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Šárka Bubíková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) Gains and Losses of Immigration in Julia Alvarez: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents |
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Petr Chalupský (Charles University, Czech Republic) Biting Divagations – Self-discoveries in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs |
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Kathleen Dubs (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia & Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary) Sleeping in Beowulf |
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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” |
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Marija Knežević (University of Montenegro, Montenegro) Sherman Alexie’s Version and Subversion of Native American Storytelling Tradition |
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Karla Kovalová (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Piecing Memories, Connecting Lives: The (Inter)Textual Quilt in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata |
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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 |
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Bożena Kucała (Jagiellonian University, Poland) Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: the Invention of Tradition |
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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 |
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Ivan Lacko (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia) Challenging the Angel: Dramatic Defamiliarization in Angels in America |
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David Levente Palatinus (The Catholic University in Rožumberok, Slovakia) From the Pictorial Turn to the Embodiment of Vision |
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Jozef Pecina (University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Slovakia) Antebellum Sensational Novels and Subversion of Domesticity |
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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 |
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Krystyna Stamirowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland) On Reading, Readers and Authors |
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Anna Světlíková (Charles University, Czech Republic) Type, Allegory, Symbol: Jonathan Edwards and Literary Traditions |
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Paul Titchmarsh (University of Pannonia, Hungary) Alternative Histories: Philip Roth and The Plot Against America |
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Roman Trušník (Tomáš Baťa University, Czech Republic) Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin? |
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| STUDENT CONTRIBUTION | ||
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Ivana Marvánová (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic)
“Migrant Mother”: the Depression Era Madonna |
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| BOOK REVIEW | ||
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Ladislav Vít “What is the Citie, but the People? True, the People are the Citie.” |
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| 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
E-mail: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz
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
