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• Bridging the Narrative Gap: The Ghost Narrator in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)

  Anna Maria Tomczak

  Views:

  315

  The essay reads Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) in the context of Walter D. Mignolo’s discussion on “border thinking” and “border gnosis” in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000). Through introducing the narrative voice of Sir Arthur Jennings Marlon James creates a link between past and present, between Caribbean and European tradition of cultures of orality and literacy, and between pre- and post-colonial times, critically engaging in the erasure of thresholds of epistemological location. Specific attention is paid to Sir Arthur’s role as a “duppy” (a ghost or spirit in the religious practice of Obeah) and as a “griot” (an African/Caribbean bard and story-teller) whose function is to narrate and document local histories and guard verbal art traditions of the community. (AMT)

• “Redemptive Reification”

  Anna Szabó

  Views:

  61

  Book review:

  Brown, Bill. Other Things. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015. xiv + 396 pages. ISBN 9780026076652. Hb. $40.00

• Parkinson’s Law and an Ironic Rhetoric of Management

  Attila Sebestyén

  Views:

  133

  Cyril Northcote Parkinson, British historian, fiction writer, and, so to say, management guru, in Parkinson’s Law created his own successful way of critiquing organizational bureaucratization. Parkinson’s work falls under the Burkean category of “literature for use,” in which affectivity becomes guaranteed by the peculiarity of irony. As Wayne C. Booth suggested, even in the case of “stable irony” there may often be some possibility of further considerations (that is, the factor of uncertainty), despite all the efforts to rhetorically control this type of irony. Booth, however, also noted that a paradoxical situation may arise in which “unstable” irony, intended to be open-ended, becomes capable of creating possibilities for referential reading and practical application. Thus, Parkinson’s Law provides the duality of entertainment through its satire and the seriousness of its management thoughts (for instance, the relationship of work and time, work and headcount, workforce selection methods, and the extension of committees or departments). These two aspects, constantly intermingling, are examined through the rhetoric of irony working in Parkinson’s Law and the practical influences it may exert. (AS)

• Never Letting Go: Ways of (Mis)remembering and Forgetting in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

  Anna Petneházi

  Views:

  60

  Book review:

  Drąg, Wojciech. Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 211 pages. ISBN 1-4438-6057-3. Hb. £47.99.

   

• “Petits pas. Nulle part. Obstinément”: Writing Finitude, Writing On

  Erika Mihálycsa

  Views:

  260

  Review essay:

  Craig, George, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, eds. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume IV: 1966-1989. Cambridge: CUP, 2016. cvii + 838 pages. ISBN 978-0-521-867962. £ 30.

   

• “If the world is dystopic, why fear an apocalypse?”

  Zsófia Novák

  Views:

  168

  Book review:

  MacCormack, Patricia. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 224 pages. ISBN 9781350081093. E-book. £15.83.

• Screen Writing the Border: Eugene McCabe, RTÉ, and the Victims Trilogy

  Lance Pettitt

  Views:

  173

  This essay explores the images and settings of the border narratives in Eugene McCabe’s television screenplays for his Victims trilogy, a three-part series broadcast by RTÉ in 1976. The series was based on McCabe’s own short stories, “Cancer,” “Heritage,” and “Victims”—which became known as the “Fermanagh trilogy”—written separately in the 1970s but published collectively as Christ in the Fields (1993). The essay argues that living on and writing out of his borderlands farm, near Clones, Co. Monaghan, McCabe experienced a condition that I term “borderliness,” which is structured into his writing about this area and the region more widely. I identify this condition by the presence of four thematic tropes that echo and interlace with each other across his screenplays. Making use of archival research in RTÉ, the essay analyzes draft script and screen realization, and supporting production material, focusing on the central, pivotal episode, Heritage, before it reaches its conclusion by drawing on adaptation theory and the conceit of the palimpsest to compare the screenplay and prose fiction versions. (LP)

• The Range of Intertextual Resonances

  József Szabolcs Fagyal

  Views:

  37

  Book review:

  Glazzard, Andrew. Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2016. 234 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-55916-6. Hb. $95.00.