsons

Abstract

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.

Keywords

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

Contact

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

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Šárka Bubíková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Gains and Losses of Immigration in Julia Alvarez: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents	9	►
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) Biting Divagations – Self-discoveries in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs	20	►
Kathleen Dubs (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia & Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary) Sleeping in Beowulf	34	►
Janka Kaščáková (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia) Meeting of the Traditional and the Modern: Jane Austen’s Emma and Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea”	51	►
Marija Knežević (University of Montenegro, Montenegro) Sherman Alexie’s Version and Subversion of Native American Storytelling Tradition	61	►
Karla Kovalová (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Piecing Memories, Connecting Lives: The (Inter)Textual Quilt in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata	76	►
Christopher E. Koy (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic) “You is got a monst’us heap ter l’arn yit”: Charles Chesnutt’s Revisions of Albion Tourgée’s ‘Carpetbagger’ and ‘White Negro’ Characters	87	►
Bożena Kucała (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: the Invention of Tradition	96	►
Katarína Labudová (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia) “Myth is more instructive than history”: (Re)constructions of Biblical Myths in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve	106	►
Ivan Lacko (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia) Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America	118	►
David Levente Palatinus (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia) From the Pictorial Turn to the Embodiment of Vision	127	►
Jozef Pecina (University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Slovakia) Antebellum Sensational Novels and Subversion of Domesticity	136	►
Ewa Rychter (The Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education in Wałbrzych, Poland) Like a Grain of Sand Irritating an Oyster. Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man and the Bible	144	►
Krystyna Stamirowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland) On Reading, Readers and Authors	158	►
Anna Světlíková (Charles University, Czech Republic) Type, Allegory, Symbol: Jonathan Edwards and Literary Traditions	169	►
Paul Titchmarsh (University of Pannonia, Hungary) Alternative Histories: Philip Roth and The Plot Against America	182	►
Roman Trušník (Tomáš Baťa University, Czech Republic) Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin?	194	►

STUDENT CONTRIBUTION
Ivana Marvánová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) “Migrant Mother”: the Depression Era Madonna	207	►

BOOK REVIEW
Ladislav Vít “What is the Citie, but the People? True, the People are the Citie.”	219

NEWS, CALLS, ANNOUNCEMENTS	223

ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

Author

Šárka Bubíková

Title of the Article

Gains and Losses of Immigration in Julia Alvarez: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract:

Immigration is a frequent theme in American literature both in fiction and in so-called ego-documents. But while United States was often considered a country of immigrants, immigration has only lately ceased to be automatically linked with assimilation and integration. In my analysis of the Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), I will focus on how immigration is depicted as both a loss and a gain, as a kind of oscillation between the need to accommodate to new home and to retain what is fundamental to one’s identity from the old.

Keywords

Twentieth-century American ethnic novel, Immigration, bi-culturality, Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent

Contact

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

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

Biting Divagations – Self-discoveries in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs

Abstract

This article aims to explore the position of Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs (1992) within the corpus of his work. It attempts to show how this small in scale yet complex novel both follows and subverts the author’s characteristic themes and narrative strategies. It will also argue that, as the novel’s central concerns are the coming to terms with one’s past and the role of memory in this process, it in many respects anticipates McEwan’s most acclaimed work so far, Atonement (2001). Written soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs ranks among his most politically engaged novels. Therefore, a special focus will be put on the author’s treatment of the theme of the often ambivalent relationship between private responsibility and public involvement that he touched upon in The Child in Time (1987) and later returned to in Amsterdam (1998).

Keywords

Contemporary British literature, narrative strategies, Ian McEwan, Black Dogs, memory, childhood, loss of innocence

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague

Celetná 13

110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Kathleen Dubs

Title of the Article

Sleeping in Beowulf

Abstract

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” As this well-known little prayer suggests, during actual sleep—while the conscious faculties are inoperative—the soul is at risk. Indeed, during sleep the body is also in danger, as the unconscious man is not alert to threat. Apparently sleeping can be a dangerous (in)activity. In the Old English poem Beowulf, actual sleeping occurs at critical points in the narrative, but always at night, or at least in darkness. Moreover, the traditional literary uses of sleep as a simulacrum of death also occur. But correlations among these concepts are not consistent. Beowulf usually fights at night, without sleep; he is, at least once, saved from death by his ability to stay awake. But he also fights during the day, though with different results. The monsters attack at night, in the darkness, so apparently they, too, do not sleep at night. But the dragon sleeps night and day until awakened, in the night, when he attacks regardless of the hour, though he is a night flyer. Thus much of the activity in Beowulf occurs at night, or in the dark, but the results are revealed only in the light of dawn. This paper investigates the different occurrences of sleep, in their various contexts, as well as in their relationships to light and darkness, and analyses their contributions to larger meanings within the poem. It concludes that sleep is a representation of inattentiveness, the result of which is usually fatal, physically as well as spiritually.

Keywords

Beowulf, Old English literature, sleep, darkness, night

Contact

Kathleen Dubs

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Arts and Letters

The Catholic University in Ružomberok

Hrabovská cesta 1

034 01 Ružomberok

Slovakia

E-mail: kathleen.dubs@ku.sk

and Pázmány Péter Catholic University

1 Egyetem utca

Piliscsaba

2087 Hungary

Author

Janka Kaščáková

Title of the Article

Meeting of the Traditional and the Modern: Jane Austen’s Emma and Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea”

Abstract

By the time Katherine Mansfield started writing her stories, it had become almost a fashion to look down on Jane Austen and consider her work as dull or at the best outmoded. Yet the gap between Jane Austen and early 20th century writers is not always as very wide as it might seem – one can find Modernists who not only admired Austen but found in her work inspiration for their own art. One of these is arguably the New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield. This paper will focus on some general similarities in Mansfield’s and Austen’s approaches, discuss affinities in their uses of free indirect discourse and provide a comparative analysis of Austen’s novel Emma and Mansfield’s short story “A Cup of Tea.” Not only in the use of free indirect discourse, but in terms of characters, plot, and structure do these two works contain major commonalities.

Keywords

Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Emma, “A Cup of Tea”, free indirect discourse, modernism

Contact

Janka Kaščáková

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Arts and Letters

The Catholic University in Ružomberok

Hrabovská cesta 1

034 01 Ružomberok

Slovakia

E-mail: janka.kascakova@ku.sk

Author

Marija Knežević

Title of the Article

Sherman Alexie’s Version and Subversion of Native American Storytelling Tradition

Sherman Alexie understands writing as a means of fighting for the cultural identity of the American Natives against the dominant culture and also against the social compliance and lethargy of his own people. Since for him literature equals rage and imagination, the task of an artist is to be loud, poetic, cruel and inappropriate, in other words, to undermine mythologies. This assumption results in cruelly realistic work, for which reason Alexie is controversial. To non-native readers his voice is surprising and entertaining, but native readers often passionately disapprove of the images of natives Alexie depicts, as well as his distortion of the traditional narrative voice and its sacred function. What seems, however, to be the least traditional feature of Alexie’s work, an abundance of markers of popular culture, strikes me as a potent, though discomforting, challenge, inviting the reader, as good storytelling always does, to participate in the construction of meaning of our mutual present.

Keywords

Native American literature, Sherman Alexie, storytelling, trickster, popular culture,subversion

Contact

Marija Knežević

Faculty of Philosophy,

University of Montenegro

Cetinjska br.2
81 000 Podgorica

Montenegro

E-mail: marija13a@gmail.com

Author

Karla Kovalová

Title of the Article

Piecing Memories, Connecting Lives: The (Inter)Textual Quilt in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata

Abstract

The use of structural and thematic qualities of the quilt has given rise to a rich tradition in American women’s literature, reflecting the historical transformation of American women’s culture and/or suggesting alternative modes of perception. Using the quilt as a tool for textual analysis, this paper will explore Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998), a debut novel describing three generations of black women bound by a shared legacy of slavery. Perry establishes herself in the tradition of black women’s writing, while creating in her work “an intertextual quilt” that challenges perceptions of American history.

Keywords

African-American fiction, Intertextuality, quilt, legacy of slavery, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Stigmata

Contact

Karla Kovalová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: karla.kovalova@osu.cz

Author

Christopher E. Koy

Title of the Article

“You is got a monst’us heap ter l’arn yit”: Charles Chesnutt’s Revisions of Albion Tourgée’s ‘Carpetbagger’ and ‘White Negro’ Characters

Abstract

Arguably the greatest advocate for Civil Rights among whites in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods, Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838-1905) influenced the African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) significantly. Both authors were born in Ohio, wrote fiction and nonfictional essays about the desperate situation of Blacks in the South during and after Reconstruction, and both ended their respective careers with a sense that their reception was either ignored or misunderstood.

Keywords

Civil Rights, racial relations, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, Albion Winegar Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, “tragic mulatto” trope

Contact

Christopher E. Koy

Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: koy@pf.jcu.cz

Author

Bożena Kucała

Title of the Article

Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: the Invention of Tradition

Abstract

The article discusses Stoppard’s play as an instantiation of how literary tradition is invented. By problematising the processes of artistic creation, transmission (especially by means of verbal communication) and interpretation of literature, the play demonstrates that the emergence of tradition is not a matter of natural growth. Based on the biography of A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love presents Housnam’s tentative attempts at identifying himself and, especially, at defining the nature of his commitment to another man. Housman’s self-perception is shaped by his knowledge of literature, and in particular classical culture. It is mainly in the work of ancient poets that the protagonist finds models for his own feelings. In his own poetry, Housman also gives priority to fabulation rather than imitation of reality. It is argued here that both his creative and scholarly work as well as his private life exemplify a variety of the processes by which literary tradition is constructed.

Keywords

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, A.E. Housman, transmission, interpretation, tradition

Contact

Bożena Kucała

Institute of English Philology

Jagiellonian University

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: bkucala@o2.pl

Author

Katarína Labudová

Title of the Article

“Myth is more instructive than history”: (Re)constructions of Biblical Myths in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve

Abstract

The paper deals with The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter. Both writers show dystopian regimes which reconstruct Biblical myths since, as it is suggested in their fiction, totalitarian states abuse myths to represent women as passive victims and objects of desire and rescue. And because demythologizing involves remythologizing, Atwood and Carter attempt not only to refuse the representations of the past literary and mythological tradition but also to declare subjectivity for their heroines; women are represented in Nancy Roberts’ words “as rescuers rather than victims” . Margaret Atwood uses the genre of speculative fiction to depict the nightmarish Gilead, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime reconstructed from patriarchal narratives of the Bible and American Puritanism. The leaders of Gilead value women for their reproductive function as ‘two-legged wombs’. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, although she has no real power to rebel against patriarchal prescriptions, claims her body and her memory as her own territory. Through her narrative she undermines Gilead’s myth of the silent passivity of women. Offered not only survives the oppression, she also re-writes the story of ‘walking ovaries’ into her own story of identity, denying the role of nameless Handmaid. In Angela Carter’s speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve, the Biblical myth of the creation of Eve from Adam’s body is remythologized by Mother, the leader of a group of militant feminists. A British man, Evelyn, is kidnapped and transformed through surgery into “the new Eve” by Mother, who is a genius surgeon as well. I focus here on intertextuality, which offers Atwood and Carter a strategy for reconstructing the gaps inherent in Biblical myths related to reproduction, creation of woman and infertility.

Keywords

Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Biblical myth, speculative fiction

Contact

Katarína Labudová

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Arts and Letters

The Catholic University in Ružomberok

Hrabovská cesta 1

034 01 Ružomberok

Slovakia

E-mail: katarina.labudova@ku.sk

Author

Ivan Lacko

Title of the Article

Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America

Abstract

Employing a montage of scenes, styles, and personal stories and plots, Tony Kushner’s monumental theatrical undertaking Angels in America offers a dialectical examination of end-of-themillennium America. This paper attempts to explore how Kushner’s dramatic approach makes use of the dialectics inherent in the figure of the angel – with all of the implicit contradictions, paradoxes and ironies. Kushner’s aesthetic functions on the basis of recurrent defamiliarization and re-familiarization which, though Brechtian in essence, technically provides the author and, in turn, also the audience with a space where elements of the epic theatre mix with traditional Aristotelian structure to offer a paradoxical unity between Verfremdung and catharsis. The intentional subversion of traditional forms and concepts (such as the character of the divine messenger) allows the dramatic presentation of a whole variety of ideas, implications and perceptions.

Keywords

Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Bertolt Brecht, Verfremdung, epic theatre, subversion, angel

Contact

Ivan Lacko

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

Comenius University in Bratislava

Gondova 2

P.O.BOX 32
814 99 Bratislava

Slovakia

E-mail: ivan.lacko@uniba.sk

Author

David Levente Palatinus

Title of the Article

From the Pictorial Turn to the Embodiment of Vision

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to map out the semiotic, cultural-historical and ideological discourses that constitute the theoretical framework of the study of visual culture, and to anchor the problem of response in an underlying phenomenology of perception. The article argues that the strong cognitive-emotional responses that images generate are indicative of the corporeal conditioning of aesthetics, which places the entirety of visual discourse into an anthropological perspective.

Keywords

visual culture, phenomenology of perception, semiotics, corporeality

Contact

David Levente Palatinus

Dept. of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Arts and Letters

The Catholic University in Ružomberok

Hrabovská cesta 1

034 01 Ružomberok

Slovakia

E-mail: dlpalatinus@gmail.com

Author

Jozef Pecina

Title of the Article

Antebellum Sensational Novels and Subversion of Domesticity

Abstract

With the sensational novels of the 1840s, a new genre of popular fiction focused on life in cities appeared in America. Through grotesque humor, repulsive images and at times extreme perversity the authors of these novels intended to unmask the corruption and decadence of the ruling class. The first part of this article traces the development of sensational novels and the achievements George Thompson, the most prolific author in this genre. The second part of the article focuses on the subversion of domesticity in Thompson’s novels. Domestic novels of 19th century usually trace the success of a virtuous heroine who overcomes all kinds of difficulties and personal misfortune and, often guided by a strong Christian faith, moves to middle-class marriage. The sensational novels of George Thompson move in a different direction and subvert social norms of the era. His narratives deconstruct marriage and family, with households frequently being split apart as a result of the perverse activities of one or both spouses. Thompson’s novels do not end in domestic bliss, but with sensational and disturbing images. In this article I focus on the subversion of domesticity in two of Thompson’s novels – Venus in Boston and City Crimes.

Keywords

sensational novels, subversion, antebellum era, family, deconstruction

Contact

Jozef Pecina

Department of English and American Studies

University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius

Nám. J. Herdu 2

917 01 Trnava

Slovakia

E-mail: pecina@ucm.sk

Author

Ewa Rychter

Title of the Article

Like a Grain of Sand Irritating an Oyster. Howard Jacobson’s The Very Model of a Man and the Bible

Abstract

For contemporary novelists rewriting the Bible (e.g., for Winterson, Barnes, Roberts, Crace or Diski), Scripture proves a potent irritant with which contemporary literature can still maintain a lively, interactional relationship. Far from being taken for granted, neglected, plundered, the Bible functions as a grating cultural presence approached with a sense of both abrasion/unease and incorrigible attachment. This paper focuses on Howard Jacobson's The Very Model of a Man (1992), a novel rewriting the biblical narrative of Abel and Cain, and examines ways the novel plays out its attachment and detachment, friction and acceptance of the Bible. It is argued that the complex character of the novel (written by a Jewish born British author) derives from midrash (a rabbinic mode of reading and relating to Scripture), a form not unknown in English literary tradition. Drawing on those theories of midrash which emphasise the culture-bound, historically conditioned position of the Bible reader, the paper investigates the ways the scriptural “irritant” is filtered through/inflected by the cultural milieu of its late twentieth-century reader.

Keywords

the Bible, midrash, subversion, contemporary novel

Contact

Ewa Rychter

The Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education in Wałbrzych

Zamkowa St. 4

58-300 Wałbrzych

Poland

E-mail: rje@wp.pl

Author

Krystyna Stamirowska

Title of the Article

On Reading, Readers and Authors

Abstract

Reading is such a common activity that, apart from the literary critic, one hardly considers its nature or reflects upon its purpose or uses. Yet it is through an encounter with a literary work that we gain access to new worlds and make contact with imaginary people and places; and, also, although indirectly and unconsciously, enter into a dialogue with the implied author – a figure both familiar and unfamiliar who is our invisible guide. The paper thus reflects on the nature of reading and the role of literature in contemporary life.

Keywords

reading, George Eliot, Adam Bede, modernism, critic

Contact

Krystyna Stamirowska

Institute of English Philology

Jagiellonian University

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: krystyna.stamirowska@uj.edu.pl

Author

Anna Světlíková

Title of the Article

Type, Allegory, Symbol: Jonathan Edwards and Literary Traditions

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical form of Jonathan Edwards’ (1703-1758) natural typology. Edwards, one of colonial New England’s greatest thinkers and theologians, apparently believed he was taking a bold step outside the well-established tradition of Calvinist typology, an exegetical principle based on figurative interpretation, when he argued that not only the Scripture but the created world also typologically represents divine truth. Contemporary scholars often see the natural type as a kind of proto-symbol, uniting mind and nature in a moment of transcendental perception. However, the rhetorical structure of the type suggests that Edwards’ natural type is closer to the emblematic tradition than to symbol or metonymy. While Edwards’ theory of typology might have been innovative, the literary form of the type remained traditional. The discrepancy between the content and form of Edwards’ natural typology gives us a more complex understanding of his position with respect to the allegorical and symbolist traditions.

Keywords

Jonathan Edwards, type, allegory, symbol, emblem

Contact

Anna Světlíková

Charles University in Prague
Faculty of Philosophy & Arts
Dept. of Anglophone Literatures & Cultures
nám. Jana Palacha 2,
116 38 Praha 1

E-mail: anna.svetlikova@ff.cuni.cz

Author

Paul Titchmarsh

Title of the Article

Alternative Histories: Philip Roth and The Plot Against America

Abstract

This paper deals with Philip Roth’s continual idea of “what if…” with a concentration on his novel, The Plot Against America. Roth has always called himself a suppositional writer, though Roth, (who is Roth?) is a continual presence in his work (Zuckerman and Kepesh, for example, in other writerly personae). Nevertheless, this work makes us question various ideas about twentieth-century American history, not only in terms of the personal, but also in terms of ideas about nationality. This is a novel that is both comic and tragic and which makes us think about our position in the contemporary world of Central and East Europe. More importantly, it makes us think about what is happening in contemporary America. It also questions ideas about Roth as author.

Keywords

American identity, American nationalism, Jewishness, anti-Semitism, dystopia, Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

Contact

Paul Titchmarsh

Faculty of Modern Philology and Social Sciences

University of Pannonia

Egyetem utca 10

8200 Veszprém

Hungary

E-mail: paultitchmarsh@yahoo.co.uk

Author

Roman Trušník

Title of the Article

Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin?

Abstract

The present article explores the fact that Christopher Isherwood, an author who was an American citizen for almost half of his life and who wrote his masterpiece, A Single Man (1964), as an American writer, is excluded from mainstream histories of American literature. The article reviews primarily sources on American gay literature that establish Isherwood as one of the major formative figures of the twentieth-century gay novel. It concludes that in the age of authors coming from the margin to the center, the mainstream histories of American literature paradoxically seem to have pushed a major author to the margin of literary life.

Keywords

Christopher Isherwood, twentieth-century American literature, twentieth-century British literature, gay literature, homosexuality, narrative technique, thematic criticism

Contact

Roman Trušník

Tomas Bata University in Zlín

Faculty of Humanities

Mostní 5139

760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

E-mail: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz

Author

Ivana Marvánová

Title of the Article

“Migrant Mother”: the Depression Era Madonna

Abstract

In the 1930s, the American photography has been enriched by the works of the group of documentary photographers in which Dorothea Lange seemed to play the most significant role. Lange’s portrait of a woman holding a baby and being surrounded by two of her other children, called the Migrant Mother, immediately exceeded boundaries of common picture and became more than an icon of one unhappy decade. The photograph’s unusual composition and Lange’s ability to catch inconveniences such as sorrow, destitution, or starvation on the one side, together with hope, confidence, and solidarity on the other side, forced many art critics to analyze the photograph and discuss its hidden meanings. One of such image’s explanations compares it to the portrayal of Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus. The article tries to explain this biblical interpretation, as well as to introduce into the story of a creation of one of the best known photograph of the twentieth century.

Keywords

American documentary photography, Depression era, Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother”, icon

Contact

Ivana Marvánová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: ivana.marvanova@student.upce.cz

We welcome original articles devoted to a variety of issues of American and British cultural studies. Articles must not have been previously published and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All articles selected as appropriate will be anonymously peer-reviewed by experts in the author’s field of study.

Citations style: Manuscripts must be submitted in English in accordance with the Chicago Style of citations (footnotes and bibliography).

General requirements:

Authors are responsible for the adequate and correct language usage. Papers should be submitted with minimum amount of formatting.

Each submission begins with the title of the article, followed by the author's name and affiliation, then abstract outlining the article’s argument and significance (200 words), keywords. At the end of the main text (before Bibliography), there shall be a short biographical information about the author in the third person (50 words).

All the author-identifying information will be removed prior to the reviewing process.

Please submit your articles by 31st May in an electronic form as Word document to sarka.bubikova@upce.cz

Submissions failing to comply with Chicago Style of citations and the required extent (4000-7000 words) will be returned to authors prior to the reviewing process.

Soubory ke stažení	Velikost
submission_guidelines_final_174332.pdf - pdf	97 kB

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Paul Titchmarsh (University of Pannonia, Hungary) “Tell everything as it is – no better and no worse:” Images of the West in Washington Irving and Mark Twain	1	►
Karla Kovalová (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) “We the human Family“: Revisions of American National History in Contemporary Slave Narratives	11	►
Christopher E. Koy (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic) The Reformulation of Ethnological Sources and Orientalist Discourse in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King	25	►
Stanislav Kolář (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Dara Horn – A New Voice in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction	41	►
Pavel Sedláček (Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic) Divergence of Canadian and American Cities	51	►
Irena Přibylová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Shape Notes, Gospels and Spirituals: Rediscovering Spirituality in the 21st Century	59	►
Milada Franková (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Sarah Waters’s Monument to Women of World War II	66	►
Bożena Kucała (Jagiellonian University, Poland) In search of Ellis Bell: Emma Tennant’s Heathcliff’s Tale	73	►
Kamila Vránková (University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic) The Theme of Otherness and the Role of Dialogue in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea	81	►
Petra Smažilová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Group Dynamics and the Dramatic Surge of British Feminism in Cloud Nine	89	►
Roman Trušník (Tomáš Baťa University, Czech Republic) A Drag Queen in Your Living Room: Michael Cunningham’s Revision of Assimilative Gay Fiction	97	►
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) London Re-experienced – Peter Ackroyd’s Historiographic Revisioning of the City	104	►
Ladislav Vít (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) W.H. Auden: The Poet and the Sea: The Sea and the Mirror	121	►
Natalia Orlova (University of J.E. Purkyně, Czech Republic), Katya Nemtchinova (Seattle Pacific University, USA) NES and NNES Teachers: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Teaching Styles	132	►

STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS
Ivan Burda (Tomáš Baťa University, Czech Republic) From Books to the Silver Screen: Transformations of Michael Cunningham’s Fiction	149	►
Lukáš Krincvaj (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Star Trek and the American Society of the 20th Century	156	►
Lucie Dlouhá (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) The Dreams of Pecola Breedlove and Richard Wright	163	►
Barbora Moravová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) African-American Slave Childhood	170	►

BOOK REVIEW
Šárka Bubíková The Literary Child and National Identity: review of Zofia Kolbuszewska: The Purloined Child	176

NEWS, CALLS, ANNOUNCEMENTS	180

ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

Author

Paul Titchmarsh

Title of the Article

“Tell everything as it is – no better and no worse:” Images of the West in Washington Irving and Mark Twain

Abstract

In the United States of the nineteenth-century, the struggle to liberate American writing from European influences took many forms, but one prophecy was that a literature of the West would amount to an American coming of age. The prophecy remains unfulfilled and as one commentator has argued, all the fiction and nonfiction concerning the Frontier “can best be expressed in the image of a Western man straddling his vast empire in splendour, yet standing with his back to the West and looking eastward with awe and reverence” (Robert Lee, From West to East). To explore this proposition, I wish briefly to examine two texts, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). In Irving’s Tour, for instance, we are given an account by a well-educated easterner, in which the actual details of Western life and idiom are censored into the picturesque, whilst Twain’s Roughing It is written from the position of a wide-eyed innocent. Both approaches tend to distort the truth. In the work of both authors, the romance of the West takes over from reality and it can be argued that in both cases the disorder of frontier life was kept outside texts, which were written for a predominantly eastern audience. The question posed, then, concerns the way the West was turned into a pastoral world by these authors.

Keywords

the Frontier, the West, pastoral, Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, Mark Twain, Roughing It, Robert Lee, From West to East

Contact

Paul Titchmarsh

Faculty of Modern Philology and Social Sciences

University of Pannonia

Egyetem utca 10

8200 Veszprém

Hungary

E-mail: paultitchmarsh@yahoo.co.uk

Author

Karla Kovalová

Title of the Article

“We the human Family“: Revisions of American National History in Contemporary Slave Narratives

Abstract

The paper discusses two contemporary slave narratives, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and J. California Cooper’s Family (1991) in order to demonstrate how African American women writers revision American past. More specifically, the paper demonstrates how both Butler and Cooper challenge the constructed ideas about American national identity, the understanding of which has been shaped by notions of family. Foregrounding miscegenation in their own specific ways (Butler via an interracial marriage that may be read as a “trope of integration”; Cooper via a “multicultural project” in which the history of humankind is presented as a narrative of miscegenation), both writers recast the American nation as a family whose members share a common history.

Keywords

African American literature, American national history, contemporary slave narratives, revision of the past, Octavia Butler, Kindred, J. California Cooper, Family

Contact

Karla Kovalová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: karla.kovalova@osu.cz

Author

Christopher E. Koy

Title of the Article

The Reformulation of Ethnological Sources and Orientalist Discourse in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King

Abstract

When Saul Bellow composed his renowned novel Henderson the Rain King fifty years ago, his undergraduate studies of anthropology under the Africanist Melville Herskovics exerted a significant influence. This paper considers the sources of many of Bellow’s descriptions of East and West African tribes in the novel. Where Bellow diverts from these sources, his changes will be considered in light of Edward Said’s concept of ”Orientalist discourse” as set out in Orientalism.

Keywords

Edward Said, Orientalist discourse, Melville Herskovics, stereotypes, colonialism, Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

Contact

Christopher E. Koy

Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: koy@pf.jcu.cz

Author

Stanislav Kolář

Title of the Article

Dara Horn – A New Voice in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Abstract

This essay introduces the contemporary Jewish American novelist Dara Horn. It concentrates on her second novel The World to Come, published in 2006. In this novel, in which Horn mixes various genres, we follow the mysterious story of the Ziskind family from Russia to America. The family history is seen through the history of a Marc Chagall painting that once accompanied the life of the protagonist Benjamin Ziskind. This essay attempts to present Dara Horn as an author with a deep knowledge of the history, culture, and religion of the Jewish people.

Keywords

Jewish American fiction, Dara Horn, The World to Come, Marc Chagall, multilayered narrative, family roots, antisemitism, Jewishness

Contact

Stanislav Kolář

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

University of Ostrava

Reální 5

701 03 Ostrava
Czech Republic

E-mail: stanislav.kolar@osu.cz

Author

Pavel Sedláček

Title of the Article

Divergence of Canadian and American Cities

Abstract

The article outlines the evolution of Urban Geography approaches to the cities and elaborates the idea of the cities as multi spatial “bodies”. Further on it compares the development of Canadian and American cities and points out the main differences, mainly those regarding the theme of sustainability.

Keywords

Urban space, urban planning, Urban Geography, sustainability, Canadian city, American city

Contact

Pavel Sedláček

Department of Languages

Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Brno University of Technology

Technická 3058/10

616 00 Brno

Czech Republic

E-mail: sedlacep@feec.vutbr.cz

Author

Irena Přibylová

Title of the Article

Shape Notes, Gospels and Spirituals: Rediscovering Spirituality in the 21st Century

Abstract

Spirituals, gospels and Sacred harp songs (recorded on paper with the help of specific form of shape notes) represent a strong 19th century American cultural tradition. Their lyrics contributed to the originality of the independent American literature. In the 20th century, these songs left Church environment and made themselves at home in popular culture too. In the Czech lands, their acceptance was given mainly thanks to the strong rhythm and emotional performance. The Czech Republic is a post-communist country with the highest percentage of atheists. Despite that, Czechs like sacred music, especially American spirituals and gospels. In the following lines I would like to show where modern roots and limits of this interest are and what challenges the Czechs have had in facing the perception of American sacred music after 1989.

Keywords

American music, gospel, spirituals, Sacred harp songs, shape notes, perception of American sacred music

Contact

Irena Přibylová
Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Masaryk University

Poříčí 945/9

601 77 Brno

Czech Republic

E-mail: pribylova@ped.muni.cz

Author

Milada Franková

Title of the Article

Sarah Waters’s Monument to Women of World War II

Abstract

British women’s visions of equality and acknowledgement of their contribution to the World War II effort were soon revised for them after the war was over. They were sent back to their traditional role to keep the hearth and home. It was not until the year 2005 that a monument was erected in Whitehall in London – the Memorial to the Women of World War II – eerily evocative by its array of nameless, empty uniforms of the lack of recognition accorded to those who wore them. A year later, in 2006, Sarah Waters in her novel The Night Watch filled some of these reluctantly abandoned uniforms with bodies as well as faces and gave them names, albeit fictional. The paper reads Waters’ story as a pointed individual account of the visions and revisions of the countless, for the most part faceless and nameless war women commemorated by the Whitehall memorial, sixty years on.

Keywords

British WWII fiction, women in WWII, Sarah Waters, The Night Watch, the Memorial to the Women of World War II, Whitehall memorial

Contact

Milada Franková
Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts

Masaryk University

Arna Nováka 1/1

602 00 Brno

Czech Republic

E-mail: frankova@phil.muni.cz

Author

Bożena Kucała

Title of the Article

In search of Ellis Bell: Emma Tennant’s Heathcliff’s Tale

Abstract

Like several of Tennant’s books, Heathcliff’s Tale is a revision of a canonical English novel. Wuthering Heights has continued to intrigue readers ever since its publication, partly owing to the disturbing gaps in the story which provoke various, even contradictory readings. Just as the central character in Bronte’s novel remains mysterious, so the authorship of the novel has been subject to reinterpretations. Published under a pseudonym, the novel was initially ascribed to Emily’s brother, but establishing the correct authorship posed further questions pertaining to the sources of Emily Brontë’s inspiration. These questions are imaginatively pondered in Tennant’s neo-Victorian novel. Heathcliff’s Tale reinterprets Wuthering Heights by completing the gaps inserted by Brontë in the original version as well as draws attention to its own artifice by imitating and enhancing the structural complexity of the original. Tennant’s book is analysed here as representative of the literary dialogue with the Victorian past undertaken by a considerable group of contemporary English novels.

Keywords

Neo-Victorian fiction, literary revision, Wuthering Heights, Emma Tennant, Heathcliff’s Tale, Emily Brontë, Ellis Bell

Contact

Bożena Kucała

Institute of English Philology

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: bkucala@o2.pl

Author

Kamila Vránková

Title of the Article

The Theme of Otherness and the Role of Dialogue in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

The role of dialogue is frequently emphasized in Jane Eyre (1847), being related to the problem of knowledge and its influence on the quality of mutual relationship. In this respect, the absence of the dialogue results in increasing estrangement and alienation. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the theme is further developed to intensify the tension between the search for the meaning and for the expression of the emotional intensity. In my paper, the concept of the dialogue in both novels is considered against the background of the ideas of Bakhtin, Gadamer, Deleuze and Levinas.

Keywords

Otherness, alienation, dialogue, Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Deleuze, Levinas

Contact

Kamila Vránková
Department of English Studies

Faculty of Education

University of South Bohemia

Jeronýmova 10

371 15 České Budějovice

Czech Republic

E-mail: vrankova@pf.jcu.cz

Author

Petra Smažilová

Title of the Article

Group Dynamics and the Dramatic Surge of British Feminism in Cloud Nine

Abstract

The play Cloud Nine (1979) belongs to a period in which British society, and especially women, were going through dramatic changes; the late 1970s represent the period of group dynamics, radicalization of women’s movement and the recognition of women’s self-reliance. The purpose of this essay is to prove that common dynamics and contemporary discussions influenced the life of Betty, the character who was, when considering other female characters in the play, most set in her ways.

Keywords

Contemporary British drama, Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine, Women’s Liberation Movement, second wave of feminism

Contact

Petra Smažilová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: petra.smazilova@upce.cz

Author

Roman Trušník

Title of the Article

A Drag Queen in Your Living Room: Michael Cunningham’s Revision of Assimilative Gay Fiction

Abstract

The paper explores Michael Cunningham’s revision of the concept of assimilative gay fiction in his novel Flesh and Blood (1995). Unlike other authors of this stream of gay fiction, who avoid the central elements of American gay culture in their novels, Cunningham brings the themes of AIDS, camp, and drag queens into the literary mainstream and in this way performs a revision of the very concept of assimilative fiction.

Keywords

American gay fiction, homosexuality, assimilative gay fiction, Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood, AIDS, drag queens

Contact

Roman Trušník

Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín

Faculty of Humanities

Mostní 5139

760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

E-mail: trusnik@fhs.utb.cz

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

London Re-experienced – Peter Ackroyd’s Historiographic Revisioning of the City

Abstract

This paper focuses on arguably the best contemporary British chronicler of historical and literary London, Peter Ackroyd. As its theoretical point of departure it deals with his seminal work on the city’s intertextual and discursive nature over the course of its development, London: The Biography (2000). In order to illustrate Ackroyd’s fictional historiographic treatment of different historical periods of London, two of his novels have been chosen – Hawksmoor (1985) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), while three others, Chatterton (1987), The Clerkenwell Tales (2003) and The Lambs of London (2004), are also referred to. All these texts are discussed from the point of view of textual and thematic interconnectedness, the mixing of the factual and fictitious in creating London’s topography, and the influences of the city’s milieu on the characters’ psyches.

Keywords

Contemporary British fiction, Peter Ackroyd, The Biography, Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, The Clerkenwell Tales, literary topography, city, London, historiographic fiction

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague

Celetná 13

110 00 Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Ladislav Vít

Title of the Article

W.H. Auden: The Poet and the Sea: The Sea and the Mirror

Abstract

The endeavour of modernist authors to ‘make it new’ involved a significant revision of the use of imagery. This paper focuses on W.H. Auden and the ways in which he used the image of the sea. It shows that the contours of the poet’s symbolic landscape changed in parallel with his dynamic ideological development. As a whole, the paper argues that there is a discernible relationship between the two phenomena, which, however, remains to be defined by scholarship.

Keywords

W.H.Auden, Poetics of Place, Ideology, the sea, literary topography, imagery, modernism

Contact

Ladislav Vít

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: ladislav.vit@upce.cz

Authors

Natalia Orlova, Katya Nemtchinova

Title of the Article

NES and NNES Teachers: A Cross-cultural Comparison of Teaching Styles

Abstract

The paper investigates the differences and similarities in teaching styles from a cross-cultural perspective. Although the dichotomy between native and non-native English speaking teachers has been the focus of numerous publications in the field, various elements of their teaching styles, in terms of both similarities and differences, have received little attention. For this purpose, authors surveyed teachers in the U.S. and the Czech Republic to analyze their general modes of classroom behavior, teaching methods, and self-image. Empirical evidence received through the survey does not fully support the idea that cultural factors influence certain aspects of classroom practices and teaching style.

Keywords

teaching styles, native English speaking teachers, non-native English speaking teachers, cross-cultural, classroom behavior, teacher´s self-image

Contacts

Natalia Orlova
English Department

Faculty of Education

University of J. E. Purkyně

České mládeže 8

400 96 Ústí nad Labem

Czech Republic

E-mail: natalia.orlova@ujep.cz

Katya Nemtchinova

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

Seattle Pacific University

3307 3rd Ave W

Seattle, WA 98119

USA

E-mail: katya@spu.edu

Author

Ivan Burda

Title of the Article

From Books to the Silver Screen: Transformations of Michael Cunningham’s Fiction

Abstract

By 1999 when Michael Cunningham published The Hours not many people had known his name although he had already written two other novels. The success of The Hours followed by a movie of same name made Cunningham world-wide known. Soon afterward he himself wrote a screenplay for another movie based upon his earlier novel A Home at the End of the World. This paper deals with some differences between the novels and their film adaptations.

Keywords

Michael Cunningham, The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, novel and screenplay, film adaptation, modernism

Contact

Ivan Burda

Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín

Faculty of Humanities

Mostní 5139

760 01 Zlín

Czech Republic

Author

Lukáš Krincvaj

Title of the Article

Star Trek and the American Society of the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of the television series Star Trek on the equal rights struggle in the 20th century USA society. Analysis of two main topics – the fight for equal rights of minorities and the position of women in society – shows that by depicting minorities as equal partners and placing women into better positions, the author of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry prepared the television audience for the changes to come and helped them to be more receptive to things “alien” to them.

Keywords

Sci-fi TV series, Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek, gender roles, racial issues

Contact

Lukáš Krincvaj

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: lukas.krincvaj@student.upce.cz

Author

Lucie Dlouhá

Title of the Article

The Dreams of Pecola Breedlove and Richard Wright

Abstract

The paper introduces two child protagonists, Pecola Breedlove and Richard Wright, and analyzes and compares their difficult childhoods, influenced by the tragic impact of racisms and long-time effects of slavery.

Keywords

Slavery, racial relations, childhood, Black Boy, Richard Wright, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Contact

Lucie Dlouhá

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: lucie.dlouha@student.upce.cz

Author

Barbora Moravová

Title of the Article

African-American Slave Childhood

Abstract

The paper focuses on some issues of slave children’s lives in bondage. A significant source for learning about the African American slavery in the Antebellum South are the slave narratives written by (former) slaves. These narratives were mainly written to document events and experiences of slavery and also to add arguments for the growing abolitionist movement. The research of this paper is based on a comparative study of the narrative works Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass and Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. These narratives provide detailed descriptions of how children lived during slavery as well as how they experienced violence and racism.

Keywords

Slave Childhood, American slavery, racism, violence, slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Up from Slavery

Contact

Barbora Moravová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: barbora.moravova@student.upce.cz

ARTICLES	PAGE	ABSTRACTS KEYWORDS CONTACTS
Antonella Cagnolati (University of Foggia, Italy) “Not too Little to go to Hell”: Literary Representations of Childhood in Seventeenth Century England	1	►
Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) You Only Have to Wish High Enough – Gifts in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift	13	►
Robert Kusek (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Arguing for that Unheard. In Search of Friday in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe	25	►
Ewa Rychter (The Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education in Wałbrzych, Poland) The Fall(ing) Made Gentler: Nostalgia and Christianity in Julian Barnes's England, England	47	►
Daniel Sampey (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) The Playing of O’Neill’s Misbegotten	64	►
Petra Smažilová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) G. M. Hopkins´ “The Windhover” as an Ambiguous Symbol	81	►
Vít Vaníček (Charles University, Czech Republic) Expanding the Kingdom of Death: Paradigms of Perception and Space in Works of Thomas Pynchon	89	►
Klára Matuchová (Charles University, Czech Republic) A Remark on Social Semiotic Value of Personal Names in Selected Fiction Samples	101	►

STUDENT CONTRIBUTION
Magdaléna Klečková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) The Magic of the Word	125	►

BOOK REVIEWS
Christopher Koy Cult Fiction and Cult Film: Multiple Perspectives	141
Šárka Bubíková Reclaiming an Undervalued Writer	145

NEWS, CALLS, ANNOUNCEMENTS	147

ABSTRACTS, KEYWORDS AND CONTACT DETAILS

Author

Antonella Cagnolati

Title of the Article

“Not too Little to go to Hell”: Literary Representations of Childhood in Seventeenth Century England

Abstract

The paper aims at analyzing the representations of childhood as they were proposed in children’s books written by Puritan authors and preachers, and published in the second half of the XVIIth century. This literature can be considered as a mirror reflecting the different opinions about children English society worked out in this period. So the biographies of “little visible saints” portrayed in books well widespread amongst Puritans reveal us some interesting characteristics, such as the precocity these children showed in reading the Bible, in listening to the sermons, or the constant praying and meditating about religious matters. The different parts of their lives (birth, infancy, sickness and precocious death) are well narrated and investigated in order to detect the so called “marks of election”, an important sign in Calvinist doctrine giving way to salvation in the afterlife. At the same time, their lives are testimonies of extraordinary virtues such as humility, obedience to parents and preachers, perseverance in attending the congregation, respect for the Holy Sabbath, and endurance of pain before death.

Keywords

Childhood, children’s books, Puritan, James Janeway, A Token for Children, A Little Book for Children and Youth, Robert Russell, the Bible

Contact

Faculty of Education

University of Foggia

Via Napoli, 25

71122 Foggia

Italy

E-mail: a.cagnolati@unifg.it

Author

Petr Chalupský

Title of the Article

You Only Have to Wish High Enough – Gifts in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift

Abstract

Hanif Kureishi, whose works frequently explore the psychology and intimate life of his predominantly male protagonists, is one of the most acclaimed contemporary British writers of multiethnic origin. This article deals with his fourth novel, Gabriel’s Gift (2001), which, to a certain degree, reassumes the thematic tradition of his earliest works, namely his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). It attempts to show that Gabriel’s Gift can be read as a kind of sequel to its more acknowledged predecessor, though its main focus has shifted from racial and political issues to a more private, and also more light-hearted, exploration of the state of humanity. The last section focuses on one of the central characteristics of Kureishi’s oeuvre, his celebration of London as a city of countless opportunities and a positive social and cultural diversity.

Keywords

Hanif Kureishi, Gabriel’s Gift, The Buddha of Suburbia, racial and political issues, British multi-ethnic literature, cultural diversity, London

Contact

Petr Chalupský

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

Author

Robert Kusek

Title of the Article

Arguing for that Unheard. In Search of Friday in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe

Abstract

The paper follows a famous question of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – i.e., ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? – and attempts to find an answer to it by a careful scrutiny of the John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe which address the issue of writing the subaltern back into history – the subject to the hegemony of the Empire being Friday, the character created by Daniel Defoe in his acclaimed novel Robinson Crusoe. The emancipatory drive of postcolonial discourse, the drive to re-empower the disenfranchised, has resulted in the undertaking of the number of projects which aim at giving voice to the subaltern who had been written out of the record by conventional accounts. With the collapse of the Empire, the subaltern announced the arrival of new literature characterized by the rejection of colonial system of knowledge, imperialism’s signifying system and even the language of the invaders. The paper discusses the politics of resistance based on the deliberate denial to give voice to the subaltern, as exemplified by John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe. A careful analysis of the novel shows the whole enterprise of giving voice to the native as unachievable and totally objectionable and argues in favour of the subaltern’s silence being perceived in terms of triumph and victory over the dialectics of power.

Keywords

postcolonial studies, J.M. Coetzee, Foe, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the subaltern, the disenfranchised, voice and silence

Contact

Robert Kusek

Institute of English Philology

Jagiellonian University

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

30-348 Kraków

Poland

E-mail: robert.kusek@uj.edu.pl

Author

Ewa Rychter

Title of the Article

The Fall(ing) Made Gentler: Nostalgia and Christianity in Julian Barnes's England, England

Abstract

The article focuses on ways Julian Barnes's England, England presents the complexity of postmodern nostalgia, and explores the role nostalgic evocations of Christianity play in the novel's problematisation of the relation between the present and the past. It is argued that contemporary nostalgia – also depicted in the Barnes's novel - is heterogeneous, i.e., (1) it shows features of both a retreat from the present as well as reflection on the impossibility of such escape; (2) it allows for the ironisation of its desire to restore the lost thing or condition; (3) it maintains the interplay between irony and yearning, preventing irony from dominating the structure of contemporary nostalgia. In the article, the heterogeneous nostalgia in Barnes's England, England is studied with the help of the concept of the Fall (and the related concepts of the pre- and postlapsarian) and of the metaphor of the arrested falling, crucial for one of Barnes's characters. The article makes the ironically Christian colouring of the dynamics of nostalgia the basis for its reading of the Barnes's novel.

Keywords

Julian Barnes, postmodern, nostalgia, irony, prelapsarian, postlapsarian, England, England

Contact

Ewa Rychter

The Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education in Wałbrzych

Zamkowa St. 4

58-300 Wałbrzych

Poland

E-mail: rje@wp.pl

Author

Daniel Sampey

Title of the Article

The Playing of O’Neill’s Misbegotten

Abstract

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill’s last completed work, the characters’ emotional struggles are depicted in a psychologically realistic manner. The first two acts of the play are broadly comic, relying on stereotypical, even hackneyed formulae, harking back to vaudeville. The second two acts move the drama toward confessional tragedy. Within these seemingly conventional contexts, however, characters plainly calculate their own performativity and otherwise overtly call attention to multiple levels of theatrical representation and illusion. Audiences are sporadically pulled out of the text and reminded that what they are participating in has been composed and is being performed. This paper will attempt to use definitions of what has been termed metadrama to characterize layers of playing therein.

Keywords

Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, staging, metadrama, performativity, theatrical representation

Contact

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

Author

Petra Smažilová

Title of the Article

G. M. Hopkins´ “The Windhover” as an Ambiguous Symbol

Abstract

Gerard Manley Hopkins himself called The Windhover “the best thing he ever wrote” (Peters, 81). This could be the main motive for adding “To Christ our Lord” under the title six years after the sonnet had been written. The implied ambiguities of “The Windhover,” evoking different kinds of explanation, constitute one of the reasons why it “is probably the most written about short poem in the English language” (Pick, 1). The phrase “To Christ our Lord” accompanying the title was made central to the discussion, as it was believed to form the key ambiguity that utterly influences the meaning of the whole work. This essay concentrates on the line “To Christ our Lord” and on two different approaches to and interpretations of “The Windhover.”

Keywords

Gerard Manley Hopkins, sonnet, poetic ambiguity, symbol, “The Windhover”

Contact

Petra Smažilová

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: petra.smazilova@upce.cz

Author

Vít Vaníček

Title of the Article

Expanding the Kingdom of Death: Paradigms of Perception and Space in Works of Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon’s works have been identified as prime examples of postmodern American prose fiction. As such, their language, narrative techniques and content, often dissonant with employed genres, have been labeled as postmodern in their dismissal of any reliable authorial message. This article argues that while Pynchon’s novels mirror paradigms of thought and of a perception of reality, they also show a consistency in re-presenting literary and geographic space, as well as history as narrative. Using three of Pynchon’s novels, the article concludes that an authorial message can be discerned both in the change and in the consistency: a message of the need for humane interaction quite different from stereotypes of the cynicism of postmodernism.

Keywords

Thomas Pynchon, postmodern American fiction, narrative technique, literary space, Gravity´s Rainbow, Against the Day, Mason & Dixon

Contact

Vít Vaníček
Indiana University

107 S. Indiana Ave.

Bloomington, IN

USA

E-mail: vitvanicek@hotmail.com

Author

Klára Matuchová

Title of the Article

A Remark on Social Semiotic Value of Personal Names in Selected Fiction Samples

Abstract

This paper is intended as a comment on an area of sociolinguistic studies that is closely related to the topic of personal and social identity. It is based on an analysis of corpus comprising three 20th century British novels and on a subsequent field research. The main focus is on the symbolism that personal names and forms of address may carry in the current context of British society and, consequently, on the reflection of social hierarchy in general, and social class in particular on the way some personal names are perceived and used. From the theoretical perspective, this paper draws on Roger Fowler’s (1996) concept of text as discourse, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (2008) heteroglossia, also incorporating the textual-functional perspective represented by the Prague Linguistic Circle as well as the work of M.A.K. Halliday. The ensuing analysis attempts to support the view that social indexicals as highly relevant agents in constructing our social reality can be successfully re-signified in reflexive acts of communication (cf Agha 2007).

Keywords

Personal names, social semiotic value, personal and social identity, Mikhail Bakhtin, heteroglossia, Roger Fowler, text as discourse, textual-functional perspective, Prague Linguistic Circle, M.A.K. Halliday

Contact

Klára Matuchová
Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty of Education

Charles University in Prague
Celetná 13
110 00, Praha 1

Czech Republic

E-mail: klara.matuchova@pedf.cuni.cz

Author

Magdaléna Klečková

Title of the Article

The Magic of the Word

Abstract

The novels Ceremony, House made of Dawn and Love Medicine are chosen to demonstrate the function and importance of orality, myths, words and rituals. The investigation of storytelling tradition should be helpful to a meaningful analysis of how literature relates to the world. There is an attempt to draw a line between the Euramerican (”white”) and the Indian side, emphasizing the emotionality of the Indians and the comeback to old traditions. The ceremonies, stories and words are a demonstration of life and liveliness. Storytelling and song singing takes on the form of a ceremony, and brings relief and healing of soul.

Keywords

Native American Literature, orality, storytelling, myth, ritual, Ceremony, House Made of Dawn, Love Medicine

Contact

Magdaléna Klečková

Department of English and American Studies

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

University of Pardubice

Studentská 84

532 10 Pardubice

Czech Republic

E-mail: magdalena.kleckova@student.upce.cz